H. H. Holmes and the Pitezel Murders

The case

The crime that hanged H. H. Holmes began as an insurance fraud. In the summer of 1894 he and his long-time associate Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter with a record of petty crime, agreed to cheat the Fidelity Mutual insurance company out of $10,000. Pitezel would set up in Philadelphia as an inventor called B. F. Perry, a body would be found that could pass for his, and the money would be split. Early in September 1894 a badly burned man was found dead in the Callowhill Street office. It was Pitezel himself. Holmes collected the payout.

Holmes had been born Herman Webster Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, in 1861. He trained in medicine at the University of Michigan, where by his own later admission he first used cadavers to defraud insurers, and moved to Chicago in 1886 under his new name. In the Englewood district he took over a drugstore and built a three-story block across the street at 63rd and Wallace, with shops below and rooms above that he advertised as a hotel for visitors to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. He paid almost no one: builders, suppliers and furniture dealers all chased him for debts. He married three women without divorcing any of them.

What he did after Pitezel's death is the best-documented part of his career and the worst. Persuading Pitezel's widow, Carrie, that her husband was alive and in hiding, Holmes took three of her children, Alice, Nellie and Howard, on a meandering journey through Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and Ontario that autumn, while moving Carrie and his own third wife along separate routes nearby. None of the three ever saw their mother again.

Pinkerton agents tracked Holmes to Boston, where he was arrested on November 17, 1894, first held on an old Texas horse-theft warrant and then sent to Philadelphia on the fraud. In June 1895 the Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer set out to find the missing children. Working from hotel registers, rental agents and letters the children had written but Holmes had never posted, he found the remains of Alice and Nellie in July beneath a rented house on St. Vincent Street in Toronto, and in August traced Howard's remains to a cottage Holmes had rented in Irvington, outside Indianapolis.

Holmes was tried in Philadelphia for Benjamin Pitezel's murder only. The trial opened on October 28, 1895; he briefly conducted his own defense, and the judge kept out evidence about the children. On November 2 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder. While awaiting execution he sold a long confession to the Hearst press, claiming 27 murders. Several of his named victims were later found to be alive, and others cannot be shown to have existed. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.

Separating the documented killings from the legend is the main task for anyone studying Holmes. Beyond Pitezel and three of his children, the record links him persuasively to Julia Conner and her daughter Pearl, who vanished from his building at the end of 1891; to his secretary Emeline Cigrand, who disappeared in December 1892; and to Minnie Williams and her younger sister Nannie, whose Texas property he took over in 1893. Other disappearances remain possible but unproven.

The rest grew in the newspapers of 1895. Reporters described the 63rd Street building as a "murder castle" with gas chambers, trapdoors, chutes and a basement crematorium where Exposition visitors met their end. The investigation found hidden rooms, which Holmes appears to have used to hide furniture bought on credit, and some human remains and personal effects, but no evidence of mass murder of fairgoers. Figures of 100, 133 or 200 victims have no documentary basis. The real total, as far as it can be established, is nine confirmed murders, with a few more probable.