Murder Monday #3 HH Holmes

   Let's talk about one of the most notorious killers: HH Holmes, the man with his own murder house. HH Holmes was born on May 16, 1861, as Herman Webster  Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire to an affluent family. He was fairly intelligent at an early age with an interest in medicine and he reportedly practiced surgery on animals, tick one for the MacDonald triangle. He graduated high school at the age of 16 and worked as a teacher after graduation. On July 4, 1878, he married Clara Lovering and had a son named Robert on February 3, 1880. At the age of 18, he enrolled at the University of Vermont, but after one year he left and then in 1882, he enrolled at the University of Michigan and graduated two years later. Before he graduated, Clara took his son and left back to New Hampshire, people that knew them would say Holmes treated Clara cruelly. His schemes started in medical school where he would steal corpses to make false insurance claims.
 
        In 1885, Holmes moved to Chicago and found work in a pharmacy, and officially started using his alias, Dr. Henry H Holme. He eventually took over the business, and it was rumored that he killed the original owner. He started to build his murder house nearby, a three-story building. The upper floors were his living quarters and many small rooms where he tortured and murdered his victims. He had trapdoors and chutes built in the house so he could quickly move bodies to the basement, where he could dispose of the remains.
 
    Holmes opened up his house as a hotel during the 1893 Columbian Exposition and that helped him accrue more victims. Usually, he would seduce women and get engaged and then his fiancees would suddenly "disappear." After the World Fair, he left Chicago to continue his schemes with an associate named Benjamin Pitezel, where Pitezel would fake his death to collect 10,000$ from a life insurance company. At this time, he went by HM Howard and during a prison term for a different scheme, he confided in an inmate, Marion Hedgepeth, about the life insurance scheme. As the police were piecing together Holmes' murderous trail, Holmes murdered Pitezel, then told his widow her husband was alive and in hiding, and convinced her to let him travel with three of her five children, who he later killed.

     Homles was arrested in November 1894. He gave numerous stories to the police, even admitting to killing 27 people. He was convicted in 1895 and was hanged on May 7, 1896, for the Pitezel murder. While there isn't an exact number of Holmes' count, estimations range from 20-200.