American History Hit - Inside a Serial Killer's 'Murder Castle'

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

He's one of the most famous serial killers in American history... but how much of H.H Holmes' gruesome crimes were sensationalised by the press at the time?Our guest today is Dr. Harold Schechter, professor at Queen’s College, City University of New York. He is the author of dozens of non-fiction books, including ‘Depraved: the Definitive True Story of H.H. Holmes, Whose Grotesque Crimes Shattered Turn-Of-The-Century Chicago.’Edited by Tim Arstall. Produced by Tomos Delargy. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. We're in Chicago, 1895. Detectives move cautiously through the dim, claustrophobic corridors of a structure

the neighborhood locals call the murder castle. In here, the air is thick with noxious smells of chemicals and smoke. Behind seemingly ordinary storefront walls, the detectives have discovered a number of strange passageways, hidden rooms and staircases leading to nowhere. In the basement, they find a furnace. surgical tables, and what they imagine, are scattered human remains. Out on the street, reporters clamor for information, fodder to feed an ever-growing national obsession

with this story now exploding in the papers. Just two years earlier, the city that dazzled with the 1893 World's Fair was now confronting something far more cryptic and criminal. And at the center of it all stands a charming, if unassuming doctor and businessman. who goes by the name of H.H. Holmes. Hey, everybody, I'm Don Wildman. You've clicked through to American History Hit, and thanks for that. Our guest today is author Harold Schechter, Professor Emeritus of Queens College, the City University of New York. He is the author of two dozen works of nonfiction, including Depraved, the definitive true story of H.H. Holmes, whose grotesque crimes shattered turn-of-the-century Chicago. If you know the story, there's still

much to be learned. If you've never heard it before, take a deep breath and brace yourself. Professor Schechter, Harold, thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for inviting me on. This is a notoriously gruesome tale. We should caution listeners. It makes me consider right off the challenge of facing true crime historians in covering such a, you know, scandalous case as this one. This is the stuff of legend, Jack the Ripper level. But how hard is it when you do this to separate fact from fiction when you're writing about it? That's an excellent question, very hard, especially when I was researching the book, which was back before the internet, allowed people like me to have access to a lot of old newspapers. I had to spend many, many weeks at various libraries,

including the U.S. Library of Congress, going through microfilms of old newspapers. And one thing about the newspapers of the late 1800s, the 1890s and so on, they were very, very sensationalistic. And they often, you know, their unspoken motto was, why let the truth get in the way of a good story? they were not above making up, you know, fabricating all kinds of lurid details that there was very little physical evidence for. So, yes, separating fact from fiction becomes a challenge, especially in the case of somebody like H.H. Holmes that a lot of myths have grown up about. We're in the late 1800s, as you say. Yellow journalism is just being born.

That will be capitalized by the likes of Hearst and all the rest, even. Until today, I mentioned in the opener where two years past the world's Colombian exposition of 1893, the World's Fair, celebrating the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's arrival in the new world, also marking, importantly, the resurgence of Chicago after its big fire of 1875. This is the Gilded Age in America. Mark Twain called it so. Context is a huge factor in this story, isn't it? Absolutely. Not only because of, as you were saying, the rise of yellow journalism at the time,

both, you know, Hearst and Pulitzer having this competition over who could, again, out sensationalize each other and sell more newspapers. But as you say, the Gilded Age, this era when there was this worship of the self-made millionaire, the cultural heroes were people like Andrew Carnegie and Morgan and so on. You know, one thing I've discovered in my research is every era seems to produce a criminal who embodies the dark underside of the culture at that moment. Isn't that interesting? You know, it's like Charles Manson.

Yeah, exactly. Embodying, you know, the dark shadow side of the hippie counterculture and so on. Holmes was the incarnation of the darkest impulses of the gilded age. There was tremendous energy in the country at that time. I mean, heavily industrialized cities like Chicago, especially Chicago, crammed with immigrants, are now creating this new kind of national identity. They are the major hubs of economic activity. And this magnet that they become creates its own folklore, almost, you know, that just layers and layers upon it.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Holmes was a man of enormous ambition, great intelligence, very resourceful. I write in my book, you know, that he could have been a kind of paragon of Gilded Age success if he hadn't been undone by his own psychopathology. Yeah, exactly. You know, he employed all those characteristics for very, very dark ends. Where's he from, Professor? He was born in a small New Hampshire town called Gilminton. He trained as a physician and had worked as a pharmacist in Philadelphia and again gradually made his way to Chicago, which, as he were suggesting, you know, at that time had really risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of the great fire of the early 1870s, had become this flourishing industrial and mercantile center, attracted, as you said, all kinds of people

from the surrounding countryside who were looking to grab their share of the American dream. And at the same time, it also would attract people like Holmes, these predators who saw in this great influx of newcomers potential targets for their own site. psychopathic greed. His name is not what he ends up being known, right? Yeah. His birth name was Herman Mudgeert. That was his last name was Mudgeett? Yeah. You could sort of see why he might have wanted a change it. You stole my line. That's what I was going to say. I mean, I suppose you could say this of any of these super criminals that how unlikely they are. But in his case, really so much so. Gilminton, New Hampshire, as you mentioned, is a, is a lovely town, an affluent

place. It was eventually it becomes the model for Peyton Place, as I understand it. It was so typical of New England. As a kid, he excelled in school. He attended Phillips Exeter. He marries early, his first wife relatively young. 1882, age 18, he enrolls at the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Michigan, even then a prestigious institution. What draws him to medicine, do you know? Well, again, there are all kinds of legends about that, one of which was that when he was a kid because of his outstanding academic achievements. He was a subject of bullying by some of the other kids in town, and that they once dragged him into the office of the local physician and made him embrace the anatomical skeleton that the doctor had hanging in his office,

which supposedly both traumatized him and at the same time inspired his fascination with human anatomy. Right. And the dissection of the human anatomy. Yes. It's thought that this was the first time he ever embarked on criminal activities while he was at Michigan, that he facilitated body snatchers to provide medical cadavers in teamwork with his own professor, right? Yeah, well, that wasn't that unusual back then. The anatomy professors, both here in the United States and overseas, were always faced with a shortage of cadavers for use in their anatomy classes, partly because the laws stipulated that the only cadavers that could be turned over to medical schools were those of executed criminals. So there was, again, a big shortage of material.

So, yeah, grave robbing for that purpose was a not uncommon phenomenon at the time. Yeah, he was opportunistic. Let's be kind in using the word. I mean, he saw an opportunity he went for, but he would do that in such a way that would become the manipulations of a con man, which is so much really the real story in the end of Holmes, not to spoil a alert there. I mean, he was that type of person who was for whatever perhaps ego or narcissistic reason able to see opportunity and then take advantage of people. That's really the machinery of what's,

the engine of what's going on, right? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Holmes was a classic psychopath. You know, he saw other human beings as simply objects to be manipulated for his own welfare, his own financial gain. He had no apparent ability to empathize or with other people, men, women, or children. He lacked a conscience. He was also very plausible. You know, the thing about psychopaths like Holmes, as we know, is that they present what one psychologist famously called the mask of sanity. You know, he appeared, you know, to be this very personable, charming, successful businessman and entrepreneur. And no one could possibly suspect, again, as is a case, with all people like this, that underneath that, you know, is this monstrous self.

Sure. And he has this upbringing that gives him all the social etiquettes that he needs to use that cover or to create that cover. He arrives in Chicago in the mid-1880s, takes up a job as a pharmacist, as you mentioned, quickly ingratiates himself into the Englewood neighborhood of that area, of that town, reinventing himself now as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes. This is his pseudonym, the new name for a new con. He takes over a pharmacy, which he has some legitimate claim to, as he's gone to medical school, I guess.

He charms the owner's widow before she mysteriously disappears. Is this his first victim? Well, that's one of the things that remains very fuzzy. When I wrote my book, I certainly presented it as the case based on the research I was able to do in these 100-year-old newspapers. It has since become known that he, A, she was not necessarily a widow, that her husband, whose name was Holton, did not die after Holmes took possession of the pharmacy, and that she herself survived after he became the owner. And the notion here is that he moves in as a partner because he wants to own it himself. The Chicago he walks into is booming, roaring, in every positive and negative. And now there has been the world's fair. I mean, it's coming up. He gets there in 1888.

It's just around the corner. How much was the world and Chicagoans and Henry Holmes and his new guys aware of this years prior? Holmes would have known about this coming and seen it as an advantage, correct? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he would have been scheming for a while as to how to take financial advantage. of this great event, which was going to bring, well, ultimately millions of out-of-towners to Chicago

to visit the Great White City, as it was called. So here is this H.H. Holmes, Henry Holmes, who has come to Chicago, set himself up in whatever means with a prosperous business in maybe anticipation of the fact that a lot of people are going to be coming. Now, from a business standpoint, smart move. Investing into a business where in a growing town with lots of people coming down the pike. Perfect. But the legend begins to form around the fact that he seems to have other motives at work here. He built a building, which we'll cover in a moment here, advertising rooms for rent, lodgings for fair visitors.

Many of those were said to be young women. One can understand, if you look at this story through a certain lens, how this was all part of a grand plan, the part of a nefarious practice of a psychopath at work here. And we'll take a break now and consider that image and come back and find out how true that is and how grisly his crimes really were. Welcome back speaking with writer, Harold Schechter, author of Depraved, the definitive true story of H.H. Holmes. By this point in the story, Professor, Holmes has arrived in Chicago and set up his shop. The building that he builds becomes legendary, for sure. It's called the murder castle in all of various accounts.

How much of this should we build? believe. First of all, tell me what the legend is. Well, let me begin by talking about the building itself. So Holmes purchased a plot of land across from the pharmacy that he was working out. And he began to construct this very large building. Of course, back then, in the wake of the Chicago fire, large construction projects like that were characteristic of Chicago. He builds this three-story kind of rambling building, the ground floor of which he rents out to various merchants and businessmen, and the top floors of which he was presumably going to use as a kind of hotel for World's Fair Visitors. Several things about the building. Homes himself was the architect,

and he was not much of an architect. So the building had all kinds of structural flaws. Also, He kept hiring different construction workers and then firing them so he didn't have to pay them. Anyway, the building itself ended up being a somewhat imposing structure that extended over a city block. But the interior, again, had all of these features that were a reflection of Holmes' and competence as an architect. You know, there were like stairwells that didn't really lead to anywhere. The corridors were very Byzantine and maze-like. So after Holmes's crimes were discovered, and reporters for the Pulitzer and Hearst proto-tabloids

began to investigate the house, all these stories began to emerge, that it had been this kind of medieval tortuism castle in which Holmes murdered and disposed of an indeterminate number of victims. Some people say over 100. So that's the legend. He's America's first serial killer is the legend. I mean, even in that title isn't correct because there were plenty of them before

he would have been. But nonetheless, it's a fabulous, sensational story at a sensational time in a sensational city. Yes. And, you know, Holmes becomes a. associated with all these folkloric monsters, particularly Bluebeard. Again, this depraved aristocrat who murdered all these women in his horror castle. So that was the legend.

And that legend has been perpetuated. And to some extent, I take, you know, is having written in a way, you know, the first major book about Holmes, I take a little bit of responsibility for perpetuating that legend. How much do we actually know about the types of people that he targeted, if indeed he was targeting them? The legend or the alleged activities had a lot to do with him finding young women. He would seduce them. He would marry them bigamously. He would take life insurance policies on them first, having gained control of their life savings.

I mean, all of these things are part of this legend. Is all of that up and up for questioning? No, I mean, it's definitely true that Holmes was a bigamist. It's definitely true that he murdered several of his mistresses. We know that he committed some very appalling crimes later in his career, including the murder of three innocent children. What has been called into question latterly by researchers is the issue of how many, if any, fairgoers were murdered in his supposed murder castle. I see. And the evidence seems to be that possibly none were. You know, if you think about it for a minute, these stories about dozens, if not hundreds

of fairgoers from out of town meeting these mysterious, terrible deaths in Holmes's castle, you have to wonder, well, didn't any family members notice that their sister didn't return from the world's friends? I mean, you know, there were no reports of any family members anywhere in the U.S. who were worried that they had friends or neighbors or kin going to the Chicago World's Fair and then disappearing. So, you know, almost all of that stuff was a fabrication. of the yellow press. There is no doubt that Holmes was a serial killer.

Okay. But, you know, the degree of his crimes and the nature of his crimes, you know, has been very, very exaggerated. We want to paint the picture of these people who are like him. You know, the serial goes as monsters,

as the Jeffrey Dahmer type, where, you know, it's for the pure need and to feed this savage beast inside of them, that they're not even in control. of, I mean, that's the idea of the serial the most murders. In Holmes

case, it has a lot more to do with opportunity, right? It's the pursuit of money, and whoever's getting in the way of that needs to be removed. That's a different kind of serial killer. It's also a, it's a serial killer, but a different sort of, you know, level, I guess, if you want to say it.

So that raises a very interesting point, and I've spoken on the subject quite a bit. The term serial killer, Well, it can be traced back, actually, to the 1930s when it was first applied by a German detective to a very, very notorious what they used to call lust murderer named Peter Curtin. If you've ever seen the famous Fritzline movie M with Peter Lorry, that's based on Peter Curtin. But the term serial killer was coined specifically to describe people, as you say, like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gasey, Jeffrey Dahmer, the Hillside Stranglers, Edmund Kemper. In other words, it was specifically coined to describe a certain kind of psychopathic sex murderer, an extreme sexual sadist who derives his sick erotic pleasure from kidnapping and,

torturing and murdering innocent victims. As you say, with Holmes, though there undoubtedly was an element of sadism involved, his primary motivation was financial. Again, he was like in that sense, a classic con artist, except one whose psychopathology led him to murder. Sure. He was willing to cross that line. Yeah. So there is a little bit of a distinction between somebody like Holmes and somebody again, you know, like those classic serial murderers from the 70s and 80s and 90s that we think of. But I do want to understand, you know, just for the listener's sake, how colorful this story really was told. I mean, you mentioned the building, called the murder castle, first of all. Second of all, it contained, according to accounts in the papers, secret rooms, trapped doors, a hidden shoot leading to the basement.

Of course, what would you use that as a mirror serial killer? throw the bodies down and a purpose-built crematorium to get rid of things. Now, they did find human remains. People did die in this place. But your point is well taken that this is a time when you sell newspapers by telling big stories. And so this naturally got inflamed to a degree. Well, he definitely sold the remains of a couple of his victims to medical schools. No doubt about that.

But they were a number of women who had become his mistresses. and who for various reasons he decided he wanted to dispose of. There's a classic Western by John Ford, classic John Wayne Western called the man who shot Liberty Valors. And at the very end, a newspaperman is interviewing Jimmy Stewart. I won't go into all the details of the plot. If you haven't seen it, highly recommend it. But all these stories have grown up about how Jimmy Stewart

killed Liberty Valence. He was the man who shot Liberty Valence. Liberty Valence was this outlaw who would terrorize the territory, played by the Great Lehmortov. It turned out that wasn't true. Turned out John Wayne, of course, had been the man who killed Liberty Valves, but nobody knew that.

And when James Stewart wants to reveal that truth, the journalist says, when legend becomes fact, print the legend. Yes. And the home story, is like a classic, classic case of that. You know, these legends were accepted as facts and have been perpetuated as facts,

but I have to say almost everything about the murder castle and those death rooms and so on, was a complete myth. Again, which is not to say that Holmes was not a serial killer, he was a serial killer. He committed appalling crimes. But what happened is after the discovery, of those other crimes, that was when these reporters for Hearst and Pulitzer entered the building,

Holmes's building, discovered all these weird anomalies, you know, like staircases that didn't go anywhere and so, and invented these incredibly lurid, nightmarish explanations for them. Sometimes even they would offer retractions. There was one point at which, for example, they discovered some bones in the basement and immediately published stories about that these were the remains of Holmes' victims. Those would be page one's stories with blaring headlines. Then if you look at the papers like three days later on page 26 in a little paragraph on the bottom, there'd be an item saying, oh, by the way, those rib bones, We're from a cow. I see.

You know what I'm saying? At some point, he begins, as all these guys do, to overstep himself. The key victim that speaks to this, Holmes is arrested in 1893 after a fire broke out at his home, and he was suspected of insurance fraud. The fact is he had developed a scheme with an associate, right? Ben Pitzel to defraud an insurance company for $10,000, a lot of money in those days, by faking Pizel's death and claiming the insurance. This was to take place in Philadelphia.

with Peitzel's wife claiming the money. But Holmes had another plan to this. Can you tell me about his secret version of events? Well, Holmes had apparently pulled off some kind of scheme like this before. The idea was that $10,000 of life insurance would be taken out in Pitesel's name with his wife, Carrie, as the beneficiary. Then they would stage Pizel's death, and Holmes would acquire a cadaver. I mean, he was used to getting cadavers for his medical school, cronies back in the day. They would get a cadaver and substitute it for Pitzel.

And they would disfigure it in some way that it would be difficult to identify. And they would claim that Pitesla had died in this accident, collect the $10,000 insurance, or carry would collect it. And then Holmes, he had an associate, this shady lawyer named Howe. they would get the money from Carrie. That was the original plan. But Holmes being Holmes, what he did was he actually murdered Pytzel and burned his face so that it looked somehow like Pytzl, who was at that point posing as a patent agent,

had somehow exploded some chemicals in his office and had suffered these disfiguring burns to his face and so on and so forth. But he murdered Pytzel, and they did collect the money. Right. And then he asked to lie to Pytzl's widow, you know, obviously. Was she in on the original scheme? Well, yes, she knew about it. Paisel had confided in her that they were going to pull off the scheme and told her that if she saw any news reports that he had died in an accident in his office in Philadelphia, she shouldn't really get worried because it was. wouldn't really be him. It would be this cadaver that they had gotten for the job. Okay. So he gives Holmes his cover story for what is Holmes actual plan, which is to murder his partner, take the

money, lie to the widow, and claim that the husband was still alive. But over time, Holmes becomes paranoid. He suspects that one of her five children would raise the alarm on me. And that's where you mentioned before the murder of two of these children, Alice and Nellie. Three, three children. Yeah. It's a little boy. I think it's a little boy. I think it's, name was also Howard. Those were incredibly heinous crimes. Carrie was this very naive, goable woman who had known Holmes for a long time. I mean, Holmes had employed Paisal at his handyman for a number of years. Holmes managed to persuade her to turn over the children to his care while they somehow moved around avoiding any potential investigations. And in the course of these

travels, he killed all three of the children. And he actually planned to kill Carrie and her other two children, but that plan went awry. And it was shortly after that that he was arrested. So let's take a break and consider this man for a little bit. When we come back, Harold and I will discuss how Holmes was eventually caught in the gruesome legacy that lives in his week. Welcome back. So Harold, Helms' racket is on the verge of unraveling. The extent of his crimes are about to be revealed to whatever degree of the truth there is, but nonetheless. How was he finally caught?

What brought him down? Well, the insurance agency that had paid off this life insurance policy on Paisal, members of the officials in the agency were very, very suspicious that this had been a scam. And they eventually brought in the Pinkerton Agency. You know, the Pinkerton Agency was the very famous private detective agency at the time. Their logo was an all-seeing eye. And that's where the phrase private eye comes from. Yeah, so these Pinkerton detectives were on Holmes's trail,

and they finally nabbed him when he was unawares and brought him. and brought him back to Chicago to stand trial initially for this insurance fraud, because Holmes kept insisting that Paisal was still alive, the children was still alive. There was really no evidence of the time that he had committed murder. They exhumed Pizel's corpse and discovered that it was, in fact, Paisel. And then Holmes claimed that he had committed suicide in this bizarre way. Anyway, it was clear that he had murdered Paisel and that he was going to be tried for Paisel's murder.

But the question remained, what happened to the three children who had been in his care for all that time and whom he had moved around to different cities just to make sure that he wasn't being followed? And the Chicago police, put one of their crack detectives, a man named Frank Geyer on the case. And Geyer, over weeks of intensive investigation and retracing Holmes's trail from Indianapolis, Philadelphia, up into Canada, managed ultimately to discover the remains

of all three children. The little boy Howard, his remains were found stuffed into a chimney, his body. his body had been incinerated. The two young girls had apparently been killed. Holmes had apparently somehow lured them into the steamer trunk in which they were carrying their possessions, drilled a hole in it, stuck a hose in the hole, and fed gas from a gaslight into the trunk

and asphyxiated them both. He kept promising the children that they were going to be reunited with their mother and that they were going to see their father. kept offering excuses to the widow, Carrie, as to why he hadn't brought the children back to her. You know, he would say, oh, well, they were visiting their father. There's no doubt that Holmes, you know, was diabolically clever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that entire trip, all those sales trips were really about killing those kids and covering his tracks about the murder of their father. Unbelievable. He was also arrested at 1894 on an unrelated horse theft. I mean, he was trying all kinds of skills, wasn't he? Yeah, and it was during one of those arrests in St. Louis for another scam that he ended up in jail with what was then a very, very notorious bandit named Marion Hedgepeth, who has been totally forgotten, but who was one of the, at the time, legendary badmen of the American West. And while Holmes was in prison with Hedgepeth, in order to pull off the insurance scam, Holmes needed a shady lawyer. And he asked Hedgepeth if Hedgepeth had any recommendations.

And Hedgepeth gave him the name of this lawyer named Howe in Philadelphia, who indeed participated in the whole Pytzel scam. Although he didn't know Paisel had been murdered. Anyway, it was Hedgepeth. after Holmes was arrested, Hedgepeth contacted the authorities and said, hey, there was this guy in jail with me last year who told me he was going to be pulling off this kind of scam and needed a lawyer. And I gave him the name of H.R.A.'s Holmes. It's one of the ways that the authorities managed to pinpoint Holmes. Interesting. He's tried for this eventually in Philadelphia, right? Yes, he's tried in Philadelphia for the Paisal murder. Mm-hmm, yeah.

He will try to conduct his own defense there, having rejected a legal team, his perhaps over-inflated ego, he can take care of this, his believe it himself. The jury deliberated, and when does this happen, by the way? This is in 1894? Yeah. Jury deliberates for two and a half hours before handing a guilty verdict. Didn't take very much time at all. He is only being tried for the murder of this man, right?

not for the children? Correct. They were holding that off the other charges, which would have taken place in different jurisdictions, where the murders occurred, where the bodies were fell. But they were holding them off his backups, you know, in case he wasn't sentenced to hang for the Paisal murder, for whatever reason,

then they can go on and try him for Howard's murder, little girl's murder. The storytelling will take place, but for now, legally, they only need one murder to kill the guy. Before his execution, though, Holmes does confess to 27 murders. Big question mark hangs over the validity of that. He ends up claiming 133. I guess once he knows his fate and that he's going to hang, he might as well get more and more famous while he goes, right?

Well, Hearst in particular, if you look at newspapers back then, every time there was a very, very sensational murderer. You know, I've written about some others at around the time. Hearst would, you know, offer the money to concoct these incredibly sensationalistic confessions, which they pretty much had nothing to do with writing or dictating. You know, these were, again, pure fabrications of Hearst's writers. So, yeah, I mean, Holmes wrote this very over-the-top, lurid, melodramatic confession, which he talked about being possessed by the devil, you know, and murdering these 27 people, and then he increase it.

You know, there's also the question of narcissism of these criminals, you know, who want to go down in history as the most monstrous criminals of the age, who want to become more famous than Jack the Ripper, or more famous, there was a very notorious case in the 1920s where some guy wanted to become more famous than Leopolden Loeb. So that's not uncommon. So it was driven both by Holmes megalomania and also by the fact that Hearst offered him a lot of money. Sure.

We should also say that before Holmes was hanged, he claimed he'd only murdered two people, two of his mistresses, and that both had died during illegal abortions. was performing. So he recanted the so-called confession that he had written for Hearst, but he also never really confess to these other crimes that he clearly committed, the murder of Pytzel and the murder of his three children. Having written a book on the subject, what's your theory? How many people did Holmes really kill? I think at the end, you know, by the time I got to the end of the book, I kind of realized that what I had written

in the preceding 300 pages there were a lot of inaccuracies that I was again caught up in the legend at the end so I did a reasonable count I think I said that we can only say for certain that Holmes murdered well only put only in air quotes seven people

primarily around the Paisal scheme well they're Paisel but also these mistresses he wanted to get rid of Right, exactly. And the pharmacy he wanted to own. Yes. It's always something that stands in the way of him bettering his life, as is always the case with these guys. So H.H. Holmes was executed May 7, 1896 at a prison in Philadelphia, having been convicted of this murder of his associate. The storytelling of this, which you've been hinting at all the while long here, is really the other story in his tale, the inflation of his victims, the motive behind his murders, especially the creation of this layer of his, the murder castle. I suppose it is the time that he's in prison and then shortly after that they turn this place inside out, right? Well, what happened is, yes, so we're going to make it into a kind of murder museum. Yeah. One thing that has always been true, it remains true even today, that people will flock

to the site of a notorious crime, you know, these morbid curiosity secrets. You know, sometimes those buildings have to be destroyed. Ed Dean, the notorious ghoul of Plainfield, Wisconsin, you know, they burned down his house because they knew it would attract all kinds of morbid sightseers. You know, they raised Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment. So. Casey, same thing. Tear these houses down. Yeah.

So, yes, there was a guy who had already announced his plans to purchase the castle and make it a tourist attraction. but then it too mysteriously burned down so that never came to pass. He was a watershed moment. I mean, here we are a century later or more talking about him still. But for law enforcement, he's a new kind of criminal, isn't he? I mean, there had been others like this, but he took it to another level because America was at another level. Well, absolutely.

You know, the Geyer's hunt to find out what had become of the Paisel's children was, you know, an extraordinary, extraordinary feat of detection. You're speaking of Detective Frank Geier of the Philadelphia Police, and he was really driving this manhunt to find out what happened. So, yeah, his kind of detective work, I guess that comes out of the Pinkerton's practices as well. Law enforcement in America was professionalizing, was organizing to another level.

Teddy Roosevelt would take it to a different place in New York. You know, the whole thing was becoming much more of an institution in these cities. And that's the other subplot of this. The advent of that urban landscape in America changes the storytelling of America. And those newspapers, especially, those publications, the magazines, begin capitalizing on this darker version of America, isn't it? That's kind of the case that this crazy factory-driven industrialization was creating new kinds of predators. Oh, absolutely. And you have to realize, I mean, you know, as professionalizes law enforcement, it was becoming, it was still in a rather primitive state. For example, most police departments in

the country, maybe all of them, you know, weren't using fingerprinting yet, even though that technology had been developed. I mean, that continued way into the, you know, early 20th century. And clearly they didn't have the kinds of forensic tools, you know, that we later came to develop. I mean, what's interesting to me, the realization, you know, that there's that journalistic saying, If it bleeds, it leads, which is sometimes attributed to Hearst, although I'm not sure. He's the one originally coined up. But that realization, you know, was known as early as the 1840s. You know, the first really proto-tabloid in our country was the New York Herald.

It was, you know, what they came to call the Penny Press. And the publisher that wrote something that I consider very important. You know, he said, all these crimes happen every day. And if you look at newspapers the way I do, you see that. Not a day goes by that some horrible murder has occurred, often more than one in particular places. He said, yeah, you know, men kill their wives every day and husbands every day and wives, poison their husbands every day, and blah. But it takes a case, he's afraid, the sublime of horror.

A case has to have the sublime of horror to really capture the public's attentionrum. And Holmes was a classic instance of that. You know, again, he seemed like a character out of these nightmarish myths and folk stories and legends. Bluebeard come to life. You know, these medieval monster, this medieval monster come to life in what was the quintessence of contemporary modern American society, you know, bustling industrialized Chicago. So that's, you know, beside the enormity of his crimes. It was all those different elements that made it into this enormous nationwide and even internationally sensational case. There's a story of a famous noblewoman in, I guess it was Eastern Europe, who was very famous for killing virgins in order to bathe in their blood.

And we went over there. Guilty as charged, we went to tell that story on television. And sure enough, I ran right into a scholar who explained to me very assiduously. no, that was the legend that was told by everybody who wanted to take advantage of the story. That's all there is to it. Yeah, Elizabeth Bathory, the Blight County. That's the one. There's a statue in the town, the whole thing.

They sell, you know, people make money off of this to this day. Well, even the original Bluebeard was supposedly a French aristocrat named Gilles Dere, who was a comrade in arms of Joan of Arc. And all these stories grew up about the hundreds of, uh, children and women who met horrific deaths in his Bluebeard's Castle, and much of that has been debunked as myth. Well, you still wouldn't want to run into the guy, and he deserves a lot of the reputation he has for the horrible things he did to some people, just not on the scale that Randolph Hurst would have liked you to believe. Harold Schechter is Professor Emeritus

at Queens College, right there in New York City, and nowadays a true crime author of many books. We discussed today his one depraved, the definitive true story of H.H. Holmes, whose grotesque crimes shattered turn-of-the-century Chicago. Harold, where can listeners find more about your work because there's lots of it? I have a website, haroldshector.com. So, yeah, I mean, the usual places. Thank you so much, Harold. It's been great to meet you. Can't wait to look at all your stuff.

My pleasure. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for listening to American. History Hit, you know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, please share with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support. Thanks so much.