America’s First Serial Killer

04.03.2022

You probably recognize names like Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and Dennis Rader — some of the most notorious serial killers from the past few decades — but does H.H. Holmes ring a bell? Before the term “serial killer” was even a thing, H.H. Holmes, or Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, started the chilling trend in the 1890s.

H. Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett in New Hampshire in 1861. As an adult, he abandoned his young wife and child in 1885 to move to Illinois. Once there, he changed his name to Holmes, reportedly as an homage to the fictional English detective Sherlock Holme

Soon afterward he apparently began killing people in order to steal their property. The house he built for himself, which would become known as “Murder Castle,” was equipped with secret passages, trapdoors, soundproof rooms, doors that could be locked from the outside, gas jets to asphyxiate victims, and a kiln to cremate the bodies. At the reputed peak of his career, during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he allegedly seduced and murdered a number of women, typically by becoming engaged to them and then killing them after securing control of their life savings. Mudgett also required his employees to carry life insurance policies naming him as beneficiary so that he could collect money after he killed them. He sold the bodies of many of his victims to local medical schools.

Holmes fled Chicago after the World’s Fair after committing too many scams. He struck again when he killed his business partner Benjamin Pitezel, with whom he was planning a life insurance scheme. He was finally caught in November 1894 and was hanged in Philadelphia in May 1896 for the murder of Pitezel. During his time in jail, he wrote about his murderous ways, saying, “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.”

On May 7, 1896, Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison, also known as the Philadelphia County Prison, Until the moment of his death, Holmes remained calm and amiable, showing very few signs of fear, anxiety or depression. Despite this, he asked for his coffin to be contained in cement and buried 10 feet deep, because he was concerned grave robbers would steal his body and use it for dissection. Holmes’ neck did not snap; he instead strangled to death slowly, twitching for over 15 minutes before being pronounced dead 20 minutes after the trap had been sprung.