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Larson , Erik. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Vintage Books , 2003.

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H. H. Holmes was born on May 16, 1861. His birth name was Herman Webster Mudgett. On July 4, 1878 he married Clara A. Lovering, he eventually abandoned her and their son, Robert. They never technically divorced. He came to Chicago, Illinois sometime in August of 1886 when he was twenty-six. He would soon become one of America's famous serial killers, and possibly it's first. Throughout his life, he acquired many aliases and nicknames, including "Beast of Chicago".

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Who Was H.H. Holmes?

Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, was a con artist and bigamist who was one of America's first serial killers. Sometimes referred to as the "Beast of Chicago," Holmes is believed to have killed somewhere between 20 and 200 people. He killed many of his victims in a specially constructed home, which was later nicknamed the "Murder Castle." Apprehended in 1894, he was hanged for his crimes two years later.

Early Life

Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett circa May 16, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Born into an affluent family, Holmes enjoyed a privileged childhood and was said to be unusually intelligent at an early age. Still, there were haunting signs of what was to come. He expressed an interest in medicine, which reportedly led him to practice surgery on animals. Some accounts indicate that he may have been responsible for the death of a friend.

Holmes' life of crime began with various frauds and scams. As a medical student at the University of Michigan, he stole corpses and used them to make false insurance claims. Holmes may have used the bodies for experiments, as well.

'Murder Castle'

In 1885, Holmes moved to Chicago, Illinois. He soon found work in a pharmacy, using his now infamous alias, Dr. Henry H. Holmes. He eventually took over the business and was later rumored to have killed its original owner.

Holmes had a three-story building constructed nearby, creating an elaborate house of horrors. The upper floors contained his living quarters and many small rooms where he tortured and killed his victims. There were also trapdoors and chutes that enabled him to move the bodies down to the basement, where he could burn the remains in a kiln or dispose of them in other ways.

During the 1893 Columbian Exposition, Holmes opened up his home as a hotel for visitors. Unfortunately, many guests did not survive in what became known as the "Murder Castle." Many of these victims - no one knows for certain the total number - 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.

Schemes

Holmes left Chicago shortly after the World's Fair to continue his schemes, including a plan with an associate named Benjamin Pitezel in which Pitezel would fake his death to collect $10,000 from a life insurance company. Jailed at one point for another fraud, Holmes confided in fellow inmate and notorious outlaw Marion Hedgepeth - who knew Holmes as H.M. Howard - about the life insurance scheme. Hedgepeth later helped investigators by revealing details of their discussion.

While the authorities eventually identified Howard as Holmes, they did not catch on soon enough to stop his final murders. Holmes killed Pitezel and, after telling his widow that her husband was still alive and in hiding, convinced her to let him travel with three of her five children, who also became his victims.

Arrest

After several weeks of outrunning authorities, Holmes was finally apprehended in November 1894. During his time in custody, he gave numerous stories to police, once admitting to killing 27 people. Convicted in 1895, Holmes appealed his case but lost.

Estimates of the total number of people Holmes killed range from 20 to as many as 200 victims.

Death

Holmes died on May 7, 1896, when he was hanged for the Pitezel murder. He was buried in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

'Devil in the White City'

Holmes' life as one of America's first serial killers has been the subject of many books and documentaries, including The Devil in the White City (2003), by Erik Larson. The book is in the process of being adapted to the small screen, with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio tapped to executive produce.

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Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, was a con artist and bigamist who was one of America's first serial killers. Sometimes referred to as the "Beast of Chicago," Holmes is believed to have killed somewhere between 20 and 200 people.

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Shortly after arriving in Chicago, Holmes went to Englewood. There he met Mrs. Holton, her and her husband owned Holton's Drugs, a pharmacy at the corner of Wallace and Sixty-third. Mr. Holton died of cancer and Mrs. Holton sold Holmes the pharmacy. When customers asked where she'd gone, Holmes told them that Mrs. Holton had gone to California.

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Earlier in 1886, Holmes had met a women in Minneapolis, and became obsessed. As the pharmacy became successful, he began traveling more and more to see her. While still legally married to Clara, he married Myrta on January 28, 1887. Lots of young, pretty women would visit Holmes's store, which made Myrta jealous. Tensions grew between them and in 1888, Myrta moved in with her parents in Wilmette, Illinois, where she gave birth to their daugther, Lucy. Holmes started visiting again, though rarely.

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Across from Holmes's pharmacy was an empty lot and in 1888, he bought it using the name H. S. Campbell. His idea was to have retail shops on the first floor, the second and third would be apartments with an office/housing for Holmes himself on the second. He didn't talk to an architect because he wanted to add secret ways throughout his building.

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While traveling in Boston on business under the name Henry Gordon, he met a woman named Minnie R. Williams. She called him Harry. Minnie had a younger sister, they'd been orphaned and sent to live with seperate uncles. When Minnie's guardian died, she unherited his estate. Holmes learned of this property, located in Fort Worth, Texas. He soon stopped visitng and his letters stopped. But she'd fallen in love. Soon, they'd find one another again and Holmes will find a purpose in his game for her.

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To keep what his actual intentions were, Holmes continuously switched out who was working on his builing. However, there were three men that stayed with Holmes. The first, Patrick Quinlan, became the building's caretaker. Charles Chappell knew how to rid a body of flesh and reassemble the bones. Medical schools were always in need of a cadavar(for studying and teaching students). The third, Benjamin Pitezel, started working for Holmes in late 1889. He and three of his five children are proven victims of Holmes. In total, he and his wife, Carrie, had three daughters and three sons (one of which died after birth), but more on them later.

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In 1891, debts began to pile up. Holmes could pay them, he was making enough maney, but he instead became friendly with the creditors and only paid a little for the building's transformation. This especially became a problem when he began his "...necessary modifications..." (Larson 85). Holmes soon learned that Myrta Belknap's great-uncle was coming to visit her and he was fairly rich. He started to visit Wilmette a lot more, bringing presents for Lucy and her mother. Belknap didn't fully trust Holmes, but Holmes soon asked him for $2,500 for a house. The house, he claimed, would be for him and Myrta. Back in Englewood, Holmes forged his signature on a new note for the same amount of money, this money went to Holmes's hotel. People in the neighborhood soon began calling his hotel "the castle",

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Beginning of 1891, Icilius Conner (he went by Ned) took a job as "...managing a jewelry counter that occupied one wall of a thriving drugstore on...Sixty-third and Wallace." (Larson 100). This, of course, was Holmes's drugstore. Remember, this is when Holmes was adding his modifications, one of which he had Ned test. Holmes had added a vault in and needed to make sure it was soundproof. Along with himself, Ned had brought his wife, daughter, and his sister to Englewood. Holmes also hired Julia and Gertrude, the sister, and paid a lot of attention to them. Gertrude went back to Muscatine, Iowa. It wasn't long before Ned's friends began speculating Julia was having an affair with Holmes. Ned didn't believe them. Holmes, seeing an opportunity, offered Ned the pharmacy. This new status didn't help his marriage and they divorced. In the divorce, Ned failed to get custody of his daughter and Pearl remained with Julia in Chicago.

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When Ned left, Holmes promised Julia that they would get married. In November, 1891, she announced her pregnacy. Holmes agreed to marry her, but only if he could perform an abortion on her. They planned the operation for Christmas Eve. Julia Conner and her daughter were killed that night with chloroform. "The sensation, as always, was pleasant and induced in him a warm languor..." (Larson 148).

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In the 1890's, there was a high demand for corpses, and Holmes took advantage of that. "They frowned on murder as a means of harvest; on the other hand, they made little effort to explore the proveance of any one body. Grave-robbing became an industry, albeit a small one..." (Larson 150). He paid Chappell $36 (now about $1,000) to clean the bones and make him a skeleton. The skeleton went to Hahneman Medical College.

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In 1892, Dr. Keeley created a "gold cure". It supposedly cured alcoholism. Pitezel traveled to Dwight, Illinois for this cure. While there he met a lovely women by the name of Emeline Cigrand. He returned to Englewood sometime in April and told Holmes of her. Emeline came to work for Holmes as a personal secretary. The two went on many bike rides together and saw the World Fair being built. Emeline didn't live in the castle, but was there often. In May, the Lawrences moved into his building, where they met Emeline. "The Lawrences often saw Emeline in Holmes's company. 'It was not long,' Dr. Lawrence said, 'before I became aware that the relations between Miss Cigrand and Mr. Holmes were not strictly those of an employer and employee, but we felt that she was to be more pitied than blamed." (Larson 165), despite a few warnings to stay away from him, Emeline had fallen completely in love (same as many of the previous women). Soon, Holmes asked her to marry him, even though he had other plans for her.

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Almost a year after Julia and Pearl's deaths, Emeline stopped visitng the Lawrences. At the beginning of December, Emeline gave Mrs. Lawrence a Christmas present, she claimed to be going to spend Christmas with her family. When the visits stopped, Mrs. Lawrence asked Holmes what'd become of her. Holmes told them that she'd gone away to get married. He even presented a wedding announcement, she'd married a Mr. Robert E. Phelps. Phelps was the alias Pitezel had used when in Dwight. The Lawrences became increasingly suspicious of Holmes and even though there were many who were still owed money, no one went to the police. "No one did. Not Mrs. Lawrence, not Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cigrand, not Ned Conner, and not Julia's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Smythe." (Larson 189). So many people went missing in Chicago and the police didn't have the resources to find every single one of them. Maybe someone would have known Holmes was a murderer if they'd known that a few days later, Holmes requested Chappell's help once again and the LaSalle Medical College got a brand new skeleton. Later, when they did know what he'd done, they found something in that vault. A footprint, etched into the wall. When found, the police knew Holmes had a fascination with chemistry, theorized that acid had been poured onto the floor. A woman had stepped in it and while trying to get out, put her foot against the door, possibly Emeline Cigrand.

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Early in 1893, several families started asking questions. They wanted to know where their daughters had gone, the Cigrand and Conner families had both hired private eyes to search for the missing woman. Still, even with all the people asking the same person for information, no one really suspected him. They only wanted information and addresses of friends. All he needed now, was a new secretary.

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February of 1893 brought him this new secretary. Minnie Williams found herself moving to Chicago and wrote to the man she knew as Harry. He explained that she couldn't call him by the name of Gordon, but Harry was alright. Once again, another woman had fallen hopelessly in love with him and Holmes could take advantage of it. Asking her to marry him was the way to do it, and no surprise, she accepted. Anna found out about the engagement and worried about her sister,  "Anna was skeptical. The romance was advancing too quickly and with a degree of intimacy that violated all the intricate rules of courtship." (Larson 203). It was like all his other relationships with any woman, he touched too much and watched too long, breaking all rules of courtship.

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Minnie still owned the land in Fort Worth and Holmes wanted it. He convinced her to sign the land over to a man named Alexander Bond on April 18, 1893. Bond then signed the land over to Benton T. Lyman. Holmes served as notary for both transactions, Bond was actually Holmes and Lyman was his loyal assistant Pitezel. Minnie and Holmes had what Minnie believed to be a legal and real wedding, just them and a preacher. However, there is no record of their marriage in Cook County, Illinois. Technically, she was his third wife, he was still married to Clara and Myrta, and his two children. In order to shut down Anna's suspicions, Holmes told Minnie to invite her to stay with them for a little while, after all, the fair would be here soon.

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The Fair opened May 1, 1983. Holmes's castle was positioned fairly close to the fair. Holmes's building housed many women during this time and the building smelled of chemicals. "The vault deadened most of the cries and pounding but not all." (Larson 257), Holmes needed new ways to kill. He had put valves into rooms, all he had to do was fill the room with gas and then clean up. Chappell's usefulness continued but Holmes didn't use him for every body, he had a kiln for a reason and pits to flled with quicklime.

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(May 1, 1893-October 30, 1893.)
Organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the New World, the World's Columbian Exposition became a defining moment in Chicago's history and the history of the United States as a whole.
When the World's Columbian Exposition opened, only 22 years had passed since the Chicago Fire of 1871; only 28 years had passed since the end of the American Civil War. In the interval, the era of Reconstruction had given way to a Gilded Age characterized by frenetic industrial growth, mass immigration, and class violence as evidenced by Chicago's 1886 Haymarket Square bombing. With many Americans wondering if sectional conflict had given way to class conflict, American political and economic leaders followed the example of their peers in Europe and turned increasingly to the medium of the world's fair to provide the cultural cement for their badly fragmented societies. The first world's fair, London's Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, had been championed by the British government to counter the spread of political radicalism and to tout the global expansion of the British Empire. The success of London's imperial show inspired Britain's continental rivals to organize fairs of their own. The United States followed in 1876 with a world's fair in Philadelphia, but this exposition lost money and left many Americans wondering if the exposition movement would ever take hold in the United States. Chicago's World's Columbian Exposition cast all doubts aside.
Momentum to celebrate the Columbian quadricentennial began building in the early 1880s. By the close of the decade, civic leaders in St. Louis, New York City, and Washington DC joined their counterparts in Chicago and announced that they were interested in hosting a fair that, in a time of great economic uncertainty, held the promise of generating commercial profits as well as increasing real-estate values. Exposition backers also were also motivated by the prospect of securing greater prestige for themselves and for their cities. By 1890, it was clear that the U.S. Congress would have to decide where the fair would be held and that the principal contenders, by virtue of their superior financial resources, would be Chicago and New York. New York's financial titans, including J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and William Waldorf Astor, pledged $15 million to underwrite the fair if Congress awarded it to New York City. Not to be outdone, Chicago's leading capitalists and exposition sponsors, including Charles T. Yerkes, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, Gustavus Swift, and Cyrus McCormick, responded in kind. Furthermore, Chicago's promoters presented evidence of significant financial support from the city and state as well as over $5 million in stock subscriptions from people from every walk of life. What finally led Congress to vote in Chicago's favor was banker Lyman Gage's ability to raise several million additional dollars in a 24-hour period to best New York's final offer. Euphoric over their accomplishment, Chicago's powerful exposition backers had no time to rest. Although Congress pushed back the opening of the exposition to 1893, major battles lay ahead, especially over the selection of a site. Many downtown commercial interests favored a central location, but struggles over property rights and traffic congestion forced the exposition corporation, headed by Harlow N. Higinbotham, and the national exposition commission, headed by Thomas W. Palmer, to settle for Jackson Park, a marshy bog seven miles south of the Loop.
To hasten the process of construction and exhibit selection, exposition authorities vested responsibility in Daniel H. Burnham, the exposition's director of works, and George R. Davis, director-general. Both drew inspiration from earlier fairs, especially the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition with its famed Eiffel Tower. And both sought ways to make the Chicago fair distinctive.
For Burnham, architecture and sculpture would be to the Chicago fair what engineering had been to the Paris exposition. With the help of his partner, John W. Root, who died suddenly in 1891, Burnham assembled a stunning array of artistic and architectural talent to design the fair's main, palatial exhibition buildings on grounds that landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned becoming a public park that would rival Central Park in New York City. Major outdoor sculptures included works by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Frederick MacMonnies, and Daniel Chester French. The major buildings and their architects included Administration, by Richard Morris Hunt; Agriculture, by Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White; Electricity, by Henry Van Brunt and Frank Howe; Horticulture, by William L. Jenney and William B. Mundie; Fisheries, by Henry Ives Cobb; Machinery Hall, by Robert Peabody and John Stearns; Manufactures and Liberal Arts, by George B. Post; Mines and Mining, by Solon Beman; and Transportation, by Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan. With the exception of the latter, which boasted Sullivan's long-remembered Golden Door, all these buildings were decidedly neoclassical, lathered with plaster of Paris, and painted a chalky white, thus bestowing the moniker of "White City" on the main exposition buildings. The White City's neoclassicism provoked a long-lived debate among architects. Sullivan, for one, would decry the pernicious effects of the fair on American architecture, while others praised the "civilizing" and uplifting effect that Burnham's Beaux-Arts plan would have on the public architecture of squalid American cities. While Burnham was developing his blueprint for the exposition grounds and buildings, Davis and his team of directors tackled the equally monumental task of giving form to the millions of exhibits that would go on display. For assistance with classifying exhibit material, Davis relied on the advice of America's foremost taxonomist, the Smithsonian Institution's G. Brown Goode, who conceptualized the fair as a veritable encyclopedia of civilization.
What exactly did "civilization" mean? Part of the answer came from the monumental exhibition palaces stuffed to overflowing with technologies of industrial and agricultural production as well as exhibits of fine art that surrounded the Court of Honor. Another part of the answer was provided by negative example through exhibits and concessions arranged along the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long avenue that ran at a right angle to the White City and blended education with amusement.
The inspiration for the Midway came from the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, where the French government and prominent anthropologists turned representations of the French colonies into living ethnological villages featuring people from Africa and Asia. To lend anthropological legitimacy to their enterprise, Chicago's exposition directors placed the Midway under the nominal direction of Harvard's Frederic Ward Putnam, who had already been chosen to organize an Anthropology Building at the fair. Putnam envisioned the Midway as a living outdoor museum of "primitive" human beings that would afford visitors the opportunity to measure the progress of humanity toward the ideal of civilization presented in the White City. All of the ethnographic villages and most of the other attractions on the Midway, however, were commercial ventures organized by entrepreneurs who obtained concessions through the Ways and Means Committee of the World's Columbian Commission. By opening day, the Midway boasted an African village and a massive Streets of Cairo concession along with other ethnological shows. But the Midway, in addition to providing a serious educational component to the fair, had become its amusement center as well. With its wheel designed by George Ferris revolving high above the fairgrounds, its notorious-at least by Victorian standards-belly dancers, and its varied cuisine, the Midway's multiple fascinations challenged the White City's unity and dignity. Indeed, the Midway Plaisance is perhaps best understood as a cultural hothouse that generated many novel mass cultural forms (Riverview Park and Coney Island, for instance, were direct offshoots of the Midway) that would lend a distinctive character to American culture as it evolved over the course of the twentieth century.
As tensions between the White City and the Midway Plaisance made clear, the World's Columbian Exposition reflected broader struggles in American society over the future course of American society and culture. Concerns about the power of the exposition to shape the future were also apparent in the struggles fought by African Americans and women over their representation at the fair.
The whiteness of the White City became increasingly offensive to African Americans as plans for the fair unfolded. In response to the determination of African Americans to show the world their accomplishments since emancipation, exposition directors insisted that African American proposals for exhibits be approved by all-white state committees. Most such requests were rejected out of hand. In response to requests from African Americans that they receive a role in planning the fair, exposition authorities appointed a St. Louis school principal to the position of alternate on the national commission. Enraged by the politics of exclusion and tokenism, some African Americans, led by Ida B. Wells, urged African Americans to boycott the fair. Frederick Douglass, who served as Haiti's representative at the exposition, disagreed and urged African Americans to participate as fully as possible. When exposition managers set aside a special "colored American" day (white ethnic groups had their own days as well), Douglass seized the occasion to insist that Americans live up to the Constitution and their promises of social justice for former slaves. But the fair, through its racist policies, had already helped pave the way for national acceptance of the separate-but-equal doctrine that would become the law of the land in 1896. Since the act of Congress that originally awarded Chicago the fair mandated that a Board of Lady Managers be created as part of the exposition's governing structure, it was clear that white middle-class women would have more success than African Americans in securing measure of representation at the fair. But it was not clear how women would be represented. Some women argued that exhibits prepared by women should be displayed in the major exhibition palaces alongside those organized by men and judged accordingly. Others pressed and won their case that women should have a separate building for their exhibits. Bertha Honoré Palmer, president of the Board of Lady Managers, lent her considerable talents to organizing exhibits for the Woman's Building, which was designed by Boston architect Sophia Hayden and located near the point where the Midway Plaisance joined the main exposition grounds. The World's Columbian Exposition defined American culture. Its World's Congress Auxiliary presented lectures and discussions by prominent political activists and intellectuals about subjects as wide-ranging and pressing as religion and science, labor, and women's rights. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave his famous paper on the significance of the frontier in American history to a meeting of historians held in conjunction with the fair. Henry Ford saw an internal combustion engine at the fair that fired his dreams about the possibility of designing a horseless carriage. For millions of visitors, the electrical illuminations of the fair were a source of wonder and excitement about the possibilities of illuminating America's farms and cities. Whether they saw the fair firsthand or experienced it through postcards or accounts in newspapers and magazines, most Americans regarded the World's Columbian Exposition as a cultural touchstone and remembered it for the rest of their lives.
Multiple tragedies marked the end of the fair. A smallpox epidemic that originated at the fair in midsummer spread throughout the city by early autumn. Then, just before the gala closing ceremonies were to be held, Mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated. Finally, shortly after the fair's close, a fire swept through the fairgrounds, destroying many of the buildings.
The fair was gone, but not its influence. It lifted the spirits of over 20 million people who paid to visit the exposition just as the Panic of 1893 hit. Furthermore, many of the exhibits found their way into museums around the country, including the Smithsonian Institution and the Philadelphia Commercial Museum. Chicago's Field Museum owed its origin to the fair and opened in 1894 in the former Palace of Fine Arts, a building that would later be reconstructed to become the Museum of Science and Industry. And the building that had housed delegates to world's congresses would become the Art Institute of Chicago. On another level, the triumph of the World's Columbian Exposition revivified the American world's fair movement and set a standard against which every subsequent exposition would be measured. Forty years later, the promoters of the Century of Progress Exposition made clear their indebtedness to the 1893 fair when they triggered the opening of their exposition with a beam of starlight that left Arcturus the same year that the World's Columbian Exposition had illuminated Chicago's skies.
Robert W. Rydell

Badger, Reid. The Great American Fair: The World's Columbian Exposition and American Culture. 1979.

Harris, Neil, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert Rydell. Grand Illusions: Chicago's World's Fair of 1893. 1993.

Rydell, Robert W. All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at America's International Expositions, 1876-1916. 1984.

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(May 1, 1893-October 30, 1893.) Organized to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Columbus's landfall in the New World, the World's Columbian Exposition became a defining moment in Chicago's history and the history of the United States as a whole.

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June of 1893 brought Anna Williams to stay with Minnie and Holmes. Anna fell for the facade too and she quickly trusted him. When asked to stay the summer, she was thrilled and had a trunk with her things shipped. Now that they'd seen the fair, Holmes showed her Englewood. He asked her to grab something from his walk-in vault. With Anna gone, Minnie was next. The footprint might also possibly be one of theirs. Holmes got some help moving a few boxes, one of which was coffin shaped and delivered to the Union Depot and taken somewhere else. The second item most likely ended up in the hands of Charles Chappell. Pitezel's family also got some gifts: "...a collection of dresses, several pair of shoes, and some hats that had belonged to his cousin, a Miss Minnie Williams..." (Larson 298). Quinlan also was given a pair of trunks, each with the MRW on the side.

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Creditors and families were getting to him. Minnie's guardians hired an attorney to look for her and protect her assets, Anna's guardian hired a private eye too. Among others, the Cigrands and Smythes continued to send letters out asking for any other information on the whereabouts of their daughters. Holmes needed to leave Chicago, so he set fire to the top floor of his castle and filed for a $6,000 policy. A man named Cowie had grown suspicious of Holmes and would only give the money to H. S. Campbell in person(the alias Holmes ran the building as). Cowie investigated Holmes and linked all of the creditors together, who'd hired an attorney George B. Chamberlin. Chamberlin met with Holmes along with about two  dozen creditors and a police detective. Holmes's charm came into play and he managed to get some creditors to shed a few tears for him. While discussing how to proceed, Holmes was told to wait outside. One attorney who had liked Holmes's solution to the problem went out and talked to him. No one is sure what happened but either way, the attorney went back into the meeting and Holmes went to Texas. With him he brought Pitezel and of course, his new fiancee, Georgiana Yoke. Before they left, however, Holmes "...insure(d) Pitezel's life for $10,000." (Larson 326).

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Holmes was arrested for insurance fraud in Boston on November 17, 1894. He had faked the death of Bejamin Pitezel in order to get the $10,000. He confessed to fraud and was now in Moyamensing Prison. In June of 1895, Detective Geyer was assigned to the case, it turned out that he had not faked Pitezel's death and now three of his children were missing. Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel had been last seen in the custody of Holmes. Geyer was determined to find the missing children. Holmes though, claimed that the children were alive and safe with a Miss Minnie Williams. To commit the fraud, he'd burned Pitezel's body in a house, the coroner needed a family member to identify the body. Carrie, Ben's wife, was too ill to come, instead Alice, at the time fifteen, went with Holmes to identify the body. After identifying the body as her father's, Holmes convinced Carrie that Pitezel was in hiding and wanted to see his children. He kept Alice and "He took Nellie, eleven, and Howard, eight, and embarked with all three children on a strange and sad journey." (Larson 341). The girls wanted to send letters to their mother, they wrote them and gave them to Holmes. He promised he would send them out, obviously he never did and instead kept them in a box labeled "Property of H. H. Holmes". After his arrest, the police found all of the letters, these would soon lead them to the children. On June 26, 1895, Geyer began to follow the trail the letters created. From Cinicinnati to Indianapolis, Geyer reconstructed the children's journey. Not only was Holmes's moving the three children around, he was keeping his wife in the same city and when in Detroit, Carrie had her eldest daughter and the baby only three houses away from her children. "It was a game for Holmes, Geyer realized. He possessed them all and reveled in his possession. One additional phrase of Alice's letter kept running through Geyer's brain. 'Howard,' she had written, 'is not with us now." (Larson 350). Still following the letters, Geyer ended up in Toronto on July 7, 1895. It took some asking around, but soon he found himself at a house Holmes had rented. In the basement, three feet under, they found the girls. Of Nellie's body, her hair was the most intact part. Their mother came to Toronto to identify their bodies.

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The man who became infamous as H.H. Holmes, one of the first serial killers in the United States, preyed mainly on naive and gullible women - young women who wouldn't be missed amid the thousands of World's Fair tourists streaming into Chicago's fashionable Englewood neighborhood.

As Chicago basked in the bright light of the White City, the 1893 Columbian Exposition that was making headlines around the world, Holmes was remorselessly collecting people, using them and efficiently discarding them. After arriving in Chicago in the late 1880s, he built what became known as his Murder Castle at 63rd and Wallace streets and proceeded to murder, swindle, lie, steal and cheat, all under the facade of upper-class respectability as the friendly neighborhood druggist and businessman.

Holmes gave Americans one of their first well-publicized cases of serial killings. The specter of anonymous victims murdered in the big city runs through our popular culture, kept alive by rare but notorious cases. Among them: the discovery this month of seven bodies, and the search for more, in northwest Indiana.

Readers today likely know Holmes, whose real name was Herman Mudgett, from Erik Larson's 2003 best-seller, "The Devil in the White City." Tribune readers near the turn of the last century met Holmes as the subject of a disturbing story published March 31, 1893, just over a month before the World's Fair was to open. The article detailed how Holmes had failed to pay for hundreds of dollars in furnishings for a hotel he planned to run at the castle to cash in on fair tourists. When angry merchants showed up to demand that he return the goods, they found nothing but empty rooms. Later a hidden room containing much of the furniture was discovered. Other concealed areas held a number of mattresses and box springs. The furnishings were removed; Holmes was left behind.

And Holmes might well have gotten away with it all had his last nefarious scheme not unraveled faster than he could cut away the loose ends.

On Nov. 17, 1894, he was arrested and accused of attempting in Philadelphia his favorite ploy: a life insurance fraud wherein a badly disfigured corpse plays the role of the insured. Though his methods were unsavory, at this point authorities still thought he was a prolific and gifted swindler. But in the following days, the Tribune's headlines revealed the growing, horrifying reality that Holmes wasn't just a con man: "Murder in the case," "Hint of dark deeds" and "Spins his own web." Officials suspected Holmes didn't bother to bring in a corpse this time, and just killed his partner, Benjamin Pitzel.

About a week later, the Tribune's big Sunday paper unspooled a 21/2-page tale of Holmes' long history of chicanery, much of it in Chicago. Headlined "H.H. HOLMES, CROOK," with secondary headlines such as "Bad From His Boyhood" and "Began to Tread Devious Paths When a College Student," it told how Holmes, while attending the University of Michigan, teamed up with a med student there to pull off the corpse-life insurance scheme multiple times.

"As an all around fraud Holmes had a wonderful success with men, but he preferred women and insurance companies. He said they came easier. Swindler of men, betrayer of women, he has left behind him a wake of ruin and tears that not all the courts of America can wash away," the Tribune reported.

The story detailed his goofy swindles, such as his patented water-to-gas invention and his "discovery" of an artesian well in his basement that produced water with amazing curative powers. It also revealed his multiple wives, who were sometimes pretty but always wealthy. Case in point: Minnie Williams, "a singular beauty" whose estate was worth at least $75,000. Both she and her sister were missing.

The story also asked: Whatever happened to Pitzel's three children?

The answer and horrifying truth would have to wait about eight months. On July 15, 1895, the bodies of Pitzel's two daughters, Alice and Nellie, were discovered buried in a cellar in Toronto. Little Howard was believed dead, but his body was still missing.

The swindler was revealed to be a serial killer. It was front-page news across the country. And the search for other bodies began.

In Chicago, authorities looking for clues turned to Holmes' house. The Tribune described it in a 1937 article: "O, what a queer house it was! In all America there was none other like it. Its chimneys stuck out where chimneys should never stick out. Its stairways ended nowhere in particular. Winding passages brought the uninitiated with a frightful jerk back to where they had started from. There were rooms that had no doors. There were doors that had no rooms. A mysterious house it was indeed - a crooked house, a reflex of the builder's own distorted mind. In that house occurred dark and eerie deeds."

Police found a house of horrors.

Holmes had created a "murder factory." Rooms could be locked from the outside. A third-floor room was a veritable bank vault, padded to muffle sound and fitted with a gas pipe to asphyxiate victims. A hidden shaft to the cellar made for easy disposal of bodies. And it was the cellar of the "murder factory" where Holmes undoubtedly worked, the Tribune reported. Behind a fake wall, police found a butcher's table, quicklime vats, bones, bloody clothing - and a crematory. In the oven, "They found a woman's watch chain. They found the buckle of a woman's garter," the Tribune reported.

The watch chain was Minnie's. The garter buckle was her sister's.

Through the summer, Tribune readers learned of Holmes' other victims, including the Conner family. Ned and Julia Conner and their 12-year-old daughter, Pearl, had moved to Chicago from Davenport, Iowa. Holmes hired Ned Conner to handle the jewelry counter in his corner store, installed Julia as a bookkeeper and leased the family rooms in his hotel. He then seduced Julia, breaking up her marriage and sending the "mild, inoffensive" Ned packing. Julia and Pearl went missing in 1893.

A former secretary named Emeline Cigrand and her fiance also went missing. Her remains were reported found in a story headlined "Bones in a trunk."

As the bodies piled up, Holmes, still jailed in Philadelphia, remained cool, admitting only to insurance fraud and denying killing anyone.

But when a jury convicted him of Benjamin Pitzel's death, his facade began to crack. The Tribune reported, "Once in a reckless, or more likely cynical moment, Holmes announced, 'O, sure, I've killed twenty-seven people!'" Authorities doubted that, having identified just 12 victims, but some now suggest he killed many more. Jeff Mudgett, who says he is Holmes' great-great-grandson, claims in a book that his ancestor was Jack the Ripper, who supposedly killed five prostitutes in London in 1888.

Holmes was sentenced on March 9, 1896, to be executed. A month later, the North American newspaper in Philadelphia printed what it said was Holmes' confession, running three whole newspaper pages, in which Holmes wrote of his "blood-curdling atrocities with an abandon that simply appalls one," the Tribune said.

Claiming again that he killed 27 people and was preparing to kill six more, he wrote, "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."

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On May 7, H.H. Holmes was hanged by his neck until he died. His name lives on.

Editor's note: Thanks to Kathy Berg, of Chicago's Clearing neighborhood, and Mark Graham, of Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, for suggesting this Flashback.

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The man who became infamous as H.H. Holmes, one of the first serial killers in the United States, preyed mainly on naive and gullible women - young women who wouldn't be missed amid the thousands of World's Fair tourists streaming into Chicago's fashionable Englewood neighborhood.

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Geyer's findings in Toronto caused the Chicago police to search his "castle". They began on July 19 and found Holmes's modifications. While some rooms were normal, some had no windows and airtight doors. "One room contained a walk-in vault, with iron walls. Police found a gas jet with no apparent function other than to admit gas into the vault." (Larson 364). This wasn't even the worst of what they found. His hotel also had a basement, instead of only two bodies though, they found Holmes's kiln, a vat of acid, quicklime, and a dissection table, along with surgical tools, bits of clothing, and so many bones. Charles Chappell even cooperated with the police and helped them get back four skeletons. Among the many peculiar things found in Holmes's castle, now dubbed the "murder castle", was a footprint so perfectly imprinted into the wall. When Geyer learned that in the cavern, they'd found a child's bones, he thought it could be Howard. Sadly, after examination, they found them to be of a girl's, possibly Pearl Conner. Geyer still believed that Howard never made it out of Indianapolis and searched every nearby town. In the middle of night, on August 19, the "murder castle" burned to the ground. Holmes was never in any of them, except Irvington. He arrived in Irvington on August 27, 1895 and learned of a house that Holmes had rented sometime in October of 1894. While sifting through the chimney flue, they found what was left of Howard. Carrie Pitezel confirmed it was her son by several possessions, including a little toy his father had bought him at the fair of 1893.

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In Indianapolis, the jury indicted Holmes for the murder of Howard and Toronto for Alice and Nellie's murders. A guilty charge from Philadelphia was all they needed, Holmes would be sentenced to death for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. "He said of Pitezel, 'It will be understood that from the first hour of our acquaintance, even before I knew he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my blood-thirstiness, I intended to kill him." (Larson 386). In Holmes's confession, he claimed to have murdered 27 people, some of which were found alive. Only nine of these could be confirmed, but due to the amound of bones found under his castle, there is a possibility he killed around 200. On May 7, 1896 at 10:13am, H. H. Holmes was hung.

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"I was born with the very devil in me," famously stated H.H. Holmes. "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."

On May 7, 1896, Henry Howard Holmes was executed by hanging for the murder of his associate Ben Pitezel. Despite Holmes' confession of killing 27 other people (some of those people were later discovered to be alive and well), he was officially linked to nine murders. Some estimate Holmes had killed up to 200 people, but these claims were exaggerated.

By the time H.H. Holmes (real name Herman Webster Mudgett) arrived in Chicago in 1886, he was a wanted man. As a con artist and bigamist, he fled from one town to the next, avoiding prison time for various scams, including insurance fraud of a ghastly nature: Holmes was stealing and mutilating medical cadavers and pretending they were victims of accidents to collect money.

But Holmes had more monstrous ideas tinkering in his dark mind. Soon after arriving in Chicago, he found work as a pharmacist and quickly began plans on building a "Murder Castle," a three-story building that took up the entire block of 63rd and Wallace streets. Holmes called it the World's Fair Hotel to accommodate tourists who were arriving in droves for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. His victims of choice? Young female drifters searching for a new exciting life in the big city.

In an article written in 1937, the Chicago Tribune described Holmes' Murder Castle in this way: "O, what a queer house it was! In all America there was none other like it. Its chimneys stuck out where chimneys should never stick out. Its stairways ended nowhere in particular. Winding passages brought the uninitiated with a frightful jerk back to where they had started from. There were rooms that had no doors. There were doors that had no rooms. A mysterious house it was indeed - a crooked house, a reflex of the builder's own distorted mind. In that house occurred dark and eerie deeds."
Here are some of Holmes' victims, both known and assumed.
The Pitezel Family were the known victims of Holmes: Father Ben and his three children, daughters Alice and Nellie, and little son Howard.

The family was killed during the fall of 1894. Instead of using a cadaver, Holmes used former business partner Ben as part of his insurance fraud scheme. Holmes knocked Ben out and killed him by setting him on fire.

On July 15, 1895 Alice and Nellie's bodies were found in a Toronto cellar. Later, authorities found teeth and pieces of bone among charred ruins that belonged to Howard in an Indianapolis cottage that Holmes had rented.

Of Holmes' assumed victims were: Julia and her daughter Pearl Connor (1891), Emeline Cigrand (1892) and sisters Minnie and Nannie Williams (1893). (Minnie had married Holmes, who swindled her out of her inheritance.)

The bodies of Julia, Emeline, and Minnie and Nannie were never found but rumor had it Holmes probably sold their cadavers to medical schools. He had consistently stated that Julia and Emeline died while undergoing illegal abortions. Julia was allegedly Holmes' lover and Emeline was Holmes' former secretary whom he later purportedly proposed to.

While searching Holmes' hotel, authorities recovered Minnie's watch chain and Nannie's garter buckle in one of the ovens. Although forensic evidence was rudimentary at the time, bones found in the basement most likely belonged to 12-year-old Pearl Connor, whom he allegedly poisoned. As for Emeline, the police believed they had come upon her hair and bones. One account claims that an eyewitness saw Holmes and his janitor haul out a big trunk the day after her disappearance.

Although there is a lengthy list of other potential victims Holmes may have murdered, these nine victims have been plausibly attributed to the serial killer's killing spree.

Just before his execution, Holmes was said to be pleasant and calm. The only request he had was for his body to be buried 10 feet deep into the ground with his casket encased in cement. (He didn't want grave robbers to dig his body up and use it for dissection.)

When Holmes was finally hung from the gallows, it was said his neck did not snap. Instead he died a slow death, his body twitching until he was finally pronounced dead 20 minutes later.

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The Victims of Chicago's First Serial Murderer, H.H. Holmes

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"I was born with the very devil in me," famously stated H.H. Holmes. "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.