Henry Mudgett was born in a small village in New Hampshire, into a family where love, decency and human dignity were considered empty words. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother was fanatical religious. If a boy born in such a couple turned out to be quietly downtrodden and worthless, it would be for the best. However, Henry was distinguished by irrepressible imagination, was far from stupid and did not inspire fears either to teachers or neighbors, despite the fact that from early childhood he showed serious deviations in the direction of outright sadism.
In 1871, when Henry Mudgett was in his eleventh year, there was a terrible fire in Chicago. Almost the entire city was burnt out, there were hundreds of victims. Many years later, at the trial, Henry admitted that while the neighbors were discussing this tragedy, he with a shudder imagined how great it would be if his parents lived in Chicago at that moment. How they would scream and writhe in the fire, how they would suffer, dying, and he would observe all this from the side …
For a long time, the victims of the sadist were only animals: he conducted the most severe experiments on them. However, then Henry switched to people, at first, however, already dead. By that time, he had finished one year at college in Vermont and entered the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, deciding that a medical degree would help in his hobbies.
The poorly guarded morgue at the Faculty of Medicine gave Henry the idea of an easy profit - he began to steal and "sell" corpses. While working as an insurance agent in parallel, Henry took out life insurance for fictional people. Then he presented to insurance companies the deceased from the morgue, disfigured by him, claiming that this was the insured person, and received money. Time will pass, and the trade in the dead, only already "obtained" on their own, will become Henry's main business.
In 1884, Mudgett graduated, moved to Chicago and got a job as a pharmacist. Soon he married, but then left his wife, then married again, then again … At the same time, he never divorced, that is, he was actually a polygamist, and some of his companions disappeared in the most strange way.
In 1886, Mudgett took the name Henry Howard Holmes. In the summer of that year, he met a certain Holton, the owner of a small pharmacy on the corner of Wallace and 63rd Street in the Inglewood area, who was dying of cancer, and got a job with him. After Holton's death, Henry persuaded the widow to sell the pharmacy to him, retaining the right to live in the same building. The old woman did not live long - "Doctor" Holmes quickly sent her to the next world.
After a while, through not entirely honest manipulations, he managed to buy out plots of land adjacent to his now pharmacy. Soon, an outwardly unremarkable building was erected on this territory, but a very strange building inside. Neighbors christened it "castle". Henry registered it as a hotel.
This hotel was built for the 1893 World's Fair, dedicated to the 400th anniversary of the discovery of America (for which it was named Columbus), and was held in Chicago. Part of the building was used as a retail space. On the first floor of the "castle" there was a pharmacy and various shops, and on the upper two floors there was an office and a maze of several dozen rooms without windows, corridors leading to brick walls, stairs to nowhere. Holmes constantly changed contractors during the construction of the "castle" - thus, only he could fully know the layout of the building.
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The "castle" turned out to be a real "hotel of death". Few of those who got into it came back alive. The corridors and passages were terribly confusing, the rooms well isolated from each other were locked only from the outside. Most of the premises were secretly piped through which Holmes, if desired, could supply poison gas. A chute led from the upper floors to the basement, through which the owner lowered the corpses of the guests. In the basement they were greeted by a "cutting room" - a room intended for removing meat from bones; the skeletons and internal organs prepared in this way were then sold to medical schools. There were two cremation ovens, a pit with lime and a vat, which, if necessary, was filled with acid, which Holmes used if the corpse or its remains needed to be completely destroyed. For "entertainment" in the basement there were also instruments of torture,including the rack …
During the period of the World Exhibition alone, more than fifty visitors went missing in the city. In addition, at that time, Chicago was actively growing, quickly rebuilding after the fire. Many people came to the city in search of work, and no one cared about their loss either. Holmes hired such people - mostly women - as maids, insured their lives, then killed them, received insurance and money for the skeleton. Random guests also became its victims.
According to the testimony of Henry Holmes himself, in one of such isolated rooms, locked in addition in a fireproof closet, one of his wives ended her life - he listened with pleasure as she first screamed, then choked and finally died in terrible agony from suffocation.
Do you think the police eventually broke into the scary "hotel" and arrested the maniac? No, Henry himself left Chicago completely freely, simply by hanging the lock on the door of his bloody refuge - he was bored of sitting in one place.
For a long time, he traveled around the United States and Canada, committing murders along the way, but still remaining unpunished. Only in July 1894 in St. Louis, the police arrested Holmes, and the judge even gave him a short prison term - a maniac killer was caught stealing horses.
After serving his due, Holmes invited his cellmate Benjamin Pitzel, who was also released, to pull off a standard trick with fake insurance. He had to fake his death, and Holmes - through Pitzel's wife, get money. True, Pitzel didn't have to pretend to be dead. Henry finished him off, arranging the case as if it were suicide, took the widow's insurance, and sold the skeleton of a friend out of habit to the nearest educational institution.
The next and last victims of Holmes were Pitzel's two daughters and son. However, already in November 1894, employees of the Pinkerton agency, who had been sitting quite tightly on the maniac's tail lately, seized him and handed him over to the police.
At the trial, when it came to the number of Holmes's victims, the number 20 sounded at first. However, after the opening of the Castle of Death, they started talking about at least 350 murders. Holmes himself confessed to only 27 of them.
The court sentenced Holmes to death by hanging. The verdict was executed on May 7, 1896. Coincidentally or not, but the first officially registered serial killer in the United States died painfully - fifteen minutes he dangled in a noose until his neck broke. The last request of the condemned was to pour concrete over his remains so that no one could dig up the body and mock him, as he once mocked his victims. This request was granted.
From the book: "The Cursed Places of the Planet." Yuri Podolsky
