It is the Spring of 1893, and the city of Chicago is all aflutter with activity. The city has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Great Fire 22 years earlier(partially at the expense of the town of Singapore, but that's for another day), and it is overcoming the final hurdles before the World's Fair comes to the door. The South Side Rapid Transit company is breaking in its new elevated railcars(the first to grace the city) at stops such as 35th Street and Roosevelt. The newly re-elected Mayor is putting the final touches on the entertainment packages, and John Coughlin is putting the final touches on his. The White City is being constructed in present-day Jackson, Washington, and Midway parks.
But as all of these preparations are being made, Herman Mudgett is busy too-converting his piece of land into a fantastic castle, which will serve as his very exclusive hotel for the duration of the fair. Mudgett's background was in medicine, and he had studied at the University of Michigan. While there, he started down a road that would foretell his ultimate destiny. While he was a student, he would occasionally break into the storage areas for the cadavers and rearrange the bodies to make it look like the victims had died accidentally, that way he could collect on the life insurance policies he had taken out on each of them. He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1884, at which point he came to Chicago. When Mudgett came to the city in 1885, he came upon a pharmacy in the Englewood neighborhood owned by an elderly couple. When the man got sick, he would help the woman take care of the shop. Eventually the man died, and Mudgett talked his widow into selling him the store. The sale was finalized, and Mudgett worked out a deal where he would pay the widow a sum of roughly $100 a month(that's about $2,500 in today's money). Eventually, Mudgett fell behind on the payments. It was at this point where the widow mysteriously disappeared. To head off any nosy neighbors, Mudgett simply answered that she was on a long trip to California.
Over the next several years, Mudgett acquired several other properties to amalgamate them into a monstrosity three blocks long. At the same time, Mudgett started going by the alias H.H. Holmes. As construction was proceeding, Holmes met up with Benjamin Pletzel, a crooked carpenter. When the structure was completed, it had Holmes' drugstore on the ground floor, and then the upper floors held Holes' personal office as well as a maze of over 100 windowless rooms, which were arranged into a maze to confuse those inside. When Holmes opened up for business, he instructed all of his employees to take out life insurance policies paid for by Holmes, that he was the sole beneficiary of. He would then make his selections from the staffers, and then kill them through various means, be it asphyxiation or other ways. After they were killed, he would send the bodies down to the basement, where he would dissect them, cremate them, destroy the bodies in lime pits, and even other means, including a stretching rack.
The year after the fair, Holmes left Chicago for St. Louis. It was here where he was briefly incarcerated for a Horse swindle, and while he quickly made bail, he met up with an inmate who pointed him in the direction of a crooked judge who would let him pursue an insurance scam. He found the judge, but he wouldn't have it. So Holmes did the next best thing. He went back to his old partner Pletzel and killed him instead. Not just that, but he took advantage of Pletzel's grief-stricken widow to allow him to take 3 of her 5 kids. Holmes proceeded to take the kids all over, before killing them. Eventually, Holmes was caught due to getting sold out by that old cellmate from St. Louis(whom he had neglected to pay off). When the truth came out about the Pletzel children, Holmes' fate was sealed. Holmes met the hangman's noose on May 7, 1896(thus making Holmes' demise happen in the same year as another icon of the fair, the Republic statue). The inmate who sold out Holmes was later killed by police in 1909. In 2003, Erik Larson took Holmes' story as the main plot line for his novel Devil in the White City.
One more factoid of note: a descendant of Holmes later claimed that Holes could have also been the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in 1888. As proof, handwriting analyses were done on some of Holmes' writings in comparison to letters written by Jack the Ripper. While the samples matched at a rate of over 97%, experts are still skeptical, as there are some doubts that the Ripper letters were actually composed by the killer himself. Regardless, it is certainly an interesting factoid.
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