Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 202: H.H. Holmes Part III - Professional Uncle

Episode Date: November 26, 2015

It's time for the conclusion of our series on H.H. Holmes as America's first urban serial killer goes full Bluebeard by way of safe suffocation on his way out of Chicago and comes close to murdering an entire family in a life insurance scam, the scheme for which the man eventually goes down for.

Hey everyone, just a reminder before the episode begins the last podcast on the left live show is this Saturday at 10 p.m At the creek in the cave 1093 Jackson Avenue in Long Island City, Queens This month is gonna see the return of Henry Zabrowski to the stage back for the first time in Months and it's gonna be our last live show until January and we're also gonna be live streaming it on our YouTube page that is the last podcast on the left live this Saturday 10 p.m Eastern at the creek in the cave 1093 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City, Queens. We'll see y'all there There's no place to escape to this is the last

That's when the cannibalism started What was that So Thanksgiving, oh, yes, what do you think it's Thanksgiving weekend what I would say is It's very strange as a whole holiday Mm-hmm an Italian went in a rickety boat Over to a famous land famous of a land of lore he did not know would exist That's right And he crashed upon the beaches of the island and then he decided to kill two million people for corn

They were all killing each other anyway. Come on people. So who's coming down the side of Columbus here? You Ben? No, I Have no idea. I'm just saying and it's not about Christopher Columbus. It's about the pilgrims you fucking idiots He comes all the way from Italy and don't you know he's saying Christopher Christopher Columbus, of course Yeah, he went to he went back to the king and queen at fucking France. I don't know where he was Italy I don't know history. I don't need to know this no, and he says like oh, I tell you if I was gonna name a type of spaghetti I would have called it rape y'all Lee. I get it. That's very good. Okay, that's a rape the guy right we understand So the pilgrims they were very well-dressed murderers. Let's move on to HH homes part three another very well-dressed murder Oh my god, he okay, so when we last left HH

He had just murdered Julia Smith under the guise of an abortion for marriage exchange That homes have proposed which is a very classic way to get me. That's right So Julia would not be the last of Holmes's romantic conquest to meet their end in his murder castle The next would be spotted not by Holmes, but by his shady assistant Benjamin Pytzel now as we mentioned last episode Pytzel was an awful alcoholic Which naturally interfered with his duties as Holmes's second in command and also he was a perfectly shaped goon Where he was like he was tall He was bald on the top and stringy long hair on the sides. He was missing a bunch of teeth

His face all sunken in but he loved his family like the Butler from Rocky Horror Picture Show riff-raff Rascal so was he but was Pete so Pytzel Pytzel was he shady or just extremely faded all the time. He was just always drunk He was too intoxicated to really be manipulative or what he wasn't no He wasn't manipulative or cunning at all. He was a total tool. Yeah, he was a complete and total like a Complete again. He's sourced 24-7 and also in desperate need of money and HH Holmes just kept being like

Oh, but here's another golden pocket watch. But first must you do is sign a letter saying that you're an actually theater bucelle It's all like weird old-timey flim flams that that Pytzel was just like give me whatever I whatever I gotta do Fuck and give me my ripple so HH Holmes was like captain Spaulding and this guy is like the idiot who pushes Chris Hardwick in the crew through the haunted house when they actually see HH Holmes very much so Now speaking of flim flam as Henry mentioned Holmes whilst a well-established flim flam man in his own right Was also susceptible to other flim flam men of the age He believed that a man named Leslie in route Keely had a cure all for alcoholism and so sent Pytzel to Keely's rehab facility Keely's solution was the so-called

Gold cure a red white and blue concoction that he called the barber pole also what Pytzel called his penis Yes, I was gonna say I could go for a couple of barber bulls right about now the ingredients aside from pure gold Injected directly into the bloodstream were closely held secret on and believe me again if any cure involves Squirting a precious metal directly into your body right go with it Yeah, I was gonna say I think that's still what they do at passages Malibu Because that's what my mom used to do because my mom whenever my mom would like we would travel to go like because my mom doesn't really fly

But she'll go on trains and shit like that But she won't wear her jewelry because she's like you never know when a con man's gonna try to get jewelry from you because every con Man no sleight of hand. That's a good. She really doesn't believe she believes that thieves are far more skilled than they actually are Right does believe every my mom is a Dickensian woman She believes that everything is flim flam men and sleight of hand artists and pickpockets And so that's what you do. She would hide her gold in a little pouch So she would keep inside of her jacket And that what better way to hide your gold than just squirting inside your own bloodstream. That's a good point

Yes, should have did that with my mother. Isn't that how they made Wolverine? That's adamantium. Yes, and it's into his bones. Isn't that something? Baby Or just do what they do in my family and you get too fat so the ring doesn't come off your finger And then you also can't even put your own hands in your pockets because this the jeans are so tight So for a con man, it's almost impossible. Just be too fat to rob. That's right So while Holmes did ostensibly send Pytzel to rehab to sober up The more likely purpose behind Pytzel's trip was to steal Keely's secret cure all formula

So Holmes could sell it himself again Holmes always working in an angle always got five or six scams In the air at one time. It's kind of insane as it really boils over as we're gonna see as we go through this episode. It's he It's almost I mean, he's just the psychopath psychopath. He really was like we always use Michael Jordan as example for this one I'm gonna say John L. He's a real field general Yeah, but bad at it where it's like cuz we John L. We never won a Super Bowl, right? Oh, he did. Yeah Yeah, he beat the Green Bay Packers and what 96 his final last two years. He he won. Is he gay? That's Troy Aikman But if you are gay being quarterback is really a fun position because you got your hands on balls

Oh, yeah, two sets of balls at night sit in front of him you get to pick on me like, oh, yeah Yeah Okay boys bend over you'll be my center gay So not surprisingly Pytzel did not return with the cure But he did come back with a report that Keely had in his employ the most beautiful woman He had ever seen a woman named Emeline Cigarette and now you know that she's beautiful in 1890s talk because the way she was described by Pytzel was as elegant and dewy

She was a dewy 24 year old so it's did she smell like wet hay. No, she was just like moist Dewey I was talking about this. I was talking about this with my girlfriend I'm saying the same thing. It's like if you just get a woman physically moist make her more like aroused in general Like if you just like throw a bucket of water on her. No light or like push her outside in the rain No, sir either spritzer down while she's asleep. She doesn't know or run a humidifier at twice the speed She's not a cat. No, I don't think that does work So Holmes, I guess I'll never know

I don't think you will so Holmes working on the description That Pytzel brought back and always on the lookout for some hot trim started a correspondence with Miss Cigrand and eventually offered her a job as his personal secretary at twice what Keely was pairing her this guy had quite the game Yeah, and it's also I will almost I don't know if I can say I admire HH Holmes in this fact But I will say over scams. He always chose Bush. He chose first so there was something about love in there Which I'm kind of into it's like he and it wasn't about just killing him to fuck him I wasn't like Ted Bundy or something like that where he had to hear the screens were to get hard He was fucking him pre-murderer as well. He was just into it

Well, he's like that that's the classic psychopath that will say anything like they will say anything to get a woman to love them And to sit get a woman to give themselves over to them. That's why a psychopath is so dangerous I could see him crushing QVC, you know, you know, Billy Mays type or the Sham Wow guy Fox News Fox News you would crush any any anything where it's just full of lies You will absolutely destroy it because you can make lies true Exactly, and he just gets pleasure out of the lie succeeding It nothing else matters for the promise again with the psychopath that pleasure is in and out Yeah, what what is the truth if you take an herbal medication that has absolutely no actual medicine in it

But it makes you feel better. Does it work? I mean that is a very interesting concept about reality, which I Again will say once more if you change your perception you could change your reality and what you can use to change your perception Ritual that's why yeah, you can basically smoke anything call it weed and you'll get stoned. I mean sometimes it'll kill you Yeah, be careful. Yeah, because sometimes being stoned is the feeling you get right before you're dead Right, right, right, right So Emily readily accepted his proposal to come work for and within just a few months Holmes had seduced her He asked her to marry him in November of 1892 and it most likely Already decided to kill her before popping the question because asking her to marry him was all part of the plan

It's very interesting because again, he gets something out of just the her living this lie And you're gonna see it played out here He it's something about creating this this this idea that he's a normal man who's seducing a woman It's like he laughs to himself that anybody would even believe that he's a normal man But it's also something he proofs to himself He can do it if you wanted to be normal he could live that normal life in a heartbeat It's psychopathic behavior because what he's doing most I guess a lot of psychopaths just out there in the world low-level Psychopaths really enjoy the ability to seduce a woman to get them to fall madly in love with them

And then throw them away entry-level psychopath entry-level psychopath temp psychopath I'm getting paid for it. Yeah, H.H. Holmes though when he intern when he got bored of a woman He killed her. Hmm. Hey, you know what? You know what? He's not right So Holmes's scheme to get away with this He gave Emmeline a dozen Plain white envelopes and asked her to address them to her closest family and friends He told her that he would of course have formal wedding announcements printed up later

But he just wanted to make sure everyone important in her life would get word that she was getting married to this wonderful man who by the way He told her to call her. I think it was Henry or Howard I think he told her to call her Howard because he had an uncle that was a Duke in England And the only way the H.H. Holmes would inherit the money was if He took the name Howard. So this is like the original Nigerian email scam. Dude. Yeah, absolutely He's been doing it back in the day And I remember y'all and what part of one of his other stipulations that he said to her is like But I do hope that you're okay with a mr. P.Dot theme to wedding

It's very popular absolutely special home with little legs dancing around that doesn't scream when you shell him They come in their own little suits So soon after addressing the envelopes Homes decided it's time for Emily to go and her death is particularly Horrifying. I mean she was crazy. Do we yeah, that's the thing when you got someone that do we okay? You can't just do it normal because she'll slide all over the place like a bar so yeah He kept on asking her to plug in light bulbs and stuff like that knowing that she just go up any time I'm sorry. I'm just super happy to have these wet hands, but they just not wait enough to zap me

Do we So while working in Holmes's third floor office one day in December Holmes asked his wife to go and retrieve some documents from inside It's safe and as soon as she walked him and walked inside He quietly closed the door of the safe behind her a little bit farther Not that pile of documents with the father's one a little bit farther Don't don't listen to that creaking noise. Oh, I must have played my Halloween sound effects I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just want to slam What what he wanted her to think was that it was all an accident he wanted he didn't want immediate fear

He didn't want the slam He wanted her to slowly realize that she was going to die because he did this also with Julia smith where he said or Smith However, the fuck you pronounce that British last name. She Was basically he he kind of coddled her and said, oh, we'll be fine. We'll be fine. Then he put her out And then killed her again that that game To keep playing it about how he's a normal man and everything's normal even while he's killing her. Yeah, this guy I mean age H. Holmes is an impressive psychopath. Yeah, it's like it's no more you read about him and the more you really Reasoned to him. He's like fucking gerbils. He's like one of these guys. Yeah, he's a he's a mastermind of evil and just can't stop

General Rommel The Desert Fox yes never charged with a war crime because everyone loved him so much. He was on the cover of Time magazine Yeah, isn't it weird of thinking Kim Kardashian also go as the Desert Fox for a little bit until she realized it had the same nickname It's a famous German Nazi General and the Nazis requested she change it So over the next few hours Holmes listened through the door of the safe vigorously masturbating just over and over and over again right as Emmeline screamed and screamed until she finally Ran out of oxygen and suffocated. I mean, I'm getting going just sitting here thinking about it

I don't mean to be like this. Yeah, you shouldn't. Oh God, I gotta stay obscene it. Yep. Those are the fetishes that are illegal Her skeleton was sold to LaSalle Medical School a few weeks later and when police finally searched Holmes's castle They would find a single footprint etched into the steel to the inside of the safe's door Now if you're asking how a small young woman could press hard enough on a steel door to leave her footprint in a desperate attempt to save her life She tried to push the door open with her foot But Holmes always the forward thinker had covered the floor of the safe and acid to speed along the asphyxiation process And the acid on her feet was more than enough to make the footprint permanent on the steel door

So when you say acid like a part of me does go to like, you know, like Leary like she was you just like tripping nuts being like, you know talking about tramps and thieves and stuff What kind of acid like chemical sulfur? I don't know if it was not trippy-dippy fun acid. No Caustic acid. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah burning acid again. This is what like, you know, I just Holmes is he's the penguin That's kind of what it's like. It's like he's got gadgets and things. He's kind of like the Riddler He's not the Joker because the Joker is more cool. I guess. I don't know. He's a super villain. Yeah Yeah, yeah, kind of awesome in a horrible way a bit of all of them wrapped into one Yeah, he's an absolute super villain without a superhero to catch him

So Emilyne was actually quite a popular girl. She talked to a lot of people in the castle She had a lot of friends a lot of family Which was the reason why Holmes had her address the envelopes After her disappearance He took the envelopes that she had addressed herself in her own handwriting Typed up wedding announcements with another man's name in place of his own and sent the Announcements to Emily's family and friends making them believe that she had run off suddenly with another man. Damn And Emilyne's parents later said that after they hadn't heard from their daughter at all

Following the announcement they just assumed that she had died in Europe or something right and her new husband Either didn't know their address or didn't care enough to inform them such were the times in America foresight on HH Holmes is incredible It's amazing. He's well He plans it out ahead of time and now he'd played the game so much again We're gonna see later on it's like what these serial kills say they plan out their killer They plan out their kills right for weeks and weeks and weeks and how they're gonna how they're gonna do it and how they're gonna get out Of it and eventually the thought process begins to fall apart because right now Zercher mode Yeah, right now. He's at the top of his game. Well, the funny thing about HH Holmes is that he never goes into murder

Berserker mode he goes in a flim flamma. Yeah, he goes in a con berserker mode He goes in a crime berserker mode as far as murder goes his records perfect But he had like he like John L. Way More like actually more like Troy Aikman Troy Aikman never lost a Super Bowl gay So while Holmes in modern times is most famous for being the so-called devil in the white city the world's fair of 1893 would actually come at the end of Holmes of Chicago rampage now as we said in the first episode the 1893 world's fair or the world's Colombian exposition as it was officially known Was up to that point the largest most spectacular and most hyped event that it ever happened in America

Yeah, yeah, it was sort of like Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden. Oh, I love it When he sings piano man, but then he's so old. He sings it again He'll sing piano man up to seven times in concert. I've heard that great great concert So and this is where Tesla, you know Introduces his big, you know invention of light and all that stuff and true story This is where the elephant ear was also invented the elephant ear. Yeah, the great the great carnival snack You don't know about the elephant ear and another day in fat long man history They funnel it all up. It's it's piping hot dough. They put it into the oil

Sometimes I take your elephant ear to cover it in Chile and there's just so you know, is that all you learned about the 1893 World's Fair and I'm not even sure if it's true I'm just saying they had elephant ears very good. It's great treat great treat so between May 1st and October 30th of 1893 over 27 million people attended the World's Fair many of them out of towners and all of them Needed somewhere to stay now in later confessions Holmes claim to have only killed one fairgoer during that entire summer But certain accounts say that as many as 50 people who stayed at Holmes's castle during the World's Fair Never came back from Chicago, but again, we're gonna cover it

Well, but again, we already covered the fact that people just leave and just don't come back Yeah, it was like 9-11 all the time all the time you could just leave and just say like I don't know He just didn't come back. I guess he's dead freedom That's back when freedom was free right right and to further suspicion that he killed more than he claimed Holmes Always had room for a female guest during the World's Fair But if any men came looking for a room they were almost always told that there were no rooms available So even after he was caught he never admitted to murdering the amount of people that he actually did it's very different than somebody like The Texas fella that Henry Henry Lucas who was just like I killed 18,000 people

But by the end of it Don't they it ranged all over the place so concerning those female guests those who stayed at the castle long term or Those who worked for Holmes noticed that he was particularly forgiving of young women who left suddenly without paying their bills which happened a Lot yeah, and while Holmes certainly had a hell of a lot of reasons for killing the women who worked for him It is possible that soon before their deaths these women. They just started wondering out loud. Hey Why didn't boss really all that bothered by all these unpaid bills and also with their this thing combined with their constant stenture chemicals Surrounding the Holmes must have led it's up with some questions have to pop up uncomfortable questions. He's got greased shoots

Yeah, if your house has greased shoots in it, you're not unless you're Getting apples from the attic to the basement real quick and you're just like, you know how rats love apples and even that statement is ridiculous Bunch of questions you would have to ask regarding does he have Alzheimer's is there some sort of elderly disease happening? Yeah, what's happening and that there's just so many women just absolutely disappeared like we said in the last episode they would just be like a whole room of clothes just left behind and they would leave without paying their bills and You know people were gonna ask questions and the people who asked questions also ended up dead So by the time the ferret come to town Holmes had already decided that it was time to leave Chicago His debts were mounting and it was getting harder and harder to talk his way out of him

And in fact some of his debtors were starting to consolidate because he started realizing this guy's not paying anybody Yeah sort of checking in with each other and like being like does this guy pay you yet? And they're like no and it because he hadn't paid for a thing He should have just filed for bankruptcy like a good old Donald Trump that would have voted him for president He did pay for chloroform. Oh, that's right. He played he paid for everything that he really wanted Absolutely, it was like what I say before my problems with my debt consolidation is that when I talked to the debt when I talked to credit card people And I was like they're like you need to pay this money, and I was like why? They were like you need to pay this money. I was like, well, what do you do if I don't pay the money?

They're like you need to pay this money and guess what? I didn't pay any of that No, don't bother. You know what I do I just go and I give him all the empty beer cans that I spent the money on and I said that's good as cash There you go. It's good as cash But Holmes before he would leave Chicago He had one last long con to finish off that long con would end in double murder The last woman close to Holmes to meet her fate in the murder castle would be a sweet naive young girl named Many Williams now many wasn't quite as beautiful as Holmes's other victims really. I was that she's the best name many Williams

Yeah, it's a cute note. She was short kind of doughy Real dumb. Yeah, real dumb. That's the quote in like multiple sources every time The only quote anyone has to say about many Williams. They just said, you know, she didn't seem to know a great deal All anyone had to say about many but the one thing that she did have was a fucking heiress She was heiress who had a massive Texas fortune 3.5 million dollars in today's money. She was worse She probably tried those elephant ears Mmm-hmm, but for Holmes, of course the money was a big deal, but He knew that more than likely he wouldn't be able to get the money

But the one thing he could get from her was a very valuable plot of land in downtown Fort Worth, Texas and had Holmes pulled off this particular plot to fruition Had he not started to go in a flim flam psycho mode later on? It is almost certain that this is where he would have built his second murder castle I mean, I feel like nowadays again, we would look up to somebody like AJ Holmes You see flip that house all the time. It's like he's there. He's a realtor psycho kid with psycho killer. That's insane He's just he's franchising out. I would love to watch him train in a new general manager in the Texas Fort Worth branch So this is where I put the grease on the on the

I'd agree shoot. Oh my god. I gotta tell you that's just good thinking because you don't know when a fat boy is gonna Need to go from the attic to the basement man. Mr. Holmes. You're just wonderful The only thing standing in the way of Holmes in the land was mini sister Nanny who had a great deal more sense than her younger sister. My name is mini and this is nanny I'm nanny. I'm mini. Hi I'm nanny my goodness. I'm with a million dollars. So am I my name's nanny It is yeah, truly obnoxious So to take care of this little problem

Holmes invited nanny to the world's fair and took the two sisters every single night for a week straight and then on July 4th 1893, Holmes suffocated both of them in his bank vault, one at a time, without either one knowing what happened to the other. Hi, I'm Nanny! Where's Manny? I'm in here, Nanny! It's me, Manny! Oh, I'm coming in there, Manny!

Right after you! Because my name's Nanny! Oh, that's great to hear, Nanny! I'm Manny! For hours! They didn't know a whole bunch. They knew each other's names, I guess. I will say, H.H. Holmes at some point during this week, he just had to be like, Goddammit!

Will you shut up? Shut up, Nanny! Shut up, Manny! Goddammit! It's tension headaches, to him just being like, it's just like, is there something wrong, Henry? I'm Nanny! No, there's nothing wrong, Nanny.

I've just got a bit of a tension headache. I think my top hat's all a bit too tight. I'm Manny! You love me! And this is my sister, Nanny! Oh, uh, when is the fair over? You know, sometimes I'm just curious about what are the hours of the fair. I'm gonna go check it out.

This is where he is really the victim. This was a tough week for H.H. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. So days later, Holmes dropped by Benjamin Peitzel's house to present his wife with a bounty of presents, dresses, shoes, hats, all the clothes that Holmes claimed were left to him by his cousin, who had suddenly got married and left the country. But you can imagine, like, Peitzel giving the gifts to his wife, or he's just like, I was gonna get some more of these hats, but I put some booze in it and it ruined the fabric.

I ran out of that cup. You bitch. I worked my whole life. Here's the garter belt. Did I mention my blood's full of gold? Which is pretty cool. I mean, this is, it is dead people's clothes, but it's no different than what hipsters do here in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when they go shopping at these thrift stores and whatnot.

It's all corpses clothes. Oh, I owe many dead men's clothes. Absolutely. People die in the clothes and the EMTs go and snip it off of them because EMTs are nothing but premature grave robbers. That's right. That's not true. They're actually, they're brave.

They are needed and they just failed a terrorist test here in the city. So we're not doing good. What? By like being like, which is the bomb and which is a baby in a carriage? Their radios don't work underground. Oh, that's kind of a problem. Anyway, it doesn't matter. We move on.

So the deed to the land in Fort Worth, Holmes kept to himself. And with this, Holmes' time in Chicago was almost at an end, but he would not leave town without one more Midwest romantic conquest. His last wife was named Georgina Yoke and much like Murdozy Belknap. It's a matter of debate as to whether Holmes actually felt something like love towards Georgina or if he just never got around to killing her. At any rate, Georgina would be one of the few women to survive a close relationship with H.H. Holmes. What we're going to see later is I believe that Georgina just helped H.H. Holmes with his story.

And in the end, in order to be a respectable businessman in this time and day, you had to be married. And I think that knowing that you have a wife in tow wherever you go and you could reference your wife and you have one and you can cut to like what seems to be a normal family life is a great way to make someone feel at ease with you. Dennis Rader, obviously the Green River. It's like these people had totally theoretically stable families. Yeah, absolutely. So as we mentioned in the first episode, Holmes had been toying with the idea of a life insurance

switcheroo scam since medical school. And while Holmes claimed to have pulled it off before, we know for sure that he tried the scam in 1893 and who better to do it with than his trusted associate, Benjamin Peitzholz. So we're going to tell them, let's see, okay, we're going to fake my death and we'll tell them that. But what I was, was I was a famous horse trainer and I died trying to save a family from a fire. You're a drunken idiot, but you might be some andes of the red horse trainer line. Yeah, I wanted to be, I always wanted to be a horse trainer, but the problem is always looking at my booze. Don't you look at my booze or turn your damn lower half in the glue and I'll take the glue and I'll throw the thing out and paste.

And now you derail it and once again you derail it. Yeah, you tell me how am I to die? So first, the year's the scam in its entirety, first Holmes would take out a large insurance policy on Peitzholz and after a few months, the two would acquire a cadaver in stage of death that would so badly disfigure the corpse that identification would be impossible. And after Holmes took care of the necessary bureaucratic rigmarole, the two would then split the payout of $10,000, which was over $250,000 in 2015 money, but that scheme would take a little bit of time to percolate for they had do-ins to take care of down in Texas. And the worst part is that he put, H.H. Holmes put Peitzholz in charge of paying his own health insurance premiums. Oh, bad idea, brilliant.

And so he would send money to Peitzholz to pay the premiums, but then Peitzholz would just spend the money on booze. Right, right. And so H.H. Holmes then had to keep up Peitzholz's half of the scam all the time. So Peitzholz, while H.H. Holmes is running all these other games, he has to go and make sure that Peitzholz's paying his premiums and we're going to find out is that right before the premium, it's like literally the whole insurance claim was about to be canceled and H.H. Holmes had to swoop in and pay it and literally the payment made it minutes beforehand before it was technically due. And that was one of the clues that they had ended up stringing together that the whole thing was a scam. Obviously, you know, you should not kill anybody, but isn't there something inside of you where you're just like,

That's caveat, man. Good, thank you. There's no time to be alive in a way. I mean, nowadays you try to pull off a scam like that. There's a detective Colombo coming to ask you a bunch of very interesting questions. Yeah, these hard shoes and these long arms are coming out and are good sniffing around in my good time, Charlie. Back in the day, all you would have to do is cut off their ears and then the detective would be like, Well, nope, this person had ears. They do not have ears. That is not this person, so we're totally confused. So after taking out the policy, Pytzel, Georgina and HH set up for Texas to build a new life in downtown Fort Worth

with a land Holmes had scammed from many. So safely away from his creditors in Chicago, Holmes started all over again with Fort Worth using the exact same methods he had used to build his murder castle the first time. But like with most people of Holmes's temperament, the need for more excitement got him into trouble. Inexplicably, Holmes and Pytzel tried their hands at horse thievery, which is a hanging offense in Texas. It's just of all of the scams. Stealing a horse, number one is dangerous because horses are big. I don't even like voluntarily riding a horse. Everyone taking one against your will. You know what I mean? And they don't know anything about goddamn horses.

And a horse killed John Candy. Well, he had to ride a horse. He was obese. Heart disease killed John Candy. Well, but he died on a horse. I'd say maybe horse steak killed John Candy. Could be. Well, I'm just saying. So the two, of course, identified almost immediately as the culprits. They left Fort Worth in the middle of the night never to return. They would resurface six months later in St. Louis. It's a nice place, St. Louis. Oh, come on. That's where Holmes would be arrested for the very first time, by the way, after trying out a pharmacy fraud.

That old trick where he would buy things on credit, he would sell, he would buy things on credit under an assumed name, sell all the products, and then when the creditors came would say like, no, that's not me. I did not buy these things. This was Mr. Bilke that bought all of those things. They saw right through it and he landed in prison. And while in prison awaiting bail, Holmes would make the mistake that would eventually get him caught for good. How old is he now at this point? Oh, 32, 33. He's our age. So he has just been, and so, but the life expectancy back then wasn't as high as it is now. Yeah, it was like 34. So he's just like an elderly man, be like, never been caught yet. Why wouldn't he stop?

Yeah, I mean, because that's that's the thing. He hasn't even, I mean, he hasn't necessarily been close to getting caught this entire time. Yeah, he's had creditors come at him, but he hasn't really had the law come at him yet because he's been able to talk his way out of it. And he's also this whole time, there's all these investigators that have been coming to his murder castle and he's been turning them away with the patina handshake. Well, now his confidence is through the roof. But nowadays, nobody trusts. Back in the day, they trusted you. They don't believe, no one believed that you were a liar or a psychopath. They thought that it was like, oh, I'll get around to it. Because this was like old timey America when things were still pure. But that little idol that we all know, there was a whole bunch of rape going on. Yeah. And again, are people still obsessed in the states about what's happening in the UK and London with Jack the Ripper?

Oh, no, that's long gone. No, it pacified us. When we saw the Jack the Ripper stuff, the whole thing was that the way the newspaper sold it was like, we'd never have anything like that over here in the congressional United States of America. Right. Yeah. I mean, while we killed how many millions of Indians with blankets. And at this time, this is when the Indian wars were raging on. Yeah, so we were really getting to the Indian killing at this point out in the Old West. Yeah. Yeah.

Everyone was killing each other. When was Wounded Knee? I like the tone that you said that. When was the casino give out? Well, what happened in Wounded Knee? Wounded Knee was only four years before this. No shit. In Wounded Knee, they armed the prisoners and then the prisoners got the Native Americans.

Holy shit. They gave them weapons to fight other Native American tribes and to protect them against wildlife. And then the prisoners, the Native Americans, you know, obviously used the guns against them. This is how we treated the inventors of jerky. Oh my God, did Native Americans invent a jerky? I'll say it. I'm 126 Cherokee. What's up? You're pinky?

By the way, you're thinking of Little Big Horn. Wounded Knee is when we just shot all the women and children. Yeah, whatever. Little Big Horn. I like that one better anyway. Jesus, man. What? That's a better name. What is wrong with you people? What about octopus dog hat? What about that brave battle of the Cherokee versus the congressional armies of the Alabamians?

I am very pro-Native American. Inventors of jerky. Struck down by Italians. I'm 112th Native American. So we're actually kind of in the Wild West speaking of, at this point, for Holmes's cellmate was a man that Harold Schechter referred to as, quote, an authentic desperado that someone so audacious with his bodilary that one would assume that he was burned to be an outlaw. Thank you, Harold Schechter. You're the best, Harold.

So this man that was in the cell with H.H. Holmes, his name was Marion Hedgepeth, a.k.a. the Handsome Bandit. This dude was very handsome, and he was handsome. Not like they say H.H. Holmes was handsome. This guy actually was handsome. And this is very interesting. This is also a trait of psychopaths. He was bragging about his crimes and his abilities because literally he wanted the validation from another famous criminal. He was struck by the celebrity because what he wanted was, there was this bad man.

And he was famous because this was a time in America where the Wild West criminal was a celebrity. Yeah, nothing's changed, has it? No, actually not really. It actually hasn't. Caitlyn Jenner's woman in the year and she fucking killed a bunch of people. Just one. And of course H.H. wanted to impress the outlaw who rode with such desperate men as James, Illinois Jimmy Francis, and Lucius, Dink Wilson. Oh man, Illinois is just a bad nickname. That's just where the dude's from. Illinois Jimmy.

Yeah, I mean, actually I think it was just his favorite state. Yeah, it could be. Dink was just because he couldn't tie his shoes and he had a fucking pot of soup for a hat. Oh. He was like, oh, that's not bad. I'm dead gold. It's out to trade. Nice hat though. So at any rate, Holmes needed one last person to pull off his insurance scam, a crooked lawyer to broker the whole thing, and Holmes figured if any man knew a crooked lawyer, it would be the handsome bandit.

So Holmes offered Hedgepeth 500 bucks for his help in the scheme and was put in touch with a man named Jeb Thaddee Howe. And as soon as Holmes was sprung from St. Louis, Holmes grabbed Pytzel and headed to Philly. Now Pytzel, who had moved his whole family, including his wife and their five children of St. Louis, for the duration of the insurance scheme, left town on July 29, 1894 after letting Carrie in on the scheme. Pytzel never saw his wife or their children ever again. It's actually a very sad story because they were talking about how he came home drunk. After they solidified the plans, because now the plan is that he was going to go and pretend to be a patent maker, like a patent clerk in this area town.

He was going to set up shop and then he was going to be blown up in a fake explosion because he was an inventor. He came home drunk one night before leaving town and the only time because he told his oldest daughter who came in and he was there like a lulling in the kitchen, totally hammered and turned to her and it was like, you see the stories of my death in the newspaper, it's lie, it's lie. And it's like, it's very sad because it's true because then they all had to play along in order for the quote unquote insurance scam to work. Right, right, right, right, but Alice actually when she heard about it, she did still, like she had her suspicions that her father was still like, she later on thought like, oh now I remember that it was a lie, but when she first heard it, she did believe that her father was actually dead.

Drunks are always saying random things. Yeah, and that's what it was, that the drunk like, she's like, yeah, dad used to come home drunk and say stupid bullshit all the time. So two months later, after Pytzel left St. Louis, his burned and decaying body would be found on the floor of the rented patent clerk's office in Philadelphia, discovered by a neighbor who had been talking to him about patenting some sort of new saw that he had invented. It was some kind of saw thing, it was a flimflam machine. Yeah, it was another flimflam machine. And again, Pytzel had become immediately known in that small little area where he had set up a shop as a drunk. He just showed up and his whole thing was like, I'm staying sober, I'm staying with it, I'm staying straight, and on the racers hatch,

because I am a part of a very complicated nuisance scam. Is that bourbon? What does that taste like? And so this was all part of the plan. Holmes, who had never intended to split the proceeds with Pytzel, had killed the man with chloroform, and it staged his body to look like Pytzel died in an explosion when he lit his pipe too close to a vat of chemical. Which is a ludicrous idea to begin with, it is ludicrously elaborate. There's many different ways you can kill somebody and dismember the face. In 1993, a known drunk, it seems like something he might do.

No, you just topple over, he had three possessions. You topple over the desk, you make the chair slightly askew, and you beat his face in, and then it looks like a robbery. I'm actually going to say H.H. had a better idea. I don't think so. He's a drunkard, I need my smoke. He lights his smoke and the whole thing goes up. That makes no sense. It could happen.

This was kind of at the beginning of forensic police work, because one of the police on the scene, he looked at it and was like, wait a minute, when a body is faced with an explosion, the limbs get very must up. Everything. And so he said his whole body was totally fine except his face was burnt. Superficial burnt. And he reeked of chloroform. Well, so he should have burnt him up a little bit more. Yes, he fired a house.

So Holmes arrived at the Pytal House in St. Louis the same day that Benjamin's wife and children read the announcement for his death. And Carrie was told, listen, let the kids think that their father is dead. It'll be a lot easier if they think he's dead, and then when he's not dead, it'll be a happy little surprise. Yeah, they won't be terrifying. They won't scare the hell out of him. It won't warp their brains or their idea of trust for the rest of time. But also, what's true with this whole thing is that his wife had begged him. It's like Pytal did the classic.

I mean, like, this is the last scam, baby. They were getting listening and they weren't getting out. Don't even think about it. Is there alcohol in your perfume? It was a huge payout. It was $125,000. Huge, yeah. Like, so it was worth the risk, but Carrie didn't, one, didn't know Holmes all that well.

All she knew was that Holmes showed up every once in a while with a bunch of dead women's clothing. But then gave presents to the kids, and at the time, that's how you were a good father. The most good fathers you didn't see for three months at a time. And you'd come home and be like, hello, children. And you'd give a rough, like, weird cigar scented fucking kisses to them, and then give weird sweet candies and leave. Yeah, sweet candies were probably just fruit. Like a plum or something.

That's pathetic. Well, what Holmes needed from the Pytal family was a family member to identify the corpse for the insurance company. And it would be much easier for everyone if the person doing the identification believed that Benjamin was dead. So all Holmes needed was to borrow their eldest daughter, Alice, for just a few days to make the identification. I'm just going to take her up to Philadelphia. We're going to identify this corpse that's not your husband, by the way. Your husband's totally fine. He's totally alive.

We just need her to go up, identify this corpse, and then I'll bring her right back. We need the shady lawyer and these three empty trunks. I'm not bringing anything else with me. We're going to get on this train and we're going to over here where I definitely did not kill your drunk, good for nothing, goon like husband. I just see her in the back of whatever automobile they're traveling in, like Toby McGuire in Fear and Lonely in Las Vegas when he hopped into the car and just scared shitless. And the truth is too, is that like how did Benjamin Pytzel's wife have any faith in the idea that her husband would have been good at this scam? Blind love. It's just unbelievable.

Like women believed in men too much back in the day. Because Pytzel couldn't keep his shit together. He was so hammered all the time, so fucked up. He's not going to be the central cog to a highly elaborate insurance scam. Oh, with a guy who just like keeps, who's had seven wives that you've known him. He had a murder hotel. But he was perfect for HH though. He had grist shoots.

No one knew about the grist shoots. Oh, I feel like you know about him. He got grist shoots and lime pits in the house. There's only so much you can escape. Like you can't say, oh, it's for, because I love this. Yeah, I love the scent of citrus. Yeah, why not? So as to why, I mean, you might ask, why did they take a 15 year old girl to identify this horribly mangled corpse instead of the man's wife?

Propriety. Well, Holmes, he didn't trust Carrie to lie convincingly because she wasn't really into the whole scam in the first place. And besides, he's like, listen, you have three other children. You have your sick infant, your Wharton, to take care of. There was also a more nefarious reason if Holmes wasn't going to pay out to Benjamin. He sure as hell wasn't going to pay out to Benjamin's family either. And what begins here is a long drawn out and particularly cruel process in which Holmes would attempt to kill each and every member of the Pytzel family one by one. And he would come very close to pulling it off.

It's like very metal, metal gear solid, the way he did this. It gets very interesting because he would just kind of, because we're going to see now is that she tails after him and her three, the rest of her kids. Basically, he takes on the kids and they go on this sort of like cat and mouse fucking weird, hostage situation. And then he fucking like snipes him or does the grot to each one? Like what's the move? What's the thing in metal gear solid when you hold the dude and then you get a balloon? I forget what it's called. I haven't played metal gear solid five yet.

I'm sorry, I hung up with fucking holding the other day and it was like, look at my video games. Never, never do that. But if they would have seen him, then an exclamation mark would have gone over his head. You're screwed. So after the particularly gruesome task of identifying Pytzel's body was completed by Alice, which by the way will cover in full on a bonus episode, the autopsy of Benjamin Pytzel. It's very interesting. It's very interesting, but yeah, that'll be one of our bonus episodes once we launch our patreon.

Holmes returned to St. Louis and told Kerry that while listen, there's nothing to worry about. Everything's going just fine. There are insurance investigators on our trail. So we're going to have to take some extra precautions. I left Alice back in Philadelphia, but what I'm going to need to do is take two more of your kids, because the insurance investigators, they're going to be looking for a woman with five kids. Yeah, so just think about it. If you think about it for five seconds, think about it for five seconds.

This woman must have been a drunk. Think about it, but you know what I'm going to say after I say think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it, but think about it. Don't think about it. Think about it. I got your kids. Don't think about it.

I'm nanny. So what happened, but you got to also remember is that HH Holmes was the pinnacle of man in his day. Of course, like she looks at him's like, well, of course, well, you know, he had all these successful businesses. He ran the castle for such a long time. And he's got a wife that he's checking in all the time with while he's killing all these kids. How does he get to go to sleep? That's what I want to say. That's what he's burning, but candles both ends.

You know what he needs is a spa treatment. He'd be crushing Twitter. Oh, you would have been so good at social media. So good social media. So over the next few months, as Henry said, Holmes would take three of Kerry's children, Howard, Nelly and Alice from town to town, registering in hotels under false names, sometimes claiming the kids as his own, sometimes saying he was their uncle, but always changing the story. To breed confusion every time. So what he was doing was he was just moving around. So if once he did, in fact, kill the children, the trail would be impossible to follow.

I actually do feel bad for good uncles because like you can't do anything with your nephews or anything. If you're not getting like, I am their uncle, everyone's just like, follow us. Come with us, please. Because there are only four good uncles. Right. I'm one of them. Oh, yeah. I'm an uncle too.

Yeah. I have a molested nothing. Nope. Good, good. Good to know. I helped my nephew with his English, with his research paper the other night. I bought my niece the entire series of goosebumps. Oh, that's very good.

She read one and said they were frightening her and then they did not tell me, but they gave them all away. So you are the creepy uncle. Unbeknownst to you. And Holmes, as he was moving these kids around, changing his story in a very BTK move, when he was asked his profession while registering at one hotel, he said, well, I suppose, hmm, I am an actor. Ooh. Love actors. Hmm. Professional uncle.

Perfect. That's what I'll say. As Holmes was moving around the kids, he was also moving around Carrie Pytzel, constantly strung in her along saying, all right, so your husband, so we're going to have to go to Toronto next, because that's where your husband is. He's waiting for us there in Toronto. And then once they get to Toronto, he'd say, well, actually, he had to go to Detroit on business for me. Well, he's got a wife that he's decided to keep alive, that he's handling with her because he's still saying that he's working for the ABC copier program or company, whatever it is. Ancestor of the mimeograph. But it just seems like ABC copier, again, just seemed like a dude inside of a box that he would just put it in there and he would draw it up inside the box and go like, stick it out, a little white slave.

And he would say, he kept saying he would make it up. He's like, oh, we're going over here for business. And then we're going to this next place because it's nicer here. We're going to Niagara Falls. I didn't give you a proper honeymoon, so now we're going to go to Niagara Falls. There is no way that he did not have the thought at some point of just being like, I should have just started like a Marriott. Like, I should have just promised continental breakfast and just ran a damn hotel. This is so much work for a big payoff, but not that big of a payoff.

He is loving it. You think he's enjoying this? Oh my God, he is loving it so much because he has these three people that he's manipulating and screaming in the back seat all the time. In certain cities, he would keep all three people, all three groups of people blocks away from each other. You see, I actually think it's not so much pleasure. There is a pleasure over when it all works out. Right. But I think what he does is he pushes himself to the extreme of stress and then makes these decisions and then does the next thing.

And that's what, it's not a love, it's an addiction to the release after stress, stress, stress, stress, stress, up to my top. Am I just about to be caught? Is everything about the fall apart? Boom, I made it. I'm a fucking genius. And that's where the pleasure is. It's not the manipulating. Yeah, I think this sucks for him.

This is work. But he's doing the game on purpose because then it feels like you're doing something. Like, it's what BTK would, in that comparison, what he would do when he would build the anticipation of killing somebody. Where he would go and he would track them and track them until it was just about to burst. And it's very interesting. It's just someone who literally is constantly bored. There is a misconception that criminals don't work their asses off. Yeah.

This is a full commitment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's also, he's also one of those rare killers. We talk about process killers and product killers. He's both because the process was when he was in the hotel and he's killing these women because it's making him hard. The product part of the killing, that's what this is. He's not planning to kill the children for pleasure. He didn't kill Benjamin Paisel for pleasure.

He's killing for money. It's all money. Yeah, it's all money. He's just mixing business and pleasure on this. He just finally figured out, it's like, oh, okay, I do the scams and I do killing on the side. I can actually combine these two things. Yeah, it's like pizza on a bagel. Yeah, you enjoyed eating pizza on a bagel and then you sold them and then you started a little business.

That's what he should have done is getting onto the pizza in a bagel business instead of all the killing. Well, we should debate Totino's Pizza World versus Pizza on a Bagel one of these days. Yeah, I think we should. We'll do that for like three or four hours. That's a bonus episode. So the children, they spent their days alone, locked in hotel rooms. They would constantly be writing letters to their mother, but Holmes kept every single one of them because it's in the letters are just so sad because they...

He told me like, mommy, you never write. Yeah. Why don't you write? Because I've been writing to you. H.H. Holmes keeps gripping on me, but he bought me fancy umbrella. How I wish you could see my umbrella, but you don't write. See you in Toronto. Yeah, and well, it started off as an adventure for the kids.

Like, oh, we're traveling from place to place. We're seeing so many different locations. This is so exciting. And then it starts getting cold and they only have like these tiny thin jackets and Holmes, he just sees buying them jackets, buying them clothing. He sees that as wasted money. Like, why would I ever do that? Yeah, why would I dress these dead kids?

Yeah, because that's what people who later on gave witness to is they said that there was this... And that's one thing that part of the scam that he never thought of is that he always stood out because he was this immaculately dressed, very nice looking man with these three waves, these horrible looking children that are dirty, they're in torn up, ripped clothing, they're always cold. But he also did the same thing to the house, too. The murder castle turned into this drab, like, fallen down thing because he became bored with it. Now, like, we're gonna see the first child to die was the youngest kid because he was being a pain in the ass. Yeah, he was starting to scream and yell and draw even more attention to him.

So he told the two little girls, he's like, listen, I'm gonna take your brother to live with my cousin, Minnie. Minnie! I'll take the kids, I'm Minnie! I'm your cousin, Minnie! Oh, my goodness. It rhymes with Winnie! It's Ann! Ann! Ann! Ann! It's Minnie! Rather stay with H.H. Holmes, I think. In reality, though, Holmes took the boy to a secluded, rented house, killed him, chopped up his body using surgical instruments that he had sharpened specifically for this event. Oh, these are just sharpened.

Yeah. And burned the body in the stove and all that was found of little Howard were teeth, bone fragments, and pieces of his clothing. Nellie and Alice would be killed soon after in Toronto. Holmes somehow convinced the girls to enter a trunk outfitted with a hole just big enough for him to run a hose into. And like so many others, the Python girls died by gas. Get on, get on, get in the trunk. It's a fun game in the trunk. Listen, you're getting in the trunk, I'm getting in the trunk. Don't you think about it? Don't think about it.

Think about it? Don't think about it. Don't think about it, it's getting in the trunk. Just think about the trunk, alright? And now by gas, does that mean he farted inside of the hole? Yes, yes, he was slamming beans down his gullet. It took a little bit of time, but sure enough, he asphyxiated them. I think let's let's let it hang. Hmm, assphyxiated.

Boom! I'm on fire. So Holmes then took the bodies to another rented house, borrowed a shovel from a neighbor, telling him he needed to bury some potatoes in the cellar. What is happening? Can I get your shovel? I gotta... What do you need? For what? For what? You know, I gotta bury shovels, bury some... So, I love the shovel, one of my favorite shovels.

I don't just give it away willy-nilly. You gotta bury some... boy... carrots, no? No, no, no, no, no, I already buried my carrots. Ask me some potatoes, I gotta bury them down in the cellar for the... for cellar potatoes, you're thinking about it, don't even think about it. Here you go, have the shovel. But it was not potatoes that H.H. Holmes was burying. What was it?

Little girl. Oh, different. They don't grow. The investi- No, they don't. That's not how life works. No, leave it or not, you don't bury a child and it turns into a tree full of life. That also sounds like the latest cure album, Buried Little Girls Don't Grow. Oh, it's sad.

So, the investigator who found the bodies after an extensive six-month search, his name was Frank Geyer. He said when he first put the shovel into the ground, quote, or only a slight hole had been made when the gas was burst forth, the stench was frightful. So, while the bodies were so badly decomposed that Alice's hair slid from her scalp as they picked her up, the youngest was the only one with actual physical harm. Her feet had been amputated to prevent identification upon discovery, for Nelly had a clubfoot.

We don't know what Holmes did with the feet, though. Oh, you know. So, you know, you ever see that Charlie Chaplin bit where he's got the biscuits on the forks and he dances with it? Yeah, Benny and June. Benny and June, yeah, yeah, yeah. Probably something like that. Get him to dance a little bit on a little tap routine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or just every time somebody asks, he was like, they're baby feet. Don't think about it. You think about it. You think about it? Don't think about it. But, you know, okay, so Holmes, he's killing Benjamin Pytle. He's killing kids. He's planning to kill more.

He's killed dozens of women back in Chicago. He would not be arrested for any of these things. He would be arrested for insurance fraud and had it not been for one man, Holmes would have likely pulled off the Benjamin Pytle insurance scam and killed the entire Pytle family. You know who Holmes forgot about? Who? The handsome bandit.

Whoa! I bet he'll go up all. No, it's very interesting because he, because that's what the Marion had, when it happened, when Agent Holmes told him his secret, he's just like, oh, this is fucking great. And he got all the information that he wanted from Holmes about his whole insurance scam. And he's just like, as soon as my sentence comes, I'm going to flip this fucking idiot who told me he was holding plans

because this guy's not a real Desperado. I bet he looked at A.J. Holmes and was like, this guy's a fucking psychopath, but he does not know how to be a Desperado. He's a dandy. He's a handsome bandit. Yes. Well, Marion is that he's the, like, real life, like, bad man of the old, like, bad man of the old West.

Really like a bad man. But the weirds are not on or among thieves, but like, you know, he was a train robber, did some intense shit, like, was a hardcore guy. Jesse James type of guy. Like Black Bart from A Christmas Story. Exactly like Black Bart from A Christmas Story. But with more rape. Uh-oh.

A lot more. So Marion never got that $500 and was far more interested in cutting a deal with the judge in exchange for a pardon, which he got, by the way. And a little thing about Marion Hedgepeth died in a shootout at a gas station in 1909. I didn't even know they had gas stations in 1909. That's kind of fun. Yeah. They were dangerous.

Yeah. Sounds like it. So as soon as Hedgepeth saw the announcement for Pytzel's death, he put two and two together as like, oh, okay, that's the, that's the score that that Holmes guy was telling me about. Hedgepeth calls over a guard, tells the guard the whole story. The guard tells the judge. The judge calls Philadelphia. And so Holmes gets arrested in Boston for insurance fraud on November 17th, 1894 by the octopus-like

system of the Pinkerton Detectivations. So there's like no one was good in this time. No. Just like everyone's a criminal. Well, to be honest, it's like everybody was a criminal, but everybody was kind of like fine with it. Yeah. Everyone was good.

I mean, they were actually good men. Like we mentioned them. The Pinkerton Detectivations was a hardcore group of guys. Yeah. They actually just had something in the news recently. There was a $500,000 car or something stolen and the Pinkerton Club or Detective Agency is on it. They're still around?

They're still around. They just read about them a week ago. Swear to God. Wow. But yeah, the Pinkertons, well, they were all also like a pretty shady group of characters. People would also hire the Pinkertons as kind of a personal goon squad. But the Pinkertons, that's where we get the term private eye from because that's what the Pinkertons called themselves, the all-seeing eye.

They're still on the case. But they were good at their jobs. They were extremely good. And the other guy that Bears mentioned that we'll probably talk about in our upcoming Supercop episode, Frank Geier. Frank Geier spent six months on the trail of H.H. Holmes and he was the one that figured out despite all of the deception, despite all of the name changes, he was the one that tracked down the children.

It's very interesting because they really were, they had been following him for a while. Yeah. H.H. Holmes was not doing a good job. All of the different stories made him incredibly suspicious, constantly. Yeah. Detective work was just so much different. I mean, now you take it to a lab, you get DNA evidence three weeks later, you can put things together so much easier.

It was all eye witness, it was all interviews. That's the only way that he was able to actually find those kids. And so H.H. He's in prison. Carrie Pytzel finds him finally and says, okay, so you're in prison, where are the kids? H.H. Holmes said, okay, here's the deal. Yes, I did commit insurance fraud.

That was a corpse that was placed there by me up in Philadelphia, but it was a cadaver. Benjamin Still alive and well, and he is now with the kids and they're either in South America or Florida. Officer, I gotta say this. It looks like you're thinking about it. Right. But what I need you to do is you go ahead and take a thinking about it and give it a bit of a go reversal of that.

All right. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Just beat him with sticks. But when the children's bodies were finally found, Holmes claimed that many, along with the mysterious accomplished named Hatch, H.H. Hey, I'm Hatch.

I'm Hatch. And this is my friend, Minnie. I'm Minnie. I'm Hatch and I help her kill babies. I'm Minnie and I kill the baby with my friend Hatch. God, man, that is the most annoying character that's ever come out of you. You don't like it? I love it.

So when, yeah, so that's what Holmes said. He said that many, along with Hatch, had killed the children while they were in her care. But now, with an obviously grisly triple child murder, at the very least, attached to Holmes, investigators finally decided to take a look at the castle that Holmes had run for years over in Englewood. The evidence inside was more than enough to seal Holmes' fate. They found the acid vats. They found the surgical tables.

They talked to the groundskeeper, this guy named Quinlan, and he was like, how did you not know? I was never allowed to clean the second floor. I mean, at some point, the detectives just had to look at each other and be like, we should have done this like seven years ago, huh? You know what? You thinking about it? You thinking about it?

Don't think about it. Don't think about it. Okay. You know what? Thank you so much. That's the one thing I learned from that A.J. Holmes guy. Thank you so much. And by the way, Quinlan killed himself with Stricknein just a few years later.

And his suicide note, the only thing it said, one sentence just said, I couldn't sleep. Oh, God, that's terrifying. Yeah. Oh, sorry. I couldn't sleep last night, but I like being alive. So Holmes would eventually be convicted of only four murders, but he would confess to up to 30 and always the adapter. Holmes went from publishing a set of memoirs professing his innocence before the discovery

of the children and the castle to saying the bodies found inside the castle. They were all donated cadavers. I got them all completely legal. I'm a doctor. I'm using them. But once they finally proved that once he once he knew that he was going to die, that he was not going to get out of it, because there were no appeals in 1894, 1896 greased shoots down to burning areas.

Lime pools. Yes. He finally said that he was he would go back and forth. He said that he was alternately possessed by or guided by the devil. He famously said, I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor besides the bed where I was ushered

into the world and he has been with me since or she. I do not want to discriminate. That's right. Cisgender. Gender is fluid too. Gender is fluid. Yes. So Holmes was hanged on May 7th, 1896.

He was not one of the lucky ones to have his neck snapped when the doors opened beneath his feet. So was strangled to death slowly over 15 minutes before finally being pronounced dead. As far as the castle goes, much of it was destroyed in an arson attempt in 1895. And today in its place stands a post office, which is, I mean, our post office is fucking miserable enough to really need to be on the lot of a murder hotel. Yeah. Yeah.

I love the federal government is like, we will take the land. We will set up an institution that will eventually at some point lead to massacres in offices. Okay. Okay. Well, first thing we're going to do is just like, if that post office doesn't work, we're going to put in dog crematorium. Yeah.

Then we'll retry the post office. Yeah. And that's it. That's H.H. Holmes. Wow. So we died slowly, which is nice. Yeah. Yeah.

It's very nice. 15 minutes of hanging and struggling there. You know, and I, and it's very interesting because I would put him along the lines of like either like a very notorious evil man or it's like, you know, but it's interesting because normally I like how it didn't kill him immediately. There's something about that too, where it's like Vlad, the vampire, Vlad the Dracool, like how that fucking, his prolonged death, how they killed him over days, the same thing with the Rasputin and like Mussolini when they were calling him Mussolini.

Rasputin a break. Rasputin was a piece of shit, all right, and they, there's something adds to the sort of like mythical nature of this like legendary boogeyman of like, it took a little bit to kill him too. And it's a long time for him to go down. Rasputin sounds like something you take if you have a cold. It sounds like a good medicine. I like that very, very much.

Wait a second. Is this the reader's digest laughter is the best medicine section? I'll tell you one thing. Oh my God, reader's digest laughter is the best medicine section is amazing and my father was always very depressed. He could never, he never get it. He always submitted. He never got in.

He always, he, so your dad was a joke writer as well. He was a truck driver. My father was a truck driver. Yeah. He had a couple of bits up his sleeve there. Never really got to hear him. H.H. Holmes, people, I think miss, they called, they throw that term genius around way too much when it comes to a lot of these serial killers, but there's just really no denying

that the man was completely brilliant. Yeah. You're sort of good at it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's like most of these things stay in people's minds. Yeah.

All right. Wow. What a series. Great job, Marcus. Thank you very much. Wonderful research. We've got, we've got to give a much thanks to Sammy Coughlin and Megan Fierro-Root on this episode.

As far as their assistance on a research goes, couldn't have done it without him. You did say Sammy's name like he was a victim of serial killers. She's, it's a girl. It's a girl. It's a woman. You've never met Sammy? I've met Sammy. You've met Sammy many times.

Oh, I love her. I really enjoy her. All of our interns are very short and that's the thing why I don't think you see them because you're just walking around underneath the clouds by your shoulders. Very good joke, Henry. You should do that for Reader's Digest. Laughter is the best medicine. All right, guys.

Don't forget this Saturday, November 28th is the last podcast on the Left Live show. Henry's going to be here for the first time in months. It starts at 10 p.m. It's totally free. Get here early because I know we've got a ton of people coming to this one. It's going to fill up quick. So that's the Creek in the Cave, 1093 Jackson Avenue and Long Island City, Queens. It's going to be great.

We won't be doing one in December just because it's too hectic with everybody's schedule. So this is the last one before the new year. Yeah, this is the last one until January. We sadly have to give a deference to fucking Christmas. It's a capitalism thing. Don't even think about Jesus. We're going home. Me and you are going home.

Yeah, going home. I'm going home in Marcus. All right. Follow Henry on Twitter at Henry Loves You at Marcus Parks. Marcus is at Marcus Parks. I'm at Ben Kissel. Thanks for supporting all the shows here that Marcus and I do together as well. Top at page seven, roundtable of gentlemen, sex and other human activities.

Yeah. And if you want your last podcast on the Left T-shirt, go to Cave Comedy. What happened to you? Go to cavecomedyradio.com slash merch. There are only 25 bucks each for Americans, $40 everywhere else in the rest of the world. And also, I got a little project going on right now over on Spotify. If you want to follow me, I'm doing a playlist for every single year from 1950 to 2015. I'm up to 1980 right now.

Playlist is running at this moment about 1,200 songs. So go follow me on Spotify. Check those out. And if you don't listen, he'll start smoking again. Yeah, exactly. And it is keeping him from killing random people in his apartment building. That's great. Megustalations.

I'm just going to throw that out there. I rarely do the Megustalations. People are wondering what it means on Facebook, and I have no idea. It means catch up. It means congratulations for liking something. Great. Sure. Hail Satan.

We all know what that means. That means have a happy Thanksgiving. And Hail Geen. Hail yourselves. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to cavecomedyradio.com.