HH Holmes

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HH Holmes (1895)

Henry Howard Holmes (actually Herman Webster Mudgett ; born May 16, 1861 in Gilmanton , New Hampshire , † May 7, 1896 in Philadelphia , Pennsylvania ( executed )) was an American serial killer .

Holmes is sometimes considered the United States' first serial killer. But that is not the case, since serial killers - for example Thomas Neill Cream and the Bloody Benders  - had already appeared. Today he is almost forgotten, despite the fact that he was one of the cruelest and most "successful" killers in US legal history. As with many serial killers, the exact number of murders can no longer be determined with Holmes. The number of his victims is estimated at between a few dozen and over 200.

biography

Holmes was born in Gilmanton / New Hampshire in 1861 to Levi Horton Mudgett and his wife.

He studied medicine at the University of Michigan and settled in Chicago in 1886 , where he worked as a doctor and pharmacist . In the same year he changed his name from Herman Webster Mudgett to Henry Howard Holmes.

In 1878 Holmes married Clara A. Lovering in New Hampshire and in 1887 Myrta Z. Belknap in Minneapolis , with whom he had a daughter named Lucy. Since he had filled out the divorce papers for the first marriage, but the divorce was never consummated, it was a case of bigamy .

Within a short time, Holmes made a substantial fortune in Chicago, which he amassed through a mixture of cunning and murder. Thanks to his charm, he knew how to ensnare the widow Mrs. Holton and to appropriate the drugstore of her late husband, in which he was previously employed. Mrs. Holton "left" shortly afterwards for California ; she never returned.

Over the next several years Holmes married a number of young women, all of whom soon lost their lives.

The horror house

The Holmes Hotel, Chicago, IL 60620, USA (Location)

Most of his deeds carried out Holmes in connection with a hotel building he built in Chicago, "the Castle" called.

In the early 1890s, just in time for the World's Columbian Exposition , the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Holmes had a huge hotel built, which he turned into a true horror house. The house had trap doors, secret passages, hidden rooms and a cellar with a torture table, oven, acid bath and several rooms that could be filled with gas from hidden nozzles so that the victims trapped inside had to suffocate in agony. Holmes was happy to host young single women at the hotel who had traveled to the World's Fair or to find work in Chicago. Inquiries from the families about the whereabouts of the women were unsuccessful.

Holmes sold the skeletons of some victims to universities.

The investigators got on the trail of Holmes through a testimony of the bandit Marion Hedgepeth, who was a cell neighbor of Holmes. He was arrested in Philadelphia in 1895 after leaving Chicago in a rush the previous year. He was convicted of nine murders and six attempted murders in Chicago, Indianapolis and Toronto that could be proven to him. HH Holmes was born on May 7, 1896 in the morning at about 10 am in the Philadelphia County Prison on gallows executed. He had previously confessed to 27 murders in a newspaper interview for which he was paid $ 7,500.

The horror house quickly gained notoriety as former police officer AM Clark rented it to convert it into a museum. A few days before the opening, the building complex burned down for unexplained reasons.

Victim

Holmes, who indulged in the agony of his victims and watched their agony through secret peepholes, did not like to lend a hand in carrying out the murderous acts. Therefore, he preferred to use methods such as gassing, poisoning, anesthetizing with chloroform, strangling or burning. His known victims, whom he confessed to, included:

  • 1891 Julia and her daughter Pearl Connor
  • 1892 Emeline Cigrand
  • 1892 Robert E. Phelps, Emeline's fiancé
  • 1892 Emily Van Tassel
  • 1893 Rosemary Ross
  • 1893 the two sisters Minnie and Nannie Williams
  • 1895 Benjamin, Alice and Nellie Pitezel

Processing in popular culture

Robert Bloch published the novel American Gothic (German: Das Haus der Toten ) in 1974 , in which he dealt with the crimes of Holmes - here called G. Gordon Gregg. In 1977 an essay by Bloch about his research, Dr. Holmes' Murder Castle (German The Secret of HH Holmes ).

The French crime writer Didier Daeninckx makes reference to HH Holmes in his novel Die Extristen (2005, original French: Les Figurants, 1995), especially his crimes in the hotel "the castle".

2010 it was announced that the by Erik Larson authored book The Devil in the White City (German The devil of Chicago ) with Leonardo DiCaprio to be filmed in the role of HH Holmes.

In the series Supernatural (S02E06: No Exit , November 2, 2006; Mörderburg , October 20, 2008) Sam and Dean lock the ghost of Holmes in a salt ring, which is then poured into concrete. The spirit of Holmes is up to mischief in the walls of a house, which stands at his execution site next to the former prison, as well as in the forgotten sewer system below.

The band Subway to Sally picked up on the series of murders in 2014 in the song House of Pain , which appeared on the album MitGift .

In the video game Watch Dogs , a reference is made to Holmes and his hotel at a so-called hotspot that the player can visit.

In the fifth season of American Horror Story , Hotel, HH Holmes is alluded to in several episodes.

In the Timeless series (S01E11: The World's Columbian Exposition, January 16, 2017), Wyatt and Rufus are trapped in the hotel in question.

Wolfgang Hohlbein deals with the case in his novel Mörderhotel - The Totally Unbelievable Case of Herman Webster Mudgett .

In 2017, the crime of HH Holmes is the basis of the episode The Lying Detective (S04E02) of the TV series Sherlock .

Reference is made to HH Holmes in the film Havenhurst .

Michael Stavarič turns the horror house into the scene of a plot in the second part of his novel Fremdes Licht .

In the radio play series Oscar Wilde & Mycroft Holmes - Sonderermittler der Krone , the acts of HH Holmes in the episode The Bone Dealer (E24), based on Henner Hildebrandt and Tom Balfour, are processed and thematized by an imitator of the London underworld.

literature

  • Erik Larson: The Devil of Chicago: an Architect, a Killer, and the World's Fair that Changed America . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-15391-3
  • Harold Schechter: Depraved: The Definitive True Story of HH Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-of-the-Century Chicago . Pocket Books, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4391-2405-5
  • Christian Brondke: The castle - confessions of a multi-murderer . Wagner-Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-86279-479-9
  • Wolfgang Hohlbein: Murderer's Hotel . Bastei Lübbe, 2015, ISBN 978-3-7857-2548-1
  • Gauthier Wendling: Escape Book: The Horror Hotel . Ullmann, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7415-2395-3
  • Michael Stavaric: Fremdes Licht , Luchterhand, 2020, ISBN 978-3-630-87551-4
  • Balfour, T .; Hildebrandt, H .: Oscar Wilde & Mycroft Holmes - Special Investigators of the Crown - Episode 24: The Bone Dealer . Bastai Lübbe, 2019, ISBN 978-3-7857-5996-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Weekly World News May 7, 1985 , HH Holmes Biography for HHHolmes , serial killer
  2. ^ For example: Harold Schechter: Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer . Pocket Books, first edition 1994, ISBN 0-671-73216-1
    And for example in the documentation HH Holmes: America's First Serial Killer ( IMDb entry ) from the TV series America's Most Wanted Serial Killers (2004)
  3. Eight assigned murders between 1876 and 1892
  4. 14 assigned murders between 1871 and 1873
  5. a b Mark Benecke, Lydia Benecke: From the darkroom of evil: New reports from the world's most famous criminal biologist . BASTEI LÜBBE, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8387-1041-9 ( google.de [accessed July 7, 2020]).
  6. Martin_Hill_Ortiz. August 25, 2017, accessed July 7, 2020 .
  7. Harold Schechter: The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers . Random House Publishing Group, New York (NY) 2003, ISBN 0-345-47200-4 , p. 397
  8. HH Holmes: America's first serial killer: Who he murdered, the way he operated, and how he was caught on www.clickamericana.com
  9. ^ HH Holmes Victims List
  10. possibly also a purely fictional character from the documentation Das Schreckenshotel des Dr. Holmes
  11. ^ Dark Places, HH Holmes
  12. ^ The Victims of Chicago's First Serial Murderer, HH Holmes On May 7, 1896 HH Holmes was hanged for the murder of his business partner Ben Pitezel. Before his execution, Holmes confessed to killing 27 people. Biography, May 2, 2017
  13. Daeninckx, Didier .: The extras . Assoc. A, 2005, ISBN 3-935936-41-9 ( worldcat.org [accessed July 26, 2020]).
  14. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a serial killer , Welt Online from November 3, 2010
  15. ^ DiCaprio as a woman murderer , Spielfilm.de of November 2, 2010
  16. ^ Oe1.orf.at: "Fremdes Licht" by Michael Stavaric. Retrieved April 21, 2020 .