The First American Devil

By Calvin Settles II

Herman Webster Mudgett

Herman Webster Mudgett was born May 16, 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire

He was born to Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price

He grew up in a very strict household and his father ruled with an iron fist

Herman’s Childhood

As a child he was often bullied

Herman’s fascination to death and the dead was brought upon by a childhood prank

The kids who bullied him took him to a body that they had found to make him touch the human skeleton. This was in attempt to scare him. Instead he realized that he was fascinated

School Life

Herman attended the University of Michigan Medical School

During his time at school, he would go and steal dead bodies from the school laboratory

Mudgett would collect insurance money from the bodies that he had stolen

He would act as if the bodies were accidentally killed to do so

His Career

Herman moved to Chicago to practice pharmacy

While he was there he became involved in real estate and other questionable businesses

He used the alias Dr. Henry Howard Holmes or “H.H. Holmes” to conduct all of his shady business

Love Life

On July 8, 1878 Herman married Clara A. Lovering

On January 28, 1887 he married Myrta Z. Belknap

On January 9, 1894 he married Georgiana Yoke

He had a child by his second wife named Lucy

He never divorced his first wife

The bigamist was a lady’s man

He also had relations with Julia Smythe who was the wife of Ned Connor

The Birth of Death

H.H. manipulated his way into buying a drug store in Chicago

He bought the store while the owner, Dr. E.S. Holton, was dying of cancer

He told the wife of the owner that she could remain to live in the upstairs apartment

As soon as Dr. E.S. Holton died Holmes killed the widow

When people asked about her whereabouts he told them that she had moved to California to stay

Holmes then bought the lot across the street from the Drug Store

In this lot he built his “Castle”

This building was three stories tall and it as a whole block long

The Castle

This Castle that Holmes had build had hallways, doorways, and stairways that lead to nothingness

The building had weird angled hallways

There were doors that only opened from the outside

He changed builders several times while the building was being built. He did this so that only he knew what the building plan was and so that there was a unique building structure that had no particular building signature

This Castle was nicknamed the “Murder Castle”

In his castle, Holmes killed many people

Because his castle was a hotel, people would come to stay in it all the time. He would lock them in the rooms and kill them

He had a chamber in the bottom of the Castle where he stored all of the bodies. Some he burnt. Some he put in a lime pit to rot. The others he dissected meticulously

America’s First

Holmes was known to be the first American serial killer, killing what was thought to be over 200 people in various ways. Some he trapped and used gas to kill them. Others he killed by hand

He acquired the nickname “Devil in the White City”

He took some of the bodies that he had killed and sold them to schools

Arrest of Holmes

On November 17, 1894 Holmes was arrested when the people caught wind of the life-insurance fraud and the murder of one of his business partners, Benjamin Pitezel

He was held on an outstanding warrant because of a horse theft

The custodian of the Castle told the police that he was never allowed to clean the upper floors of the Castle. The police conducted an investigation over the next month where they found evidence that led them to knowing that he killed at least 20 people

It was later estimated that he killed 230 people based on the number of missing people that had come to that area

Holmes claimed to have been possessed by the devil

He was executed by hanging on May 7, 1896

Works Cited

Larson, Erik. The Devil in the White City. New York: Vintage Books, 2003.

"H.H. Holmes." Wikipedia. 9 Oct. 2008 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

H._H._Holmes>.