by Opal Elaine Moyer

Created on: August 22, 2010

     H.H. Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett, the American serial killer, who was at large in Illinois, around the same time that Jack the Ripper was at large in London.  Mudgett was born in Gilmantown, New Hampshire on May 16, 1860.   While enrolled at the University of Michigan Medical School, he began his lengthy career with insurance fraud, stealing cadavers from the school and using them to collect money from insurance companies on the bogus insurance policies that he'd purchased. 

     He, eventually, moved from New Hampshire to Englewood, Illinois, where he found employment at Dr. E.S. Holtons drugstore.  Dr. Holton was dying of cancer and his wife was relieved to have help minding the store; she'd been doing it on her own since her husband had taken ill.  Upon her husband's death, Mrs.  Holton agreed to let Holmes buy the business, provided that she could continue to live in the rooms, above.  When he failed to pay her, she filed a lawsuit against him.  She would never carry through with this lawsuit, however; she suddenly disappeared.  When customers inquired about Mrs. Holton, he would simply tell them that she moved to California, because she was too distraught over her husband's death to remain there.  She was never heard from again. 

   After the Holton's were out of the picture, Holmes began remodeling the drugstore.  He would hire a contractor, allow him to work for a week and then fire him.  No one knew the floor plans of the finished building, except Holmes, himself.  There was a rooming house on the upper floors.  In addition to the drugstore, addtional shops were built on the first floor.  The guests rooms were complete with peep holes, gas pipes and chutes, leading to the basement-torture chamber.  The cellar had been made into a torture chamber/laboratory complete with a vat of acid, dissecting table and a crematorium.  He, also, had a device that he called the "elasticity determinator", which he claimed could double the length of a victim.  This was much like the "rack" used during the Medieval eral.  His "castle" was completed in May of 1890.  It is estimated that as many as fifty lodgers may have fallen prey to his "torture castle" during the time of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. 

     In addtion to insurance fraud, grave robbery and murder,

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>