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Hermann Mudgett |
VICTIMS: 200+ |
Born in New Hampshire in May 1860, Mudgett has been called America's worst mass killer, and whether or not he deserves this title he was certainly one of that country's most prolific and inventive criminals. Bigamist, swindler and multicide, the final total of Mudgett's killings will never be known; remains of as many as two hundred corpses were found in the Chicago death-house known as 'Holmes' Castle', though he had only got as far as detailing twenty-seven of them before he was executed. Hermann Mudgett studied medicine at Ann Arbor, and for a short while afterwards practised as a doctor in New York. After some misunderstanding with the law over the possession of corpses, Mudgett fled to Chicago where he entered employment with a drug company. The owner of the business, poor woman, disappeared mysteriously shortly after meeting Mudgett and he repaid her memory by taking over the company. Actually, quite a lot of people whose paths crossed Hermann Mudgett's disappeared mysteriously - including a succession of bigamous wives and mistresses. In 1891 the man now calling himself H.H. Holmes gave up the drug business and moved in to manage the bizaffe hotel which he had commissioned to be built on a vacant lot on the corner of Chicago's 63rd Street. He hired and fired his builders at such a rapid rate that none ever knew the exact layout of the building - which was how the labyrinthine series of torture chambers remained a secret for so long. The hotel was visited by hundreds of guests, particularly during the period of the Chicago World Fair, and many of them never checked out - at least not through the lobby. Particularly vulnerable were attractive young women, whom Holmes lured to his lair, seduced and after sexual intercourse drugged and despatched to the cellar via a specially constructed chute. Although the sequence varied according to whim or circumstance, most of the victims next found themselves in one of the air-tight gas chambers where they would choke to death while Holmes watched through a glass panel. When they were dead, the girls were transported to the dissection room where the deadly doctor performed his 'experimental' surgery, disposing of the unwanted remains in one of the many acid baths, furnaces and quicklime pits. It was, nevertheless, a careless insurance fraud committed in Texas that first drew official attention to H.H. Holmes (or H.M. Howard as he then was). Thanks to a crooked lawyer he was soon free, but by then he had come to the unwelcome notice of a tenacious detective named Geyer, who pursued his quarry through Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. During this period Holmes had disposed of a former partner named Pitezel and the three Pitezel children and run off with Pitezel's wife. When the corpses were found in an Indianapolis rooming-house, Holmes was taken into custody. On 30 November 1895, Hermann Mudgett was sentenced to death for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. Meanwhile, police had explored 'Torture Castle' and uncovered its grisly secrets. In the time that remained to him, Mudgett began a rambling memoir in which he was able to detail twenty-seven of his murders before being executed on 27 May 1896. Contrary to the last, Mudgett retracted his confession at the foot of the gallows, claiming that his previous admissions were simply for the purpose of publicity - to give the newspapers a good story. This bio was taken from "The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers," by Brian Lane and Wilfred Gregg. |
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MY OPINION *shrug* 200? Is that all? What a loser...
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