He is often called America’s first serial killer, the man who built a hotel of horrors to murder hundreds of fairgoers at the Chicago World’s Fair. The reality is darker in some ways and far smaller in others. This is what the historical record actually supports — and what the yellow press invented.
Contents
Part One: A Boy Called Herman
The man the world would come to know as H.H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett on 16 May 1861 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. His parents, Levi and Theodate, were strict Methodists, his father a farmer and postmaster. By every available account it was an ordinary rural childhood in a small American town — neither the gothic tale of beatings and isolation that some later writers invented, nor the idyllic upbringing he himself claimed when it suited him.
What is documented is that Mudgett was clever, bookish, and unusually preoccupied with anatomy from an early age. Local lore — never fully verifiable — held that older boys once forced him to touch a human skeleton in a doctor’s office to frighten him, and that he came away fascinated rather than afraid. Whatever the truth of that story, by his late teens he was set on medicine.
He married Clara Lovering in 1878, when he was seventeen. The marriage produced a son, Robert. Within a few years Mudgett had abandoned them both. He enrolled at the University of Michigan’s Department of Medicine and Surgery, graduating in 1884.
It was during medical school that the pattern of his later life first emerged. Cadavers used for anatomy training proved to be useful in another way: Mudgett stole bodies, disfigured them, and used them to fake deaths for insurance claims. The scheme was crude but profitable. It also taught him that human remains, properly placed, could make a paper trail say almost anything.
Part Two: Chicago and the Castle
By the late 1880s, Herman Mudgett had reinvented himself as Dr Henry Howard Holmes — a name he chose, apparently, for its respectability. He arrived in Chicago in 1886 and took a job at a drugstore in the Englewood neighbourhood on the city’s South Side, eventually acquiring the business under murky circumstances after its previous owner conveniently disappeared.
In 1887 he committed bigamy by marrying Myrta Belknap in Illinois while still legally married to Clara. In 1894 he would do it again, marrying Georgiana Yoke in Denver. None of the three wives, at any point, seems to have been aware of the others.
Beginning in 1887, Holmes started building. On the corner of 63rd and Wallace Streets in Englewood he constructed a large three-storey commercial building with shops on the ground floor, his own pharmacy among them, and lodgings above. He acted as his own architect. He fired contractors before they could see the whole of his plans, hired new ones, and fired them in turn — a habit later writers would interpret as proof of sinister design, though the simpler explanation is that he was avoiding paying anyone in full.
This is the building that would become known, after his arrest, as the Murder Castle.
Part Three: What Was Actually in the Castle
This is where the historical record diverges sharply from the legend, and it is worth being precise.
The popular story — repeated in countless documentaries and most famously in Erik Larson’s 2003 bestseller The Devil in the White City — describes a purpose-built murder factory: a maze of more than a hundred windowless rooms, gas jets controlled from Holmes’s bedroom, soundproofed chambers, trapdoors dropping victims into a basement crematorium, acid vats for dissolving bodies, doors that opened onto brick walls. The implication is that Holmes designed the building to kill on an industrial scale, then advertised it as a hotel during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition to draw victims in from across the country.
The historian Adam Selzer, whose 2017 book H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is now widely considered the most rigorously sourced account, examined the original property records, blueprints, contemporary newspaper coverage, and police reports. His conclusions are unsparing.
The building was indeed strange — a confusing layout of small rooms with awkward corridors and at least some hidden compartments. But the secret chambers, Selzer argues, were used to hide stolen furniture and conceal Holmes’s own movements from creditors, not to dispose of bodies. There is no contemporary evidence of gas jets rigged for asphyxiation, no acid vats, no working crematorium. The “hotel” was never actually licensed or operated as one during the World’s Fair. Of the verified Holmes victims, only one — possibly — was a fair visitor. The rest were people he already knew, often intimately.
The 200-victim figure traces back, Selzer found, to a 1940 pulp history of Chicago crime by Herbert Asbury. It has no basis in any document from Holmes’s own time. The number Holmes confessed to — twenty-seven — is also unreliable, because at least nine of the people he named in that confession were demonstrably still alive when it was published. He appears to have been making some of them up.
The number historians can actually verify, with confidence and corroborating evidence, is nine.
Part Four: The Victims We Can Name
The confirmed Holmes victims share two characteristics. Almost all of them were people he knew personally — lovers, employees, business partners, their children. And almost all of them died inside an insurance scheme.
Julia Smythe Conner was the wife of Holmes’s pharmacy jeweller, Ned Conner. She and Holmes began an affair. Her husband eventually left, and Julia stayed on, working in the building and increasingly entangled in Holmes’s schemes. She and her six-year-old daughter Pearl Conner disappeared around Christmas 1891. Julia was pregnant at the time. Holmes alternately denied any knowledge of their fate and confessed to killing Julia accidentally during an abortion — a confession that did not account for what happened to Pearl. Their remains were never definitively identified.
Emeline Cigrand, a young stenographer Holmes hired in 1892, vanished later that year after taking out a life insurance policy with him as a beneficiary. She had told friends she was about to be married.
Minnie Williams and her sister Nannie Williams were heiresses from Texas. Minnie became engaged to Holmes in 1893 — under one of his aliases — and signed over property to him in Fort Worth. Both sisters disappeared in the summer of 1893. Holmes used the Fort Worth property to start another building project that would later collapse around him.
And then there are the Pitezels, whose murder finally undid him.
Part Five: Benjamin Pitezel
Benjamin Pitezel was Holmes’s longtime business associate — a carpenter, sometime drunk, and willing accomplice in years of fraud. By 1894 the two men had moved their operation from Chicago to Philadelphia, where they set up a fake patent office on Callowhill Street. The plan, agreed between them, was that Pitezel would fake his own death in an explosion at the office. Holmes would then identify the body, claim a $10,000 life insurance policy from the Fidelity Mutual Life Association, and split the proceeds with Pitezel’s family.
This was the scheme as Pitezel understood it. Holmes had a different plan.
On 2 September 1894, Holmes killed Pitezel. The exact method is disputed — some accounts say he was drugged with chloroform and burned alive, others that Holmes used a chloroformed body to stage the scene — but the outcome is not. Pitezel’s body was found three days later. The insurance company paid out.
The complication was that the coroner had asked for a family member to confirm the identification. Carrie Pitezel, the widow, was too ill to travel. In her place, the family sent their fifteen-year-old daughter Alice Pitezel.
What happened next is one of the strangest and most disturbing episodes in American criminal history. After Alice identified the body, Holmes did not let her go home. He kept her with him, and over the following weeks he persuaded the still-mourning Carrie Pitezel to send him two more of her children — Nellie Pitezel, eleven, and Howard Pitezel, eight. He told her that her husband was actually still alive, in hiding, and that he was taking the children to be reunited with him.
Instead, Holmes took the three children on a long, looping journey through Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, and finally Toronto, with Carrie travelling separately in his wake — kept always a city or two behind, sending and receiving letters that he was secretly intercepting and forging. He was, in effect, herding the entire family across the continent while killing them one by one.
Howard’s charred remains were found later in a rented house in Irvington, Indiana, where Holmes had killed him and burned the body in a stove. Alice and Nellie were strangled and buried in the cellar of a house Holmes had rented in Toronto. They were discovered there in the summer of 1895, after a Philadelphia detective named Frank Geyer — in what remains one of the most remarkable feats of investigative work in nineteenth-century policing — retraced Holmes’s route across two countries, hotel by hotel, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, until he found them.
Part Six: Capture and Trial
Holmes was not initially arrested for murder. He was arrested in Boston in November 1894 on a horse-theft warrant out of Texas — a relatively minor charge that he himself, believing horse-stealing to be a hanging offence in the West, was eager to escape by confessing instead to the Pitezel insurance fraud. He came willingly back to Philadelphia, smug in his belief that fraud was the worst the authorities could prove against him.
The break came from another prisoner. Marion Hedgepeth, a train robber Holmes had befriended in a St Louis jail the previous year, had been promised $500 for putting Holmes in touch with a corrupt lawyer who could help with the insurance scheme. Holmes had never paid. Hedgepeth, nursing the grudge, told the authorities everything he knew. Investigators began pulling at the thread.
Detective Geyer’s pursuit of the three missing Pitezel children — chronicled in real time by newspapers across the country — produced the bodies that turned a fraud case into a murder prosecution. Meanwhile, in Chicago, police searched the Englewood building for the first time. They did not find a hundred-room murder factory. They did find enough evidence of foul play, fraud, and human remains in suspicious places to fuel weeks of sensational headlines. The building burned down in August 1895 in a fire that was almost certainly arson, though the arsonist was never identified.
Holmes’s trial began in Philadelphia on 28 October 1895. He was charged only with the murder of Benjamin Pitezel — the case the prosecution considered most provable. He dismissed his lawyers and represented himself for the opening, performing with the theatricality that observers had come to expect from him, before eventually allowing counsel back in. The jury took less than three hours to convict.
Part Seven: The Hanging and the Confession
While awaiting execution in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison, Holmes did what he had always done when cornered: he talked. He sold a written confession to William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal for $7,500 — a fortune at the time — in which he claimed responsibility for twenty-seven murders. The text was lurid, self-aggrandising, and in places demonstrably fabricated. As later investigators would establish, several of his named victims were still alive. Some appear to have been invented entirely.
“I have every attribute of a degenerate,” Holmes wrote, “a moral idiot.” It was the closest he ever came to a coherent account of himself, and even that was performance.
On 7 May 1896, on a scaffold inside Moyamensing Prison, Holmes retracted the confession from the gallows. He claimed innocence of all but two killings, neither of them Pitezel’s. The trapdoor opened. The drop did not break his neck cleanly, and he is said to have twitched for some minutes before being pronounced dead. He had asked for his coffin to be encased in cement so that no-one could ever exhume him for study.
The cement held until 2017, when, at the request of his descendants who were curious about persistent rumours that he had bribed his way out of execution and sent another man to the gallows, the grave was opened. Dental records confirmed it. Herman Webster Mudgett had been hanged in Philadelphia in 1896 after all.
Part Eight: What Kind of Man Was He, Really
The Holmes who emerges from a careful reading of the documentary record is, in some ways, less impressive than the Holmes of legend, and in other ways more disturbing.
He was not a criminal mastermind. His insurance scams were repetitive and increasingly desperate. He was caught largely because he never paid the people he owed and because his cover stories collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. The Murder Castle did not function as the industrial-scale slaughterhouse of myth — but he did kill, repeatedly, the people closest to him, including three children he had spent months emotionally manipulating.
The clinical literature on Holmes is necessarily speculative — modern forensic psychology did not exist in his lifetime — but what later writers have noted is the strikingly transactional quality of every relationship he formed. Wives were vehicles for property. Lovers were vehicles for insurance policies. Children were chess pieces in the manipulation of their parents. His charm, by every account contemporary and otherwise, was real and effective. It was also entirely instrumental. There is no evidence in any letter, any interview, any moment of his recorded life, that he experienced other people as anything other than means to his ends.
If the modern term for this is psychopathy, the older language is perhaps no less accurate. Holmes himself reached for it in his confession. He described himself as a moral idiot — someone in whom the basic apparatus of conscience appeared simply to be missing. Whether that absence was congenital, developmental, or some interaction of both is a question no-one in the 1890s was equipped to answer, and the documents he left behind do not provide enough to answer it now.
Part Nine: The Names That Matter
The historiographical work of the last twenty years — particularly Selzer’s — has done something valuable. By insisting on the actual evidence, it has stripped away the carnival of the Murder Castle and revealed the smaller, sadder, more comprehensible crime underneath: a serial fraudster who killed people who trusted him, mostly for money, sometimes apparently for convenience, and at least once — in the case of the Pitezel children — for reasons that defy any rational accounting at all.
The verified victims, the people for whom the evidence is solid enough to name, deserve to be remembered as more than entries on a list. Julia Conner was twenty-eight when she disappeared, a wife and mother caught in an affair she did not know how to escape. Pearl Conner was six. Emeline Cigrand was twenty-four, and friends remembered her as cheerful, hopeful, full of plans for her wedding. Minnie Williams was twenty-eight, Nannie twenty-four; they had inherited modest wealth from their family in Texas and trusted the man they thought Minnie was about to marry. Benjamin Pitezel was forty-four, a flawed man tangled up in his partner’s schemes, who in the end agreed only to fake his own death and was killed for the privilege. Alice Pitezel was fifteen. Nellie was eleven. Howard was eight.
These are the names. There may have been others — the documentary record is incomplete, and Holmes himself, even at the end, took whatever truth he knew to the scaffold. But nine is a number worth holding onto. It is small enough to remember, and large enough to be a tragedy.
A Final Note
The myth of the Murder Castle has, over the past century, served many purposes. It has sold books and tourist tickets. It has given Chicago a gothic origin story to set against its industrial one. It has allowed each generation to project its own anxieties onto the figure of a Victorian gentleman in a high collar with a neatly trimmed moustache. What it has not done, on the whole, is honour the people he actually harmed.
The honest version of the Holmes story is less spectacular than the legend, but it has the advantage of being true. He was a fraudster who became a murderer, who used the modern machinery of insurance and rail travel and forged correspondence to extend his reach across a continent, and who was eventually undone by a Philadelphia detective who refused to stop asking where three children had gone. That detective, Frank Geyer, deserves to be remembered too. He found them.
