Lectures in History: Serial Killer HH Holmes

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:04]This week on C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast, James Garza teaches a class on H. H. Holmes, the notorious 19th-century figure often described as America's first serial killer. The lecture explores Holmes' crimes during the Gilded Age, including the infamous murder castle he operated near the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where investigators believe multiple victims were killed. The class explores the broader social and cultural anxieties of the Gilded Age from economic inequality and corruption to fears surrounding modern city life through the story of one of the country's most infamous criminals.

[00:00:41]>> Good morning, everybody.

[00:00:43]Um today we're going to go ahead and get started uh for um today's um uh lecture on crime and in a departure from talking about Jack the Ripper, we're going to talk about a crime that took place at the same time, more or less at the same time, and we're going to talk about, as promised, H. H. Holmes and Gilded Age America. So, the the quote there is from a contemporary newspaper of the era, "The most detestable criminal of modern times."

[00:01:19]And the newspapers of the era, this was the era of yellow journalism. A lot of newspapers, even even smaller towns in the United States, picked up on the crimes of H. H. Holmes.

[00:01:36]Uh who And that was not even his real name. Um Herman Mudgett was his real name.

[00:01:43]Uh Webster Mudgett, Herman Webster Mudgett. And um his so-called murder castle, all right?

[00:01:51]And over the decades, in fact, throughout the 20th century and even into the 21st century, the legend of H.H. Holmes has just increased over time. So, today we're going to go into we're going to dive into the world of H.H. Holmes. But, before we do that, we're going to talk about the setting of H.H. Holmes, which is Chicago in the 1890s. All right? So, this is um you know, we have to talk about the setting.

[00:02:21]And we're going to take you where H.H. Holmes lived. All right.

[00:02:27]So, Chicago in the 1890s population was about 1 million over a little bit over 1 million people. It was a major destination for immigrants, as well.

[00:02:37]And um basically the hub of Midwestern capitalism in the United States.

[00:02:44]And it was a city that had a lot of industry, a lot of commerce.

[00:02:51]And as you can see from the pictures, it was a very crowded city.

[00:02:54]It was also a city known uh that had a I guess a reputation for vice and a reputation for crime.

[00:03:05]So, a lot of people in smaller towns and cities, even in Lincoln, Nebraska, right? Omaha, Des Moines, in Kansas, even points farther west, knew that Chicago was a place that you had to be careful with.

[00:03:20]And in the 1890s, at the same time that H.H. Holmes was or Mudgett was prowling around Chicago, um the city was also host to a World's Fair.

[00:03:34]All right. A World's Fair that um was actually called the Columbian Exposition of 18 of of the 1890s.

[00:03:43]Uh this Columbian Exposition was one of many that were held throughout the world in the latter half of the 19th century.

[00:03:52]Uh and these were intended to showcase progress.

[00:03:57]Uh they were places where, you know, uh corporations, companies, states, governments would send their agricultural and uh advancements for people to go and see.

[00:04:12]So, they attracted a lot of attention.

[00:04:14]Even the state of Nebraska, for instance, sent in its uh products as well. Countries like Mexico, Great Britain, Australia would send in products as well for people to go visit.

[00:04:25]And they were major tourist attractions.

[00:04:28]Uh there were a lot of um displays, a lot of entertainments.

[00:04:33]You had uh pavilions, exhibits.

[00:04:37]Uh if you weren't invited if officially to go to this exposition that took place at the same time, you could always camp out at the entrance.

[00:04:47]For instance, uh the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show camped out at the entrance even before uh it opened in the in the um 1890s, and they made over a million dollars.

[00:05:01]So, this was a very famous exposition.

[00:05:05]And sadly, only one building remains out of this.

[00:05:10]It was also known as the White City because of the plaster that was used, the white plaster that was used to um display that to coat all the buildings. And the buildings were only meant to be temporary as well.

[00:05:24]So, it was a city that displayed its progress, but it also was a city that had uh problems especially. And sometimes the people who live there, well, they said, "So what, right? If we attract people from small-town America who are um offended by our our uh allures, let's just say that, right? It doesn't really matter because we make money, right? So, it's a story that this story today centers on the the the world of H. H. Holmes, right? And it's about ambition and greed. It's about a nation on the move because H. H. Holmes was a person who was on the move. In many ways, he represented partly the story of many uh many people who went to Chicago, but he wasn't from the Midwest. He was from New Hampshire.

[00:06:22]And it's also about progress in the Gilded Age, but it's also about the criminal underworld.

[00:06:27]And in a way, he was a representative of the criminal underworld, and in a way, he was not because he tried to portray himself as a sort of a businessman, right?

[00:06:38]Businessperson out front, but in reality, H. H. Holmes had a dark past when he arrived in Chicago at the end of the 1880s. He was a con man, a swindler.

[00:06:53]And then he graduated into murder.

[00:06:57]Now, the history books, the history texts say that he was America's first serial killer.

[00:07:05]He was invented to be America's first serial killer, but in many ways, he was just a murderer.

[00:07:13]And he was into a lot of uh swindles, a lot of uh uh of con games, and that's where we're going to go first. But these swindles, these con games, insurance frauds, and all that uh relied on him recruiting a lot of people.

[00:07:29]And these uh people, right? Herman Mudgett, it was his real name, uh willingly went along because they also wanted to make money, right? He was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in 1861. And by all accounts, according to what has survived, and a lot of people talked about it, there's even an autobiography that supposedly he wrote, but it was really ghostwritten, and most of it is just invented. And I cautioned you, all of you, because there's not really a good book out there about him. Most of the books out there uh are either um not written by professional historians, because a lot of what is written about him is basically about is well, there's a lot of half-truths, let's just say that, because Holmes invented a lot of stories about himself, right? He was a professional liar.

[00:08:26]That's what he really was.

[00:08:28]And a lot of the stories about his childhood and early life really are full of half-truths.

[00:08:35]There's stories that in his in the small town of Gilmanton, which really was a picturesque uh New England town, um many people, if you are into uh if you study literature, it was in inspired the stories of Peyton Place, right?

[00:08:52]Uh there's stories that people mysteriously died when he was a teenager. Maybe he was associated with those deaths.

[00:08:59]We don't know.

[00:09:00]Uh but he had a uh a good childhood, although he was somewhat of a loner.

[00:09:06]And maybe that translated into his um well, misadventures in medical school, because that's what he decided to go into.

[00:09:15]And in medical school, where he went to at the University of Michigan, let's just say that he excelled at something in medical school, which was dissections.

[00:09:28]He was a did addicted to dissections, and addicted to lies, right? So, he volunteered a lot for those. Well, other people in medical school um maybe didn't want to do those. He really loved doing them.

[00:09:45]And there is where we see the young Holmes sort of becoming um kind of well, the the formative Holmes, right? Uh there's stories that he would maybe uh like a romance widows in in the at the university in the town there uh in the state and then he would deny those stories. And then at graduation, his professor defended him and at after graduation, he told his professor, "Those stories you heard, it's all true."

[00:10:25]Right? Other stories, that's where he started learning how to run the classic insurance scam at that era. Insurance companies had just begun or had begun to pop up in American life.

[00:10:39]And Holmes decided that was a great way to make money. How do you make money?

[00:10:44]Well, an insurance scam and dissection you dig up bodies or you procure bodies.

[00:10:53]And he would disappear in the middle of the night and come back with a body.

[00:10:58]Right?

[00:10:59]And he would tell the insurance company, "This is so-and-so. They've died."

[00:11:04]Right? He would come up with an inventive story. And this is the way that Holmes figured out a way to make a lot of cash.

[00:11:12]$5,000, $10,000, which was a lot of money in those days.

[00:11:17]And that is the was the key to making money for himself for himself and his associates, insurance fraud.

[00:11:27]And sometimes he was good at it.

[00:11:29]Sometimes he was not good at it Because he required people to help him out. And those people would right find out his secrets.

[00:11:42]So, this is what Holmes This is the kind of life that Holmes lived or Mudgett, let's just say that, lived. Now, you may ask yourself a question, why did he use the alias of Holmes? Was he inspired by Sherlock Holmes? There's no proof that he ever read any Sherlock Holmes novels.

[00:12:02]Uh and uh he actually had about 15 different names.

[00:12:09]It's just that the name stuck.

[00:12:11]All right. He began to use it later on in life.

[00:12:14]And uh he used a lot of different aliases because he was a con man.

[00:12:20]And he had to run those con games.

[00:12:24]And he found a lot of people that were willing to belie- willing to believe him.

[00:12:30]So, now we translate, we move from Holmes the medical student to Holmes the swindler.

[00:12:39]Right? So, cuz there're many different versions of Holmes out there.

[00:12:43]He moves to Chicago around 1888 and he builds the castle.

[00:12:50]But it's not called the castle yet.

[00:12:53]At 63rd and Wallace Street in the South Side of Chicago.

[00:12:58]All right.

[00:12:59]And there and that's a picture of it right there. It does look like a castle, sort of. An imposing building. And it didn't have a third floor at the very beginning. It had a first floor and a second floor.

[00:13:10]And it wasn't really a hotel.

[00:13:13]All right.

[00:13:13]It was a place where Holmes could set up businesses.

[00:13:17]All right. He could rent space to other people to set up businesses. What kind of businesses? Well, you know, selling tonics, sort of a drugstore, other kinds of of businesses, small businesses.

[00:13:32]And he would run another type of fraud, which was known as credit frauds.

[00:13:38]Essentially, Holmes would buy things on credit.

[00:13:45]Let's say a suit or furniture.

[00:13:49]And he would promise to come back.

[00:13:54]Let's say he would buy it in the morning.

[00:13:56]And he would come back, said, "I promise I'll be back in the afternoon with the money.

[00:14:03]But I'm a gentleman.

[00:14:05]I'll pay you back."

[00:14:08]Of course, Mr. Holmes.

[00:14:10]We're all gentlemen here.

[00:14:13]And he would never return.

[00:14:15]>> C-SPAN's Lectures in History Podcast continues in a moment. Now, back to C-SPAN's Lectures in History Podcast.

[00:14:23]>> That's theft.

[00:14:25]But in those days, before credit cards, many people bought and sold things on word of honor. And of course, on credit.

[00:14:36]They you could go to a store and buy things on credit, and you would run up a tab. And when you get paid, when you got paid, you would just pay that on your payday.

[00:14:46]So, credit fraud or fraud on merchandise was something that Holmes excelled in. He was very, very good at it. Because he would look at you with his piercing eyes, and you would trust him. Right?

[00:15:02]And after all, he was dressed very well with his bowler hat and tie. How could he not, you know, be telling the truth?

[00:15:11]Remember, he believed in himself. He was a very confident person.

[00:15:17]And he would buy furniture for his building.

[00:15:22]And this is where the stories of the trapdoors come in. He had secret trapdoors built in or hidden walls.

[00:15:30]And he would hide the furniture in there.

[00:15:34]So, when the creditors came screaming into the store, "Where is my money?"

[00:15:44]Holmes would be very calm and say, "Well, the owner of this building is not here.

[00:15:54]Why don't you have a cigar and some some bourbon and I'll see what I can do." And the people would calm down because who would turn down a good cigar in those days?

[00:16:08]And it he was telling the truth, partly.

[00:16:12]He would invite them to look around. The furniture was not there because it was hidden behind a false wall.

[00:16:21]He put he placed the titles, the deeds to the building in his mother-in-law's name.

[00:16:29]He was very smart.

[00:16:31]So, those were the kinds of swindles and con games that he ran.

[00:16:38]Insurance fraud, credit fraud, but he required associates.

[00:16:45]And over time, those associates knew too much.

[00:16:52]And they became obstacles.

[00:16:54]Over time, they became obstacles.

[00:16:58]There are some statistics which point out that he was sued over 100 times.

[00:17:06]And at one point, he had to get out of town.

[00:17:09]He went to Colorado and got involved in a fraud over a mine.

[00:17:14]He He to Texas and got involved in fraud over horses.

[00:17:20]A horse fraud, some kind of horse fraud.

[00:17:23]And that in Texas was very serious. In fact, that was such a serious crime that detectives followed him all around the country tracking him down, and that proved to be his undoing.

[00:17:39]And in that time, the detectives that would follow you around were the Pinkertons, the Pinkerton Detective Agency.

[00:17:45]So, Holmes bit off more than he could chew eventually.

[00:17:51]But, one of the biggest frauds that he ran, right?

[00:17:56]was marriage.

[00:17:59]Right? You know.

[00:18:01]The bigamist. Holmes was also a notorious bigamist. He was married three times at the same time.

[00:18:11]To three different women, and he had also a mistress, or maybe two, or maybe three.

[00:18:18]No one knew exactly how many.

[00:18:22]And although his wives did not die, one of his mistresses did die, Minnie Williams.

[00:18:31]So, his first wife was Clara Lovering.

[00:18:34]And he was married to her.

[00:18:38]He was his first wife from 1878 on, and he tried to divorce her.

[00:18:42]He accused her of adultery.

[00:18:45]But, the judge didn't believe that, and that case was thrown out of divorce court, or the courts.

[00:18:53]And Holmes sort of gave up on that.

[00:18:56]While he was still married to her, he married Myrta Belknap in Minneapolis in 1886.

[00:19:05]He didn't tell Myrta that he was still married to Clara.

[00:19:10]And then when he went to Denver for his mining fraud, he married Georgiana Yoke.

[00:19:17]And he didn't tell Georgiana he was married to Myrta.

[00:19:21]And at the same time he neglected to tell Wilhelmina that he had three other wives.

[00:19:27]So, Holmes was very busy lying all the time.

[00:19:34]And he was also moving around from place to place.

[00:19:38]This was well, one of those things that Holmes did was he lied very well.

[00:19:47]And once the marriage proposal went out, many of the women felt compelled, I have to do it for my honor.

[00:19:57]All right? I have to do it for my honor.

[00:20:00]And this was a big problem in the end because none of these women knew about the other until Holmes paid for his crimes.

[00:20:13]And the biggest crimes that Holmes paid for, of course, was murder.

[00:20:19]All right? And that's what we're going to talk about right now.

[00:20:23]And we're going to pay a visit to the to some of these later on.

[00:20:28]The murder.

[00:20:30]Now, the his- history of Holmes is that Holmes some accounts say that he killed over 200 people.

[00:20:40]And that in the castle, the so-called castle, once he built the third floor, right? And then their basement, he had a torture chamber.

[00:20:49]I want to tell you where that story came from and towards the end of today's lecture.

[00:20:55]Uh there's a definite point to that and that story still persists today.

[00:21:02]Right? If there's ever a movie made out of this, they're going to put that in that movie.

[00:21:07]Right? That he was a torture doctor.

[00:21:09]That story is not really true. All right? There's a reason for that story to exist because Holmes had some things in his building that looked like torture uh devices, but not. One of the things he had, for instance, was a a gas tank.

[00:21:27]Uh one of the scams he ran was um he had a tank that he filled full of water.

[00:21:38]And he told people some of them who were visiting the fair probably that this tank converted water to gas.

[00:21:52]It was a miracle.

[00:21:54]You want to invest money in this? Well, I don't know. Maybe. Look, let me show you how it works.

[00:22:00]And he sure enough it converted water to uh gas.

[00:22:06]But he had hooked up the tank to the gas lines secretly.

[00:22:12]So, this became part of the torture chamber's mystique.

[00:22:16]All right?

[00:22:18]And when they investigated and found some of the bones of his victims there, well, they assumed this was part of the part of the the torture chamber, right? And the traps, right? The hidden walls where he hid the furniture because that was just the insurance scam.

[00:22:39]All right?

[00:22:40]So, Holmes already had uh his activities at greed. Pure greed laid the foundation for his latest for his legend.

[00:22:53]All right?

[00:22:55]Any questions so far?

[00:22:57]Yes.

[00:23:09]>> Uh hi, I'm Ron. Um I was wondering if Did H.H. Holmes ever like get in trouble with the police? Like I know he's been sued, but did he ever have like jail time, anything like that?

[00:23:18]>> Um he did towards the end because he tried to defraud uh a big insurance company called Fidelity Mutual.

[00:23:27]And that was the the the biggest fraud operation that he ran with one of his associates um one of the victims.

[00:23:38]And that was the big scam that he tried to run at the end, and he was he went to trial for that.

[00:23:44]And uh and I'm I'm going to talk about that.

[00:23:47]That's um one of the victims was uh the Pitezel family, right? These These were the four canonical victims.

[00:23:57]And Ben Pitezel and Holmes came up with that idea. Let's defraud Fidelity Mutual because they've got a lot of money.

[00:24:08]Right?

[00:24:09]How do we do that? Well, Holmes probably cooked up the scheme saying, "We're going to pretend that you die, Ben.

[00:24:20]I'll get a body from somewhere, a morgue, somewhere like that." And it was easy to get bodies because the so-called body res- the resurrectionists, as they were called, would dig up bodies sometimes or they would get them from the poorhouses uh Jack the Ripper style, right?

[00:24:37]But then Holmes had a brighter idea. He just killed Ben.

[00:24:40]So, [laughter] that's said, "Why am I going to go to all the trouble and get a body when I can just kill this He knows too much about me."

[00:24:49]And then he hid the body and hid That was the only um That was the crime he was tried for. He hid the body, and then he told his poor widow, Connie, "Oh, Ben is still alive. He's somewhere in London. Don't worry about it.

[00:25:02]And give me um give me uh I want to take care of your children because they need a father."

[00:25:11]Right?

[00:25:12]Howard, Ali, and and Nelly. Some of the children.

[00:25:16]So, he was taking care of them. He had legal guardianship of them.

[00:25:21]And he would take them on trips throughout the Northeast.

[00:25:26]All the same time telling her, "I will find your husband." Well, his husband Her husband was decomposing.

[00:25:35]Um and that was the crime, right?

[00:25:39]Fidelity Mutual. And they were fooled for a while. They were fooled. But then the insurance company started doubting the story because they had to go inspect the body.

[00:25:49]And they said, "This Well, is it or is it not? Oh, I don't know. This guy has There's something off with him." And that was the big That's what That's the investigation.

[00:26:01]He was He was under investigation for that when the assumed victims were found of the children.

[00:26:12]Right?

[00:26:13]And these children were the ones He eventually killed them.

[00:26:17]He killed the two girls who were young, Alice and Nelly, because he had them under his care.

[00:26:26]Right? And he he persuaded the mother, "If you ever get insurance money for the death of for Let's say, I'm going to take out You should take out a You should take out uh life insurance on your husband. And if you ever get that money, you should share it with me."

[00:26:48]And he suffocated them in trunk.

[00:26:54]And they were discovered in a house.

[00:26:58]Not in Chicago. And when they were discovered in a house uh by the owners of that house, uh Alice was 13 and Nellie was nine.

[00:27:08]They were murdered in Toronto.

[00:27:10]Um that's when everything fell apart.

[00:27:14]So, he was already being questioned by the police.

[00:27:17]He's Harry been detained. He was being questioned. And who was there? Were the Pinkertons. They were being He was being questioned over horse theft in Texas.

[00:27:28]Everything caught up to him. This was in 1894, 1895. And by that time, right?

[00:27:35]He was being questioned.

[00:27:37]And he he had manipulated Carrie, told her her husband was still alive, and it would be a good idea to put three of your children under my care. And he was being questioned. And then they told him the news.

[00:27:50]We found bodies in a house that you rented.

[00:27:56]We've traced the ownership.

[00:27:59]And then he just said, "Well, I guess I'm going to hang for that."

[00:28:05]He predicted his own death.

[00:28:06]So, he moved around a lot.

[00:28:09]And we have to remember that this This was a nation on the move at that time.

[00:28:12]You could catch a train overnight. You could be somewhere there.

[00:28:16]And it was hard It was difficult to trace exactly where he had been.

[00:28:22]And that Fidelity Mutual scam was the one that did him in.

[00:28:27]All right? And he had When he was arrested for that scam, he actually had tr- planned it, right? And he had actually tried to to um hire somebody else or try to to in other people with it, including a member of one of the last train robbery gangs in the country. And that person also talked about it to the police.

[00:28:56]So, in essence, Holmes had a very inflated opinion of himself.

[00:29:08]And he only dug himself in very deep.

[00:29:11]So, rumors spread.

[00:29:13]There were who were several missing people in Chicago, um including Julia Conner and her 5-year-old daughter Pearl.

[00:29:23]There were also other women, Minnie and her sister Nannie. Minnie was the mistress.

[00:29:30]And another woman, Emeline Cigrand. And these people had disappeared. No one knew who they where they were. They had seen them with another man, a man who was not Holmes, or was he Holmes? He went by a different name.

[00:29:44]They had seen them in and around the house in Englewood, right, in the South Side.

[00:29:51]Where were they?

[00:29:54]What happened to them?

[00:29:56]So, they went to investigate the house, and they found bones.

[00:30:06]And that's how we get the idea of right, that there were remains in the house.

[00:30:14]But, there were only some vertebrae, some skeletal remains there. No one could definitely trace these were five assumed victims.

[00:30:25]And given the science of the time, it is assumed that those five women died there, or four victims died, five women died there or other places.

[00:30:36]But, it is not definitive.

[00:30:40]Right? They're assumed victims of Holmes. The only ones we know for certain that he killed was an entire family.

[00:30:50]All right, Ben Howard was another son.

[00:30:53]He killed him in another location uh in Indiana, I believe. And then Ben and Alice and Nelly.

[00:31:01]So, those are the only definitive victims, but there is a longer line.

[00:31:05]There is a longer list, I'm sorry, of victims that have disappeared that disappeared over time. There was even one story of a a man who collapsed outside of his business, had a seizure or something, and Holmes went outside and asked him, "What's wrong?" And he couldn't answer, and Holmes poured some chemical into his mouth, and the man died. This was a story, right? So, there were a lot of legends associated with him.

[00:31:35]And as a result of that, we are not There's There's no certainty because uh people disappeared, and then they turned up later because the newspapers would report them as the victims of Holmes. But, it's interesting because one newspaper uh in San Francisco, uh the Call, the newspaper was called the Call, said that no, he didn't kill a lot of people. He supposedly killed 27, but only a few people only a few people actually died. So, back then, they were already doubting many of these stories.

[00:32:14]All right, they were many They were doubting a lot of these stories because Holmes liked to inflate a lot of his of his activities.

[00:32:28]So, that's where we get the idea of that. The newspaper see the murder castle right there. That's from a newspaper.

[00:32:35]And you can do a search for these. You go to Library of Congress, you can do a search.

[00:32:39]It's fantastic to to find all of this information, but every newspaper has a different account of Holmes' activities because it's elusive. He was like a ghost.

[00:32:50]And no one knew exactly what he was up to.

[00:32:54]But we do know that he went to trial.

[00:32:58]All right? He went to trial. And in the trial, which took place in 1895, October 28th to November 2nd, Holmes had already been on trial for insurance fraud. He was charged with one count of murder, Ben Pitezel.

[00:33:14]And he defended himself because nobody was good enough to be his lawyer, right?

[00:33:21]It was a disaster for him personally.

[00:33:24]It was a disaster. They questioned him.

[00:33:29]And he came up with all sorts of excuses, but finally that was the only murder charge that stuck or that he was found guilty of.

[00:33:40]And he stayed in jail for a year. The judge sentenced him to hang.

[00:33:48]Capital punishment. This was in Philadelphia where they found the remains of of Ben.

[00:33:54]And he was executed on May the 7th, 1896. And there's a description of of of it there.

[00:34:03]All right? Of the execution there, one of the executions. Although in actuality he was wearing a hood when the trapdoors opened.

[00:34:13]And that was it.

[00:34:14]The death of Holmes. And after that, the newspapers ran with the story.

[00:34:19]They interviewed everybody, a lot of people associated with him. Bad luck followed them everywhere. Some people committed suicide.

[00:34:27]The Murder Castle burned down later on. Today it's empty field and there's a post office nearby.

[00:34:37]Um and the fair closed up.

[00:34:42]And that was it.

[00:34:44]Or was it?

[00:34:46]Because Holmes was kind of resurrected.

[00:34:52]Several times actually.

[00:34:55]And we have to go to this man. Herbert Asbury.

[00:35:02]Before I go on, any questions?

[00:35:07]Yes.

[00:35:10]>> C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast continues in a moment. Now, back to C-SPAN's Lectures in History podcast.

[00:35:24]>> Uh I was wondering in this class we learn a lot about you know, a lot of serial killers and usually we we find out that there's there's like most of what we like like I I I felt like I knew before this class. It was it was a lot of myth and like legend.

[00:35:36]>> Mhm.

[00:35:36]>> What why do you think that that that that that that that that is for like almost every single serial killer?

[00:35:41]>> Um >> Does that make sense?

[00:35:43]>> Yeah. Well, in this case a lot of serial killers the media sort of invents a lot of the legends. All right. Some in some cases yes, it's true. The serial killers do do what they have to do.

[00:35:56]But in this case, I think as the farther back you go, a lot of the mythology of the serial killers becomes inflated.

[00:36:03]Because the serial killers don't exactly follow the pattern that they're supposed to do. In order for them to be a serial killer, the definition of a serial killer was actually something that came up later on in the late 20th century. But what was a serial killer in the early 20th century? Who who was a serial killer? All right. In this case, I don't know if we can actually define Holmes as a serial killer. We can define him as a killer, as a murderer for insurance fraud, maybe.

[00:36:32]But um but writers historians or um other people have invented him as a serial killer.

[00:36:43]Be- But a serial killer is a person who kills two or three more people, and no one knows the identity for a while until he finally is revealed through police investigations, right?

[00:36:53]Um and the bodies follow a a set pattern.

[00:36:57]And Holmes killed there were different methods of of killing for Holmes. Uh asphyxiation uh was one of his methods. Chloroform, he ordered a lot of chloroform from from drug companies or or pharmacies. So Holmes killed based on what was convenient for him.

[00:37:19]People were obstacles.

[00:37:20]So it wasn't exactly he didn't have a a demographic that he went after.

[00:37:28]He killed children, he killed men, he killed women.

[00:37:31]Uh so and he may have burned their bodies, right? Um so it wasn't really he he's not really classified as a classic serial killer, but the legend of the murder castle was invented. And sometimes serial killers exist maybe only in the imagination.

[00:37:56]In this case, Herbert Asbury who's famous for writing several books of uh for instance, The Gangs of New York wrote a book in 1940 called Gem of the Prairie which is about Chicago. And the book uh was later re- uh had it retitled The Chicago Underworld.

[00:38:18]And he had a chapter in there about Holmes.

[00:38:22]and Herbert Asbury was uh a historian and a journalist.

[00:38:29]And he wanted to sell books.

[00:38:31]So, he started writing about Chicago and in many cases what he wrote about Chicago was true. Chicago was had parts of Chica- parts of Chicago were really uh let's say there was a lot of gambling going on in Chicago in that time period. There was a a uh a district in Chicago where you could go do anything you wanted, right?

[00:38:56]More or less anything.

[00:38:57]Uh the Levee as it was called, right? It was This is before Al Capone, right?

[00:39:02]There was a an underworld in Chicago and a lot of people went to Chicago. They didn't go to the to the fair to go ride that giant Ferris wheel, the first Ferris wheel, right? In America.

[00:39:16]They went to that place, that location.

[00:39:20]A lot of men went there. As you know, they stepped off the train and they were given a book saying, "This is where you go to have fun, right? Gamble and other sorts of things."

[00:39:31]And and Asbury ran with that when he wrote this book. And he had a chapter and he and he heard about these stories that became part of the mythology of Chicago.

[00:39:43]Right? They called it the Gomorrah of the plains, uh a place of evil.

[00:39:49]Which a lot of people, you know, said, "Don't go there, right? There were Don't go to Chicago." And people went.

[00:39:56]And that was when the story took off.

[00:40:00]And every book and every writer after that right?

[00:40:08]Used his book as a basis.

[00:40:11]And that's when he was he became the serial killer. He became the serial killer after the age of serial killers appeared in the American landscape, which was the 1960s and 70s. So, we started hearing about serial killers in the 60s and 70s, which we will talk about in this class.

[00:40:30]And then people saying, "Well, wait a minute. Who was the first serial killer in the United States?" Uh I think it was this guy, Holmes.

[00:40:38]Even though there were others. And there others out there, but they're in the archives and they look around.

[00:40:46]Right?

[00:40:48]So, we can thank thank Asbury, Herbert Asbury. And it's such an entertaining book, right? Because it talks about the Chicago underworld.

[00:41:00]And I'm going to add something here, a little postscript.

[00:41:04]Holmes was so alluring as a character.

[00:41:08]Was he really buried in the cemetery in Philadelphia?

[00:41:15]They dug him up in 2017 to see if he was there.

[00:41:21]They found an empty coffin at first.

[00:41:24]A mystery.

[00:41:25]And no, he was there.

[00:41:28]And they did DNA tests with his descendants, one of his descendants.

[00:41:34]And sure enough, it was him.

[00:41:37]And they reburied him.

[00:41:41]So, Holmes had an afterlife. He's had an afterlife, many afterlives. And in legend, right, and fact, he's expanded and there's been several popular books that have been written about him.

[00:41:56]Uh but in reality, I would say Holmes is, right, and you know, I have the sources I used for today's talk.

[00:42:05]Holmes it's really a story about greed in many different ways. It's a story about greed because Holmes basically ran all these insurance frauds and games and con games, but he had willing partners, people who wanted to get rich along alongside him or were fooled and in in the end, right, some of them, of course, were victims like the women he married.

[00:42:34]And in the end, Holmes decided these people know too much. They're obstacles.

[00:42:41]And like the people the the the bodies he dissected, Holmes saw everybody the same way.

[00:42:50]Holmes saw everybody the same way.

[00:42:53]And that is essentially the story of this of this person, right?

[00:42:58]Um unlike other serial killers who we know the identity of, we know his identity, right?

[00:43:03]And he turns out to be I don't know. I mean, he's unusual as a person, I think, in many different ways.

[00:43:10]And I think he's much more multi-dimensional.

[00:43:13]He's a character study.

[00:43:15]Somebody who was lurking around while Chicago did have an underworld and in way it had a uh a streets had streets hell's half acre, for instance, uh Bedbug Alley.

[00:43:27]You Who knows what that place was like? All these places, if you really wanted to know what the what the underworld was in Chicago, you went to talk to him. He was the underworld.

[00:43:41]He was out there in the open, in the store, and he was running the underworld itself. He was the murderer when he was in town. And he would travel around on the trains and run all of these scams.

[00:44:00]Final questions.

[00:44:05]Anybody have any? Yes.

[00:44:17]>> Is there a specific um part of H. H. Holmes or the crimes that he was committing that you feel is like um extorted and drawn just to be like something way bigger than it is or something that's not drawing enough attention from the crimes that he did or has done?

[00:44:33]>> I think the biggest part of it for me when I was researching this case, besides the murders, is why he was able to run these frauds in a way that um the big insurance companies he the what I read is that he [snorts] was running these insurance frauds and he understood that this was being done a lot at that time.

[00:45:01]So, this to me points to a bigger a bigger uh um I guess you could say dimension to this case is that were people digging up a lot of bodies during this time period? Is that area for further research, further study? I know it was happening a lot in London, right?

[00:45:19]With the Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders. So, there was an active industry in this and Holmes was aware that maybe he could get away with this and maybe he could not.

[00:45:30]So, it's something that I I would like to do more research on this.

[00:45:33]Obviously, um but this whole necropolitics or necrocrimes, right? Of going into cemeteries and medical schools uh having a nefarious reputation, I think points to this idea that as Mudgett, right?

[00:45:54]Mudgett the world of Mudgett, he belonged to this medical medical school the university and in in the a town or what's going on here, right? With insurance frauds. Insurance fraud.

[00:46:09]And do and the lack of communication and there's no national, you know, there's no communication with police forces.

[00:46:18]Everything is there's no FBI.

[00:46:22]So, you can run these frauds and get away with it.

[00:46:27]Thank I think that part talks about that.

[00:46:32]All right. Well, thank you everybody and um we'll see you on Friday.

[00:47:05]>> That was James Garza discussing the life and crimes of H. H. Holmes and what his story reveals about fear, media, and society during America's Gilded Age. You can find more lectures and history podcasts wherever you get your podcasts.