In March 2017 a judge in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, granted a petition by the great-grandchildren of Herman Webster Mudgett to dig up his grave. They wanted to settle a rumor that had run since 1896: that the man hanged at Moyamensing Prison under the name H. H. Holmes had bribed his way out and let a substitute die in his place. The court attached a condition, that no commercial spectacle or carnival atmosphere be created around the remains, and ordered them reburied whatever the result.
The diggers found what the record said they would. Holmes had specified his own burial at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon: a pine box filled with cement, sunk ten feet, and the coffin covered over with cement again, so that no anatomist or souvenir hunter could reach him. The cement had preserved his clothes and his mustache. It had not preserved anything testable. The soft tissue, in the words of Samantha Cox, the University of Pennsylvania anthropologist who led the work, had gone to sludge, with no usable DNA in it. He was identified from his teeth and bones. Press accounts reported then, and still report, that DNA testing confirmed the body. No such test was possible.
He was convicted of one murder, that of Benjamin Pitezel, his accomplice of many years, tried in Philadelphia in the fall of 1895. That is the whole of the judicial record. Every other number attached to his name rests on remains, on testimony, or on the confessions he sold.
Mudgett was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, on May 16, 1861. In July 1878, at seventeen, he married Clara Lovering of Alton in a quiet ceremony, and they had a son. He studied at the University of Vermont and then medicine at the University of Michigan, from 1882 to 1884, and by the time he left he was stealing cadavers and using them in insurance frauds, a practice he later admitted to. The marriage did not survive his wandering, but he never ended it.
He reached Chicago in 1886 as Henry Howard Holmes and took a job at a drugstore in Englewood owned by Elizabeth Holton, then took over the business under an installment arrangement he did not honor in full. The story that Mrs. Holton vanished after selling to him began at his trial; she and her husband both outlived him. On January 28, 1887, in Minneapolis, he married Myrta Belknap while still married to Clara (some accounts put the wedding in 1886). He filed for divorce from Clara afterward, and it never became final. Myrta bore him a daughter, Lucy, on July 4, 1889, and lived in Wilmette while he spent most of his time in the city. In 1887 he began building across the street from the drugstore, at Sixty-third and Wallace, a block-long building with shops below and rooms above, usually described as three stories. He paid for it largely by not paying for the materials.
The building has been called the Murder Castle since the summer of 1895. The sealed rooms, the gas jets, the body chutes, the basement furnace, the maze of windowless corridors and trapdoors: that description was assembled by Chicago newspapers competing with one another in the weeks after his arrest, when the story sold better the worse it got. Something strange had certainly been built there, the local police knew the place well before anyone called him a murderer, and Holmes certainly used it. What has never had evidentiary support is the part everyone remembers, that he fed large numbers of visitors to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition through it. The building burned in 1895, and the site in Englewood is now occupied by a post office.
About nine deaths are generally attributed to him, on the strength of remains, witnesses and the pattern of disappearances around him. Julia Conner, born Smythe, the wife of Ned Conner, who ran the jewelry counter in the drugstore, became Holmes's lover after her husband left; she vanished with her daughter Pearl around Christmas 1891. Emeline Cigrand, a stenographer who had worked at the Keeley Institute in Dwight, Illinois, came to work for him in May 1892 and vanished that December. Minnie Williams, who had inherited property in Fort Worth, Texas, lived with him as his wife in 1893, though whether they ever legally married is unclear; she and her sister Anna vanished, and he acquired the Texas property. Then came Pitezel and three of the Pitezel children in 1894.
As the fair ended, his creditors closed in, and he left Chicago. On January 17, 1894, in Denver, he married Georgiana Yoke, with Clara and Myrta both still his legal wives; some records give the date as January 9. That summer a fraud landed him briefly in a St. Louis jail, where he shared a cell with the train robber Marion Hedgepeth and asked him to recommend a lawyer who could help with an insurance swindle.
The swindle was the one that caught him. He and Pitezel agreed to fake Pitezel's death for a ten-thousand-dollar policy, with Holmes to supply a substitute corpse. Instead, in early September 1894, in a house on Callowhill Street in Philadelphia, he killed Pitezel, and then collected. He took three of the Pitezel children, Alice, Nellie and Howard, away from their mother, Carrie, telling her at each stop that they were with her husband or with each other, and moved them between Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit and Toronto while she followed, sometimes in the same city on the same day without knowing it.
Hedgepeth, who never got the fee Holmes had promised for the lawyer's name, told the police about the scheme. The insurers put the Pinkerton agency on Holmes's trail, and on November 17, 1894, he was arrested in Boston on an outstanding warrant for horse theft in Texas, apparently ready to leave the country with Georgiana, who knew nothing. In custody he admitted only to insurance fraud.
Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia detective, took up the children's trail in the summer of 1895 with a stack of photographs and a list of rental agents, and worked city by city until he found them. Alice and Nellie Pitezel were buried in the cellar of a house on St. Vincent Street in Toronto. Howard's remains were in a rented cottage in Irvington, near Indianapolis, where the boy had been burned in a stove. Geyer's search is the finest police work in the case, and it is the reason anyone knows what happened to the children.
The trial for Pitezel's murder opened in Philadelphia at the end of October 1895, and Holmes for a time conducted his own defense. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder on November 2, and he was sentenced to death. Awaiting execution, he sold a confession to twenty-seven murders for a reported seven thousand five hundred dollars, and the Philadelphia Inquirer published it in April 1896. Several of the people he named in it were later found alive. He had already given at least two other accounts that could not be reconciled with it or with each other. He was a professional fraudster to the end, and the last thing he sold was the story of himself.
He was hanged at Moyamensing on May 7, 1896, nine days short of his thirty-fifth birthday. The drop did not break his neck, and he took some minutes to die.
The numbers have kept growing. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City put him back into general circulation in 2003, and in reporting the 2017 exhumation, whose whole purpose was to establish a fact, national outlets stated as background that he had killed as many as two hundred people at the fair. That figure has no source beyond the 1895 newspapers and his own paid confession. The number a court established is one, and the number the evidence supports is about nine.