The Untold Truth Of America's First Serial Killer

H.H. Holmes was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, and most of his childhood history comes from his own accounts. When Holmes penned his autobiography, he obviously did so with a pretty strong bias. While it can't entirely be trusted, it can be used to test the waters of his strange tale.

According to Holmes, his parents were strict Methodists. He had a particularly strong bond with his mother and a father who would beat him — or send him to the attic — for misbehaving. He also wrote of one day in particular he said shaped his dark fascination with the inner workings of the human body. Growing up, he said, he had a fear of the town doctor's office. He said every time he walked by the open door and the smell wafted out at him it would turn his stomach. A few of the neighborhood bullies noticed and dragged him in. The boys forced him to touch the doctor's skeleton, and it's been speculated that was the moment that sparked something morbid and ultimately led to his enrollment in medical school (via Fosters).

There's one more odd thing of note about his time in Gilmanton — he spent a single term teaching in one of the local schools.

When The Telegraph announced Leonardo DiCaprio signed on to play H.H. Holmes in Martin Scorsese's adaptation of the story (DiCaprio is now slated to executive produce), it described Holmes as "a heroic swindler as well as a mass murderer." That's no exaggeration.

Long before the Murder Castle, Holmes started his dark ways with insurance fraud. While he was a student at the University of Michigan, he would steal bodies from the medical school, mutilate them, and then collect insurance claims. His tuition was paid with money he'd swindled from a wealthy woman, and according to Forensic Scholars Today, that was a regular thing. Holmes wooed and married multiple women, then convinced them to make him the beneficiary of their fortunes before leaving them. He once juggled three women in three different cities at one time.

According to The Telegraph, he also masterminded some bizarre scams, like selling a cure for alcoholism or selling a machine he claimed could turn water into gas. Really, it was a washing machine he'd hooked up to a gas main, but he was such a charismatic liar that his pyramid schemes worked. He even ran one out of the Murder Castle: There was a pharmacy on the first floor from which he sold magical, "miraculous healing mineral water" by the glass.

H.H. Holmes' life wasn't just dark and depraved; it was massively confusing. Trying to sift through the details is like trying to untie the rat king's tail. But there are confirmed bits and pieces. According to Harper's Magazine, Holmes hooked up with Julia Conner in 1890 and moved her and her 8-year-old daughter into the Murder Castle. Then her husband left, and Holmes went off to Texas, where he met Minnie Williams.

Harper's says Williams was a wealthy young woman who fell in love with a man she knew as Harry Gordon. She moved to Chicago with "Harry" in 1893 and quickly grew jealous of Conner, who later disappeared. (The remains of a young child were later found in the basement, thought to be those of Conner's daughter.) Williams became the mistress of Murder Castle, and while no one knows whether she was more victim or accomplice, her sister was invited to join them in Chicago ... and then promptly disappeared. Holmes later said Williams had killed her sister in a jealous rage. While it's hard to take his word for it, she did almost anything for him, including being a witness to one of his many marriages. That marriage was in January 1894; Williams disappeared within a few months.

The idea of stepping into H.H. Holmes' dark, brick-walled basement for the first time is unfathomable, and it's impossible to imagine the horrors law enforcement were confronted with when they finally stepped inside. According to Chicagoist, the centerpiece of the basement torture chamber was something the police described as a medieval rack. Holmes gave it the much more catchy name of "elasticity determinator," and he used it to try to prove the human body could be stretched almost infinitely. 

Harper's Magazine says Holmes never completely explained his theories — or how the machines were supposed to work — but that he believed he could eventually create an entirely new race with his experimentation. To those ends, he stretched some of his victims in the hopes of kick-starting his race of giants. Others, he just wanted to get the details on their fortunes.

The basement was also kitted out with several pits filled with quicklime and acids, a crematory, operating tables, and cabinets filled with surgical instruments. Horror movies don't have anything on this because this was very, very real.

Say what you will about H.H. Holmes, but there's no arguing the fact he was diabolical, charming, and incredibly good at convincing anyone to believe anything. He got away with murder for years, and according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, it wasn't until he made a few crucial mistakes that things started unraveling.

The first was that he killed his partner in 1894, a man named Benjamin Pitezel. He met Pitezel about the same time he met Minnie Williams, and he definitely recruited Pitezel into his schemes. The plan was pretty simple: fake Pitezel's death, then collect and split the insurance money. Instead, Holmes got him drunk, set him on fire, collected the cash, and left town with three of his children. When the claim was investigated as fraud, law enforcement caught up to Holmes in Boston and sent him back to Philadelphia, where he'd killed Pitezel.

Philadelphia assigned one of its best officials, Frank Geyer, to look for the missing kids. When he tugged on that single string, the whole elaborate tapestry started to unravel, beginning with the discovery of two Pitezel daughters — ages 11 and 15 — decomposing beneath a Toronto house Holmes had briefly rented.

According to Executed Today, H.H. Holmes showed no sympathy when Benjamin Pitezel's wife testified against him at his trial, but when his own current wife took the stand, he played the part with a "fount of emotion." He largely defended himself — with some aid from an attorney — and was given the death penalty on November 2, 1895, less than a week after the trial started. Holmes appealed several times, and when it became clear that he wasn't going to dodge the death penalty, he sold his confession to a newspaper for $7,500. He confessed to 27 murders, then denied any of it was true the day after it was published.

He was hanged on May 7, 1896, and as he stood on the scaffold he gave his last words, saying (in part), "I only wish to say that the extent of my wrongdoing in the taking of human life consists in contriving the killing of two women that have died at my hands as a result of criminal operations." He went on to deny killing Pitezel or his children and was hanged. Afterward, his final wishes were granted: He would be entombed in cement and buried 10 feet underground.