Henry Howard Holmes, for unexplained reasons, appears to have been overlooked by many true . We are all aware of the violent times we live in and are constantly reminded of this unfortunate reality through newspapers and television news channels. This though is not a modern problem, humans have always been susceptible to cruel and violent acts. Many have had murderous intent and carried it through. The rare few are capable of much worse and commit evil monstrous acts that both horrify and yet intrigue us. The person who is the focus of this book, was such a man.
Though the majority of his victims were women he charmed and ensnared in his murderous grasp, he also murdered men and children.
To achieve an easy way to entrap and dispose of his intended victims, Holmes constructed a huge building that when his crimes were revealed, the newspapers of the time named the "Murder Hotel." And this is a fair description as there can be no doubt the building was constructed for the sole purpose of killing his victims and the disposal of their corpses.
Some of its stranger features included maze like corridors and dead ends, doors that opened on to brick walls, airtight soundproofed rooms, a shaft that led from the top floor to the basement, secret rooms, staircases and passages, and in the basement, which also contained a secret chamber, acid vats, quicklime pits, and a huge furnace capable of reducing a human body to ash. This was just a few of Holmes unusual additions that seem to have been included to torture, kill and then dispose of the evidence.
He also profited from many of his victims, either insuring their lives for large amounts, with himself as the beneficiary, or sold their corpses to medical institutions, who at this time, never had enough corpses for their many students to dissect. So desperate were they to receive another corpse, questions were rarely, or ever, asked as to the provenance of the body purchased. Another way he profited from his victims was to strip their flesh from the bones and have a professional articulator join the bones together so he could sell the skeleton to those in the medical profession in need of such things.
It is believed he enticed some of the many visitors flocking to Chicago to visit the grand sights of the 1893 World’s Fair, and sought advantage of the influx of vulnerable young women, some who had ventured from their small home towns for the first time.
Charm and trust were Holmes's most effective weapons and he welded them as expertly as any surgeon would a scalpel.
He married four different woman and not one of them suspected they were not the only one.
As the trial judge said when charging the jury responsible for convicting Holmes: "Truth is stranger than fiction, and if Mrs. Pitezel's story is true—(and it was proven to be true)—it is the most wonderful exhibition of the power of mind over mind I have ever seen, and stranger than any novel I have ever read."
After 2 years of research and consultation with modern day serial killer profilers, I believe this to be one of the most accurate dramatised accounts of America's first documented serial killer, H. H. Holmes.
crime enthusiasts. Set partly in the era when "Jack the Ripper" was terrorizing the foggy streets of London with his gruesome slayings, Holmes was committing his nefarious crimes in Chicago, undetected.
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