The Murder Castle: 15 Facts About H. H. Holmes

1. H. H. Holmes wasn't his real name.

He was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, the son of a farming family. He took the name Henry Howard Holmes in the 1880s, one of many aliases he used throughout his life as he moved from city to city, leaving unpaid debts and fraud behind him.

2. He trained as a doctor.

Holmes graduated from the University of Michigan's medical department in 1884. According to later accounts, he took bodies from the medical school, disguised them and used them in insurance scams, claiming the dead were people he had insured. Fraud would remain the common thread of his entire criminal career.

3. He was married to three women at the same time.

Holmes married Clara Lovering in New Hampshire in 1878. Without divorcing her, he married Myrta Belknap in Minneapolis in 1887, and then Georgiana Yoke in Denver in 1894. None of the three wives appears to have known about the others at first, and all of them outlived him.

4. He built his "castle" by constantly firing the builders.

In Chicago's Englewood neighborhood, Holmes put up a large three-story building at the corner of 63rd and Wallace Streets, with shops on the ground floor and apartments above. He repeatedly fired construction crews, which allowed him to avoid paying them and meant that few people understood the building's full layout.

5. Many of the castle's horrors were invented by newspapers.

After Holmes's arrest, newspapers described the building as a "Murder Castle" with secret passages, soundproof gas chambers, trapdoors and chutes leading to a basement with acid vats and a crematorium. Modern historians have found little evidence for most of these claims, which seem to have been exaggerated by sensational journalists competing for readers.

6. He tried to profit from the 1893 World's Fair.

When the World's Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago in 1893, millions of visitors poured into the city. Holmes advertised rooms in his building to fairgoers. Legend says he murdered many of these guests, but there is no solid evidence that any fair visitor died there.

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7. Historians can link him to about nine murders.

Holmes is often said to have killed as many as 200 people, but that number has no basis in evidence. Historians can connect him with reasonable confidence to around nine victims, including his mistress Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl, his employee Emeline Cigrand, and the sisters Minnie and Anna Williams.

8. He sold his confession for a fortune, and some of his "victims" were alive.

Shortly before his execution, Holmes confessed to 27 murders in a lurid account published by the Hearst newspapers, which reportedly paid him $7,500, a huge sum at the time. Reporters soon discovered that several of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive.

9. Insurance fraud led to his worst crime.

Holmes and his longtime accomplice, Benjamin Pitezel, plotted to fake Pitezel's death in Philadelphia and collect a $10,000 life insurance payout. In September 1894, Holmes instead killed Pitezel for real. He then persuaded Pitezel's wife to let him take three of her children with him on a journey across the United States and Canada.

10. He was arrested for stealing a horse.

The detectives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, hired by the insurance company, tracked Holmes for weeks. He was finally arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, on an outstanding warrant for a horse fraud in Texas. Only later did investigators realize the full extent of his crimes.

11. A Philadelphia detective found the missing children.

Detective Frank Geyer followed Holmes's trail through cities in the Midwest and Canada in 1895. In Toronto, he found the remains of Alice and Nellie Pitezel buried in the cellar of a rented house. Their brother Howard's remains were later discovered in Irvington, Indiana. Geyer's investigation made national headlines.

12. He briefly acted as his own lawyer.

Holmes went on trial in Philadelphia in October 1895 for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. At one point, he dismissed his attorneys and tried to defend himself, cross-examining witnesses before taking his lawyers back. The jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death.

13. His execution did not go as planned.

Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896, just days before his 35th birthday. The fall did not break his neck, and he reportedly took around 15 minutes to die, twitching at the end of the rope as witnesses watched.

14. He asked to be buried in cement.

Fearing that grave robbers would steal his body for medical research, Holmes asked to be buried 10 feet deep in a coffin filled with cement. Rumors that he had escaped execution persisted for decades, until his body was exhumed in 2017 and identified by his teeth.

15. His castle is long gone, but his legend keeps growing.

The Englewood building was damaged by fire in 1895 and demolished in 1938. A post office now stands on the site. Holmes's story reached a huge new audience in 2003 with Erik Larson's bestseller The Devil in the White City, and one of his descendants has even claimed that Holmes was Jack the Ripper, a theory historians do not take seriously.