My Ultimate Demise

As I fear that you are ready to hear how I was brought to justice and executed, I will get straight to the point.

I will also say this: I remained in control almost 'till the very end.

The year was 1895. Pitezel and I had tried to con the Fidelity Mutual Life Association by doing the same con trick I had been pulling for the past 20 years. The problem was that the FMLA had hired a detective, Detective Frank Geyer from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, to look into me and my past. Eventually, Geyer exposed the murders of the Pitezel family and at the same time, my home, or as the newspapers liked to call it, the "Murder Castle," was broken into by the Chicago police and found my secret vault and rooms in the basement, which included my operating room that had blood stains everywhere. Sensing that there was nowhere to run, I confessed to some of the things that I had done but not all. My testimonies had true and false information, so as to save some of my image. I was finally tried on September 12, 1895 by a Philadelphia grand jury and was sentenced to death by hanging. On May 7, 1896, I was brought to Moyamensing Prison and was hung at 10:13 precisely. 

 Before I died, I told my lawyers that after I was pronounced dead, a coffin was to be filled with cement, then I was to be put into the coffin, and finally, another layer of cement was to be placed so that no one could rob me in my grave. I didn't allow any scientists to take apart my brain or take away any part of my body, to the chagrin of the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia. 

My grave is not marked and under another alias. I am buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Delaware County, Pennsylvania.

Now that you know about me, try and find out how many people I really killed. I implore you.

A List of Victims

My Kills Gave Me Great Pleasure.

And my kill list is very long.

I will give you a list and quick summary of a few of my kills although these are not all of them, just a few and most known cases:

Julia and her daughter Pearl Conner: Julia was formerly married to Icilius "Ned" Conner before they moved to Chicago and decided to get a divorce, which was my fault because I had been sleeping with her. After Ned moved away and remarried, Julia and Pearl stayed with me at my hotel until Julia told me that she was pregnant with our baby. I had begun to grow repulsed at the idea of living with Julia and her daughter and so I decided that I would get rid of them. I told Julia we would marry soon but first we had to kill the baby, for it meant that I had been sleeping around with her during her previous marriage. She agreed and on Christmas Eve 1891, she put Pearl to bed and went with me to a secret room where instead of performing an abortion, I killed her by giving her too much chloroform. After I was finished with Julia, I did the same to little Pearl. By the time I was finished, the clock struck 12; it was Christmas Day. I disposed the bodies immediately.

Emeline Cigrand: Before I met her, she worked as a stenographer to Dr. Keeley. As time went on, I courted her and asked for her hand in marriage; she accepted. In the early days of December 1892, her feelings for me had begun to diminish and she started talking about leaving me. Then one day, I asked her to come to my study and go into my vault to retrieve a paper. She went in and I quickly closed the door. I had poured acid on the floor before her entry and so she died by acid, although she left her foot print on the door, leaving a notice to those who inspected the door, that she had been murdered in that vault.

Anna "Nannie" and Minnie Williams: Minnie I had met previously in a visit to Boston and after inviting her to my home in Chicago many a time, she agreed to come. I used my charm to make her fall in love with me and when Minnie wrote this to her sister, Anna, she received a unsure and questioning response; Anna wasn't sure that I was the gentleman I was chalked up to be. Before Anna could have much say in the matter, in 1893, I "married" Minnie in the presence of a fake preacher so we were never truly married. I invited Anna to spend the summer in Englewood, so she could understand why Minnie loved me so much and she agreed. After a few weeks, I tired of them both and promised to take Anna to Europe but first I had small business matters to take care of in my office and it was there that I told both ladies to go into the vault and retrieve some papers for me. After they entered the door closed and both women were suffocated. 

*These Next Cases Were My Most Known and Most Fun Deaths I Had Taken Yet

Mr. Benjamin Pitezel: Pitezel was a unintelligent idiot who did anything I told him to."'From the first hour of our acquaintance, even before I knew that he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my blood-thirstiness, I intended to kill him,'" (386). I had him take out a life insurance policy, with me as the secondary beneficiary, and told him that we were going to con the insurance company by faking his death. Instead, I killed him. He was burned to death by yours truly. 

Nellie, Alice, and Howard Pitezel: After Mr. Pitezel died, I told Mrs. Pitezel that I would take the kids off her hands and would meet up with her in a short period of time. She agreed and never saw her children again. I took the children to Boston, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and possibly more places but I won't tell you. Nellie and Alice, I stuffed into a trunk and after a few hours pumped a poisonous gas into it. The girls were buried in Toronto, Canada, in the basement of a rented house. Howard was strangled by myself and I dismembered and burned his body, then buried it in a house outside Indianapolis.

Alice and Howard Pitezel

Nellie Pitezel                

And So the Killings Commence

I have and will always be proud of my accomplishments that I have made, although I would never admit this to anyone else. 

Any other reflections on my actions or my nature are untrue.

"One mourning in August 1886," (34), when I was about 25 years of age, I arrived in Chicago to carry out my genius plan. Some have described me as "fresh and crisp," (35) and received "the glances of young women," (35). I had always been confident and I dressed to impress men and women alike, but not for the same reasons as you will later find out. I had brown hair and bright blue eyes, like those "of a Mesmerist," (35). Women of any age were drawn to me for my charm and my gentlemen-like character and both women and men respected me because was able to manipulate their feelings and make them believe I was a innocent man. 

After I passed the licensing exam, I searched for, and found, a suitable drug store in which I wanted to acquire: Holton Drugs, the drugstore "on the northwest corner of Wallace and Sixty-third,"(36). Something I shall tell you in advance, and is of great importance to my story, is this: across the street from Holton Drugs was a vacant lot where great horrors were soon to follow. The owner of Holton Drugs was Mr. Holton, a sick man who would soon die of cancer and made his wife, Mrs. Holton, run the establishment on her own. As I was "good with conversation," (37), I talked with Mrs. Holton and, as she could not care for her husband and run the drugstore simultaneously, she agreed to sell the business to Holmes for a small price and in return, she and her husband would continue living in their flat above the store. After a short period, Mr. Holton died and Mrs. Holton moved to California to visit family and then remained there permanently. I actually killed her and she was one of my first murder victims out of over two hundred victims total.

 As time moved on, I met and married another woman who I was particularly fond of: Ms. Myrta Z. Belknap. Together we had a daughter, Lucy, but I had begun to lose interest in Bertha and in addition, she was jealous of my attention I showed toward most of my clients, which were in fact mostly women, and later became possessive of me, for which I didn't care in the least. When she had our Lucy, she was at her parents home in Wilmette, IL, because she could not stand the way I neglected her. I remained a faithful father and brought her and her mother many gifts to make up for my absence. 

After it was announced that the World Fair would be hosted in Chicago, I sold my store and bought the vacant lot across the street with horrifyingly brilliant ideas. I would build a hotel that would serve as apartments for tourists that would soon be coming to see the Fair. But, unbeknownst to its inhabitants, it would also be a trap in which I would kidnap and murder men and women and secretly burn their bodies or cut off all their skin and sell their bones/corpses for a profit. There is a picture of my famous home below.

My hotel had three main floors and a secret basement. On the bottom floor, I had retail shops, including a doctor's office, a barber shop, and a jewelry parlor, that I created and registered under different aliases. The reason for this is because when I bought furniture or anything for my hotel, I would not pay a cent and when creditors came and demanded I pay the money I owed, the man who ran the shop was never to be found. I also charmed the creditors who came to me asking me to pay the money I owed for the things I bought under my own name so that they came to me angry but left happy and laughing, as if we had been friends meeting over and over. These tactics would later lead to my demise.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEBz7lizROyeCASdHN10fvgEQ8EeyP3t9ptMAEhGk2lzKeL7vfD5-fxFOgY7dLlkisbHyliyqVvZY443R4n4FuBTWPP94DOFUWhqb4Gan3RCIeLC9wTpSHpbWwyi_l_X263wcqXehXCA8/s1600/murdercastle-Page+40.jpg
On the second and third floors, I created secret rooms and unending hallways that I used to trick guests but these were not commonly used by me and my methods; no, I took pleasure in controlling them and making them dance so I normally called in woman to my office and then locked them in my sound proof vault behind my office. There, I would pleasure myself in choosing whether I should kill them or keep them alive and if I wanted to kill them I had many options. My most common methods were leaving the women to suffocate, filling the room with acid through a pipeline I had specifically built for this purpose, or take them out of the vault and instead use chloroform, a deadly compound that, if used in large quantities, could kill oneself. After the woman died, I would put the body into a chute that went to the basement, another favorite activity of mine waited for me in those rooms.

 The basement also had many rooms, including a kiln, a couple rooms where I experimented on the bodies, and rooms where I disposed of the less interesting bodies. A kiln is a room that is made with fire-proof brick and can withstand temperatures up to, at least, 3,000 °F. 

The Beginning

To tell you my story, I will have to start from the beginning. 

I was born on May 16, 1861 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, in the United States of America. 

 My childhood was very boring and bleak, days passing with little to no excitement. As a child, I harbored a phobia of dead corpses, which included the fake skeleton that was in the my home town's doctor's office. After a couple bullies forced me into the doctor's office, I came "face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize me," (38). Now, my reaction to the skeleton has been a controversial subject among many, but I remember that moment as clear as day. A smile lit up my face; a grin could be seen going from ear to ear. When my captors turned me around to see my reaction, for I had not made a sound or moved, they glanced at my face and, what they saw I will never truly know, ran as fast and as far as they could out of the building and away from me.

Since that time as a child, I was fascinated by human anatomy. I would never verify this to be true but some historians have found that in small boxes that I kept as a boy, my greatest treasures were stowed away, including "skulls of small animals that he disabled and then dissected, alive, in the woods around Gilmanton," (39).
At the age of sixteen, I graduated school and took a job as a teacher in Alton, NH. where I met my first wife, Clara A. Lovering. We married on July 4, 1878, although one of the few reasons why we married was because I wanted her to have sex with me. Our marriage technically lasted for a short amount of time until I lost interest in her. We are still married according to the "wedding registry of Alton, NH,"(41).
I graduated college at the age of nineteen and went into the medical program, first at the Univeristy of Vermont, then at University of Michigan, which was "most noted for its emphasis on the controversial art of dissection," (41).
 During and after I graduated from medical school, an old friend, also a medical student, along with a few accomplices, and I came up with one of the best plans in con artist history; we believed that we could con the life insurance agencies into paying us hundreds of dollars for the death of a fake family we had made up. First we took out life insurance on 3 family members and named ourselves the secondary beneficiaries, in case a family member died in which we would receive compensation for the death. After taking out life insurances, we agreed to gather 3 corpses which would later be identified as the family that Holmes' crew had taken life insurance on, and then after faking their deaths, we would collect the $40,000 as compensation (In the late 1800's, this would have been equal to about $800,000 today). I contributed the child family member but after a short period, I backed out of the group, for I feared that the insurance company would expose our game and, as this was illegal, would have us arrested for fraud. I did not actually give up on the plan and after acquiring my portion, I traveled to Chicago where I planned to become a druggist, a position in which acquiring corpses was considered normal, but was turned away for I needed to take and pass a licensing test in order to become a druggist in the state of Illinois.
When I took the test, I registered myself as H.H. Holmes, which would be known throughout the world in no longer than 10 years time. This is all I will say on the matter, but I will say this: this was not the last time I deceived the insurance companies or any company for that matter. I rather enjoyed it.
Now, onto the more important matters of my life, more importantly, the beginning of my perfect plans to build a scandalous life.

The Murder Castle Itself

The Serial Killer Himself 

A Mr. H.H. Holmes