The Murder castle

TRIGGER WARNING: This true-crime article contains talk about the killing of adults and children. If you are sensitive about these topics, please skip this article.

The Murder Castle: true crime

By Lily Loukx Niehaus

Herman Webster Mudgett, commonly known as HH Holmes, was born on May 16, 1861 and is originally from Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Holmes is known for being a notorious serial killer and con-man in the 1800s. Many people refer to him as America's first serial killer, although we will never know for sure.

Holmes had a normal family and childhood (considering the era of the 1800s), which is rare for serial killers. His family never had money problems because his father was a successful farmer. At an early age, Holmes was bullied by some boys at school. He was scared of the doctor's office and the boys knew of that. One day, the boys took him and made him stare at a skeleton at the doctor's office. The longer he was there staring at the dead body, his perception of it changed. According to Mental Floss: “While he was certainly scared at first, Holmes later said the experience exorcized him of his fears about death, and may have led to his fascination.”

Image from Flickr

After that experience, different sources vary in their accounts of Holmes' upbringing. Some say that Holmes was killing animals and became a serial killer after that incident. Others say that he led a normal childhood and grew a liking for killing after high school. This we will never know, being that it was in the 1800s, and the honest truth got lost over time and the loss of people. After that, Holmes led a pretty normal childhood. He was ingenious for his age, graduating at only 16 years of age. After high school, because he was so intelligent, he started doing teaching jobs while also doing odd farming jobs with his father. They would travel and do different farm jobs. One day, he was at a farm job when he met the farmer's daughter, named Clara Lovering. The two fell deep into young love. Shortly after that, they eloped when Holmes was 17 years old and, two years later, they had a baby boy named Robert Lovering Mudget.

Image from Flickr

Image of Chicago in the 1800s

Two years after that, at the age of 22, Holmes went to medical school in Vermont for a short period, and then transferred to Michigan Medical School for the remainder of his schooling. In medical school, he had admiration for his mentor, Dr. James Jackson, the chief of anatomy. Dr. Jackson and Holmes started dissecting bodies in the morgue together, but what Dr. Jackson didn’t know was that Holmes would steal the corpses and mutilate and dissect the bodies in his home. He started doing this regularly. He would take the dead body, mutilate it so it was unrecognizable and then make up their identity in order to get their life insurance money. This happened for a while. Just before he graduated medical school, his wife Clara took their son and left him. They actually never got divorced. After he graduated from medical school, he went traveling all around the US. Finally, in 1886, he settled in Chicago.

When he arrived in Chicago, he got a job at a pharmacy owned by Elizabeth Holtan. According to Smithsonian Magazine, they became good friends and Elizabeth and her husband actually ended up selling the pharmacy to Holmes. This is where the castle comes into play. When he bought the pharmacy, he also decided to buy a plot of land across the street from it. This is when the Murder Castle was born. The original blueprints for the building were going to be a two-story building; a full block along the bottom was going to be a barbershop, little stores and a bigger pharmacy.

Later on, Holmes decided there was going to be a third floor to make more money and it was going to be a hotel. Though it was never actually a functioning hotel, he had people stay in it, but it was never advertised as so. This building had the purpose of getting people inside, capturing them, torturing and killing them and then making money off their bodies. According to Mental Floss, people working on the building would get suspicious, but Holmes would fire them before they ever got close to alerting the authorities. Holmes only used the top floor for storage and that is where he lived. The killings would mainly happen on the second floor.

Image from picryl

There were about 35 rooms in total on the second story. They included tiny chambers; most rooms did not have windows and some rooms did not have doors. The only way to get in was from a trap door. There were staircases that led nowhere, and there were hidden staircases. There were dead ends, fake doors and lots of trap doors. Shoots throughout the hotel allowed Holmes to put dead bodies in them and the bodies would just fall down into the basement. There was a vault that he would lock people in and they would just slowly die. Many of the rooms also had ventilators so he could suffocate his victims and gas them to death and, of course, most of the rooms were soundproof. Finally, the last disturbing room is one that had iron plates with blow torches behind them, and when the torches were turned on, they would essentially burn the victim alive. Holmes also had many torture devices, as well, including body stretchers and spikes on doors. He had a good security system that would activate if somebody entered the building so he could hide the victims and clean himself up. After he killed the victims, he sometimes would skin the body, strip the muscle and everything off and then sell them to medical schools that did not want to pay full price.

Image from Flickr

Most of Holmes' victims were young women. According to Biography.com, they were "women who were seduced, swindled and then killed. Holmes had a habit of getting engaged to a woman, only for his fiancée to suddenly 'disappear.' Other victims were lured there by the offer of employment.” His first known victim was named Julia Smith. Her husband worked in one of Holmes' shops. Julia and Holmes started to have an affair. Holmes was married to Merida at the time. Her husband found out and left Pearl (their 6-year-old daughter) and Julia to stay with Holmes. Some time passed, and Julia had thought she was pregnant. Holmes offered to give her an abortion, since he was a trained doctor. Unfortunately, she never survived the operation. We do not know if this was intentional or not, but we can guess that it was. He also killed her six- year-old daughter, as well. A couple of weeks afterward, he started renting out their room, which kind of shows how little he cared about this loss.

The next victim was Emiline Cigrand. She worked at the building, as well. They started seeing each other and, months later, she went missing. After this, people would ask what happened and he would say she moved to Europe to get married. This happened with others, as well. One, named Edna Vantassel, also worked at the building and then just went missing. Holmes' fifth confirmed killing was named Minnie Williams, an actor from Boston. She had money from her family and that is what he wanted. All he had to do was kill her and her sister and the family's land and money would be his. He came up with the plan to have her sister come out and “ surprise” Minnie, but she never got to see her sister. Holmes locked her in the vault room and the floor was covered in acid; she slowly died from that. Holmes also killed Minnie and then all their land and money was his.

Holmes kept up his insurance fraud for a while, but he was not stupid. He knew that people were catching on, so he decided to leave Chicago. He went to Texas and stayed on the land he got from Minnie Williams. He met his new wife, named Georgiana Yoke. They met in Colorado while traveling, trying to lead the police away before going to Texas. In Texas, he got arrested, but not for what one might think. He got arrested for stealing horses.

Texas in the 1800s

Image from Flickr

After he got out of prison, Holmes somehow convinced Pitezel, his best friend, to fake his death. Pitezel agreed, as long as his family got a big cut. They started the plan to get a body exactly like him. Holmes then decided, since Pitezel was having cold feet, to just kill Pitezel himself by knocking him out and burning him alive. The next day, the family confirmed that it was Pitezel and they all got the money. Of course, they thought it was a cadaver, but it was actually his body. HH Holmes then decided he did not want to share the money, so he came up with this idea to tell the family to travel around for a while and then they would all meet up in London. He took three of the children to travel around with and Pitezel's wife would take the others. These three children in his possession were sadly all killed by Holmes. The brother was poisoned and cooked on a stove. The two girls were gassed to death, then buried naked.

Image from Flickr

After this, Holmes traveled around more, still telling Mrs. Pitezel to do the same and that her children were with him. Then, a person named Marion Hedgepeth ratted him out to the police. He was a man that Holmes had met in prison and promised a cut of the insurance money in exchange for getting Holmes a good lawyer. He told the police, but Holmes was smart and police could not find him. Finally, they tracked down Ms. Pitezel and they informed her that that actually was her real husband that she identified and Holmes had killed him. She was devastated and felt so betrayed but, even more, she was worried about her three kids that were with Holmes. She pointed them in the right direction.

On November 17, 1894, he was caught and taken into police custody. When being interviewed, at first, he denied murdering anyone but, then, before being executed, he admitted to 27 killings, but some believe he killed more than 200 people. Finally, on May 7, 1896, in Philadelphia, Herman Webster Mudgett was executed at the age of 34 years old. As ironic as it may seem, his last request was to be buried ten feet underground in a cement block because he was in fear of grave robbers and what people would do to his body. Some of his last words, according to Biography.com, were "I was born with the very devil in me...I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of an intellectual man to be great. The inclination to murder came to me as naturally as the inspiration to do right comes to the majority of persons." And that's where it ends; the murder castle was torn down in 1938 after a fire broke out in the building. To this day, there are only nine named and proven victims of Herman Webster Mudgett (HH Holmes).

Page updated

Report abuse