EP283: America's First Serial Killer H.H. Holmes

too bad to have, honestly. So, yeah, I had a physical therapy today, so my shoulders a little sore. But how is that going? It's going good. So my physical therapist is somebody I went to college with, so I'm known for a really long time. And I told her, I said, it's starting to feel better. I told her, like, before we started our session today, I've only gone to two. Today was number three. And she's like, yeah, physical therapy

really works. And we were kind of laughing because I was like, this bullshit works, you know what I mean, this boodoo. Yeah, this who works. But it really has been feeling a lot better. So I think the prescription was for twelve visits, so yeah, so I'm gonna do it for the next six weeks. So, oh good. I know your your mobility is pretty limited on that side. I couldn't believe it when you show me at our movie date. But no, that's awesome news. Well good, I'm glad.

That's the latest and greatest. What she got today got us a story. I want to take you back. Gosh, when was it? Was it the late nineties in your garage the candles. Shannon and I had a candle making business for a little while. It was so fun. It was probably the mid eighties, the mid nineties, mid nineties, mid to late yeah, okay, And so to pass the time, when you have to pour candles in a container, you

have to wait and check for air bubbles. So Tanya and I would just sit out in the garage and just talk and it would be cold, but it was okay because there was a heater in there and we were watching our candles set up. We started playing, you know, the usual fun game f Mary Kill and we are well back in the day. Now this is the nineties for wrestling. So we would pick wrestlers and Tanya loved Hunter Palmsley Triple h God. He was so fucking It would usually just be down to two him and the

rock him, and they were really the hottest. No one I wouldn't even consider, And so it would always be like Hunterhearst Houndsley in the shower fingering or the rock Doggie on the stairs. It would be so close. It would be like, oh gosh, it's hard. It was a really difficult It was like totally Sophie's choice because it was really a hard decision to make. And then we would do it with Paul Bearer, mister Fuji. It would be like two horrible choices, two nightmare choices, and we

would just be giggling and laughing so hard. And I just bring it up because this week's story. His initials are triple H, and he went by H H. Holmes. Oh triple eight. Yes, there was a triple H back in the eighteen hundreds. He was not a wrestler. He was America's first serial killer. Oh America, girl, I'm going to take you right back. America at the end of the nineteenth century was a country racing full speed into

the future. Cities rose like steel giants, electric lights flickered to life in places where darkness used to settle without argument. Railroads carved new lines across the landscape, carrying strangers from one end of the country to the other faster than most newspapers could print their names. And in that rush

toward progress, something unexpected happened. The country became anonymous. People arrived in cities where no one knew who they were, where they came from, or what ghosts traveled with them. A man could reinvent himself overnight, a woman could vanish in the space of a single block. Entire lives could unfold or collapse in crowded streets where everyone minded their own business. It was the perfect ecosystem for a predator.

And in the early eighteen nineties, while Chicago prepared to showcase the wonders of modern civilization to the world, a man moved quietly through the city with a smile on his face and something far darker in his mind. His given name was Herman Webster Mudget, but the name history remembers the name he gave himself was doctor Henry Howard Holmes. Holmes appeared respectable, polished, soft spoken. He dressed well, paid attention to details, and carried himself like a man the

world ought to trust. People described him as charming and intelligent, a gentleman, a doctor, but charm as camouflage. An intelligence is a weapon. Holmes didn't simply kill. He designed murder. He engineered it. He built a structure, brick by brick, that operated like a machine for disposing of human beings. He turned anatomy into opportunity, He turned anonymity into cover. And when the world finally discovered what he'd done, it struggled to understand the truth because America didn't have a

word for a man like him. Not serial killer, not psychopath, not organized defender. Those weren't invented yet. Holmes was the first. And the story you're about to hear isn't the mythologized version, not the Hollywood embellishment, not the half remembered urban legend, and not the water down folklore of a so called murder castle. This is the Holmes who existed in reality, calculated, inventive, cold, and extraordinarily patient. A man who saw human beings not

as people but his assets. A man who could build a house that didn't just hide death, it produced it. A man who learned exactly how easy it was in the chaos of a booming country to make someone disappear without a trace. So tonight we're going to step into

that world. We're going back to the beginning, before the newspaper headlines, before the confessions, before the trial, back to the child who learned how to lie without blinking, and the medical student who discovered how profitable a body could be. And then we descend into the castle. Because to understand doctor H. H. Holmes, you have to understand the machinery he built and the system he exploited, long before the

country even realized a monster was walking among them. Hermann Webster Mudget was born on May sixteenth, eighteen sixty one, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, a place where church pews outnumbered storefronts and the rhythm of daily life was slow, predictable, and tightly controlled. His parents were strict Methodists, committed to discipline and moral order. In that era, obedience was a virtue,

silence was expected, and fear was considered a tool. Holmes would later insist his childhood was pleasant, calm, and ordinary. The people who knew him remembered something very different. Neighbors described him as unusually bright, but unnervingly detached, a boy who didn't laugh with other children, didn't scare easily, and lied with a casual confidence that adults didn't know what

to do with. He seemed to understand early that people believed what they wanted to believe, and if he delivered the right expression at the right place moment, he could get away with anything. It was an early form of manipulation, and Holmes mastered it effortlessly. But the story he repeated most often, the one he claimed that shaped him, was the now famous skeleton incident. According to Holmes, neighborhood boys once forced him into a doctor's office where they shoved

his hand into a human skeleton to terrify him. He said, the fear melted into fascination. He said that moment sparked his lifelong obsession with anatomy. It's a neat story, it's a cinematic story. But there's one problem. There's no evidence it ever happens. Holmes wrote that story himself years later, while awaiting execution. Historians believe he created it as part of his personal mythology, a dark origin Taleman to explain

or even justify everything that came after. But whether the Skeleton's story he was real or not, something else was true. Holmes understood the power of narrative. He understood how to make people remember him the way he wanted to be remembered. He understood how to turn himself into a character. And long before he became a doctor, long before he built the castle, long before he made his first body disappear, Holmes learned to become whoever he needed to be. But

childhood is only the prologue. The real transformation, the moment Holmes learned exactly what a human body was worth, began at the University of Michigan Medical School. Shut up, shut up. He worked at U of M. He was at U of M. Oh Yes, this is where he learned the value of a body. By the early eighteen eighties, Herman Webster Mudget had shut his skin. Distance from his childhood gave him freedom, and he stepped into the world of

higher education with a new kind of confidence. He enrolled in the University of Michigan Medical School in eighteen eighty two, a decision that would alter the course of his life in many others, in ways no one could have predicted. Medical schools in the nineteenth century were worlds unto themselves. The halls carried the metallic smell of discarded instruments and formaldehyde. Anatomy labs were crowded with cadavers, bodies obtained from sources

that ranged from legally ambiguous to outright criminal. Grave robbers known politely as resurrectionists. That was their yes, their street term, supplied much of the demand. It was an open secret. Everyone knew about it, and no one talked about it because dissection was essential to learning, and the supply had to come from somewhere. Holmes stepped into this world like a man entering a library he already meted. He understood anatomy quickly, not just the structure of the human body,

but the opportunities it presented. There are students who study because they must, and there are students who study because they see advantage. Holmes was the latter. This was the first time he was surrounded by corpses, not as symbols, not as stories, but as raw material. Bodies were accessible, movable, convertible, and in the right circumstances, profitable. Holmes discovered a method that exploited both medical anonymity and insurance loopholes. This process

was simple, elegant, and ruthlessly efficient. You create a false identity, You take out a life insurance policy under that identity, then you obtain a cadaver that resembles the imaginary policy holder, and finally you mutilate that body to sit just a violent accidental death. Doesn't this remind that story that you covered the two parts with that irishman? Oh? Yes, Michael Malone. Yes, I was thinking of him when I was doing this. They tried to kill him and kept trying to kill him,

and kept over and giving him gasoline. Almost. Oh right, paint Dinner. I think it was paint Dinner's paint Thinner. Yes, yeah, terrible. It was. Holmes, with his medical knowledge, authenticated the corpse, the insurance company paid the claim, and the false identity died without question. He ran these schemes with fellow student Robert Leecock, but even among the ethically flexible students of nineteenth century medicine, Holmes stood out. He had no hesitation,

no discomfort, no internal conflict. He had found his first entrepreneurial model, death is business. He learned the paperwork, the anatomy, the insurance codes, the art of forging documents, and most importantly, he learned how easy it was to make a body disappear, the first unconfirmed victim. This is one story that rarely makes the mainstream accounts a young woman who came to

the medical school for tutoring. She studied stenography, and she was bright, independent and fascinated by scientific education in a time when most women weren't encouraged to pursue it. And she visited home several times, and then she vanished. No missing person's report, no newspaper alert, nothing. But around the same time, Holmes was overheard asking a fellow student about quote,

disposing of a female corpse discreetly end quote. That phrasing, even in the morally gray world of nineteenth century anatomy, raised some eyebro Yeah, I read flat flag? What Yeah? What? The woman was never identified and herds as appearance never recorded, but the timing and the silence speaks for itself. Holmes had crossed the line internally from fraud involving corpses to creating a corpse himself, and he learned something that would shape the rest of his life. Young women could vanish

without consequence. No one came looking, no one raised hell, no one cared enough to ask questions. Disappearance was easy, Disposal was easy. Death was easy. And with that realization, Hermann Webster Mudget began shedding his old identity entirely. He walked toward a new life, a new city with a new name. Holmes Holmes arrived in Chicago in eighteen eighty six, a city bursting at the seams, smoked from factories, clung to the skyline, street cars rattled, immigrants poured in by

the thousands. The air tasted like ambition and ash. Chicago was a place where you could beat anything, a place where a new name was enough to rewrite a man's entire past. Holmes called himself a doctor, and no one questioned him. He took a job at a drug store in Inglewood, a working class neighborhood that smelled of coal dust and opportunity homes. Sold medicine with a warm smile, he counted change with a soft hand, and when the aging owner of the drug store died unexpectedly, Holmes comforted

the widow with gentle words and patient eyes. Not long after she disappeared, Holmes acquired the drug store Hmmm, and with it the financial footing he needed to build something far more ambitious, something the world would later name the Murder castle, though that phrase didn't capture the cold precision behind it. Holmes purchased a vacant lot across from the drug store and began construction on a three story building that defied logic. The workers who built it complained constantly,

the blueprints changed weakly. Holmes kept the plans locked away. He hired carpenters, then fired them, then hired new ones, then fired them too. It wasn't incompetence, it was strategy. No single person ever saw the building's full design. When the investigators eventually entered the building in eighteen ninety five, they documented features that read like architecture of a nightmare.

Hallways that led nowhere, staircases ending abruptly at blank walls, rooms with no windows, no vents, no escape doors that locked from the outside, only secret passages and hidden corridors. Shoots leading directly to the basement, angled perfectly to accommodate a human body. A sealed vault with gas jets that could be activated remotely and in the attic. A walk in kiln lined with firebrick capable of reaching temperatures high enough to obliterate bone. Well, damn, he had crematorium in

his attic crematorium that shoot down to the basement. Did you ever see American horror story Hotel. No. I never watched that one. This is so reminiscent of it. This wasn't chaos, this wasn't accidental. This was engineering. Holmes didn't build a home. He built a machine, a structure designed to confuse, isolate, weaken, and finally erase. The castle was the body, Holmes was the brain, and the young women

who entered it were raw material. Inglewood had no idea what it was living beside Chicago had no idea what it had invited in. Because the castle was only the stage. The real horror was what and who disappearing inside it. The castle didn't become famous overnight. It didn't announce itself. It didn't scream or cry out or drip blood into the sidewalk. It blended in. It looked like any other large commercial building. In Inglewood, offices on the first floor,

rental rooms above. People entered constantly, travelers, employees, customers, deliverymen, neighbors. But the ones homes focused on most were young women. Chicago in the early eighteen nineties was full of them, newly independent, newly urban, newly vulnerable women came from small towns and farming communities across the Midwest, hoping for work, education,

or excitement. They answered newspaper ads promising respectable employment. They rented rooms cheaply, often with little more than a trunk and a handwritten letter of reference. Holmes didn't choose victims at random. He selected women who were isolated, transient, or unprotected, women who wouldn't have family nearby to question their absence, and once he hired them, Holmes encouraged them to take out life insurance policies, policies that listed him as the beneficiary.

It was one of his earliest red flags, and it was the one almost no one noticed. I'm sorry, don't take a life insurance policy out on me. I start it, stop it. Julia and Pearl O'Connor the first documented disappearance so. Julia Connor was working at the castle's pharmacy counter when Holmes noticed her. She was charismatic and attractive. Entrapped in a failing marriage, Holmes exploited that instantly. He offered her stability, attention, affection,

then seduction. Julia and Holmes began an affair, and soon she and her daughter, Pearl lived inside the castle itself, and then Christmas Eve eighteen ninety one, they vanished. Holmes later claimed Julia died during a botched abortion and that Pearl went elsewhere. But holmes lies always came in half formed fragments. His stories shifted with each retelling. What didn't change were the forensic traces later recovered in the castle

the case file discovery. In the basement of Julia and Pearl during the eighteen ninety five excavation, investigators found small, fragile femur fragments belonging to a child between six and eight years old, a partial dental plate consistent with young girl's fragments of jewelry identified by relatives as Julia's, strands of long, dark hair lodged inside a drain gate, chemical residues consistent with quick line decomposition. There was no abortion,

there was no departure, there was no disposal. Julia and Pearl's remains tell a story Holmes refused to Emmeline's. The grand was intelligent, careful, and far more guarded than holmes usual targets. She worked as a scenographer. She had a family nearby, and she had her own plans, her own ambitions, but Holmes had a talent, a dark talent for creating trust. He courted her. Proposed marriage described a future so detailed

it became almost tangible. Then one afternoon, Emmaaline told a coworker she had a meeting in Holmes's office to talk about the future. She was never seen again. Months later, a trunk belonging to Emmaline was found in the castle's basement, locked, tagged and empty. Her body has never been recovered. Her disappearance, like so many others, was buried under the weight of a city too busy, too crowded, and too chaotic to notice a single missing woman. The Minnie Williams, was wealthy

by nineteenth century standards. She inherited Texas property worth thousands Home saw her as a gold mine. He seduced her, convinced her of his affection, then persuaded her to sign the deed to her property over to a man named Alexander Bond. Bond was Holmes himself. When Many's sister, Nanny arrived in Chicago to visit, the two sisters were last seen entering the castle together. Neither was seen again. What investigators found instead were forged letters, forged signatures and property

transfers that pointed to Holmes as the sole beneficiary. The sisters were gone, their assets were not. Holmes didn't kill impulsively. He killed for reasons money, control, convenience, and when the castle's architecture required a body, he provided one. So how many disappeared? The truth is simple and chilling. We will never know the full number. Chicago in the eighteen nineties

recorded thousands of untraced disappearances each year. People vanished from boarding houses, factories, tenements, and rail lines without paperwork, without follow up, and without anyone filing a missing report. Holmes knew this, He navigated it, and he fed off of it. The castle didn't merely hide victims. It processed them, and it reduced them. It eliminated all evidence that they were ever there. And Chicago and all its industrial glory, was

the perfect hiding place. But everything changed in eighteen ninety three when the World's Fair came to town, and suddenly the entire world walked straight past the castle, never suspecting the darkness inside. In eighteen ninety three, Chicago transformed into something extraordinary. After years of construction delay, political wrangling, and national pressure, the World's Columbian Exposition finally opened its gates.

Over six hundred acres of gleaming white buildings rose from the muddy swamp land near Lake Michigan, lit at night by more electric bulbs than most Americans had ever seen in their lifetime. It was called the White City, a mirrored dream of what America hoped it could become. Modern, bright, safe, and full of promise. But that was the illusion above the surface. Down in Inglewood, just a few miles away stood holmes Castle, dark, labyrinth, and carefully designed to be

everything the White City wasn't. The fair brought twenty seven million visitors through Chicago. It was a tidal wight. Twenty seven million and eighteen three. Yes, it was a tidal wave of humanity, mothers, fathers, businessmen, inventors, students, countless, young women traveling alone, searching for independence, excitement, and opportunity. For Holmes, it was a banquet, the perfect cover, the perfect stream of victims, a city flooded with strangers no one would

ever trace. Holmes placed advertisements in newspapers across the Midwest and East Coast, would say young women wanted good pay, travel opportunities, room and board included it was innocent enough the kind of add Thousands of employedlawyers posted during the fair. Women arrived with trunks and dreams. They entered Holmes's office with resumes neatly folded, and they signed employment contracts written in his elegant handwriting. And then they vanished. Some were

last seeing buying a new dress for their job. Some mailed letters homes saying that they had arrived safely. Some walked into the castle confident they had secured their future homes made sure they never had one. The fair created a crisis of lodging. There simply wasn't enough places to stay. Boarding houses overflowed with guests. Thousands slept in makeshift dormitories or took rooms in private homes. Homes exploited this chaos. He rented out rooms in the castle to visitors. Guests

came and went. Most left unharmed, but enough disappeared that investigators would later struggle to reconstruct exactly who stayed there and who never checked out. He understood the genius of noise. When everyone is shouting, no one notices a single missing whisper. So the case file missing Persons during the Fair between May and October eighteen ninety three, Chicago police recorded a staggering number of disappearances, many of them young women traveling alone.

Numerous missing persons were never identified. Many were travelers with no local contacts. Everything that made Holmes's checklists women trying to flee marriages or family, you know, getting away a degree of desperation, and newspapers were flooded with pleas like missing daughter, last letter sent from Chicago, seen at the fair, no contacts. Since many young women fell into that, Holmes

didn't need much to hunt victims. They came to him because the World's Fair made Chicago shine like the future, and predators understand better than anyone that bright lights cast the darkest shadows. The castle was running at full capacity, and while Chicago celebrated its triumph of modernity, Holmes perfected the art of making people vanish. But eventually, even he made a mistake, and it wasn't the castle that betrayed him. It was a man he thought he could control, a

man named Benjamin Pitzel. For all his charm, for all his intelligence, for all his architectural brilliance, HH Holmes was undone by something surprisingly simple, greed and the belief that no one not even the law would ever be smart enough to catch him. By eighteen ninety four, Holmes had a new accomplice, a carpenter named Benjamin Pitzel. Pitzel was a father, an alcoholic, and a man desperate for money.

He saw Holmes as charismatic and successful, a man who could offer him steady work and a sense of purpose. Holmes saw Pizel as something else, a tool, a liability, and eventually opportunity. Holmes and Pizel had run several insurance scams together, but the last one, the one that would expose everything, was supposed to be their biggest score. Yet. Holmes proposed a ten thousand dollars insurance fraud scheme. Pizel

would bake his own death in a lab accident. A burned body would stand in, the insurance company would pay the claim, and they would split the money. But Holmes had a different plan. He never intended to split anything, and he never intended for Pizel to walk away alive. In September of eighteen ninety four, Holmes and Pizel traveled to Philadelphia under assumed names. They rented a small office space where the accident was supposed to take place. Holmes

had already prepared the corpse, or so Pizel believed. Holmes gave Pizel chloroform enough to render him unconscious, not enough to kill him. Then, while Pizel was still alive, Holmes set him on fire. The medical examiner later noted blistering patterns and lungsoot that proved Pizel inhaled smoke while dying. Holmes didn't stage death, he orchestrated one. He left Pizel's body in the office, arranged debris around to make it look like an explosion, and filed the death certificate under

the alias they had created. The insurance company paid the claim, Holmes pocketed the money. Then, unbelievably, he visited Pizel's widow, Carrie, and told her the fake death had gone perfectly, that her husband was alive, and that he was now on the run. He looked her in the eyes and lied with total ease. Now the children. This is where Holmes

cruelty entered territory that still chills even hard investigators. Holmes offered to escort three of the Pizel's children, Alice, Nellie, and Howard, across several states, claiming he would reunite them with their father. Carrie, desperate and trusting, agreed. Holmes then took the three children on what history now calls the Murder Tour. They traveled through Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, Toronto, and

several small towns in between. The children believed that they were going to see their father, and Holmes knew none of them would ever see their father again. Howard, the youngest, at just ten years old, was murdered first. Holmes rented a small cottage outside Indianapolis. Neighbors saw him buying a large wooden trunk and a quantity of stove fuel. They heard a child crying inside the house one afternoon, and then silence. Howard's remains were later found burned, crushed, and

concealed in the chimney flu of the rented home. Scorched bone, fragments of small femur, pieces of jawbone with developing teeth, charred scraps of a wool coat. Holmes didn't bury him, he incinerated him piece by piece. After killing Howard, Holmes took the two girls to Toronto. They stayed in a rented house while Homes traveled back and forth between cities

under various aliases. Witnesses reported seeing the girls through the window, Alice reading, Nelly brushing her hair, unaware they were never going home. Did he tell them anything about like what happened to their brother? They did not cover that. I'm not sure if they were sounds like he'd be so charming. They could tell shit, many of them right, yes, exactly, very gaslight, very misleadings, just diabolical. Detective Frank Guy would

later discover the truth. In the cellar of that Toronto house, Geier found a large wooden trunk, its lid nailed shut. Inside were the skeletal remains of Alice and Nelly, the bone positions showing that they had been placed on top of each other. There was evidence of binding strands of blonde hair, clothing fibers consistent with the garments known to

be theirs, in chloroform residue inside the trunk lining. Holmes had killed them quietly, no screams or struggles, just two children in a box, their lives treated as afterthoughts in one of Holmes's endless schemes. Now Detective Frank Geier the man who followed the footsteps of a ghost. Geyer was a seasoned Philadelphia detective known for his patients and his

ability to read the small details others overlooked. When he was assigned to find the missing Pizel children, he knew immediately that Holmes was lying, but Geier didn't know how deep the deception went, not until he traced the rental records, interviewed landlords, followed ticket stubs, and checked rooming houses across half a dozen states. Geier discovered corpses and places where

Holmes had stayed days, sometimes hours before. He found burned chimneys, acid pits, abandoned trunks, ash piles, clothing scraps, and the faintest biochemical traces of decomposition in floorboards. What began as a search for missing children became the expose of a serial killer unlike anything America had ever imagined. Holmes fraud unraveled, his alibis collapsed, and suddenly the castle in Chicago wasn't the biggest mystery anymore. The castle was just the beginning,

because Holmes had killed far beyond its walls. He wasn't a man who needed a layer. He was a man who carried the machinery of murder inside of him, and once investigators realized what they were dealing with, they turned their eyes back to Chicago, to Inglewood, to the building. No one ever fully understood the Castle. By the time the detectives began investigating the Chicago Castle in Earnest, the building had already taken on a kind of mythic presence

in Inglewood. People whispered about its strange layout, its endless renovations, its revolving dora of female employees who rarely stayed long enough, or stayed at all. But no one truly understood what the building was until they stepped inside. And what the public later called the Murder Castle doesn't capture what investigators actually found. This wasn't a haunted mansion or a Gothic horror. It wasn't theatrical. It was industrial, mechanical, and methodical. Homes

didn't build a torcherd house. He built a processing facility, one that disguised death with the efficiency of a man who viewed murder as an extension of business. So we're going to walk through, as the investigators did, first floor, the front of the deception. The first floor looked harmless enough, shops, offices of pharmacy rooms. Anyone might walk into on an ordinary day. But the moment detective stepped past the rental front,

the atmosphere changed. The walls tightened and the corridors narrowed, and the air grew colder, old plaster and dust mixing with something else, something metallic, that had never quite left the building. It was the smell of the second floor and the second floor the maze. Detectives described the second floor as a tangle of hallways that led nowhere, but that phrase doesn't do it justice. The layout made no

architectural sense. There were doors that opened into blank walls, rooms without windows, rooms without door knobs on the inside, rooms fitted with gas fixtures connected to valves hidden in holmes. Personal office investigators found hidden staircases behind wall panels, narrow corridors that looped back on themselves, rooms that trapped sound, and shoots, vertical shafts running down into the basement. Homes

didn't build fear, He built disorientation. He created a place where a victim could move from room to room, losing their bearings, losing their sense of direction, losing hope, while homes remained in total control. The sealed vault. One of the first major discoveries was a sealed vault, a seal lined room with a heavy door, air tight seams, and the faint chemical traces of charred human tissue. On the inside of the vault door were scratch marks, human scratch marks.

Investigators could see the clawed trails left by someone trying to desperately get out. The vault connected directly to a gas line controlled from Holmes's office. Victims locked inside were suffocated, their bodies left in the sealed room for hours before being moved down the chute to the basement. This was

not chaotic, it's not improvised. It was planned. The third floor contained apartments supposedly for permanent tenants, but most rooms showed no signs of long term habitation because no personal belongings, clothing, pictures, nothing. It was as if the people who lived there had simply evaporated or never left the room alive. Now descending into the basement, this is the true heart of the castle. The basement is where investigators finally understood the full scope

of holmes design. It wasn't a basement at all. It was a workshop, a laboratory, a disposed facility. What they found was so disturbing that investigators had trouble placing it into official reports without stripping away emotion, but this is what they documented. Item one a dissecting table, long, wooden, heavy, heavily stained. The stains were a mix of old and new layers upon layers that took a chronological story of repeated use. Dark blotches confirmed to be human blood, knife

marks carved deep into the surface. Item two of bone, saw and surgical kit. Not the polished professional kits you'd expect from a doctor. These were worn, utilitarian and coated and rust. Several blades contained microscopic fragments of human tissue embedded in the metal. Item three a six foot chemical vat filled with corrosive substances, sulphuric acid could climb and other compounds used to dissolve organic matter. The walls of the vat were coated with softened bone residue, white, chalky,

and unmistakably human. Item four the cremation kiln, a large walk in furnace lined with firebrick, capable of reaching temperatures of above sixteen thousand degrees fahrenheit, hot enough to reduce bone to brittle shards. Inside the ash, investigators found melted jewelry bone splinters, fragments of human pelvic bones, the scorch remains of woman's corset stays. Item five. Bone fragments multiple individuals.

Partial rib cage from a young female child size vertebrae, mandible sections with dental growth patterns indicating victim between six and ten years old, a nearly intact adult femur. Fragments of a skull bearing signs of blunt force. Trauma six was personal items scattered cross shelves and in corners of the basement. Women's shoes size three through eight, hairpins, pieces of cloth buttons, a woman's pocket watch, charred remains of

letters never mailed. Item seven. The shoots. Three vertical shafts angled perfectly led from the second floor into the basement. Investigators dropped sandbags down one chute and watched them land directly beside the dissecting table. Holmes designed the gravity to do the lifting for him. The basement floor showed layers of dried biological residue. Tests were rudimentary in eighteen ninety five, but investigators noted pooled blood under work benches, spray patterns

near walls, coagulated droplets near the cistern. Experts later concluded that multiple individuals had been processed there, likely over the span of years. Case file for Holmes his behaviors Even today, Holmes checks nearly every box of the modern organized offender. Meticulous planning, controlled crime scenes, intentional concealment, methodical disposal, no emotional attachment, no panic, no remorse, no escalation curve. He was dangerous from the first kill and a chilling ability

to blend into society without suspicion. You know who this reminded me of to you, Richard Kuklinsky, that we just did. Yeah, if his psychological was compartmentalization, and that's we're finding to be huge in criminal cases, the person's ability to compartmentalize. Oh yeah, detach yourself. You know. Yes, Holmes didn't behave like a man battling inner demons, and he behaved like a man conducting business. And that's what makes him particularly terrifying.

His victims weren't obstacles to overcome, they were resources to be managed. The confession that revealed nothing. While awaiting execution, Holmes wrote a memoir titled Holmes's Own Story. He really should have considered that name. That is a bit of a tongue twist. Holmes. Holmes own that doory. It reads like a fever dream, a bizarre blend of lies, half truth,

self praise and outright invention. He confessed to twenty seven murders, then recanted, then confessed again, then added details that were impossible, then denied everything. Most of what Holmes wrote was fiction, an attempt to control the narrative even as the news waited outside his cell. But in the end, the memoir buried the deeper truth. Not because Holmes wanted to admit guilt, but because he wanted to remain unforgettable. Holmes cared about

one thing above all else, legacy. He wanted to be remembered, feared, disgusted, studied. A century later, he got exactly what he wanted. But charming psychology can only go so far. Eventually, even the most polished monster has to sit in front of a judge and explain the unexplainable. That moment finally came for Holmes, as he turned it into a performance. Holmes wasn't afraid of the law. If anything, he relished it to him.

The courtroom wasn't a threat, it was a stage. I know he's a Taurus, but this is like total Leo rising behavior, And I totally say that with love to Leo Risings. Yeah. So it was a stage, an audience, captive an audience, a captive room of people forced to listen to every word he said. And Holmes loved an audience. When he appeared for trial in eighteen ninety five, charged only with the murder of Benjamin Piss, he behaved less like a defendant and more like a socialite attending a luncheon.

He smiled, he nodded politely. He greeted the press as if they were old friends. He offered corrections to their notes. He provided quotes, polished, witty, almost flirtatious. Reporters adored him, Lawyers admired him. Jurors found him oddly likable. And that's the most disturbing part. Holmes charmed people while on trial for murder. He represented himself, of course, of course, of course he did. Holmes fired his lawyers and represented himself

for large portions of the trial. His legal arguments were articulate and well constructed. He crossed examined witnesses with the confidence of a seasoned attorney. He objected with perfect timing. The courtroom became his Kingdom. He leaned back in his chair, He observed the jury, He made small jokes, He disarmed tension with a smile, And when the prosecution described the gruesome details of the Pizel case, Holmes didn't flinch, not once, No shame, nothing, just the calm expression of a man

evaluating the weather. But charm doesn't erase facts. The insurance fraud trial linked Holmes directly to Pizel's death. Rental records placed him in the cities where pizels children disappeared. Forensic evidence, crude by modern standards but devastating in eighteen ninety five, pointed straight to him. Detective Geyer's testimony was the tipping point, a blow so thorough and methodical that the jury visibly recoiled.

Geyer traced holmes movements. He wrote down the dates, the addresses, train stations, receipts, landlords, neighbors, ash piles, bone fragments, chimneys, trunks. Every detail drew the news tighter around home Holmes's neck, and Holmes knew it. The verdict, the jury didn't debate long. Holmes was found guilty of the murder of Benjamin Pitzel and sentenced to death. Not for Castle, not for the women, not for the hundreds of disappearances, just for Benjamin. But

in the end it was enough. Holmes accepted the verdict with the same serene, unsettling composure he had held through the entire trial, as if none of it applied to him. He thanked the judges, nodded politely to the jury. He shook hands with the bailiffs. A killer to the end, but always a gentleman. For a man who spent his entire life controlling every room, he walked into the prison at Moyamensingh must have felt suffocating. The walls were thick, stone,

the air damp, the light dim. Holmes had charmed crowds, seduced employees, deceived families, and manipulated entire sees cities. But inside these walls there was no one left to memorize, no audience, no stage, just time, too much of it. While awaiting execution, Holmes kept himself busy by writing letters and talking to reporters, crafting a memoir so filled with contradictions that historians still struggled to separate deliberate lies from

calculated omissions. He pivoted between innocence and guilt with theatrically smooth transitions, confessing to twenty seven murders, retracting them, then confessing again with new details each time. Holmes treated confession like another khn. He told stories that made him seem brilliant, mystical, misunderstood. He claimed he was born with the devil inside him, a dramatic flourish meant to romanticize his crimes, not explain them.

In reality, Holmes didn't fear death. He feared being forgotten. The day of his execution, on May seventh, eighteen ninety six, Holmes was led from his cell to the prison courtyard, where the gallows stood. The morning was cool and still, the kind of quiet that fields stage like the world itself, was waiting for the performance to begin. Reporters filled the viewing area. Clergy stood nearby. Officials whispered to each other with stiff shoulders and white knuckles. Holmes walked with calm,

steady steps. His posture was perfect, his shoes shined. His face carried a faint, unreadable smile, the same polished expression he had worn in the courtroom, at the Castle, in the drug store, and in every lie of his life. He climbed the scaffold, as if accepting an award. When asked if he had any final words, he delivered them smoothly, without tremoor. I have few words to say. I am innocent of killing Pitzel. I could not have killed him.

A final lie, unnecess unbelievable, but delivered with the same confident cadence he always used. A liar's last breath is still a lie. The drop that didn't break his neck now the hangman pulled the lever and Holmes fell, and the rope snapped tight. But the drop was miscalculated, and Holmes's neck did not break. Instead, he began to strangle slowly. For nearly fifteen minutes, his body hung suspended between life and death. Witnesses reported small twitches, spasms, the jerking of

limbs as his body struggled against the inevitable. The crowd stood in stunned silence, watching a man who had inflicted so much slow suffering now experiencing his own. It was a macabre's symmetry, a fitting end. Holmes's face remained strangely composed even as he died, another grotesque anomaly and a life full of them. But some, as later claimed, he looked serene, even peaceful. Others said his calm expression made the scene more horrifying. Most murderers died anonymously, Holmes made

sure his death was theatrical. The strange request. Holmes insisted on being buried ten feet deep in a coffin filled with cement. He claimed it was because he feared grave robbers would steal his body and dissect it. The irony was unmistakable. Holmes feared in death the exact violation he had flicted on so many others. But there was another layer. Some criminologists believe Holmes wanted to prevent future scientists from cutting into his brain, studying it and discovering the truth

about what he'd been. Holmes wanted to control the narrative even underground. Even after the rope tightened, Holmes was gone, But the question he left behind was not why did he kill? The question was how many did he kill? And the truth is we still don't know. A legacy

America couldn't forget. Holmes didn't start the American fascination with serial killers, but he became the blueprint for the ones who followed the manipulation of Ted Bundy, The Double Life of Dennis Rader, the organizational precision of Robert Hansen, the outward respectability of John Wayne Gacy, the quiet brutality of Gary Ridgeway. All of them echo Holmes. All of them walk in a path he carved. Holmes was the prototype, the earliest model of a predator, shaped not by madness

but by opportunity. And as America grew more crowded, more anonymous, and more complex, men like Holmes began to appear with terrifying frequency. He wasn't a single monster. He was the first chapter in a long book the country would spend a century trying to understand. Holmes died believing he outsmarted everyone, the police, courts, journalists, the public, and in many ways he did. He took his secrets with him. He buried his true victim count deep inside the cement coffin he demanded.

Holmes wasn't afraid of hell. He wasn't afraid of judgment. He wasn't afraid of death. He was afraid of analysis. He was afraid of being known. He was afraid of losing control of the story, because control was the only thing he ever cared about. Holmes didn't just kill people, He erased them. He reduced them to ash, to acid, to fragments no one could identify. He turned human life into something transactional, disposable, untraceable. But the one thing he

couldn't erase was the lesson he left behind. That progress hides predators, that charm conceals cruelty, that danger often looks like a gentleman who smiles warmly, offers a handshake, and seems like the safest man in the room. In the end, the Castle wasn't the monster Holmes was, and more than a century later, the shadow he casts still lingers over American true crime, a reminder of how darkness evolves, adapts, and waits for the right moment to walk among us again.

And that, my dear Tanya, Wow, the story of America's first serial killer. Wow, what a great story. I mean it's not but you know what I mean. Yes, no, thank you, right, fascinating, right, Yes, that hotel you have to see so you know, American horror story. Our listeners watch it. I know you've got to see the correlation because Tanya. Number one, Evan Peters always gets me there, right, Yeah, So he's in it and he's like the crazy owner of it, and the Hotel is set up very similar

Sarah Paulson, she plays Sally. It's Lady Gaga is in it, Matt Balmer's in it. Yeah, oh, Kathy Baby. I stopped watching American Horror Story probably after Coven. I don't remember. I watched four or five seasons. I think Hotel came after Coven because I was gonna stap at Hotel too, but then when I was called when Lady Gaga was on there, so you know, I wrote that he was a prototype, but it makes me think of more of an archetype. He's like the major arcana of negative cards. Yeah,

you know, just right. I mean, in any basement that has quick line, my god, where's the door? It's crazy. I feel for those victims, but yeah, there's always a predator, you know. I'm always fascinated too, like how do they put these cases together? Like that police Geyer, Yes, a detective Geyer. I don't know, like it's just and this is the beginning. I mean, telephones were just introduced, I know, like how did these I mean you said, like everything

is just fascinating. It's fascinating that we know all this stuff about it, considering Holmes light about everything to find like factual information is just craziness. So it's a it's a really interesting story. So I'm really glad you covered it. Thank you. She Yeah, I want to thank Tiffany m. She emailed and suggested that we cover it and I was all over it. Yeah, And I also want to give a shout out to gabriel Gabrielle sorry and Bethany sent it out love to you guys, so you email.

It was just so much love. I could feel us in it and I was like, who are these girls? Are these ladies so we've just want sent our love and say hey, yeah, thank you Gabrielle in Bethany. So all right, well thanks again Shannon, Thank you everyone for listening episode. Please visit our website Crimesoconsequences dot com. If

you would like more episodes. You can subscribe to our Patreon at patreon dot com, slash t nt Crimes or Quinn subscribe through the Apple podcast app and what you get is you get early release ad free and you get an extra episode. Woho. So check that out and I think that's all the business. Sounds like it. Shannon, my club, I will see you next time, yes, my queen. Until next time, until you fine ye