Today in History—November 17: The Murders of H.H. Holmes

On this day in 1894, authorities arrested H.H. Holmes in Boston on suspicion of fraud. Only later did they unearth the murders that would earn him notoriety as one of America’s first serial killers.

Herman Webster Mudgett was born in New Hampshire. He enrolled in medical school, where he allegedly used cadavers from the university lab in elaborate insurance scams—and may also have engaged in grave robbing.

He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1884 and moved to Chicago a few years later—now under the alias Henry Howard Holmes, possibly to distance himself from his past.

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He worked at and later ran a drugstore. Across from it, he constructed a three-story building that would come to be known as his “Murder Castle.”

Legend holds that Holmes’s killing spree peaked during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which drew millions from across the globe to Chicago. The charming, suave Holmes supposedly romanced several women during this time, promised marriage, and took control of their savings before murdering them.

His “Murder Castle” has been portrayed as a counterfeit hotel that contained a nightmarish menagerie of torture chambers, trapdoors, dead ends, locked rooms, gas jets to suffocate victims, and secret chutes that led to the basement, where he dismembered and cremated bodies.

Most of these tales, however, owe more to sensationalized yellow journalism than evidence. Though Holmes was a swindler and a murderer who had killed multiple people he knew—usually for money and sometimes in twisted ways—there is little proof that he designed a house of horrors specifically to lure and murder tourists. Holmes confessed to 27 murders, though fewer than 10 of these are supported by evidence. Some supposed victims were later found alive, and some were found to be fictitious. The surest of Holmes’s victims were also his last: his business partner, Benjamin Pitezel, and three of Pitezel’s children. Before he was executed in 1896, Holmes asked that his coffin be filled with cement—for fear of grave robbers.