|
Herman Webster Mudgett sounds like a name a writer would give to a humorous character in a story about small town life. Mudgett, AKA HH Holmes, was born in a small town, but there was nothing humorous about him. He was America’s first identified serial killer.
Born into a prominent family in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Mudgett appeared to have everything going for him. He was intelligent, handsome, and charming. The promise of his talent was dashed when he was dismissed from medical school after he was caught stealing cadavers, which were central to a scheme he had devised to defraud insurance companies. He would go on to successfully defraud insurance companies, swindle people out of their money and land, commit bigamy, sell phony health exlirs, and commit many murders.
His knowledge of medicine enabled Mudgett to launch his criminal career. In 1886, he moved to Chicago and changed his name to the more distinguished sounding Henry Howard Holmes. With an advertisement for a pharmacist in hand, Holmes walked into a pharmacy and observed for a while before introducing himself to Mrs. Holton, the owner’s wife. Her husband was terminally ill, which left the burden of running the business to her. Holmes watched as she struggled to fill a prescription according to the instructions of her husband, who was bedridden in their private quarters above the pharmacy. Holmes seized the opportunity and, much to the Mrs. Holton’s relief, deftly filled the prescription. She hired him immediately. After her husband died, Holmes arranged to buy the pharmacy. He defaulted on his payments and Mrs. Holton threatened to take him to court. She disappeared. Holmes told people that she had moved to California, although no one ever saw or heard from her again.
With the cover of a respectable business, Holmes was positioned to continue his criminal activities. He moved the pharmacy across the street into the first floor of a three story building, which he had carefully designed. During the course of construction Holmes hired and fired contractors on a routine basis. He would hire and fire workers so often that when construction had been completed, more than 500 workers had been employed. As odd as this may have seemed, no one questioned it until years later when the press would dub the building Murder Castle.
During the construction, Holmes didn’t want anyone to figure out that his building was peculiar, which is why no one was allowed to work on it long enough to gain a true picture of its unusual features. It contained an odd assortment of rooms, some secret, some lead lined, and some without windows. Some of the windowless rooms were fitted with gas jets. There were large chutes that ran from these rooms to zinc lined tubs in the basement. A huge kiln, a lime vat, and what was described as an autopsy table occupied the basement. Police would later learn that Holmes murdered many people, mostly young women, in his Murder Castle. Most often, he gassed them, performed autopsies, and burned the bodies in the kiln, throwing any remaining unburned bones into the lime vat. Due to the efficiency of Holmes’ setup, police were never able to determine exactly how many people he murdered. The proximity of the house to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair brought the chilling realization that Holmes had access to many transients whom no one would report missing.
However, it was not the depraved business going on in Murder Castle that brought Holmes to justice. It was an insurance fraud scheme. He double crossed Marion Hedgepeth and that was the beginning of his downfall. Hedgepeth was an infamous bank robber serving time in a Philadelphia jail where Holmes was temporarily being held during a fraud investigation. Holmes was released, but not before telling Hedgepeth of his plan to bilk an insurance company out of $10,000. According to the plan, his long time lackey, Benjamin F. Pritezel, was to take out an insurance policy on himself and disappear. Holmes would secure a cadaver, disfigure it, and later help identify it as Pritezel's body. Meanwhile, he would have a lawyer acting on behalf of the Pritezel’s family collect the insurance money. All he needed was an unethical lawyer to make his scheme work. In exchange for $500.00, Hedgepeth put him in touch with a shady lawyer. Holmes’ scheme succeeded. However, he failed to give Hedgepeth his share of the money. Hedgepeth went to the authorities with the story.
What Hedgepeth didn’t know, and the police later determined while they had Holmes in custody on fraud charges, was that Holmes actually murdered Pritezel. He duped Pritezel’s wife into assisting him perpetrate the fraud, using three of her five children. They helped make what she thought was a false identification of their father. Holmes lead her to believe they would actually identify a cadaver which had physical similarities to her husband that were manufactured by Holmes. After they helped with the identification, Holmes killed the children. He planned to kill Mrs. Pritezel and her remaining children, and would have done so if Hedgepeth hadn’t come forward. Pinkerton Detectives were hired to aid the police investigation. They backtracked Holmes’ trail to uncover the scheme and find the children’s bodies. The evil of Murder Castle was brought to light. Holmes was tried and convicted for Pritezel’s murder.
While awaiting sentencing, he sold his story to a Hearst newspaper. In the story, he admitted to 27 murders. Although estimates of the number of his victims range from the 27 he admitted to over 200, no one will ever know how many people were murdered by America’s first identified serial killer. Herman Mudgett, AKA HH Holmes, was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.
|
| |
