Born Herman Webster Mudgett, the man who would become known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes—or simply H. H. Holmes—was one of America’s most notorious criminals.
Before his execution in 1896, he built a career of fraud, forgery, bigamy, horse theft, and murder, and faced more than 50 lawsuits in Chicago alone. On May 16, 1861, Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, to Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, early English immigrants to the area. He was the third of five children, with siblings Ellen, Arthur, Henry, and Mary. His devout Methodist parents came from a farming background, and his father worked at times as a farmer, trader, and house painter.
Popular accounts have painted Holmes as a child who tortured animals and suffered under a violent father, framed to fit the modern serial killer profile. But eyewitness testimony from his early life does not support either claim. At sixteen, Holmes graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy and began teaching in Gilmanton and nearby Alton. On July 4, 1878, he married Clara Lovering in Alton, and their son Robert Lovering Mudgett was born in Loudon, New Hampshire, on February 3, 1880.
Robert later became a certified public accountant and served as city manager of Orlando, Florida. Holmes enrolled at the University of Vermont in Burlington at eighteen but left after a year, dissatisfied. He then entered the Medical and Surgical Department of the University of Michigan in 1882 and received his degree in June 1884. During his studies, he assisted Professor William James Herdman, then head of the anatomy department, in grave-robbing to supply medical cadavers while working in a New Hampshire anatomy lab.
Holmes apprenticed under Nahum Wite, a prominent advocate of human dissection. He later admitted that as a student he had used corpses to defraud life insurance companies on several occasions. His roommates claimed he behaved violently toward Clara, who returned to New Hampshire in 1884 before he graduated and later wrote that she did not know much about him. After moving to Mooers Forks, New York, a rumor spread that Holmes had been seen with a young child who then disappeared.
According to Holmes, the child returned to his home in Massachusetts. No investigation was conducted, and Holmes left town quickly. He traveled to Philadelphia, where he briefly worked as a guard at Norris Downstate Hospital before taking a job at a pharmacy. While he was there, a small child died after taking medicine purchased from that pharmacy.
Holmes fled the city immediately after denying any role in the death. He changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes just before moving to Chicago, hoping to avoid exposure by people who had fallen victim to his earlier scams. Arriving in August 1886, he found a pharmacy owned by Elizabeth S. Holton at the northwest corner of South Wallace Street and West 63rd Street in Englewood.
Holton hired him, and after he proved himself a hard worker, he bought the business shortly afterward. One common misconception is that Dr. Holton and his wife were murdered by Holmes. In fact, Dr.
Holton was a fellow University of Michigan student only a few years older than Holmes. Another supposed victim of the so-called Castle, a Miss Kate Durkee, was found alive, proving Holmes had not killed her. Construction of a two-story, multi-use building—with apartments on the second floor and commercial space, including a new pharmacy—began in 1887 after Holmes purchased the vacant lot across from the pharmacy. Fictionalized accounts claim Holmes built the hotel to lure visitors to the nearby World’s Fair so he could murder them and sell their skeletons to medical institutions.
There is no evidence Holmes ever tried to lure strangers into his hotel with the intent to kill. None of his probable victims were strangers. While there is evidence he had sold bodies to medical colleges in the past, he obtained them by robbing graves, not by committing murder. One of Holmes’s earliest victims was his mistress, Julia Smythe, the wife of Ned Isaelius Connor.
Ned moved into Holmes’s building and worked in the jewelry section of the pharmacy. After learning of the affair between Smythe and Holmes, Connor quit his job and left, abandoning Julia and her daughter Pearl. Julia retained custody of Pearl and continued her relationship with Holmes while living in the hotel. On Christmas Eve 1891, Julia and Pearl disappeared.
Holmes later claimed Julia died during an abortion procedure—unlikely, given his medical education and the high mortality rates of such procedures at the time. He also claimed he poisoned Pearl to conceal the circumstances of her mother’s death. During an excavation of Holmes’s basement, a partial skeleton was found that could have belonged to a child Pearl’s age or younger. Ned, Pearl’s father, later became a key witness at Holmes’s trial in Chicago.
During a business trip to Boston in April 1893, Holmes met a railroad worker named Minnie Williams, introducing himself as Henry Gordon. The two began dating and became involved. He continued corresponding with Williams and sending love letters even after returning to Chicago. She moved to Chicago in February and accepted his offer to work as his personal secretary at the hotel.
Holmes convinced Williams to transfer the deed to her property in Fort Worth, Texas, to Alexander Bond, an alias he used. She signed the deed in April 1893, with Holmes acting as notary. He later transferred the deed to Pitezel under the alias Benton T. Lyman.
The following month, Holmes and Williams rented an apartment in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, posing as a married couple. Minnie’s sister Annie visited in July and told her aunt she planned to travel to Europe with her brother Harry. After July 5, 1893, no evidence suggests Minnie or Annie were still alive. Holmes left Chicago because insurance companies wanted to charge him with arson.
He resurfaced near the intersection of Commerce Street and Second Street in Fort Worth, where he had inherited land from the Williams sisters. He tried to build an unfinished structure there without paying suppliers and contractors, but no murders occurred at that site. In July 1894, Holmes was arrested and jailed for the first time in St. Louis, Missouri, on suspicion of reselling pawned goods.
He was soon released on bail, but while in prison he had a conversation with Marion Hedgepeth, an outlaw sentenced to 25 years. Holmes devised a plan to take out an insurance policy on himself and then fake his death to defraud the company of $10,000. In exchange for the name of a trustworthy lawyer, Holmes promised Hedgepeth a $500 commission. A young St.
Louis attorney named Jeptha Howe was recommended. Howe agreed to join Holmes’s plan because he thought it clever. But the scheme failed when the insurance company grew suspicious and refused to pay. Holmes then devised a similar plot with Pitezel.
Pitezel agreed to fake his own death so his wife and Holmes could split the $10,000 from his life insurance policy. Pitezel was to pose as an inventor named B. F. Perry in Philadelphia, with the plan calling for his death and the disfigurement of his body in a lab explosion.
Holmes was tasked with finding a suitable corpse to play Pitezel’s role. Instead, Holmes used chloroform to render Pitezel unconscious and then set his body on fire with gasoline. Pitezel’s real corpse was used to collect the insurance money. Holmes continued to deceive Pitezel’s wife, who knew nothing, convincing her to grant him custody of three of their five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard.
The infant and the eldest daughter stayed with Mrs. Pitezel. Holmes traveled across Canada and the northern United States with the three children, while Mrs. Pitezel followed a parallel route, unaware he was using another alias and lying about the fate of her children and the murder of her husband.
Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia detective assigned to investigate Holmes and locate the three missing children, found the decomposing bodies of the two Pitezel girls in the basement of a rented house in Toronto. Geyer later said, “The deeper we dug, the worse the smell became, and when we reached a depth of three feet, we discovered what appeared to be a human forearm bone. ”
Holmes eventually admitted to placing Alice and Nellie in a large trunk and locking them inside before killing them. He drilled a hole in the trunk’s lid, inserted one end of a hose through it, and connected the other end to a gas line.
He buried their naked bodies in the basement of his rented home at 16 St. Vincent Street in Toronto. According to reports, Holmes went to a nearby pharmacy to buy the drugs he used to kill young Howard Pitezel. The boy’s teeth and bone fragments were found in the house’s chimney.
Holmes’s bloody spree ended when he was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, tracked down by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from Philadelphia. Texas authorities were growing suspicious, and Holmes was preparing to leave the country with his third wife, who knew nothing. He was arrested on a warrant for horse theft. After the discovery of Alice and Nellie’s bodies in July 1895, Chicago police and journalists began investigating Holmes’s Englewood building, now locally known as “The Castle.
” Adding to the drama, his lawyers quickly resigned, and Holmes decided to defend himself. He proved reasonably skilled, likely due to his extensive experience with lawsuits in Chicago, and surprised courtroom observers. But he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death. By then, it was clear Holmes had also killed the three missing Pitezel children.
After his conviction, he confessed to 27 murders in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto, plus six attempted murders—though many of the people he claimed to have killed were still alive. Hearst newspapers paid Holmes $7,500 for his confessions, which quickly proved to be largely false.