Herman Webster Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, on May 16, 1861. He trained in medicine at the University of Michigan, where he began stealing cadavers to run insurance frauds, and arrived in Chicago in 1886 under the name Henry Howard Holmes. He took a job at a drugstore in Englewood, took over the business, and built a three-storey block across the street at 63rd and Wallace with shops below and rooms above. He financed it by not paying for the materials.
The building has been famous since 1895 as the Murder Castle, with its sealed rooms, gas jets, chutes and basement furnace. Much of that description came from Chicago newspapers competing with each other in the weeks after his arrest, and the more elaborate version has been repeated ever since. A structure with odd interior work certainly existed and Holmes certainly used it, but the claim that he processed a large number of visitors to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition through it has no evidentiary support, and the fair's role in the story is largely atmosphere. He practised and was tried under the name Dr H. H. Holmes, which is how the case is known.
What can be attributed to him rests on bodies, remains and testimony rather than on his own account. Julia Smythe, the wife of a man who worked for him, disappeared with her daughter Pearl at Christmas 1891. Emeline Cigrand, his stenographer, disappeared in 1892. Minnie Williams, whom he had promised to marry, and her sister Anna disappeared in 1893, along with the Texas property Minnie owned. Around nine deaths are generally accepted. Twenty-seven is his own figure and it is not reliable.
In 1894 Holmes and Benjamin Pitezel, a longtime accomplice, arranged to fake Pitezel's death for a ten-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. Holmes killed him instead, in Philadelphia, and then took three of the Pitezel children away from their mother on the pretext of reuniting the family, telling her at each stop that they were somewhere else. Pinkerton detective Frank Geyer followed the trail from city to city through the summer of 1895 and found Alice and Nellie buried in the cellar of a rented house in Toronto and Howard's remains in a stove flue near Indianapolis. Holmes had been arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, on an unrelated warrant.
He was tried in Philadelphia in October 1895 for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel alone, and convicted. Awaiting execution, he sold the Philadelphia Inquirer a confession to twenty-seven murders for a reported seven thousand five hundred dollars. Several of the people he named in it were subsequently found alive, and he had already given at least two other, incompatible accounts. He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896, and buried in concrete at his own request. He was thirty-four.