Famous Serial Killers — Dr. H.H. Holmes
In my novels, I write about serial killers. Sometimes I let real murderers inspire myself. I write about these killers here now. Today it’s about one of the most productive serial killers in American history: Dr. H.H. Holmes.
life
Dr. Holmes’ real name was Herman Webster Mudgett. He was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire.
There he was born in 1861. Mudgett was a strange child. He enthusiastically dissected animals, cut them alive, and kept their skulls and bones in a box he treasured.
Little Hermann was not very popular with his classmates. He was weak and strange, attracting their attention. He was teased and harassed throughout his school days.
Once his classmates locked him up in a doctor’s office where he was alone with a skeleton. He was terrified, but after that, he developed a sick interest in anatomy. Around this time the cruelty to animals must have become a mania for him.
After his unhappy childhood — his father was a beating alcoholic — he went to the University of Michigan as a medical student in 1882.
Mudgett was already married and had a son. His wife was the primary breadwinner, and he contributed to the family income with odd jobs.
At that time, medicine was making big leaps. Doctors needed more and more fresh corpses to do research and practice. They were willing to buy bodies of unknown origin. Thus Mudgett became a corpse collector, among others.
The permanent occupation with corpses must have been very accommodating to his secret inclinations. It is speculated that he already murdered occasionally at that time to get new corpses for his customers.
After graduating, he left his wife and child and traveled the country as a fully trained doctor. He sometimes practiced here, sometimes there. Mudgett developed the image of an educated citizen and finally invented a new name for himself: Dr. Henry Howard Holmes.
He lived under this name in Chicago since 1886. His cultivated nature made him popular with women. He had no difficulty getting to know new lovers.
In 1887 he remarried in Chicago without divorcing his first wife. At that time, it was not difficult to adopt a new identity, as the reporting system was not yet well developed, and there was, of course, no data reconciliation between the state authorities.
In Chicago, Holmes was now to become the monster known to criminal historians today.
The Horror House
A year later, he bought a piece of land in Chicago. There, he wanted to build a hotel that would serve exclusively to satisfy his dark urges.
He drew the plans for the house alone and did not let anyone see them. The plans included hidden stairwells, an airtight room, and hidden chambers. The airtight room was equipped with a device for introducing gas.
During construction, Holmes replaced the craftsmen so often that no one could see enough to suspect anything. None of the workers knew the whole layout.
In the end, the hotel had dozens of rooms. Holmes set up shops on the ground floor, and he also ran a mail-order business for medical supplies.
The murders
Finally, in 1891, he was ready to realize his fantasies. He had accommodated his new wife and child far away. To crown the construction work, he had a large stove built into the basement of the house.
He claimed that he wanted to use it for glass melting.
The first victims Holmes killed in his horror house were his new lover and the child he conceived with her. He killed her with chloroform. Then he called an acquaintance who works as a carver.
He had no suspicion about the two corpses because Holmes was a doctor. For a modest wage, he detached the meat from the skeletons, burned it in the cellar in the new oven, and prepared the skeletons. Holmes later sold them to the university.
After these initial murders, Holmes really got going. He found his victims without any problems. Either they came to work in one of his shops or to live in his hotel.
He killed the women at night when they were asleep. He had constructed his hotel in such a way that he could enter any room unnoticed at any time. Either he strangled the women in their sleep, or he took them to one of those isolated rooms, where he either killed them with injected gas, or he left them to starve and die of thirst.
He then transported the bodies through a system of hidden shafts and trapdoors to the cellar, where he burned the remains in the large oven. However, he often only burned the meat, which he meticulously removed from the bones beforehand. He continued to sell the skeletons to universities and research institutes.
It was the time of the World Exposition. The female victims ran to Holmes in droves. Everyone seemed to be looking for a job or a hotel room in the city at that time. For Holmes, it was like Christmas.
Escape and Arrest — The End of Doctor Holmes
But the mass disappearance of young women did not go unnoticed.
Demand increased, people became suspicious. Holmes realized that his time in Chicago had run out and ran away. Together with an acquaintance who knew nothing about his murders, he fought his way through two years of small fraud.
Holmes also killed his partner after persuading him to buy life insurance in Holmes’ favor. Holmes then contacted the murdered man’s wife and claimed he wanted to see his wife and three children.
When the family met with Holmes, he also murdered them.
But meanwhile, an insurance detective was on his heels. The man suspected that something was wrong in the case of Holmes’ partner, who had allegedly died in an accident.
In November 1894, the insurance detective found Holmes and had him arrested. At that time, he had no idea that Holmes was one of the worst serial killers of all time.
This changed when his hotel was searched during the investigation.
Bones, clothing, hair, and other clues were discovered, suggesting that unspeakable things must have happened in this house.
Holmes was then sentenced to death by hanging. When he realized his approaching end, he testified in full. He confessed to a total of 27 murders he could remember but said that it must have been about 200.
The execution was carried out on 7 May 1896. Holmes died without resistance and without showing feelings.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._H._Holmes
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