Herman Webster Mudgett, who called himself H. H. Holmes, was convicted of one murder. A Philadelphia jury found him guilty in November 1895 of killing Benjamin F. Pitezel, a carpenter who had worked for him for years and had joined him in a scheme to cheat a life insurance company. The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania upheld the verdict in March 1896, and Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896.
The rest of his reputation rests on other kinds of evidence. Detectives found the remains of three of Pitezel's children in houses Holmes had rented in Irvington, Indiana, and Toronto, but he was never tried for their deaths, and the trial judge in Philadelphia refused to let the jury hear about them. Several women and a child who had been close to him in Chicago disappeared between 1891 and 1893. In the spring of 1896, while awaiting execution, he sold a confession to 27 murders that a Philadelphia newspaper printed in full; some of the people he named in it were still alive, and on the gallows he denied killing any member of the Pitezel family. Most of what is now told about his Chicago building, the "Murder Castle," came from a few weeks of newspaper reports in the summer of 1895. Historians who have gone back to the records accept far smaller numbers than the hundreds of victims claimed in later books and broadcasts.
He was born in 1861 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Britannica's entry by the historian Philip Jenkins gives the date as May 16, 1861, with a question mark; Smithsonian magazine, citing the scarce records, gives May 1861. His father's home was still in Gilmanton in 1894, when Pinkerton detectives watched him visit it, according to Frank Geyer, the Philadelphia detective who later wrote the official history of the case.
Most of what is known of his boyhood comes from Holmes himself, in a book he wrote in Moyamensing Prison in 1895 while awaiting trial and published that year as Holmes' Own Story, under the name Herman W. Mudgett, M.D. It was written to deny what he called atrocious slanders, and it should be read as his own version. In it he described a strict, religious home, a father who used the rod, and small boyhood trades in calves and sheep. He wrote that he prepared for Dartmouth but enrolled for one year at the University of Vermont in Burlington before moving to the medical school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. A 2015 history column in the Rutland Herald says he left Vermont after a year because he found the school too small.
By the time he left New Hampshire he was married. The court record of his trial shows that he had a wife in Gilmanton, and Judge Arnold, ruling on his motion for a new trial in November 1895, held that his earlier marriages, in New Hampshire and in Illinois, made his later marriage to Georgiana Yoke void. At the hearing on that motion the prosecution produced an affidavit from the Gilmanton wife saying that Holmes had resumed relations with her during his travels with Carrie Pitezel and Georgiana Yoke.
Michigan Medicine, the university's medical center, records that he enrolled under the name Mudgett in 1882 and graduated in 1884; Holmes wrote that he received his diploma in June 1884. He was not a distinguished student. The Ann Arbor Argus reported that he got into trouble with a widowed hairdresser, a Mrs. Fitch, who wanted to marry him, which he could not do because he was already married. When the matter reached the medical faculty he narrowly escaped expulsion, and Victor Vaughan voted against letting him graduate, according to the Argus as quoted by Michigan Medicine in 2025.
Later accounts say that he began handling cadavers as a student and used them in insurance frauds. Michigan Medicine repeats that story but cites no record for it. Holmes himself admitted in his book that a summer job selling books in northwestern Illinois during his student years was a fraud.
Holmes wrote that after graduating he worked for a firm in Portland, Maine, then taught a winter school and opened a medical office at Mooers Forks, in northern New York, where he struggled for about a year before selling his horses and leaving in the fall of 1885. He spent the winter of 1885 to 1886 as a drugstore clerk in Minneapolis, worked briefly as a keeper at the state asylum in Norristown, Pennsylvania, and then at a drugstore on Columbia Avenue in Philadelphia. He left Philadelphia, he wrote, after a child came in to say that medicine from the store had killed a sibling. No independent record of these stops has been reported.
According to his own account, Holmes passed the Illinois pharmacy examination in Springfield under the name H. H. Holmes, and in July 1886 he bought a drugstore at 701 Sixty-third Street in Englewood, a growing district on Chicago's South Side. He then built a large building on the opposite corner, at Sixty-third and Wallace, and described the debts and creditors' suits that followed.
Adam Selzer, a Chicago historian and tour guide whose 2017 book H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil is built on the primary records, has described the building in his writing. The ground floor was retail space built in 1887. Long-term apartments were added on the second floor later, and a third floor was added later still, to rent as flats during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893; whether those rooms were ever rented is disputed. Selzer argues that the building "never for one day truly functioned as a hotel" and that it had no front desk, lobby or staff of the kind the word suggests. Smithsonian magazine, summarizing his work in 2021, reported that the third floor was never finished, furnished or opened, and that Selzer regards it as a device for swindling suppliers, investors and insurers.
The building did have hidden rooms, and the city knew about them before the fair opened. In March 1893 the Chicago Tribune ran a long article after Holmes was caught using concealed rooms to hide furniture he had bought on credit and never paid for, Selzer wrote in Time Out Chicago in 2015. When the collectors came, the building appeared empty; a janitor later showed where Holmes had walled up a room full of the furniture, Smithsonian reported. In 1893 he was known in Chicago as an inventive swindler, not as a suspected killer.
Benjamin F. Pitezel joined him in early 1888. Holmes wrote that he hired Pitezel as a carpenter through an advertisement, and described him as a dreamer and inventor, quiet and improvident, who later worked for him in real estate and lumber. Pitezel had a wife, Carrie, and five children. He was 37 in 1894, according to an affidavit his daughter Alice signed that year.
Holmes had a second household north of the city. He married Myrta Belknap of Wilmette, the daughter of John Belknap, who ran an express business in the village, and they had a daughter, Lucy. In 1892 Holmes built a Queen Anne duplex with turrets flanking a central porch at what became 726 Eleventh Street, on the site of the Belknaps' cottage on John Street, for Myrta, Lucy and her parents, according to records of the Wilmette Historical Museum. He appears in only two Wilmette directories, 1892 and 1894, and was rarely there. After his arrest, reporters tried without success to interview Myrta. She and Lucy stayed in Wilmette for a couple of years after his execution, the house was sold at auction, and both became teachers. Myrta never remarried and died in 1924; Lucy died in Los Angeles in 1956. The house, later the Wilmette Inn and then an apartment building, was demolished in 1997.
At the November 1895 hearing on his new-trial motion the prosecution produced letters from Holmes acknowledging a marriage and a record that he had filed for divorce in Chicago. In a letter read at the trial, he wrote to an insurance agent that his wife had told him the agent had called on her about Pitezel; the Supreme Court cited it as proof that he had a wife living in Illinois as Mrs. Holmes.
Several people connected to Holmes in Chicago vanished between 1891 and 1893. None of these disappearances was ever tried, and the evidence for each is circumstantial.
Julia Conner and her daughter, Pearl, were last seen shortly before Christmas 1891, Smithsonian reports, and historians treat them as probable early victims. Smithsonian notes that Erik Larson's 2003 book The Devil in the White City presents the details of Julia's death as a plausible reconstruction, not as a documented account. On the gallows in 1896 Holmes admitted that two women had died after abortions he performed; the Pottsville Republican identified them as Julia Conner and Emily Cigrand, while other papers said he did not name them.
Emeline Cigrand was a stenographer from Indiana who worked for Holmes. The Indiana State Library's Hoosier State Chronicles, drawing on 1895 Indianapolis papers, describes her as from Lafayette; the Pottsville Republican in 1896 said Anderson. In late July 1895 her father, Peter Cigrand, and her sister Philomena came to Chicago police headquarters while the search of the Holmes building was under way, The Raleigh Times reported.
Minnie R. Williams and her sister Nannie, also called Anna, are the third case. Holmes wrote in 1895 that he met Minnie around January 1, 1893, at a Chicago employment office and that she worked in his office. He claimed that Nannie came to stay with them in a house on Wrightwood Avenue in the summer of 1893 and died in July after Minnie struck her in a fit of mental illness, and that he put the body in Lake Michigan and sent Minnie to Milwaukee. That is his account alone. In July 1895 District Attorney George S. Graham of Philadelphia said that Holmes had obtained the ground for his Englewood building through a trade with Minnie Williams, who had inherited property, and that a Chicago lawyer, George B. Chamberlain, now controlled both the building and a Texas property valued at 40,000 dollars, The News and Observer of Raleigh reported. Selzer has written that Nannie Williams is the only visitor to the 1893 fair whom anyone has seriously suspected Holmes of killing in the building, and that the count of such victims has stood at one since 1895.
In 1894 Holmes and Pitezel were in Texas, where Holmes wrote that Pitezel married a woman in Fort Worth in early 1894 and that the two men dealt in property and horses. The Fort Worth charge of horse stealing was the one on which Holmes would be arrested in Boston that November.
In January 1894, in Denver, Holmes married Georgiana Yoke before a clergyman, using the name Howard. She testified at his trial that she lived with him as his wife until about the following November. Before his arrest she had learned that he had married a woman in Gilmanton, whom she understood to be living, and she had heard of a woman in Wilmette, though she did not understand that he was lawfully married to her. Holmes told her he had been informed that the Gilmanton woman was dead, the Supreme Court recorded. Hoosier State Chronicles describes Georgiana Yoke as from Franklin, Indiana.
In 1894 Holmes was jailed for several days in St. Louis over a drugstore he had bought with notes and a chattel mortgage. In the jail he met a train robber, Marion C. Hedgepeth, who was awaiting sentence. Holmes's own book describes a train robber who asked for money to bribe his way out, and says Holmes left about 500 dollars with a lawyer, 300 of it set aside for the robber.
On November 9, 1893, the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia, through its Chicago branch, issued a 10,000-dollar policy on the life of Benjamin F. Pitezel, Geyer recorded. The plan, as Holmes later admitted to police in Boston, was to fake Pitezel's death by substituting another corpse and collect the money. In his 1895 book Holmes said the idea was Pitezel's, that Pitezel had wanted to stage his death in the swamps of Mississippi and Alabama, and that Holmes had refused.
In 1894 a man calling himself B. F. Perry rented a house at 1316 Callowhill Street in Philadelphia, between Thirteenth and Broad streets, and hung a sign offering patents bought and sold. Perry was Pitezel. Holmes wrote that he last saw Pitezel alive on the night of September 1, 1894, after a talk in which Pitezel admitted spending rent money on liquor and asked for help staging a robbery at the house. Reports of the trial give the date of the killing as September 2, 1894.
Eugene Smith, a carpenter and inventor who had patented a saw set, had seen the sign and called at the house to sell his patent. On one visit he saw a man go upstairs with Perry; he later identified that man as Holmes. On Monday, September 3, he found the shop empty. On the morning of Tuesday, September 4, he found a body upstairs. Geyer recorded that the body was badly decomposed and burned about the face. The coroner's inquiry found congestion of the lungs and an odor of chloroform in the stomach, and the inquest verdict was death from congestion of the lungs caused by inhaling flame or chloroform or another poison. No one claimed the body. It lay in the morgue for eleven days and was then buried in Potter's Field.
Then the claim arrived. Jeptha D. Howe, a St. Louis lawyer, wrote to the coroner and the insurer saying that he represented Carrie Pitezel and that the dead man was Benjamin F. Pitezel. On Saturday, September 22, 1894, the body was taken up again at Potter's Field. Holmes, who was present, dealt with the marks used to identify the body, among them a wart on the neck and a cut on the leg. Alice Pitezel, who described herself that year as in her 15th year, had been brought to identify her father; according to Geyer, she identified the teeth. Holmes signed an affidavit dated September 23 saying he had no doubt the body was Pitezel's. On September 24 the company paid Howe a check for 9,715.85 dollars, the face value less its identification expenses, and gave Holmes 10 dollars for his travel.
The question at the trial was whether Pitezel had killed himself or Holmes had killed him. The Supreme Court summarized the evidence in 1896. Chloroform poisoning was practically conceded by both sides. A post-mortem found about an ounce and a half of chloroform in the stomach. Medical experts testified that a man taking chloroform himself would make involuntary movements that would break any connection between a bottle and his mouth, and that the drug had not affected the lining of the stomach, which meant it had been put there after death.
Holmes gave the police his own version. He told Superintendent Linden of the Philadelphia police that he had found Pitezel dead on the floor of a third-story room, after a note led him to a letter in a bottle saying Pitezel would kill himself, with a large chloroform bottle beside the body and a tube and quill running to the mouth. Holmes said he dragged the body to the second floor, broke the bottle, and set the face and beard on fire with a flammable liquid to make the death look like an accidental explosion, because he feared that a suicide would void the policy. In July 1895, while police dug in Chicago, he repeated the claim that Pitezel had committed suicide and that he had removed the signs of it to collect the insurance, The Raleigh Times reported. The jury did not accept it.
The fraud came apart because Holmes broke a promise to Marion Hedgepeth. On October 9, 1894, Hedgepeth wrote from the St. Louis jail to the city's chief of police, Lawrence Harrigan, describing a scheme by a man he knew as H. M. Howard, one of Holmes's names, to defraud an insurance company with a substitute corpse. He said Howard had promised him 500 dollars for introducing him to a lawyer who could help, and that he had never been paid. Inspector W. E. Gary of the Fidelity Mutual took a sworn statement from Hedgepeth in St. Louis. The company's officers at first dismissed it, but Gary kept investigating, and the company Pinkerton agents took up Holmes's trail, Geyer recorded.
By then Holmes had the children. He had taken Alice from Philadelphia after the identification, and later collected Nellie and Howard from their mother. Carrie Pitezel kept her other two children, Dessie, about 16, and a baby. Holmes told her that her husband was alive and in hiding, and he moved her and the children through a series of cities, always keeping them apart. The Supreme Court described the arrangement: Carrie Pitezel believed her husband was alive and followed Holmes's directions from place to place, while the group of three children was kept ahead of her and apart from both her and Georgiana Yoke.
In Burlington, Vermont, in October 1894, Holmes used the name J. A. Judson to rent a house on North Winooski Avenue for a "Mrs. A. E. Cook" and two children, the Rutland Herald recorded in 2015; Mrs. Cook was Carrie Pitezel, and Georgiana Yoke was in Burlington with him. He bought nitroglycerin at a pharmacy on St. Paul Street and left the bottle in the basement with a note asking Carrie to bring it upstairs. She left it alone. Holmes later admitted the attempt, and the Burlington police chief had the bottle taken away and buried. A Pinkerton detective and an insurance investigator lost him at the post office, found him again at an opera house, and followed him to the house before he left for Boston.
Holmes was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894. The arrest was made on a telegram from Fort Worth, Texas, charging him with horse stealing; the insurance fraud charge came afterward, Geyer recorded. Carrie Pitezel was drawn to Boston by a decoy letter and was also arrested.
On November 19 Holmes gave his first statement, to O. M. Hanscom, deputy superintendent of police in Boston, and John Cornish, superintendent of the Pinkerton agency there. He admitted a conspiracy to defraud the insurance company by substituting a corpse, claimed that a medical friend in New York had supplied the body, and said that Pitezel and the children were alive. Geyer, who reproduced the statement, regarded it as an attempt to mislead. Holmes was taken to Philadelphia and held in the county prison at Tenth and Reed streets, known as Moyamensing.
Frank P. Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective born in the city in 1853, was assigned to the case and sent to find the children. In Toronto he was paired with a local detective, Alf Cuddy, and the two men checked hotel registers and showed photographs to house agents, Spacing magazine recounted in 2015 from Geyer's book.
The break came from a Toronto resident, Thomas Ryves, who said a man matching Holmes's description had briefly rented the house next to his on St. Vincent Street, number 16, near Yonge and College streets, and had borrowed a shovel to dig a hole in the cellar, he said for storing potatoes. On July 15, 1895, Geyer and Cuddy dug in the cellar with the same shovel. At about three feet they found human bones. The bodies of Alice and Nellie Pitezel lay one above the other. The son of the new tenant had found a wooden toy egg with a small snake inside, which matched a toy their mother had described, and the owner had found partly burned girls' clothing in the chimney. The cellar held no trace of Howard. The Toronto Evening Star called the case "one of the strangest stories of a life of crime and remorseless cruelty that the continent has produced." Spacing gives the girls' ages as 13 and 11; Alice described herself as in her 15th year in her 1894 affidavit, and Geyer described Nellie as not over 11.
In Indianapolis Geyer worked with Detective David Richards of the Indianapolis police. In the eastern suburb of Irvington, Holmes had briefly rented a cottage at the corner of Julian and Bolton avenues in the fall of 1894 under the name A. E. Cook. In August 1895 Howard Pitezel's burned remains were found there, part of them in a chimney, after three local boys found bones; the Indianapolis Journal reported on them at length that month, Hoosier State Chronicles records. Spacing reports that pieces of jaw and teeth were among the remains and that a toy found in the house helped identify the boy. In September 1895 Carrie Pitezel testified before the Marion County coroner, Hiram C. Castor.
Geyer's book, The Holmes-Pitezel Case, was published in Philadelphia in 1896 with the permission of the district attorney and the mayor. In its preface he wrote that four murders had been proven beyond doubt and that Holmes's arrest had prevented three more, and he described Holmes as a more deliberate and cold-blooded villain than almost any other. Geyer retired from the police in 1903, opened a detective agency, and died in October 1918 during the influenza epidemic.
While Geyer searched Canada and Indiana, Chicago police and reporters took over Holmes's Englewood building. What they reported in July and August 1895 is the source of most of the Castle legend, and the newspapers of those weeks show how claims rose and fell.
On July 22 a report from Chicago described a noosed rope with dark stains, found on an upstairs wall beside a dumbwaiter shaft; detectives theorized that victims were strangled in the shaft below, the El Paso International Daily Times printed the next day. On July 26 police announced that a bench in a storeroom bore stains a doctor called "undoubtedly blood," and suggested Holmes had used it to dismember bodies, The News and Observer reported. On July 27 searchers in the basement found a mass of long brown hair and more bones; the bones found that day were later identified as soup bones from a butcher shop, the El Paso paper reported. On July 30 police forced open a large tank in the basement that a witness named Chappell had said was used to dissolve bodies; it held a few inches of petroleum, and the investigation largely disproved his story, although the diggers did find parts of two thigh bones, a piece of skull and four smaller bones, The Raleigh Times reported.
The police turned their attention to Patrick Quinlan, the building's longtime janitor. Chicago's police chief, Badenoch, said he had enough evidence to indict both Holmes and Quinlan and would not let Quinlan turn state's witness. Police found a letter from Holmes in prison telling Quinlan to account for his movements and to answer questions truthfully. "I have done no killing, Pat," Holmes wrote.
Selzer, who has compared the papers' coverage, describes those weeks as a game of telephone in which a rope became a gallows, a worn table became a dissecting slab and ashes in a stove became a crematory, most of it quickly debunked; "you simply can't cremate a body in a wood-burning stove," he wrote. He has also written that bones taken from the cellar could not be identified by the science of the time and may not all have been human. The site was dug again in the 1930s without any major discovery; Selzer called the 1895 search "more Keystone Cops than CSI." In August 1895 the building was damaged by fire, but it was not destroyed: Selzer says it stood, with its top floors rebuilt, until 1938. The site is now occupied by the Englewood post office.
The Toronto and Irvington discoveries changed the case from fraud to murder. A Philadelphia grand jury indicted Holmes for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel within weeks, on September 12, 1895, according to Smithsonian. District Attorney Graham, assisted by Thomas W. Barlow, would try him for Pitezel's death alone, in the Court of Oyer and Terminer for the city and county of Philadelphia.
The trial ran from October 28 to November 2, 1895, the dates recorded on the official report published in 1897 by George T. Bisel of Philadelphia. It was held in Courtroom 676 on the sixth floor of Philadelphia's City Hall, with spectators filling a gallery of 300 seats, The Philadelphia Inquirer recalled in 2019. Judge Michael Arnold presided and planned three sessions a day, morning, afternoon and night, as long as everyone could stand it, according to a wire report printed in The Red Cloud Chief of Nebraska.
The first morning was chaotic. Holmes's lawyers, William A. Shoemaker and Samuel P. Rotan, asked for a 60-day continuance, saying they had had far less time to prepare than the prosecution. Graham opposed any delay, and Arnold refused it. When the lawyers said they would withdraw, the judge warned that abandoning a murder case on the eve of trial could cost them their licenses. Holmes stood and said he would discharge them; Arnold told him he could not. The lawyers left anyway, and Holmes questioned the jurors himself. He challenged the first man called, Enoch Turner, and kept using his challenges until he had only two left when the box was full. Two young lawyers brought in to help him were men he did not know, and he refused to trust them with his life, The News and Observer reported. Shoemaker and Rotan returned the next night, according to the Inquirer.
The prosecution brought witnesses from Boston, Chicago, Indianapolis and Irvington, and Geyer was expected to be its principal witness. Carrie Pitezel testified, and the Supreme Court later allowed her account of seeing her children's remains in Toronto as part of a continuous story bearing on motive. Georgiana Yoke testified for the prosecution. The defense argued she could not testify against a man who was her husband; the judge left the validity of the marriage to the jury, which rejected it.
Graham's opening address had described the disappearance and deaths of the children. When the prosecution reached that evidence, the defense objected that it showed separate crimes not charged in the indictment. Judge Arnold sustained the objection and excluded it. The jury that convicted Holmes therefore heard about the children's deaths only through the prosecutor's opening and through Carrie Pitezel's account of the Toronto morgue, not as proof of murder.
Holmes called no witnesses. Rotan asked the judge to take the case from the jury on the ground that the Commonwealth had not proved murder beyond a reasonable doubt; Arnold declined to rule then, and the case went to argument. The judge instructed the jury that it must acquit if it believed Pitezel had committed suicide, and told it that the chloroform could not have been self-administered, a statement the Supreme Court later found supported by the expert testimony.
The jurors ate dinner before taking a ballot, and every one voted guilty of murder in the first degree. They talked for about an hour and a half more before telling the court they had agreed, according to a contemporary wire report preserved by Utah Digital Newspapers. When the verdict was read, Holmes showed little reaction beyond a slight cough.
On November 18, 1895, the motion for a new trial was argued before three judges, Arnold, Wilson and Thayer. Shoemaker produced an affidavit from a woman named "Blanche Hannigan" saying Pitezel had told her he meant to kill himself. Graham asked for the witness. A police matron then testified that she had signed the affidavit for 20 dollars at Geyer's suggestion and knew nothing of its contents, and a detective testified that Shoemaker had written it and paid him to find someone to sign. The court held Shoemaker in 1,500 dollars bail on a charge of subornation of perjury. Rotan told the court he knew nothing of the affidavit, and was cleared of blame. He argued that the prosecution had improperly brought the children into the case, that the defense had been unprepared, and that Georgiana Yoke should not have been allowed to testify, The Wilmington Messenger reported. One judge pressed Graham on exactly how Pitezel had been made to take the chloroform, and Graham conceded that the Commonwealth had not shown the method in detail.
On November 30 Judge Arnold went through the fifteen exceptions one by one and refused a new trial. He held that Holmes had been married in New Hampshire and in Illinois before he married Georgiana Yoke, so the Yoke marriage was void and her testimony was admissible. Asked whether he had anything to say, Holmes answered, barely audibly, that he did not. Arnold sentenced him to be hanged, The Florence Daily Times of South Carolina reported, addressing him as Herman W. Mudgett.
The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania decided Commonwealth v. Mudgett, Appeal No. 136, on March 4, 1896, in an opinion by Justice Williams. It overruled every assignment of error. Georgiana Yoke was presumed competent when she was called, the court held, and the burden of proving a lawful marriage that would disqualify her lay on the defendant; the trial judge had given him more than he was entitled to by letting the jury decide it. The prosecutor's opening was not made improper by the later exclusion of the evidence it described, and no exception could be taken to it days after it was delivered. Carrie Pitezel's account of the Toronto morgue was admissible as part of the story and as evidence on motive, since the Commonwealth's theory was that the children were killed to keep her from learning of her husband's death and her right to the money. The charge on reasonable doubt was adequate, and the strength of the circumstantial case came from the facts, not from any unfairness by the judge. "The defendant had a fair trial," the court concluded, "and that is all he has a right to demand."
In April 1896, awaiting execution, Holmes gave out a confession to 27 murders. The Philadelphia Inquirer printed it on April 12, 1896, in an issue that also carried an article by Geyer; the pages survive in scans kept by a Camden, New Jersey, local history archive. The Inquirer, recalling the confession in 2025, said the paper had purchased it and quoted Holmes's line, "I have every attribute of a degenerate." He also wrote that he was born with the devil in him, WTTW reported in 2017. The Lykens Register of Pennsylvania reported on May 1, 1896, that he had received 7,500 dollars for his "alleged confession" and that Carrie Pitezel had come to Philadelphia hoping to recover part of the money he had taken from her.
The confession was not reliable. Some of the people Holmes said he had killed were still alive, as Selzer and others have pointed out. Before the trial he had published a book insisting on his innocence; afterward he confessed to a long list; and on the scaffold he said something different again.
On April 22, 1896, Father P. J. Dailey and three other priests received Holmes into the Roman Catholic Church in the prison. Because he had been immersed as a Protestant, the baptism was conditional. Dailey said Holmes appeared sincere in his repentance and resigned to his death, the Lykens Register reported.
In his last days he was reported awake much of the night, reading the Bible and newspapers marked with stories about his case; on his last night he wrote letters and slept from midnight until six. Sheriff Clement was said to prefer that any statement be made in the cell rather than from the gallows. The official witnesses gathered at about 10 a.m. on Thursday, May 7, 1896.
On the scaffold Holmes spoke slowly, his voice growing louder until every word carried. "I am not guilty of taking the lives of any of the Pietzel family," he said, as the Pine Grove Press Herald printed it. He admitted responsibility only for the deaths of two women after abortions he had performed. He knelt with the priests, shook hands with those around him, and, when the official seemed to hurry, told him to take his time and not bungle it. Asked if he was ready, he said yes and goodbye. The trap fell at 10:12 a.m.
The papers disagreed about what followed. The Pottsville Republican quoted the coroner's physician as saying the neck was not broken but its muscles were torn, and described convulsive movement for about ten minutes; the Philadelphia Times and the Elizabethville Echo said the neck was broken. He was pronounced dead fifteen minutes after the drop by one account and about half an hour by others. The body was cut down at 10:45. Holmes had asked that no autopsy be performed. As he had directed, his coffin was set in cement in a vault at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, outside Philadelphia, with no service. The Philadelphia Times reported that he left no money, only a large manuscript. He was 34.
For more than a century a rumor held that Holmes had bribed his way out of the execution and that another man was buried in his place. In late 2016 members of his family petitioned the Delaware County Court to exhume the grave, citing family lore that he had escaped "through some subterfuge," NBC10 Philadelphia reported. A judge approved the request early in 2017, and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, which owns the cemetery, also had to agree. The dig was arranged with the History channel, which filmed it for the series American Ripper, and with Jeff Mudgett, Holmes's great-great-grandson, who had long suspected that Holmes escaped to England and became Jack the Ripper.
Janet Monge and Samantha Cox of the University of Pennsylvania led the excavation, which began on May 6, 2017, and took about ten days, PhillyVoice reported. Cemetery records said the grave was ten feet deep and filled with concrete. The first wooden coffin, found at about six feet, was empty; its concrete had never set. Beneath it was a second container with a board marked "Mudgett" and "H.H. Holmes" in wax pencil. Inside were a skeleton, boots, a waistcoat and a suit coat, a metal cross engraved with his name and the date of his death, and an intact mustache that began to flake in the air.
The remains were identified chiefly from the teeth. Holmes's medical records showed he had lost nearly all his molars, and the skull matched, as did distinctive features recorded in a drawing by his doctors. In September 2017 the Associated Press reported the findings and quoted Cox as saying the soft tissue was too decayed for DNA testing. In December 2017, though, PhillyVoice reported that the team had drilled into the dense bone around the ear canal and sent the sample to King's College in London; after inconclusive first results, the testing showed that the skeleton was related to the Mudgett family. "The best we can say at the end is that this skeleton we had is a relation to the Mudgett family," Cox said. The remains were reburied at Holy Cross on August 31, 2017, in a white coffin, as the court order and the archdiocese required.
Before 2003 Holmes appeared mostly in pulp thrillers of the 1940s and in a 1974 novel by the author of Psycho, PhillyVoice noted in 2017. Then Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City, published in 2003, set his story beside the building of the 1893 fair and made it a best seller. Larson's own endnotes acknowledge that some of his Holmes scenes are speculative, Smithsonian has noted, and Selzer has called the book closer to a novel than to nonfiction in its Holmes chapters. A film adaptation was announced in 2015 with Leonardo DiCaprio attached. Selzer's 2017 book set out to separate the record from the legend; the historian calls the popular version "a new American tall tale."
Proven in court: the first-degree murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel in Philadelphia in September 1894. The verdict was upheld by the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1896.
Attributed but never tried: the deaths of Howard, Alice and Nellie Pitezel. Their remains were found in houses Holmes had rented, and Geyer, the Philadelphia prosecutor and the Supreme Court's summary of the Commonwealth's theory all treat them as his work. The trial judge excluded that evidence from the jury, and no court ever ruled on it. Some later accounts say he was convicted of the children's murders and of attempted murders; that is wrong.
Suspected: the disappearances of Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand and the Williams sisters. Holmes admitted on the gallows that two women had died after abortions he performed, and one paper named them as Julia Conner and Emily Cigrand; his 1895 book said Minnie Williams killed her sister. No remains were ever identified as theirs.
Victim counts: the confession of April 1896 named 27, and some of those people were alive. Selzer, as reported by Smithsonian and WTTW, accepts nine deaths that can reasonably be attributed to him; a 2017 review of his book in School Library Journal said he narrowed the confirmed murders to four, Pitezel and the three children. Britannica's entry says Holmes later raised his own count to more than 130 and that some researchers put the total above 200. Selzer traces the claim of hundreds to pulp magazines of the 1930s, and the Camden archive's notes to the 1940s; the hundreds have no support in the record.
The "Murder Castle": the building had hidden rooms that Holmes used to hide furniture from creditors, and police found bones and other remains in its cellar in 1895. The gas chambers, torture rooms, body chutes, acid vats and crematory, and the image of fair visitors lured into a hotel and killed, rest on newspaper reports of July and August 1895, several of which were contradicted within days, and on later retellings. The building was not a functioning hotel and was not destroyed in 1895.
Other claims: that he escaped the gallows (disproved by the 2017 exhumation); that he was Jack the Ripper (a theory promoted by a descendant on television, with no supporting evidence); and that two skeletons found on a farm near Schneider, Lake County, Indiana, in October 1919 were his victims, a link made in the Lake County Times of October 22, 1919, according to Hoosier State Chronicles, and not otherwise established.
1861: born Herman Webster Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire (May 16 in Britannica, with a question mark).
1882 to 1884: medical student at the University of Michigan; graduates in June 1884.
1885 to 1886: by his own account, practices at Mooers Forks, New York, then works in Minneapolis, Norristown and Philadelphia.
July 1886: by his own account, buys a drugstore at 701 Sixty-third Street, Englewood, Chicago, under the name H. H. Holmes.
1887: the ground floor of his building at Sixty-third and Wallace is built.
Early 1888: hires Benjamin F. Pitezel as a carpenter.
Before Christmas 1891: Julia and Pearl Conner are last seen.
1892: builds a house in Wilmette for Myrta Belknap Holmes, their daughter Lucy and her parents.
January 1893: by his account, meets Minnie Williams.
March 1893: the Chicago Tribune exposes hidden rooms used to hide unpaid-for furniture.
July 1893: by his account, Nannie Williams dies.
November 9, 1893: Fidelity Mutual Life issues a 10,000-dollar policy on Pitezel.
January 1894: marries Georgiana Yoke in Denver as "Howard."
1894: jailed briefly in St. Louis, where he meets Marion Hedgepeth.
1894: Pitezel, as B. F. Perry, opens a patent office at 1316 Callowhill Street, Philadelphia.
September 2, 1894: the date of Pitezel's death given at the trial.
September 4, 1894: Eugene Smith finds the body.
September 22 to 24, 1894: the body is exhumed and identified; the company pays 9,715.85 dollars.
Fall 1894: Holmes rents a cottage in Irvington, Indiana, as A. E. Cook; in October he rents a house in Burlington, Vermont, as J. A. Judson.
October 9, 1894: Hedgepeth writes to the St. Louis police chief.
November 17, 1894: Holmes is arrested in Boston.
November 19, 1894: admits the insurance fraud in a statement to police and Pinkertons in Boston.
July 15, 1895: Geyer and Cuddy find Alice and Nellie Pitezel at 16 St. Vincent Street, Toronto.
July and August 1895: Chicago police search the Englewood building.
August 1895: Howard Pitezel's remains are found in Irvington; the Englewood building is damaged by fire.
September 12, 1895: indicted in Philadelphia for Pitezel's murder.
October 28 to November 2, 1895: tried before Judge Michael Arnold and convicted of first-degree murder.
November 18, 1895: new-trial motion argued; Shoemaker held on a perjury charge over a forged affidavit.
November 30, 1895: new trial refused; sentenced to death.
March 4, 1896: the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania affirms (174 Pa. 211).
April 12, 1896: the Philadelphia Inquirer publishes his confession to 27 murders.
April 22, 1896: baptized a Catholic in prison.
May 7, 1896: hanged at Moyamensing Prison; buried in cement at Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon.
1903: Geyer retires from the Philadelphia police; he dies in October 1918.
1924: Myrta Belknap Holmes dies.
1938: the Englewood building is demolished, according to Selzer.
1997: the Wilmette house is demolished.
2003: Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City is published.
Late 2016: descendants petition the Delaware County Court to exhume the grave.
May 2017: the grave is excavated by University of Pennsylvania archaeologists.
August 31, 2017: the remains are reburied.
September 2017: the remains are reported to be his.