H.H. Holmes

Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861 – May 7, 1896), also known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmesor simply "Dr. Holmes", was an American serial killer who confessed to up to twenty-seven murders and fifty attempted murders; Modern research estimates the number of his murders at around three hundred.

Semblance

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, the third of five children of Levi Horton Mudgett, an alcoholic and abusive father, and Theodate Page Price, a Puritan Methodist mother. He soon manifested hatred towards women, especially those with wealth, an unusual interest that would frame him as a Don Juan of crime.

At the age of eighteen, to pay for his medical studies, he married a rich young woman named Clara Lovering with whom he had a son, Robert Lovering Mudgett. He ruined her and once she had brilliantly obtained her diplomas from the University of Michigan, without divorcing her he went to live with a wealthy young widow, who satisfied her needs thanks to the income from the respectable boarding house in she. Already a doctor, he left that second conquest, practiced for a year in the state of New York and then went to settle in Chicago.

Handsome, with a distinguished air, attentive, loving with animals, always elegantly dressed, Mudgett had countless romantic successes. Upon arriving in his new city, he soon seduced a young millionaire named Myrta Belknap. He took the name Dr. Henry Howard Holmes to overcome her reluctance, married her and had a daughter, Lucy Theodate Holmes. Thanks to some forged deeds, he swindled $5,000 from his in-laws to have a sumptuous home built in Wilmette.

Then he inherited, on the outskirts of Englewood, a pharmacy owned by Melisa Holden, a widow whose lover and trusted man he became. Based on falsifications of accounting and embezzlement of funds, he managed to become owner of all of his assets and then made them disappear.

The "Holmes Castle"

To build his castle, 'Holmes Castle', Dr. Holmes turned to several companies, whom he never paid and soon interrupted their work. In this way, he was the only one to know in detail a building whose strange arrangement could have aroused curiosity. He was preparing for the 1893 exhibition, which was to attract a considerable number of people to Chicago, including beautiful, rich and single women. Holmes acquired land through a series of scams and undertook the construction of a hotel resembling a medieval fortress, the interior layout of which he conceived himself. Each of the rooms in the building was equipped with traps and sliding doors that led to a labyrinth of secret corridors from which, through windows hidden in the walls, the doctor could secretly observe his clients.

Disguised under the floorboards, an electrical installation allowed him to follow the slightest movement of his future victims on an indicator panel installed in his office. By opening a few gas taps, he could suffocate the occupants of some rooms without moving.

A forklift and two "slides" They were used to lower the corpses into a cellar where, depending on the case, they were dissolved in a bucket of sulfuric acid, reduced to dust by incineration, or sunk alive in a vat full of lime. In a room called "the dungeon" had installed torture instruments. One of the machines installed especially caught the attention of journalists: an automaton that allowed the soles of the victims' feet to be tickled until they laughed to death.

Holmes Castle was completed in 1892 and the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago opened on May 1, 1893. During the six months it lasted, Dr. Holmes's killing factory was not vacated. The executioner chose his "clients" With caution, they had to be rich, young, beautiful, alone, and to avoid inopportune visits from friends or family, his home had to be located in a state as far away from Chicago as possible.

The latest crimes

With the end of the exhibition, the hotel's rents suffered a brutal drop and Holmes soon found himself short of money. To obtain the proceeds, he burned down the top floor of his property and demanded a premium of $60,000 from his insurer, without thinking that the company could do an investigation before paying it to him. Once discovered, the doctor took refuge in Texas, where he carried out scams that landed him in jail for the first time. Released on bail, he came out again a few months later, but not without having launched a new criminal operation.

The idea was simple: an accomplice, named Pitezel, had to get life insurance from a company in Philadelphia. Then an anonymous corpse disfigured by an accident would be presented as his. The premium that Mrs. Pitezel would be distributed and the "dead" He would go for some time to make himself forgotten in South America. However, Holmes changed his plans and actually killed Pitezel, avoiding the search for a disfigured corpse and keeping all of the cousin's money, since he later got rid of his children.

However, a former cellmate, Marion Hedgepeth, reported him, and the police conducted an investigation. The essential investigations were conducted by private detective Frank Geyer, who had the credit for discovering Holmes' true nature and worked for the renowned Pinkerton National Detective Agency, then contracted by the insurance company. As a result, Holmes confessed the insurance scam and the murders of Pitezel and his family.

Once the criminal was arrested, the police searched the hotel, and it was discovered that it had been used as a place of torment and an execution room. Agents found airtight chambers from which gas could be pumped, an oven large enough to hold a human body, vats of acid, and rooms equipped with surgical dissection instruments as well as all the paraphernalia of torture. At trial, a prosecution witness described his work as an employee of Holmes, who had hired him to deflesh three corpses for $36 each.

Holmes was sentenced to death by the Philadelphia Court and hanged on May 7, 1896, but not before having spent three years in confinement, when he was thirty-four years old at the time.

Number of victims

In court, Holmes claimed to have murdered twenty-seven people (apart from Pitezel and his family) throughout his life. However, this figure is hardly credible. The accused confessed to having killed people who were still alive at the time, flouting justice. The police were only able to link and prove nine cases. Although the number of victims is not known with certainty, discoveries made in his castle by some criminologists suggest that there were close to two hundred women.

In popular culture

• The actor Keanu Reeves will star the mini-series The Devil in the White City (The Devil in the White City). Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are the producers of the adaptation of the best seller homonym of 2002 written by American journalist Erik Larson. The mini-series will follow the steps of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, while Reeves will incarnate Daniel Hudson Burnham, the main architect to whom the killer ordered to build his terrible den in which he committed his crimes, the Castle of Holmes.