The Haunting Case of H.H. Holmes

Summary

HISTORY This Week – “The Haunting Case of H.H. Holmes”

Released October 27, 2025
Host: Sally Helm
Guest/Expert: Adam Seltzer, author and Chicago tour guide

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode dives into the legend and reality of H.H. Holmes, the notorious 19th-century criminal, often claimed to be "America’s first serial killer" and infamous for his so-called “Murder Castle” in Chicago. Through expert insights and detailed historical research, the episode explores the origins of the Holmes legend, separates fact from myth, and examines how media sensationalism both built and distorted the legacy of H.H. Holmes.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The 1895 Trial and Public Perception

• The podcast begins in a Philadelphia courtroom (00:36), where H.H. Holmes—born Herman Mudgett—stands accused of killing Benjamin Peitzel.
• Jurors had already formed opinions due to the sensational press, which depicted Holmes as a monstrous, possibly prolific murderer.
• Sally Helm acknowledges the truth beneath the legend, noting Holmes did kill Peitzel and others, but much about the infamous “Murder Castle” and hundreds of supposed victims was fabricated or exaggerated by media.
  • Quote: “A lot of the news coverage about his murder castle and his crimes is pretty much made up.” — Sally Helm [03:25]

2. Chicago’s “Murder Castle” Reality vs. Myth

• Adam Seltzer, Holmes expert and author, describes the present-day site as “mostly a blank space next to a post office” [06:27].
• Original features are gone, and Seltzer debunks much of the folklore, noting his own experience as a Chicago tour guide and researcher.
• The castle’s legend (secret rooms, torture chambers) was amplified by yellow journalism and persists despite scant historical evidence.
  • Quote: “He swindled the Edna Iron and Steel Company. He swindled the construction company, he swindled the architects.” — Adam Seltzer [14:36]

3. Holmes’s Early Life and Psychological Profile

• Holmes was born Herman Mudgett in Gilmanton, NH, in 1861. Myths about a traumatic or abusive childhood don’t hold up.
• He had strabismus (misaligned eyes), which led to distrust from others and honed his skills in persuasion and lying from a young age.
  • “He lied when he didn’t have to, he lied when it only made things harder for him.” — Adam Seltzer [10:32]
• Fascination with anatomy was genuine; stories about morbid incidents in youth and medical school have mixed reliability.

4. Initial Crimes: Fraud, Swindles, and First Killings

• Holmes adopted the name H.H. Holmes after arriving in Chicago; the origins are unclear, but not likely inspired by Sherlock Holmes.
• Holmes’s early scams included buying barber equipment on credit for his pharmacy and not paying, which set a lifelong pattern.
  • “Once he got away with a couple of things, he just wanted to keep on doing it.” — Adam Seltzer [13:42]
• First major murder: Julia Connor and her daughter Pearl (Christmas 1891); Holmes consistently claimed Julia died during an abortion, but evidence suggests Pearl was poisoned.
• Other women, like Emmeline Sigrand and sisters Minnie and Nannie Williams, entered Holmes’s orbit and soon vanished.

5. The World’s Fair and Hotel Scheme

• The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair presented another opportunity: Holmes claimed he was building a hotel for fair-goers, but there’s no evidence it was ever functional. It was primarily another swindle—he burned the incomplete third floor for insurance money [18:50].

6. Escalating Crimes and The Peitzel Murders

• Holmes convinced business associate Benjamin Peitzel to join a fake-death insurance scam but instead killed him with chloroform [20:53].
• Holmes then took custody of Peitzel’s three children under false pretenses; he killed all three while keeping their mother in the dark [22:14].
  • “He was telling them that any minute now we’re going to see your father. He was telling their mother that their father is still alive. This is a big scam.” — Adam Seltzer [22:19]

7. Capture and The Sensational Investigation

• Arrested in Boston, Holmes confessed to insurance scams, hoping to avoid harsh punishment in Texas for horse theft.
• Authorities tracked Holmes's path, and detective Frank Geyer uncovered the corpses of the Peitzel children in Toronto and Indianapolis [24:33].

8. The Media Circus and the Making of a Legend

• Police and journalists flooded the so-called Murder Castle, indiscriminately handling evidence and letting imagination fill the gaps.
  • “It was not exactly what you would call a professional investigation.” — Adam Seltzer [25:40]
• Newspapers like the New York World created diagrams and lurid room names (“Secret Hanging Chamber,” “Death Shaft”), fueling the myth of hundreds of hidden victims [27:16].
  • “If you’ve ever looked up Holmes online, you’ve probably seen the diagram... It’s a really entertaining article… also filling in a lot of blanks with their own imagination.” — Adam Seltzer [27:16]
• The public, hungry for monstrous tales, was easily swept up.

9. Trial, Confession, and Execution

• Holmes’s Philadelphia trial for Peitzel’s murder was dramatic: his lawyers briefly quit, he self-represented, and witnesses like Carrie Peitzel offered heart-wrenching testimony. Holmes reportedly showed no remorse during trial but reacted emotionally when his third wife, Georgiana, refused to use his name [30:39].
• The press competed for Holmes’s confession, and he ultimately claimed 27 victims—many proven, posthumously, to be alive or nonexistent. Evidence supports only 9 confirmed murders.
  • “Of those [27], at least half a dozen were still alive. Several others were fiction. There’s really just nine that we know of.” — Adam Seltzer [32:00]
• In 1896, Holmes was hanged. At his request, he was buried in a giant block of cement to prevent his skeleton being displayed.
  • “He had been getting offers from people who wanted to put his skeleton on display at a carnival. He didn’t like the idea of that.” — Adam Seltzer [32:51]

10. Lasting Legacy and Historical Lessons

• The H.H. Holmes legend was routinely revived in media and literature, drawing from early yellow journalism and sensational embellishments.
• Seltzer reflects on the cautionary tales of such myths, asking how many other historical stories are remembered not for their truth, but for their most sensational iterations.
  • “There’s this great game of telephone that takes place over the course of several decades and we just remember the wildest parts of the stories.” — Adam Seltzer [33:49]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On separating fact from legend:
  “If we trace things back and kind of peel back the onion, we eventually do find some of the real story.” — Adam Seltzer [09:23]

• On Holmes’s compulsive lying:
  “He lied to the census man, he lied almost constantly. I’m not qualified to diagnose whether it was pathological, but it sure seems to have been.” — Adam Seltzer [10:32]

• Regarding the media circus at the Crime Scene:
  “They let reporters go digging through things with their bare hands, let them handle all of the evidence...” — Adam Seltzer [25:40]

• On the power of sensational journalism:
  “The number of people who went to Chicago for the fair and didn't come back was a long one... They started speculating how many of these people might have gone to H.H. Holmes Hotel.” — Sally Helm, paraphrasing The New York World [27:44]

• Reflecting on historical mythmaking:
  “How many other stories could we go back and find? If you look at the contemporary accounts and all the stuff in the legal archives, you might find some totally different story.” — Adam Seltzer [33:49]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• 00:36 – Introduction to the Holmes trial, the legend’s origins
• 06:27 – Description of the present-day “castle” site, beginning myth-busting
• 10:15 – Holmes’s childhood and early psychological profile
• 13:19 – Pattern of scams begins; credit fraud and personality traits
• 15:39 – First confirmed killings (Julia and Pearl Connor)
• 18:29 – The Chicago World’s Fair and the hotel scam
• 20:53 – Murder of Benjamin Peitzel, the insurance scam
• 22:14 – The murder of the Peitzel children
• 24:33 – Discovery of victims, Detective Geyer’s work
• 25:27 – Police investigation and press intrusion
• 27:16 – The New York World's lurid “murder castle” schematic
• 30:19 – Trial proceedings, Carrie's testimony, and media frenzy
• 32:00 – False confessions, press competition, and confirmed body count
• 32:51 – Execution and Holmes’s final requests
• 33:49 – Reflections on legacy, legend, and historical narrative

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Episode Takeaway

This episode rigorously contrasts the facts about H.H. Holmes and his crimes with the sensational legends that have endured for over a century. Through Seltzer’s research and first-hand knowledge, the podcast demonstrates how media, public fascination, and historical telephone have built “America’s first serial killer” into a dubious icon of evil—reminding listeners to question what lurks behind history’s most lurid stories.

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Transcript

[Sally Helm]

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[Sally Helm]

History this Week, October 28, 1895. I'm Sally Helm. A Philadelphia courtroom murder trial, day one. 60 potential jurors are waiting to be vetted. First up is a streetcar conductor named Enoch Turner. He stands, swears to tell the truth, gives his profession his address, and after the preliminaries, the lawyer's first question is, do you, Enoch Turner, already have an opinion about the guilt or innocence of this prisoner? The prisoner in question is sitting right there before the jurors. Herman Mudgett, alias H.H. holmes. He has a mustache and a pointed goatee. He's pale, fidgeting. He stands accused of killing one of his business associates, a man named Benjamin Peitzel. But in the press, he's been accused of much, much more. It's said that Holmes might have murdered hundreds of people in Chicago, that he built and occupied a horrifying castle of death in the city, with rooms that people are calling the Death Shaft, the Black Closet, and the Room of the Three Corpses. It's been reported that bones were found in his basement, that his castle contains a mysterious soundproof room. Many times a murderer, said one headline in San Francisco, another in Nashville. He's sups on crime. So it's no wonder that some of the prospective jurors assembled in this courtroom may already have some thoughts about the case. Enoch Turner answers the question honestly. Does he have an opinion about the guilt or innocence of H.H. holmes? I have, turner says through reading the papers. He doesn't say what his opinion is, but it's probably not favorable. And he's likely not the only juror who came into the room already suspecting that Holmes is a killer. The thing is, they're not wrong. Holmes is in fact guilty of killing his business associate, Benjamin Peitzel. He's also killed before and since. He's committed crimes ranging from pretty run of the mill insurance fraud to horse swindling to murder. But also, a lot of the news coverage about his murder, Castle and his crimes is pretty much made up today. Some have called him America's first serial killer. But how did HH Holmes earn this reputation? And why is it so hard to learn the truth about this legendary fiend? Foreign.

[Adam Seltzer]

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[Sally Helm]

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[Adam Seltzer]

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[Sally Helm]

You know, I'm gonna check the math on that. Ten years since it went off the air and we thought that made this.

[Adam Seltzer]

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[Sally Helm]

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[Adam Seltzer]

The site of it today is mostly a blank space next to a post office. There's about 4ft of overlap with where the post office is now.

[Sally Helm]

That's Adam Seltzer, who recently wrote a.

[Adam Seltzer]

Book about homes and I have been down in the basement of the post office a couple of times and it is kind of creepy down there, but there's nothing original left.

[Sally Helm]

Seltzer has been to a lot of sites in Chicago where HH Holmes also tread because he's worked for many years as a tour guide in the city. He loves Chicago, says he's discovering new things there all the time.

[Adam Seltzer]

Today I went for a walk and saw a pig on a leash. Didn't see that every day and found out the statue they called Babraham Lincoln is fairly near my house.

[Sally Helm]

Why Babraham?

[Adam Seltzer]

That's young Lincoln with his shirt unbuttoned and got to admit the dude looks hot.

[Sally Helm]

Years ago, the company Seltzer works for wanted him to develop a new tour centered on City legend H.H. holmes. So he started researching.

[Adam Seltzer]

I felt like I needed to find more stories just to have more places to go on the tour. And it came to realize just how much ink was spilled about this HH Holmes guy over the years and how much of it is just collecting dust on microfilm reels.

[Sally Helm]

Seltzer ended up getting deep into the source materials. Newspapers, court transcripts, police records, and writing a book. Now, when he goes to the corner of south Wallace and 63rd streets where the castle once stood, he sees what's in front of him.

[Adam Seltzer]

A railroad track, an Aldi, and a little vacant lot.

[Sally Helm]

But he can also imagine what Holmes would have seen when he stood on that side. Same street corner in the late 1800s.

[Adam Seltzer]

Guys selling things from carts on the street. The building that he put up had a restaurant and a candy shop and a tinsmith. You would have seen carriages going down the street now and then. You might have seen somebody testing one of those newfangled horseless Automobiles going down the road.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes first shows up on this street corner in 1886 looking for a job.

[Adam Seltzer]

Holmes is a young man with a mustache, just like every other young white man at the time. Time. Nothing in the world is as popular today as mustaches were.

[Sally Helm]

Then he graduated a few years before from medical school in Michigan. And as the story goes, he got.

[Adam Seltzer]

A job in Old Dr. Holton's Pharmacy where his poor hapless wife was trying to run the place while old Mr. Holton was dying upstairs of cancer. It's always implied that they disappeared and were never seen again, and Holmes told everybody they had gone off to California.

[Sally Helm]

Some who later wrote about Holmes suggest he didn't duped this elderly couple out of their pharmacy before he made them disappear. AKA murdered them probably. But when Seltzer goes looking for the Holtons in the archives, it turned out.

[Adam Seltzer]

It wasn't an old man and his wife at all. It was a young doctor and her husband. And they both lived well into the 20th century, so he's off the hook for those ones.

[Sally Helm]

This is just one example in Holmes story where urban legend might have taken over from the truth.

[Adam Seltzer]

But if we trace things back and kind of peel back the onion, we eventually do find some of the real story.

[Sally Helm]

By the time H.H. holmes first walks into the Holtons pharmacy, he's already a somewhat mysterious figure. But according to Seltzer, he didn't have a stereotypical serial killer origin story.

[Adam Seltzer]

We don't have any stories about him torturing animals when he was a kid or about his father being a drunk. A lot of these are just patterns that we've seen in other modern serial killers that people have kind of assumed. Assume ought to be applied to Holmes.

[Sally Helm]

H.H. holmes was actually born Herman W. Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire in 1861. Not a lot is known about his childhood, but Seltzer did read consistently that the young Holmes suffered from a common condition called strabismus. When a person's eyes don't always point in the same direction over and over.

[Adam Seltzer]

When you look at interviews with people who knew him, they say again and again things like, I knew I couldn't trust that guy cause he never looked me right in the eye. And so even back as a kid, people probably would have instinctively distrusted him. He had to learn to be very persuasive even as a kid.

[Sally Helm]

Even if that meant lying.

[Adam Seltzer]

Oh, the man lied constantly. He lied when he didn't have to, he lied when it only made things harder for him. He lied to the census man, he lied almost constantly. I'm not qualified to diagnose whether it was pathological, but it sure seems to have been.

[Sally Helm]

One detail from Holmes childhood that does fit with the common story of serial killers is that the young Herman Mudgett was fascinated by anatomy and learning about the human body.

[Adam Seltzer]

What exactly got Holmes interested in medicine, we can't exactly know. We know that his uncle had served as a surgeon for the Union army during the Civil War. That might have had something to do with it.

[Sally Helm]

There's also this story about an early moment of bullying.

[Adam Seltzer]

Apparently some kid shoved him into a doctor's office where there was a skeleton on display just to scare him. Whether that's true or not is very difficult to tell. But we do know that he studied with the doctor in town who, even years before Holmes was born, was widely known for his collection of morbid anatomical specimens. So a skeleton would have been the least of what that guy had.

[Sally Helm]

Herman Mudgett did eventually find his way to medical school, where stories of his morbid fascination keep cropping up.

[Adam Seltzer]

There were stories that went around after he was captured, talking about him taking dead bodies home with him to dissect from the medical school or while he was teaching school. School briefly. When he ran out of money to go to school himself, he supposedly brought a human foot into the class to show the class, though that was denied at the time.

[Sally Helm]

And there were some indications that much it had a violent side.

[Adam Seltzer]

My favorite story from those days is one day he beat the heck out of his roommate because the roommate had borrowed his mustache wax without permission.

[Sally Helm]

Oh, my God.

[Adam Seltzer]

You don't tug on Superman's cape and you don't borrow H.H. holmes's mustache wax.

[Sally Helm]

In medical school, Mudgett wasn't an exceptional student.

[Adam Seltzer]

The professors say that they graduated him mainly out of pity.

[Sally Helm]

By May of 1886, Mudgett had set his sights on becoming a pharmacist, and he finds his way to Chicago. This is the moment when he decides to give up the name Herman Mudgett and become HH Holmes. Why that name, we have no idea.

[Adam Seltzer]

It probably just sounded like a nondescript sort of name to him. It was occasionally said that it was taken from Sherlock Holmes, but the first Sherlock Holmes story wasn't published for months after this.

[Sally Helm]

Maybe Holmes was just trying to leave his past. In the past. He'd been married. His wife and child were back in New Hampshire, but he had no intention of having anything to do with them. He arrives in Chicago and begins his new life. According to Seltzer, he takes over the pharmacy from a doctor, Elizabeth Sarah Holton. It all seems to have been done on the up and up. One of the first things he does then is buy barber equipment.

[Adam Seltzer]

You know, pharmacists would generally have a barber shop attached in those days.

[Sally Helm]

And this purchase, Seltzer says, proves to be a pivotal point in Holmes's life.

[Adam Seltzer]

But he bought all the stuff for it on credit and then didn't pay it off. Which I think is what he discovered was his real true love was buying stuff on credit and then not paying, paying for it.

[Sally Helm]

Buying stuff on credit and then not paying for it kind of becomes Holmes's thing.

[Adam Seltzer]

It does seem like to me that he almost got addicted to scamming people once. He got away with a couple of things, he just wanted to keep on doing it.

[Sally Helm]

Eventually he sees an opportunity right across the street, a vacant lot opposite the pharmacy.

[Adam Seltzer]

The property is where he built his new building, which initially was a two story building with retail, including a new pharmacy on the front first floor and then residential apartments on the second floor.

[Sally Helm]

And this is what people would come to call the Murder castle.

[Adam Seltzer]

Yeah, this is what people would eventually call the castle. And then in the 20th century we called it the Murder castle.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes, it seems, used the construction project to make money. A lot of people later suggest that he designed the building specifically to carry out murders. But Seltzer says he didn't find any evidence to confirm this. He thinks this was likely just another one of Holmes scams. Buying goods and services on credit and never paying.

[Adam Seltzer]

He swindled the Edna Iron and Steel Company. He swindled the construction company, he swindled the architects.

[Sally Helm]

Within a couple of years the two story building is complete and Holmes takes on some tenants. In 1889, the Connors move in. Ned, his wife Julia and their daughter Pearl. Holmes gives the couple work in the jewelry store on the first floor. He has by this time found a second wife, Mirta. He's also still married to his first wife who lives back in New Hampshire. But none of that stops him from starting an affair with Julia Connor.

[Adam Seltzer]

And it seems that everybody in the building knows about it except for Holmes wife Mirta, who is also living on the second floor.

[Sally Helm]

The affair carries on for two years. Then Ned Connor, Julia's husband, also finds out and leaves his wife and child. Soon after, Holmes commits what seems to be his first murder. On Christmas of 1891, Julia Connor and her daughter Pearl turn up missing.

[Adam Seltzer]

It's tough to know exactly what happened, but Holmes was fairly consistent in saying that Julia had died during an abortion. Most likely he had gotten her pregnant and decided the easiest thing would be to get her out of the way.

[Sally Helm]

It's possible that Holmes had truly tried performing an abortion and that given the danger of the operation and his relative inexperience, Julia died accidentally. But Seltzer says it's basically impossible that Pearl's death was an accident.

[Adam Seltzer]

He never said what happened to Pearl. Most likely she would have been poisoned.

[Sally Helm]

And it's likely they died in the place where they lived. Holmes Castle. No one seems to catch on at the time that Holmes has anything to do with these disappearances, certainly not law enforcement. And five months later, Emmeline Sigrand moves into his building. They too embark on an affair.

[Adam Seltzer]

I think that she knew Holmes had a wife who had now moved up to the north suburbs, but she thought that the wife was dying and pretty soon she'd be Mrs. Holmes. They live in a nice big house on Honore Street.

[Sally Helm]

Hmm. But that's not how it works out.

[Adam Seltzer]

But that's not how it worked out.

[Sally Helm]

A year after Julia and Pearl disappear, so does Emmeline Sagrand. Holmes also later claimed that she died during an abortion, but he almost certainly killed her once.

[Adam Seltzer]

He'd done it once or twice. He just got kind of used to it, I suppose. But there's also the next couple of people that he killed. It's hard to guess what his motivation would have even been.

[Sally Helm]

Minnie Williams had come to Chicago from Texas. She tried to become an actress, but ran out of money. So she becomes a secretary for HH Holmes.

[Adam Seltzer]

They rented an apartment together up on the north side, along with Minnie's baby sister, Nanny, who had come up to join them. They hadn't really seen each other much as kids, but they moved into the north side and both of them just disappeared completely. July of 1893.

[Sally Helm]

This time, Holmes didn't use a story about an abortion. It got a lot more elaborate.

[Adam Seltzer]

Holmes had a long, rambling story that Minnie had killed Nanny and he had helped her dispose of the body, and that Minnie was still off in the world someplace.

[Sally Helm]

He sticks to that story throughout his life, even later suggesting that Minnie Williams was involved in crimes that he himself had been accused of. Around the same time the Williams sisters disappeared. Something big is happening in Chicago. Decades later, it's still a major part of the legend of H.H. holmes. The city is hosting the World's Columbian Exposition, aka the Chicago World's Fair. It was a chance for Chicago to prove itself as a major world city over the course of this huge six month long event. Regular Chicagoans had been looking forward to the fair for years.

[Adam Seltzer]

Everybody in Chicago thought they were going to get rich off of this world's fair. Everybody had some kind of scheme to make money off of it.

[Sally Helm]

H.H. holmes, swindler extraordinaire, obviously saw an opportunity. He decided to add a third story to his building and claimed that he was going to turn the whole thing into a hotel for the upcoming fair.

[Adam Seltzer]

Holmes never finished this hotel or had it open for business, and I don't think he ever really planned to. The whole idea was just to swindle people. He got a $3,000 investment from a doctor who lived on the second floor. He was able to go to flooring companies, hardware companies, mattress companies, anybody who might furnish stuff for a new hotel and get all kinds of stuff on credit because they were just being way too free with their credit. They were all eager to get rich off of the fair too.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes borrowed all this money. And then a few months after the start of the fair, the third floor where the hotel was supposed to be housed mysteriously burns down and Holmes files a big insurance claim.

[Adam Seltzer]

The insurance companies were not fooled for one second.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes has to skip town. He goes to Denver with his new lover, Georgiana Yoke. There he picks up some cash that was owed to Minnie Williams as a result of her brother's death in a mining accident. And he marries Yoke, even though he's still technically married to two other women. Then Holmes and Yoke head to Texas to steal something else from the deceased Minnie Williams. Some land she'd owned on that property. Holmes tries to pull the same trick again. He builds another castle.

[Adam Seltzer]

There's only a couple of drawings of it that survive, but it looks like just a double sized version of the castle back in Chicago.

[Sally Helm]

He swindles a bunch of money with this project too. And he tries some other tricks.

[Adam Seltzer]

He had gotten involved in some horse swindles while he was there.

[Sally Helm]

What's a horse swindle?

[Adam Seltzer]

Um, buying horses on credit and not paying for them.

[Sally Helm]

A classic HH Holmes move. Pretty soon he has to skip town again. But before he leaves, he comes up with a new plan. Holmes has a sometimes business associate named Benjamin Peitzel. And he goes to Peitzel and says, hey, let's get you a life insurance policy.

[Adam Seltzer]

And once it matured, they were going to fake his death.

[Sally Helm]

Ooh, okay. A little sinister for Benjamin Peitzel, gotta say, Fake his own death. Is that what happens?

[Adam Seltzer]

Well, that was the plan.

[Sally Helm]

They'd fake the death and split the money. Holmes and Peitzel go up to Philadelphia and set up a fake business for Peitzel. He was supposed to be buying and selling patents and doing some inventing himself on the side. The idea was that they'd bring a random dead body into the office one day and make it look like Peitzl had died in a laboratory accident. Peitzel seems to have been all in on this scam. He even has real clients, like this one guy who had invented a new kind of saw. One day that man shows up at Peitzl's office. He bangs on the door, nobody answers, so he forces his way in and starts poking around.

[Adam Seltzer]

Holmes probably thought it was going to take a lot longer for anybody to find the dead body. Didn't reckon with just how eager somebody might be to get their patent out there in the world.

[Sally Helm]

This saw inventor finds the body of Benjamin Peitzel. He'd been killed with chloroform by his friend H.H. holmes. Peitzel's widow is able to get the insurance money, but of course he swindles.

[Adam Seltzer]

The widow out of most of it and says, we have to settle some debts with this. And then starts traveling around the country with three of Peitzel's children.

[Sally Helm]

Yeah, why is he traveling with the children? Is that not weird since he just murdered their father?

[Adam Seltzer]

It was definitely weird. But he was telling them that any minute now we're going to see your father. He was telling their mother that their father is still alive. This is a big scam that we've pulled. It's all going to be okay. In the next city we're going to see him and every. We'll all reunite and then we'll all go off to Europe together.

[Sally Helm]

It's not long before the authorities in Philadelphia realize that something is fishy with the insurance claim. They're on to Holmes's scam. And they learn that there's a warrant out in Texas for his arrest for that horse swindling. It's all adding up. This guy is a scammer. They track him to Boston and arrest him as a horse thief.

[Adam Seltzer]

Holmes was panicking when they arrested him, and then they got him to the station and he recognized the insurance company inspector and said, oh, I get it. This is really about the insurance scam up in Philadelphia. While I am, in fact a big insurance scammer, I admit it. We faked his death. Please send me to Philadelphia to stand trial for that, not to Texas as a horse thief.

[Sally Helm]

Why?

[Adam Seltzer]

He was scared to death of Being in a Texas jail, swindling an insurance company in Philadelphia is not going to get you as harsh as a punishment as stealing a horse in Texas in those days.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes winds up in jail in Philadelphia and he starts talking to anyone who.

[Adam Seltzer]

Will listen, telling all these stories about how, oh, I've done this a million times, faking people's death for the insurance money. I'm a big insurance scam guy, not a murderer. Big insurance scam guy.

[Sally Helm]

Meanwhile, the Peitzel children are missing.

[Adam Seltzer]

He tells everybody, oh, I reunited them with their father. They're off in hiding someplace.

[Sally Helm]

But really, the Peitzel children are dead. Pretty soon, Holmes is put on trial for the insurance scam.

[Adam Seltzer]

But this time he's changed his story a little bit. Now he's saying that was in fact Benjamin Peitzel's body, but it was a suicide and he made it look like an accident so the family would get the money. So after the trial, the district attorney took him inside and said, okay, so you admit that that's Peitzel's body. That leaves the question of where the children really? And he said, oh, they're off with my old friend Minnie Williams. She has taken them off to London someplace.

[Sally Helm]

Minnie Williams, of course, has been dead for two years. A Philadelphia detective is on the case, a man named Frank Geer. He tracks Holmes's path through the country and soon makes a discovery.

[Adam Seltzer]

He finds that there's a place that Holmes rented in Toronto where the current renters won't go into the basement because it smells so bad. So they go down into the cellar and start digging and find the two girls, Alice and Nellie, buried in a shallow grave.

[Sally Helm]

A little later, Detective Geyer finds their brother, Howard Peitzel, who had been killed in Indianapolis a few weeks before his sisters. Now law enforcement is starting to understand what they're dealing with, and they go digging through the life of this guy, H.H. holmes. Before long, attention turns to the building he'd owned in Chicago, the castle that, remember, had been at the center of a different insurance scam. And there were stories that it was full of hidden rooms where Holmes had been hiding stolen furniture. The police think maybe we should look around there.

[Adam Seltzer]

The police started digging up the basement, looking under every piece of tile in the building, and. And they let the reporters from every paper just come along with them.

[Sally Helm]

The potential crime scene turns into a media circus.

[Adam Seltzer]

It's almost unthinkable. Today they let reporters go digging through things with their bare hands, let them handle all of the evidence, let them interview everybody they could get their hands on. It was not exactly what you would call a professional investigation.

[Sally Helm]

The chief of police in Chicago at the time, John J. Badenock, he had.

[Adam Seltzer]

No experience as a copy, nothing in criminal law or any kind of law or forensics or anything like that.

[Sally Helm]

Just a few months before his appointment as chief of police, he had been a flour and feed dealer. But Badenoch was part of the political machine in Chicago, and so he gets a new job. Not surprisingly, he struggles to carry out an effective investigation. The police do find some bones in the basement of Holmes building, but they struggle to make sense of them.

[Adam Seltzer]

Forensics wasn't quite there yet. If this had happened a few years later, they could have taken some of the bones that they found in the basement of that building and figured out for sure whether they were human bones or soup bones. But in 1895, they weren't quite there yet.

[Sally Helm]

The information is confusing and incomplete, and Holmes has not yet stood trial for murder. But this is smack dab in the middle of the yellow journalism era. A lot of newspapers are quick to publish anything that will sell, so reporters go looking for juicy stories.

[Adam Seltzer]

Oh, we found a rope. Maybe he was hanging people. Or here's a bench. Could that have been a dissection table? There's some knives in the kitchen. And even now, if you walk around the base, I was like a mopbringer. You could kill somebody with that.

[Sally Helm]

The New York World publishes an article that soon becomes famous.

[Adam Seltzer]

If you've ever looked up Holmes online, you've probably seen the diagram they put with all the names of rooms, like Room of the Three Corners, Corpses, the Secret Hanging chamber, the Death shaft, the Black closet, the maze. And it's a really entertaining article. It's based on them kind of piecing things together from the Chicago papers and also filling in a lot of blanks with their own imagination.

[Sally Helm]

The article describes the building as a hotel, even though, according to Seltzer's research, it never actually functioned that way.

[Adam Seltzer]

They had this line in there that the number of people who went to Chicago for the fair and didn't come back was a long one, and in the greater number, foul play was suspected. They started speculating how many of these people might have gone to H.H. holmes Hotel.

[Sally Helm]

This is where the myth of H.H. holmes really starts to take off.

[Adam Seltzer]

That paragraph has been verbatim in just about every Holmes thing written since then.

[Sally Helm]

And so the idea is kind of like maybe every single person who disappeared during the World's Fair or who came to some mysterious end, maybe Holmes was behind all of them.

[Adam Seltzer]

Right. I can just kind of imagine Chief Badenoch thinking, I've done it. I've solved every murder of the last five years.

[Sally Helm]

The article is sensational. It calls the building a murder factory. Other newspapers pick up the story and the public is wrapped. They want to see Holmes punished, and soon enough they will. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover. Discover your way. And that's what running is all about. Run your way. @newbalance.com Running.

[Adam Seltzer]

Ford was built on the belief that the world doesn't get to.

[Sally Helm]

Decide what you're capable of.

[Adam Seltzer]

You do. So ask yourself, can you or can't you? Can you load up a Ford F150 and build your dream with sweat and steel? Can you chase thrills and conquer curves in a Mustang? Can you take a Bronco to where the map ends and adventure begins? Whether you think you can or think you can't, you're right. Ready, set, hoard. Well, I was down on my last.

[Sally Helm]

Dollar Then I started saving because the.

[Adam Seltzer]

Bank said fiscal restraint is what you're.

[Sally Helm]

Craving so I put my earnings in a high yield account Let the savings.

[Adam Seltzer]

Compound and the interest mount I'm optimizing cash flow putting debt in check now time is my friend and not a.

[Sally Helm]

Pain in the neck and we've got.

[Adam Seltzer]

A little cash to rebuild the old boring money moves make kinda lame songs but they sound pretty sweet to your wallet brilliantly boring since 1865, H.H.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes is put on trial again in Philadelphia, this time for the murder of Benjamin Peitzel. And the first day in court is a circus. Early on in the proceedings, Holmes two lawyers were withdraw. They say they haven't had enough time to prepare for such a difficult case. Holmes is left to represent himself.

[Adam Seltzer]

By all accounts, he did a reasonably good job of it.

[Sally Helm]

But pretty soon he's outmatched. His attorneys come back after just a day away. But the prosecution presents damning testimony against Holmes, including from Carrie Peitzel, who had lost her husband and three children. She breaks down on the stand. Holmes doesn't appear to react with any sorrow. In fact, the Philadelphia Inquirer writes that he smiles. A few days into the trial, on Halloween, Holmes wife, his third wife, Georgiana, is called to testify. She introduces herself as Georgiana Yoke, a slight to Holmes because she doesn't use the last name she'd shared with him. Reports say that the prisoner begins to weep and shake in his seat. The defense calls no witnesses, presents no case. They're hoping that the prosecution's case won't be strong enough for a conviction.

[Adam Seltzer]

Most people who were watching the trial who were experts in such things said that was probably the strongest hand they could have played, but it wasn't strong enough.

[Sally Helm]

Holmes was convicted very quickly, sentenced to death by hanging. In the months before his execution, the press is still trying to capitalize on the story.

[Adam Seltzer]

Every paper was trying to get him to write a confession. He turned the New York world down and kind of to get revenge, they put up a thing themselves saying Holmes is about to write a confession where he will confess to having killed 20 people. And really he was negotiating with the New York Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But after that, he couldn't very well confess to Future fewer than 20 people. So he ended up confessing to 27. But of those, at least half a dozen were still alive. Several others were fiction. There's really just nine that we know of. The confession doesn't add to too much. It was strictly written for the money.

[Sally Helm]

This questionable confession also adds fuel to the idea that Holmes killed dozens of people. Seltzer says his count is nine, still a horrifying number. And on May 7, 1896, Holmes is executed.

[Adam Seltzer]

The weird thing about it is he was buried in a giant block of cement by his own request. He had been getting offers, like people who wanted to put his skeleton on display at a carnival. He didn't like the idea of that.

[Sally Helm]

That is the end of the life of H.H. holmes. But his story has a long afterlife. It's revisited in the Chicago Tribune in the 1930s, in the 1940s, in a book called Gem of the Prairie. And in the early 2000s, in the book Devil in the White City. Adam Seltzer had heard the more extreme parts of Holmes story passed around for years. Things that were first reported in those newspapers that loved to print scary looking maps of the murder castle. And he said it was incredible to him how even after so much time in the archive, so little of Holmes's story could be definitively pinned down.

[Adam Seltzer]

It is something that makes you think about how many other stories we might be getting completely wrong. How many other stories could we go back and find? If you look at the contemporary accounts and all the stuff in the legal archives, you might find some totally different story. You know, there's this great game of telephone that takes place over the course of several decades and we just remember the wildest parts of the stories.

[Sally Helm]

Thanks for listening to History this week for more moments throughout history that are also worth watching, check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today. If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address, historythisweekhistory.com or you can leave us a voicemail 212-351-0410 special thanks today to our guest, Adam Seltzer, author of HH the True Story of the White City Devil and Harold Schechter, professor emeritus of Literature at Queens College and author of the Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer. This episode was produced produced by Ben Dickstein. History this week is also Produced by Julie McGruder, Julia Press and me, Sally Helm. Our editor and sound designer is Bill Moss. Our researcher is Emma Fredericks. Our executive producers are McCamey Lynn, Jesse Katz and Ted Butler. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review History this Week wherever you get your podcasts and we will see you next.