American Monsters: H.H. Holmes and The Chicago Murder Castle

0:00 Speaker 1: Warning, Kind of Murdery contains adult themes, explicit language, and descriptions of violence. It is not suitable for anyone, and we recommend you stop listening now.

0:18 Speaker 2: True crime with a dash of the paranormal, the garish, the strange in the darkly comic. A podcast that's about more than just murder. It's my very own pocket dimension, home to a curated collection of bizarre and compelling stories, the unsolved, the unsettling, and the unbelievable. I cover it all just so long as it's kind of murdery. Hey, everybody, thanks for being here. I am Zevan Odeberg and this is kind of murdery again. Another big dose of gratitude for Jerry and Tracy Polly from Hillbilly Horror Stories who asked Kind of Murdery to participate in their Halloween special that dropped this Monday, October twenty eighth.

0:59 Speaker 2: So on over to Hillbilly Horror Stories and listen to that. If you haven't, and if you happen to find your way here because of Hillbilly Horror Stories, well then thank you so much for joining me. And as I teased in the Halloween special, with just a little bit of the story of HH Holmes and his infamous murder Castle in Chicago. Well, today I'm going to tell you the whole story. So if you're ready, please join me as we uncover what truths we can and solve what mysteries we may kind of murderies. American monster HH Holmes in the Chicago Murder Castle starts now.

1:39 Speaker 2: Oh, I almost forgot Happy Halloween, everybody. Four days before HH Holmes was set to hang on May seventh, eighteen ninety six, the Chicago didn't hold back. They ripped into him like a dog tearn into a bone, calling him a multi murderer, a bigamist, a seducer, a resurrectionist, a forger, a thief, and a general swindler. And that was just the warm up. They said this man was quote without parallel in the Annals of Crime unquote. And that's a fancy way of saying he was the nastiest piece of work in the history of history.

2:26 Speaker 2: Holmes didn't just kill people. He turned murder into an art form. He liked his victims close where he could watch them die, vaults to suffocate them. Boiling oil for a man who got too unlucky, poisoned for the rich ladies who happened to have just a little too much money in their bank accounts. The Chicago Chronicle wasn't writing about a man. They were writing about a monster, an American monster, one that played with people like toys until he got bored and tossed them aside, And in a few days they were going to string him up for it.

2:58 Speaker 2: Holmes claimed, who have killed twenty seven people, twenty seven poor souls who had the bad luck of crossing paths with him, and is so called murder Castle. Now, the murder Castle wasn't just a hotel. It was a death trap. Secret passageways, trapped doors, sound proof torture rooms. It was a building designed for one thing, to kill. Now, if you checked into the world's fair hotel holmes Little House of Horrors or giant Castle of Horrors, you might have thought you were just getting a room for the night.

3:29 Speaker 2: But then you'd run up a flight of stairs and find it didn't lead anywhere but to a dead end, literally a dead end. Open a door and boom, solid brick was staring you in the face. Step into a bedroom and suddenly the smell of gas fills the room, your lungs burning, panic setting in. You try to escape, but the door's locked. And even if it weren't, good luck finding your way out of that funhouse, you'd be lucky to find daylight again before Holmes put you out of your misery. According to the Crime Museum, Holmes had the sticks down to a science.

4:01 Speaker 2: Shoots and elevators. Yeah, they weren't for luggage, they were for bodies. Holmes would drop his victims down into the basement, where he had a dissecting table, a stretching rack, and a crematory. Hell of a way to end your vacation. But you see, Holmes, he didn't just kill. He ran an operation, a one man murder factory. He wasn't just kind of murdery. He was absolutely positively super duper murdery. Or at least that's how the story goes. The legend of HH Holmes and his so called murder Castle grew almost as large as the man himself is.

4:36 Speaker 2: He Holmes wasn't just any killer. He was one of America's first real serial killers. And it wasn't just the body count that made him infamous. It was that house, the Murder Castle. Initially, people thought it was just a regular hotel, a smart business move by Holmes to cash in on the eighteen ninety three Chicago World's Fair. But when the police finally took a good hard look inside, they found something straight out of a nightmare. The murder Castle wasn't just some run of the mill, spooky lodging with a few secrets behind the wallpaper, or a rotating bookcase.

5:10 Speaker 2: No, no, no, nothing that ordinary. This thing was a cathedral to the macabre. It wasn't built for guests, It was built for victims. As for the actual body count, well that's still up for debate. Some say Holmes killed as few as nine people, Others think he might have murdered as many as two hundred. Either way, he wasn't running a resort. He was running a slaughterhouse. In recent years, some historians have started poking holes in the legend of HH Holmes. In his so called murder Castle. There's no question they say that the man was a killer.

5:42 Speaker 2: He definitely earned that much. But some of the more twisted details, the gas chambers, the trap doors, maybe not. Experts think those could have been whipped up by the newspapers, the kind that didn't mind stretching the truth as long as it sold copies. This was, after all, the apex of yellow journalism, the fake news of the early twentieth century. And the truth, they say, these rational naysayers being the they I'm talking about, the truth they say, is horrifying enough without the embellishments.

6:15 Speaker 2: Holmes was a murderer, There's no debate about that. But maybe, just maybe he didn't need all the theatrical setups to get the job done. His life, though, well, it's turned into a real American tall tale, a bizarro version of Paul Bunyan, but instead of chopping down forests, Holmes was chopping down humans. The man himself has become something bigger, something darker, an American Jack the Ripper, a kind of devil in the American imagination. He is perhaps the prototypical American monster, just as the Boogeyman is the prototypical creature under the bed, And just like any good tall tale.

6:58 Speaker 2: Paul Bunyan, who I mentioned a moment ago, of course, he was an invention of the imagination, but there were some really big loggers chopping down some really really big trees back then. And the true story or true legend of H. H. Holmes, just like a good tall tale, all started out with a kernel of truth. Holmes was the real deal, just maybe not the matd architect of death that legend made him out to be. Or maybe maybe he was. So let's dig into the facts, strip away the sensationalism, and what do we really know.

7:34 Speaker 2: For starters, those reports claiming Holmes killed over two hundred people pure exaggeration. Only nine victims could be confirmed, and they weren't random strangers drawn into some haunted house. They were people Holmes knew the friend had romanced and manipulated before he killed them as part of his money making schemes. The man wasn't just a serial killer. He was a con artist with a body count. As for that murder castle everyone talks about, well not exactly what it sounds like. Sure it had a sinister reputation, but it wasn't some grand hotel filled with travelers doomed to meet a grizzly end.

8:10 Speaker 2: The first floor shops, the second floor long term rentals hardly the stuff of nightmares. But we're getting a little ahead of ourselves, because, after all, it is Halloween, and don't worry, the nightmares are coming. While sitting in prison, counting down the days to his execution. Holmes wrote an autobiography, but it wasn't some soul bearing confession. It was a book of lies. He claimed innocence, painted himself as a victim, and threw in a bunch of tall tales. The newspapers, which as I mentioned earlier, were deep in the throes of yellow journalism, ate it all up.

8:44 Speaker 2: They ran, with every exaggerated word, making sure Holmes's name would live on an infamy wrapped in a haze of half truths and outright fabrications. But the real truth, the truth that actually exists independent of our biases and opinions, Well, that truth. We don't know much about that truth for sure, because only Holmes knew the full story of what really happened inside that hotel. Only he knew for sure how many lives ended within its walls. And if you ask Holmes himself, he'd tell you he never had a choice.

9:20 Speaker 2: In his own words, he said, I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing. And well, we may never know the real truth about HH holmes career of violence, lies and bloody murder. There's a fair amount that we do know about the man himself, so let's get to that, and maybe along the way we'll uncover just a little bit more of the real truth about the bloody deeds committed by the horrible HH. Holmes. Now everyone knows the name HH Holmes, but that wasn't his first name.

9:59 Speaker 2: It wasn't his true name. That was Hermann Webster Mudget. Born in May eighteen sixty one to a wealthy New England family, Mudget grew up with all the privileges that money could buy. By all accounts, he was unusually intelligent, picking things up faster than most. He even chose his new name, Henry Howard Holmes, as a nod to Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective. But for all of his brains, there were cracks in the facade of his rationality. Early on, Holmes had a strange fascination with medicine, but it wasn't the healing kind.

10:32 Speaker 2: He reportedly started experimenting on animals, practicing his own twisted brand of surgery. And then there's the darker rumor that he may have been responsible for the death of a friend. It's the kind of thing that makes you wonder just when the switch flipped for him when he went from curious child to the man who'd become one of America's first and most notorious serial killers. Or was there even a switch? Perhaps h H. Holmes Hermann Mudget was just born an American monster. So, like I said, even relatively early in life, there were rumors of Holmes's strange proclivities, the torture of animals, the possible murder of a childhood friend, And as the rumors of his sadistic tendencies and possible violent crimes continued to gain momentum and credibility as Holmes got older and stuck to his unsettling ways.

11:29 Speaker 2: Well, the man who was then known as Herman Webster Mudget didn't stick around to face the consequences. In his twenties, back in his hometown, he'd married a childhood sweetheart named Clara, and she had borne him a son. But Mudget left his wife and young son in the dust without a thought and skipped town. And that's when Herman Webster Mudget became Henry Howard Holmes, a fresh start with a new name. It wasn't long before he found himself in Chicago, the Windy City, where he quickly got a job at a drug store on sixty third Street.

12:03 Speaker 2: His charm in medical nohow opened doors for him, and soon enough he wasn't just working at the drug store, he owned the place. Of course, rumors started flying that Holmes had done more than just take over the business. People whispered that the original owner hadn't just sold it, that Holmes might have killed him. But Holmes wasn't one to let rumors slow him down. He had bigger plans. As a verified con artist, he already had a knack for deceit, and now he was about to add bigamists to his resume.

12:33 Speaker 2: He married a second woman, Murda Bell Knapp, while still legally tied to Clara, and then with murder by his side, Holmes purchased a new pharmacy in the city's Englewood district, setting the stage for his next act in a career of crime that was just getting started. Debonair and preach Naturally charismatic, Holmes had a way of drawing people in. He was so damned likable that at one point he managed to be married not to one or two, but three women at the same time, and none of them knew about the others.

13:05 Speaker 2: But beneath that charm there was something that left a few people uneasy. Maybe it was the way he could smile and make you feel like you were the only person in the room, Or maybe it was the way you'd walk away and feel like you'd just been played. Still, his charm worked, wonders. It helped him pull off one financial scam after another for a while. It even helped him get away with murder. Harper's Bazaar once wrote quote, almost without exception, his victims appeared to have two things in common, beauty and money.

13:38 Speaker 2: They lost both translation, Holmes had a taste for the rich and the pretty, and once they were in his orbit, they didn't keep either their looks, or their money or their lives for long. I just mentioned how Holmes was so smooth that he managed to marry not just a second time, but a third, having long ago grown tired with Claire Barah. The new wife, Murda couldn't satisfy him either, so in eighteen ninety four, he tied the knot with Georgiana Yoke, and once again no one raised an eyebrow. This guy could have a whole house of cards stacked behind him, and people would still shake his hand and call him a gentleman.

14:19 Speaker 2: As C. E. Davis, one of holmes employees, later remembered, Holmes used to tell me he had a lawyer paid to keep him out of trouble, but it always seemed to me that it was the courteous, audacious rascality of the man that pulled him through. He was the only man in the United States that could do what he did. In other words, Holmes didn't just rely on legal loopholes or fancy lawyers. No, it was his audacity, his ability to charm you with a grin while picking your pocket that got him out of the messes he created.

14:49 Speaker 2: He had that rare blend of nerve and smooth talking, the kind that made you question your own instincts while he was halfway to the bank with your money. So let's get to the genesis of the murder cap vestle. In eighteen eighty seven, Holmes bought an empty lot right across from his drug store and kicked off the construction of a three story building. He told people it was going to be for apartments and shops, a standard business move in a city that was growing fast. But this wasn't just another building.

15:15 Speaker 2: It was an eyesore, big and ugly, with more than one hundred rooms stretching for an entire city block. But hey, Chicago was booming. New buildings were popping up all over the place, and nobody gave it much thought. The city was the beating heart of the Midwest, sitting right on the shores of Lake Michigan and serving as a hub for the sprawling railroad networks criss crossing the country. Chicago was the center of everything, a city on the move. But while the city was growing, something much darker was taking shape in that massive, ugly building.

15:46 Speaker 2: Little did the residents know they were about to live next to a house of horrors. For his mansion, Holmes had a clever plan. As I mentioned, the first flour would be all storefronts, prime real estate he could rent out to the flood of new businesses opening up in booming Chicago. The second floor apartments for newcomers trying to make a name for themselves in the windy city. Some of those tenants, though, well, they might have been signing a lease to their own deaths, because holmes third floor was something out of a nightmare, reportedly filled with asphyxiation chambers, mazes, and hidden staircases.

16:18 Speaker 2: It was a twisted labyrinth designed to confuse and trap his victims and the truly unlucky ones. They ended up in the basement. That's where the real horrors waited. Holmes had his own little house of horrors down there, and the rumors about what went on beneath the building's floors or what gave his house its bloody reputation. Holmes was smart, though he switched out builders and architects throughout the construction. Nobody ever saw the whole picture, just bits and pieces of odd, unsettling design choices.

16:48 Speaker 2: By the time anyone could put it all together, the place was already a monster, and Holmes was ready to feed it. In eighteen ninety four, when the police first got inside the World's Fair Hotel that's the real vanilla name for Holmes, so called Murder Castle, Well what they found was let's say confusing doesn't even begin to cover it. There were hinged walls that moved, false partitions, that hid more than they revealed. Some rooms had five doors, others had none at all. There were secret chambers, airless little boxes hidden beneath the floorboards, iron plated walls were there, too, designed to choke off all sound.

17:27 Speaker 2: It wasn't just a building, it was a maze, and every dead end had a deadly purpose. Holmes's own apartment was no less terrifying. In the bathroom there was a trap door that opened up to a staircase leading to a windowless cubicle, and in that cubicle a shute. And let's be clear that shoot wasn't for laundry. Now I mentioned how the first floor of the hotel was shops and the second was apartments. Well, in eighteen ninety two, Holmes added a third floor, and he told everyone it was going to be hotel space.

18:01 Speaker 2: But here's the thing. It was never finished, never furnished, never opened to the public. The whole hotel concept was just affront another one of holmes tricks to swindle suppliers, investors, and insurers. So while the legend paints him as some twisted innkeeper, the truth is he was running a long con and playing the game until the very end. You see, Holmes wasn't just a serial killer. He was a serial liar. The guy had a knack for weaving myth into his own story, dressing up his crimes with legend and lore.

18:33 Speaker 2: But just because H. H. Holmes World's Fair Hotel was never an actual functioning hotel business, it doesn't mean it wasn't a murder castle. Police discovered one room in particular that stood out. It was lined with gas fixtures. This is where Holmes would seal his victims in, flip a switch from an adjacent room, and wait while the gas did its work. Nearby, they found another shoote same deal, straight down to the basement, where the real horrors were waiting. Holmes had designed every inch of the place to confuse, to trap, and to kill, and he did it with chilling precision.

19:09 Speaker 2: But it wasn't just about the rooms. The entire place was wired up like a sinister machine. Every door, every step connected to an intricate alarm system. If someone so much as stepped into the hall or started heading downstairs, a buzzer would go off right in holmes bedroom. He knew exactly where you were, and once you were in, you didn't stand a chance. Now, as terrifying as all this sounds, and it certainly does, it's important to remember that some of these details have been questioned. Over the years.

19:36 Speaker 2: Historians have started to wonder if some of the more twisted designs, like the gas chambers and trap doors were exaggerated or even invented by the newspapers. And sure, some of the details may have been made up. But the first real clue as to what the twisted floor plan was all about came when the cops stumbled onto a pile of bones. Most of them were animal bone, sure, but mixed in with them remains and the smallest bones those belonged to a child, probably no older than six or seven. That's when it hit them.

20:07 Speaker 2: This wasn't just some oddball architecture. This was a house built for killing. And when the authorities made their way down into the cellar, that's when the full nightmare came to light. See next to a blood stained operating table, they found a woman's clothes, as if she'd been there just moments before. Another surgical surface stood nearby, a cold and empty The basement was littered with horrors. There was a crematory, shelves lined with acids strong enough to disintegrate anything they touched, and a bizarre assortment of medical tools.

20:37 Speaker 2: Some of them made sense, others not so much. And then there was the torture device. No one knew exactly how it worked, but just looking at it was enough to make stomachs turn. This wasn't just murder, it was methodical. It was clinical. Holmes wasn't content with just killing his victims. No, he wanted to break them first. As we now know, homes of session with dead bodies didn't fade after his college days when he moonlighted around with his horrible medical experiments, and neither did his surgical skills fade.

21:10 Speaker 2: So after dropping his victims down those shoots, he didn't just leave them there. He dissected them, cleaned them, and then, because for Holmes, there was always a way to make money, he sold their organs or skeletons to medical institutions or the black market. And as creepy as that murder mansion looked from the outside, and it did, it wasn't like Holmes had to drag anyone into it. His victims walked in willingly, likely charmed by holmes flattery and the image of wealth and success he projected.

21:41 Speaker 2: Some of them were probably even his employees, lured into the mansion under the guise of a job offer. In the two short years he operated his castle, Holmes hired more than one hundred and fifty women as stenographers. A few of them were even his mistresses. These women weren't just numbers to Holmes. They were ponds in his twisted game, and like so many others, they had no idea what kind of monster they were dealing with until it was far too late. Holmes had the habit of photographing the ones he liked the most.

22:11 Speaker 2: The women were young, beautiful, and far too trusting of the smooth talking gentleman who had all the right words. In a big, unfamiliar city, Chicago, with its endless stream of newcomers flowing in and out of the train stations, provided Holmes with a steady supply of fresh faces. People were always moving, always on the go, and his mansion, sitting right in the heart of the city, seemed like a safe enough place to land if you didn't know any better. And despite the women who went missing while working for him, murder wasn't what put Holmes in the crosshairs of the authorities.

22:45 Speaker 2: People come and go in a big city, they vanish, and nobody really bats an eye. In a place like Chicago, before modern technology could track your every move, it wasn't unusual for someone to drop off the map. It was easy, in fact, to write off the disappearances as young women moving on, finding a better opportunity, or maybe even heading back home. Holmes knew that he relied on it, and as long as people kept passing through his doors without anyone asking too many questions, he had all the time in the world to continue his gruesome work.

23:16 Speaker 2: But the grizzly details of what police found in holmes murder castle, many of which we've already discussed, didn't come to light until after his capture, and there's still more to unravel before that. To furnish his massive castle, Holmes relied on credit. He'd order furniture, fixtures, and anything else he needed, but when the creditors came knocking, well, they wouldn't find what they were looking for. In one instance, workers from a local furniture company showed up to repossess their property, only to be met with a building that appeared completely empty.

23:47 Speaker 2: As John Barlow Martin wrote for Harper's in nineteen forty three, quote the castle had swallowed the furniture, as later it would swallow human beings. It wasn't magic, though, Holmes had a trick up his sleeve. He bribed the janitor to help him hide the furniture, moving it all into a single room, and then walling up the door. By the time the repo men arrived, the place looked like a ghost town. Holmes was always one step ahead, whether it was dodging creditors or later covering up his far more sinister crimes.

24:17 Speaker 2: So I know, I just told you that the Murder Castle never actually operated as a hotel, and that was part of the legend of the monstrous HH Holmes that historians have mostly undermined these days. But just for the fun of it, or perhaps I suppose better said, just for the horror of it, here on Halloween, let's talk a little bit about that legend. I'm going to tell you the story as the legend goes, because, after all, legends are part of our history as well. So, according to the legend, the Murder Castle, Holmes's World's Fair hotel was ready just in time for the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition in May eighteen ninety three, a celebration of human ingenuity and progress.

25:04 Speaker 2: Some people would probably feel it necessary here to point out the extremely Eurocentric nature of that ingenuity and progress, but I really don't need to go down that rabbit hole. I mean, it was, after all, called the World's Columbian Exposition, so nobody had canceled Columbus. Yet. The fair was a massive cultural event, drawing over twenty seven million people from all corners of the globe to Chicago, and for homes, at least the homes of legend, it was a golden opportunity and most likely for the real homes as well.

25:38 Speaker 2: But back to the legend. He opened up his castle as a hotel, welcoming visitors who had come to see the wonders of the World's Fair, but for many of his guests it would be the last place they'd ever check into. The exact number of victims nobody knows for sure, but what's clear is that many of them were women, Women who had been charmed, seduced, and eventually swindled before Holmes put them in an earth grave. He had a pattern, what the fancy pants call a modus operendi. He'd get engaged to a woman, make her feel like she was the one, and then she'd vanish other victims.

26:11 Speaker 2: They weren't there for romance, they were there for work. Lured by the promise of employment in a city bursting, just absolutely bubbling with opportunity. But once they entered the doors of Holmes Hotel in quotes, they never made it out again. Holmes likely first victims were Julia Connor, the wife of one of his drug store employees, and her young daughter, Pearl. The two were last seen alive just before Christmas of eighteen ninety one. Julia had been close to Holmes, too close, according to the rumors, and when she and her daughter disappeared, no one thought too hard about it.

26:45 Speaker 2: It was Chicago, after all, people vanished all the time. But what happened to Julia after her disappearance was far more chilling. Holmes, always looking to make a profit, paid a local man to remove the skin from the corpse of an unusually tall woman. Ulias stood six feet tall, and her skeleton, stripped of any identifying features, was then sold to a medical school. No clues or traces of who the body had once been, just bones, and for Holmes it was just another transaction, another way to turn death into dollars, as he always did.

27:18 Speaker 2: After the World's Fair wrapped up, Holmes didn't stick around Chicago for long. He had bigger schemes to chase, and one of them involved an associate named Benjamin Petetzel. Together the two men hatched a plan that was as cold blooded as it was calculated. Potetzel would fake his own death and together they'd collect ten thousand dollars from a life insurance company. Easy money, or so it seemed, but Holmes, always the mastermind, had no intention of splitting that payout fairly. In fact, the plan was just another layer of Holmes's growing web of deception.

27:50 Speaker 2: The man was always looking for the next mark, and this time Petetzel was it. At one point, Holmes found himself behind bars for yet another fraud, and it was the first time and it wouldn't be the last. Well locked up, he got chummy with a fellow inmate and a notorious outlaw named Mariyon Hedgepath. Now Holmes, of course, was at this point going by one of his many aliases, H. M. Howard, and Holmes, being Holmes, couldn't resist bragging. By the way, Marion was more commonly also seen as a man's name back in the day.

28:22 Speaker 2: There So this Marion Hedgepath was a man and fellow inmate in the jail, and HM. Howard Holmes ended up spilling the details of his life insurance scam to Hedgepath, thinking nothing of it. But Hedgepath wasn't about to let that juicy bit of info slide. Later, when the heat was on, he helped investigators by revealing exactly what Holmes had told him. Holmes, ever, the charmer, might have thought he could outsmart anyone, but Hedgepath, Marion Hedgepath, he saw through the act and he knew how to play the long game too.

28:54 Speaker 2: The authorities eventually figured out that HM. Howard was none other than H. H. Holmes, but by the time they caught on, it was too late to stop his final murders. Holmes had already killed Benjamin Petetzel and he wasn't done. In a move that was as cruel as it was calculating, Holmes told Petetzel's widow that her husband was still alive hiding out. But the real horror came when investigators pieced together what Holmes had been up to with Potetzal's children. Holmes had turned it into a sick game.

29:25 Speaker 2: He kept three of the potetzl kids close, but always just out of their mother's reach. He was playing cat and mouse with their lives. At one point, Holmes even stashed two of the children in separate lodgings, just a few streets away from each other, close enough to touch, but far enough to stay hidden. It was a game for Holmes, one investigator remarked, and like the worst games, it was about power. He possessed them all, Potetzel's wife, her children, and he reveled in the control. To him, they weren't people, they were ponds, and he always made sure he was the one holding all of the pieces.

29:59 Speaker 2: Holmes run finally did come to an end in November of eighteen ninety four, when he was arrested in Boston on suspicion of fraud. And at first the authorities figured they were dealing with just another con man, a smooth talking swindler with a knack for staying one step ahead of the law. That was Holmes's bread and butter, lying, cheating, and scheming. But this time the police dug a little deeper, and when they started peeling back the layers of his shady dealings, while they stumbled onto something much darker.

30:30 Speaker 2: As we all know now, and as we've talked about for this entire show, Holmes wasn't just scamming people. He was killing them. And the real bombshell dropped as I'd just described, when Mary and Hedgepath told them of Holmes's plan to defraud the insurance company and murder Potetzel, and then they subsequently found evidence linking Holmes to Potetzel's murder in Philadelphia. When that happened, it wasn't about fraud anymore. They had a killer on their hands, and this time there would be no escape for H. H. Holmes.

31:04 Speaker 2: In July of eighteen ninety five, the trail of his crimes led Philadelphia detective Frank Geyer to a grim discovery. Beneath a cellar in Toronto. Buried there were the bodies of two of the Potetzal sisters. The site was enough to churn even a seasoned detective stomach. The corner, finding no visible injuries on the girls, believed that Holmes had suffocated them in a particularly cruel way by locking them in a large trunk and filling it with gas from a lamp valve. Death wasn't enough for Holmes.

31:36 Speaker 2: It had to be a slow, methodical, and heartless death, even for children. And the horror didn't end in Toronto. Authorities later found the charred remains of the third Potetzal sibling at an Indianapolis cottage Holmes had once rented. The pattern was clear. Holmes didn't just kill to escape detection. He killed because for him, it was part of the game. While Holmes sat behind bars, the murder charges against him were quickly overshadowed by an absolute mount everest of financial fraud that had been building up against him.

32:11 Speaker 2: In the end, Holmes was officially tied to nine murders. Of course, in typical Holmes fashion, he couldn't resist bragging, and he claimed he'd killed at least twenty seven people, three times as much as he most likely actually did. But his confessions were all over the place. He gave three different stories, each with a different number of victims, and none of them mined up. The true number of lives he took impossible to pin down. Holmes had designed his house to make sure of that, be acid baths to melt down body parts, a human sized stove to burn the evidence.

32:42 Speaker 2: Holmes was methodical about covering his tracks. In one pile of ashes, investigators even found a small gold chain from a woman's shoe. It was just enough to hint at the true scale of the horrors that had taken place in his castle, but not enough to give anyone a clear answer on how many sold had been lost. I read this quote to you earlier, said Holmes in his autobiography, penned in prison. Quote I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing.

33:14 Speaker 2: And in his warped mind, that's just how it was. By the end, Holmes wasn't just familiar with death, he knew it inside and out, and he wasn't about to let anyone make a spectacle out of his remains. So after he was ultimately bound guilty of Benjamin Petetzel's murder and sentenced to death, he asked to be buried in cement, paranoid that grave robbers would come sniffing around for his bones, and right before his death in eighteen ninety six, Holmes claimed that he was turning into the devil. He even said his face was taking on something downright demonic.

33:51 Speaker 2: And when he took the stand at his own trial, Holmes put on the same smooth act he'd used all his life. He represented himself, and the papers ate it up, calling him a quote remarkable unquote lawyer with a twisted kind of charisma. But as I just mentioned, charm only got him so far, and on September twelfth, eighteen ninety five, a Philadelphia grand jury found him guilty of Benjamin Potetzil's murder and he appealed. Sure, but for HH Holmes, it was game over. They hanged Holmes on May seventh, eighteen ninety six, at Moyamen Saint Prison.

34:24 Speaker 2: But even in death, he didn't make it easy. When the floor dropped, his neck didn't snap like it was supposed to. Instead, he lay there twitching for a full twenty minutes. It was a full twenty minutes before the beast of Chicago finally went still. As for his burial, they did it exactly as he wanted, ten feet deep in Philadelphia, packed in a cement filled pine box. After a life spent haunting Chicago, Holmes made sure he wouldn't be coming back, and he made sure that no one would be getting close enough to him to try to bring him back.

35:00 Speaker 2: And the mystery of HH Holmes didn't end with his hanging. Rumors kept spinning, whispers claiming Holmes had somehow cheated death and survived his execution. Those whispers held up all the way until twenty seventeen, when, at the request of his descendants, archaeologists dug up the remains from his grave. Dental records finally put the myth to rest. Holmes was exactly where they'd left him dead and buried. But hh holmes legacy had a dark ripple effect. Strange, twisted fates seemed to haunt those connected to his case.

35:34 Speaker 2: The man who'd first tipped off the police about Holmes's schemes, he was shot by a Chicago cop. The prison warden, the one who'd kept Holmes behind bars, took his own life. Even the District Attorney's office, where the case was prosecuted, went up in flames. And then there was Patrick Quinlan, the caretaker of Holmes's castle and the one man who knew all its secrets. In nineteen fourteen, Quinland died by his own own hand, leaving behind a note that simply read, quote, I could not sleep unquote.

36:05 Speaker 2: As for the murder Castle itself, it didn't last either. In eighteen ninety five, the place was gutted by fire. Word has it that two men were spotted slipping in that night, but they were never identified, and then the remains of the building were demolished in nineteen thirty eight, and today an unremarkable US Post office stands on the site. H. H. Holmes monster that he absolutely was, was, for his own part, all too happy to paint himself as harmless. In his memoir, he wrote that he was but a very ordinary man, even below average in physical strength and mental ability.

36:43 Speaker 2: He added, to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrongdoing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power. But Holmes's story proves one thing for a fact, sometimes the most ordinary man is the one hiding the darkest secrets. Happy Halloween, everybody. I'm Zevan Odelberg and this has been kind of murdery.

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