Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 116: HH Holmes and his Murder Castle

Episode Date: November 3, 2022

gareth was in town so we recorded a spooky episode with him (sorry for lateness) see Gareth at Railnatter: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzA-8fUrw2C5cRcP9gO5BwA Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Oh, yeah. I'm not sure. Rashes catches on fire and murderous. Yes. Like that team from maximum overdrive. And then when Alice is ready, we'll go. I'm ready. I just started recording and we'll see how much of a space that gives me.

All right. Hello. And welcome to, Well Scares Your Problem. Oh, it's Halloween. It's scary. That's right. Do I have my creepy drops here? I think I might do.

Just continue. Yeah. Do you want to see yourselves while I find them? There you go. Thank you. I'm Justin Rosniak, Brackets Scary. I'm the person who's talking right now. My pronouns are he and him.

All right. Go. I am, I don't know, Malice Coldwell Killie. Yeah. My pronouns are she and her. I'm the person who's talking now. Oh, Liam. Oh, Liam.

Yes. Hi. I am Liam, but from beyond the grave. I was recently murdered by our guest at some sort of HH Holmes murder mansion tribute thing. Yes. Oh, yes. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah, I'm downstairs. I'm the corpse formerly known as Garth Dennis because nothing rhymes with or can be punned into my regular stupid name. What about Scarith Dennis? Scarith Dennis is funny. Yeah, that's pretty good. Let's go with that.

Yeah, let's go with that. Okay. We're a true crime cut. We're a true crime podcast today. That's right. Stay sexy and don't get murdered. We never think the police did anything wrong, even though we collect examples of them fucking everything up.

We're going to make money and lots of views and stuff like that off of the misery of living and named persons. Yeah. We'll sell you a little mug with like a photo of someone's dead aunt on there and you can buy it and it'll be like cute, you know? Yes, exactly. We'll sell like a million of them. Recall ourselves.

What's the really shitty one that I hate? No, that's all of them. My favorite murder is the one you're thinking of. It's the one I was referencing. Actually, it's not all of them. I think last podcast on the left is pretty good. It is possible to do a good true crime podcast. It's just that this will not be it.

We will sell you a votive candle of David Parker Ray. All you have to do to do a good true crime podcast is not suck off the police. That's true. That's literally all you have to do. Not like wildly disrespect the victims. Those two things would really kind of go hand in hand. And yet it's it's a bar that's only once been surmounted. Yes.

What you see on the screen in front of you here is a perfectly ordinary building. Yeah, it's a two over one. It is. Yeah, I think the whole thing was timber framed. So it's really just a it's a it's a three over zero. They've not finished the top floor. Believe this is after the first fire. Oh, shenanigans foreshadowing.

Yes, foreshadowing. I do like this guy in the foreground here, who has proven that from the invention of photography until today, it is perfectly normal and responsible to see someone with a camera and stand stock still stare down the lens and be like, what the fuck is that? What are you looking at? What are you looking at? I don't know my pronouns neither do you. I like they stood in the middle of the of the kind of the tramway tracks.

He's about to get hit by a. So you can read smog is in this photo. That's true. The honorable member of the 18th century. Yes. Now, you may think this is an ordinary building, but what most people don't know is that it is actually an ordinary building, scary, spooky. Today we're going to talk about H.H. Holmes and his murder castle.

Yeah, the double apostrophes around Castle are actually appropriate. It's not Castle. It's normal. It's a normal. It's normal three story building. It was just a normal building. First we have to do the goddamn news. Dear, oh dear, the SNM lady was outlived by a cabbage.

She was. We're now on to our third Prime Minister in what, like seven weeks, something like. We put out like Jesus Christ. We put out like two episodes total during the Prime Minister ship of Liz Truss. That's right. Yeah. For us. Versus.

Let us. Let us one. Yes. Yeah. I mean, obviously the thing is that for the period of the trust ministry, I was very busy working as a special advisor. But you know, I was still able to record this podcast in my downtime. I was unfortunately drafted by the fake news media for a while.

She didn't. She didn't get shit done at all, which is perhaps not surprising considering she is now the shortest live Prime Minister and the guy after her in that record died in office of a heart attack. Was it? Oh, is it hard? I thought it was cholera. No, I think he died of a heart.

George Canning, although given that this was in the 19th century, he could have died of like apoplexy or like Dutchman's bite or something. Did she serve longer than Warren Harding? No, she is. She is the shortest serving by I think it's 65 days or so. Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking Warren Harding.

122 days. President Warren Harding. The guys. Yes. Yeah. OK. Sorry. I was.

I was. I just know that the number was like 100. The previous record was like 119. The brain didn't connect to you about Warren Harding. Possibly. Possibly the shortest serving head of state in peacetime ever. Yeah. Yeah.

I believe Ben Harrison served. I may have been a little longer than that, like 55 or something. I'm sure someone in the comments knows. No, no, no. She's actually beaten William Henry Harrison because William Henry Harrison died as a consequence of his inaugural speech because he, you know, gave him D.C. That was who I was thinking. That's who I was thinking.

Without wearing a coat. He died after 32 days in office, which means she has like almost three weeks on him. So you know, that's that's the lesson that like that's why your mum always told you to wear a coat when you're going outside because of William Henry Harrison. Yeah. Otherwise you might, you might break a record though. Yeah. What I thought was funny is this, the Daily Star is a trash tabloid.

Oh yeah. This was their thing they did. They set up a webcam on their lettuce and a picture of Liz Truss. What's funny is that like the day after she resigned, they had a front page and making fun of or rather being accusatory about people who were comparing her to a lettuce and saying it was trivializing. Well, listen, if you can't have it both ways, what's the point of being a British tabloid? Right.

Of course. Spectacular. Yeah. And so now we have Rishi Sunakin who's going to do austerity again. The entire country is going to collapse over the winter. It's going to be absolutely barbaric. It's going to look like children of men, but less colorful. And then at some point after that, Kierstam is going to get in and make jokes illegal.

So I look forward to all of that. Oh, that's going to cause problems for us. Oh yeah. No. Well, we're hosting the United States. That's not to say. Yeah. I'll say for right this very second.

Garrett, Garrett, there's never been a better time to overstay your visa. Yeah. Leave your wife. Only be with us. Sort of more of a sort of a cult vibe than a podcast inches away from getting a compound. Yeah. I would like a compound. Oh, no, that'd be fun.

I mean, the thing is right. We say things as jokes in this segment and then they just kind of like have a way of happening. Yeah. If you have a line on a compound. Yeah. I've been spotting a lot of real estate in my various shenanigans around Philadelphia. There are a lot of empty lots that you could turn into a compound for sure.

No problem. You got to get one that has real access, you know. Yes. The one by Woodland does. Yeah. That's true. Well, person written still fucked up. Bad.

Yeah. Do that. Still bad. It's going to get worse. Other news. This is a second piece of news I put in entitled. How are you so bad at this? Oh my God.

This is your little like Ukraine war updates. It's not very like wonkish or military. It's that essentially like Putin has one way of shoring up domestic political support in Russia. As we saw with his, you know, first election, which is to blow up a shitload of apartment buildings. Now the FSB doesn't have the ability to do that anymore. The Russian Air Force has had to take over that duty.

So now they've managed to do this twice in a week. So they whack a plane and do an apartment building. Why? Twice. I didn't do it twice. I get once. Once it's fine. Fair enough.

But everyone, everyone fucks up once. It's the location that's funnier about these two. Right. Oh yeah. Because the, okay. So there's the one on the left here. This is an ear cut because they flew an SU 30 into a building. The right is in with the beautifully silo.

I said pilot coming down like, oh, I fucked up. Yeah. That's gone poorly. Yeah. Everyone's mad when this guy shows up to the party. Yeah. That that's in yes. Neither of these are anywhere near the war.

Yes. Cause like across the as of sea from Ukraine. It cuts cause way fucking further out in Siberia. Isn't that like like Lake Baikal or somewhere? Yeah. Give or take. I mean, yeah. My, my entire.

That's not, that's not very good. No. And both of these were like good. Both of these were training flights, which culminated in this happening and then flying into apartment buildings. Well, that's why you, that's why you do training. If you didn't do training, this would happen a lot more. Even worse.

That's right. That's right. I'm sure that I'm sure they're giving people real good training. All these conscripts in the Russian Air Force right now. I'm sure they have a really great training program. The guy who has to like screw the wings on, he's. What if every day were 9 11 brought to you by the Russian Air Force. Yeah.

The, uh, the one in your cuts gone, the left here, this one only killed its pilots. They just flew into an empty house. Um, right. It did manage to knock out power to a bunch of the city, which is very funny. This one looks like it killed a whole shitload of people. Oh, and it did. Uh, this is killed like 15 people and injured another 19. Hey, both pilots got out as you see here with the little, the little parachute.

Training. Yeah. That's the Russian military is very good at killing Russians. Yes. Uh, and by donkeys. Yeah. And so they just, they just came down, landed and presumably had sort of an awkward time until they, you know, someone came to pick them back up again.

Um, and they're so few. I mean, they're so few. The Russian military has just hammered through its personnel. Oh yeah. They're going to be flying again. They can't go. They can't be in the service. They have to get back in a plane again because they haven't got nearly enough pilots.

So. Yeah. Only to 9 11 another Russian apartment building. Imagine you're the guy who, imagine you're the guy who 9 11's two apartment buildings. I mean, what do you do after that? You know the thing about how pilot nicknames like are usually based on like some embarrassing mistake you made or whatever. I think that's kind of like stretching the limit.

Oh, they called me two buildings because of what I did to those people in those apartments. Yeah, I think it's kind of stretching the nicknames ability to like make you feel comfortable. Yeah. This is bad to say. This is bad to say. They call me. They call me a Boris women and children.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a good allegory for the general state of things in Russia right now. 100%. Look how bad I wanted. I don't endorse the law. I don't endorse the liberal blood bloodlust over Russian deaths, but it is really funny when they fuck up. Well, it's not nice to know that they are hammering their way through young Russians. That's not good.

That's bad. But as as Radiohead sang, you do it to yourself. You do. And that's what really hurts. That's true. All right. That was the goddamn news. Okay.

Now we're going to talk about this guy who looks like every sort of like marketing executive in Shoreditch in about 2015. Yeah. Yeah. So this is this guy. This guy is H.H. Holmes. Yeah. He did stick and pokes in a spare time.

Yeah. Real big field of the men singers. Really into like moustache oils. Sailor Jerry Santos. Painted on eyebrows. Yes. Yeah. He was born as Herman Webster Mudget.

Oh, that's unfortunate. May 16th, 1861 in Gilmantan, New Hampshire. We do have to give him critical support for blazing a trail of if your name sounds stupid, just change it. Yes. We like that. We approve of that. A lesson I have not learned.

Your name is good. It's fine. Yeah. You have a good name, Gareth. It's a weird combination. You have two first names. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

That's a lot better than having two last names. Oh, yeah. Fuck you, man. You should be shit. I get along fine with two. Thank you very much. So, I'm in the context of your first name is a last name. I see, yeah.

Yes. Kelly is the first name. That is true. That's true. Two first names and one first names and one last name. Yeah. That's fine. I can just make one of them like a middle name.

You know, it balances out. This is perfectly acceptable. A middle name has to be something that's really weird, I think. Yeah, like Alec. You only see an Alec aside from Alec Jones, you know? So, yeah, that's that is. I'm an Alecster. I do like an Alecster.

For the deep lore people, for the rail network people listening to this because I know you're out there. Yes, you all know my middle name is Alec. Yes, very good. You can pat yourselves on the back. Why? Okay. Mine's Sydney, but it's spelled wrong.

Next day. I don't have a middle name because I didn't choose one. So, if you've got a good middle name out there, you know, right in maybe. Sydney, but spelled wrong. Maybe like S-Y-D-N-W-E. So, typically for. Sydney with more wise. Typically for men.

It's spelled S-I-D-N-E-Y. And for women, it's S-Y-D-N-E-Y. Can you guess which spelling I got? Hint. It's S-Y-D-N-E-Y because my dad didn't fucking know there were two spellings. That's cool. You're like named after the city. No, I named after my mother and her father, her grandfather.

I don't know. We're just getting perilously close to answering all of our security questions. Yeah, exactly. My security questions are all Ross eats poops. Ross eats poops. Hey, Gareth. What's your national insurance number? I almost instinctively would read it right out to you there.

I'm pretty sure you could do nothing with it. It's not like a social security number. I'm pretty sure you could do absolutely nothing with a national insurance number. Two breast augmentations for Gareth Dennis? Yes. What the fuck? My breast augmentations. What are breast augmentations?

I think you're tits bigger, Alice. What? No, I was complaining because the idea of that joke was that Gareth had stolen my breast augmentation. Oh, how could he do that? No, you're stealing his. I think it'd be funny. I think it'd be funny if you're your middle name. Falsely.

Who do you think gave you the breasts? And I'm just like lying there like, no. When there are only one pair. One pair. Yeah. The New York Times or whoever's listening to us in our newfound moment of respectability. Fuck you. We will never be.

We will never be decent at this. No. So I miss a budget here. Yeah. Our friend Herman here, he went to University of Michigan to become a doctor. That does explain the psychopathic. Yeah. Yeah.

This is true. I worked in the anatomy lab, right? It's tracking real good. Yeah. Yeah. Where he and his professor, Professor William James Herdman, did the normal thing you do in the anatomy lab in the 1800s. You go rob some graves.

Yeah. Yeah. You got to find some cadavers. Not so many people are donating their bodies to science at this point. Right. This is such a waste of your time. If you're a medical school in like the 1880s, I guess at this point, there's so much other shit you could be doing.

You could be doing cocaine 23 hours of the day. Yeah. You could just be injecting unknown chemicals into yourself. And these guys, is it grave robbing? I mean, it beats phrenology, I guess. But yeah. Well, yeah. I don't know.

It sounds like it might be fun. Well, robbing a grave. Yeah. It doesn't sound like it'd be that bad, right? Yeah. It's deep. And I don't know. I'm not so sure.

And the bits fall off if it's a bit old. I don't care if the bits fall off. Honestly, that's a turnout for me. You got to find a fresh one. You got to find a fresh one. Speaking of fresh one. Speaking of fresh one. Hey.

Hey. What's it? What if a necrophiliac and an alcoholic got in common? Both enjoy cracking open a cold one. Yeah. You can't take that one past me. Yeah. Yeah.

The dirt's already like broken up for you. You're just, you know, you dig a lazy six foot deep hole. You take the coffin out. Grab the body. Put it back in. The guys already broke. Citation marks, but for corpse robbing, sure. Yeah.

Yeah. The guys already did the hard part for you. Like the grave diggers. But like people are pretty like ungainly. It's a carry, right? Like any. Yeah. That's a two matter.

I assume you got a couple guys with you on the grave robbing. Yeah. He's like fully dead. Just cannot. You know? Yeah. I was speaking of dickheads. Go Phils.

So, so he is, you know, this is just standard sort of sociopath guy. You know, he's a serial liar. He's a philanderer. He's a manipulator. He's normal sociopathic shit. He's good as a doctor. You know, he's a doctor. Yeah.

Exactly. Um, so. Does he graduate medical school? Yes. Great. And he looks exactly like this. I didn't actually put this in as a resemblance. I was looking for an image for scams.

But if you go back and forth. It's actually quite good. Yeah. You can really see the resemblance here. This is true. Um, so he had some sort of early griffs and swindles he was into. Right. Incredible.

You know, cause yeah, yeah. A nice swindle. Um, now grave robbing and subsequent human dissection are fun. Right. I would say the bills though. I would. Yeah. But listen, do what you love.

You will never work a day in your life. You say that, but you've never tried to make a living as a, as a grave robber. That's true. I haven't. Well, during this process, Holmes finds his real passion, which is insurance fraud. Oh, that's a victimless crime. We're back in the day. Like people just giving out insurance just for whatever, right?

You could have a conteen at this point. It must have been so much easier. Yes. The scam was pretty simple. You take out a life insurance policy. You go Robert grave and you make the body look like it was in a tragic accident. Then you claim the benefits of the life insurance policy. Rinse and repeat.

Right. You don't have to like do any like ID checks to take out a life insurance policy on someone else either. So no one's going to ask questions that this one guy with his moustache just keeps coming back around. You've got to not worry about that. I like the idea that they've got five just they've only got five cadavers and they kind of have them all in a shed and they're kind of getting slowly more battered and bruised

as they've staged more and more sort of crashes and it's like tidying them up and one of them has got an arm off and they're kind of like, oh, these are getting really bashed up. Yeah. They're going to have to go get another one. This guy, Dr. Mudger, he's so unlucky. Like he's had like six aunts die of explosions. Can you believe that? He did this several times in college, but he left it behind after graduation and instead

tried to take. Useful indiscretion. I know, right? Yeah. We've all done things in college that we kind of cringed around. Let's not do that. Let's not have this discussion. Liam, did you rob a grave?

Alice, robbing a grave would be considered ethical compared to some of the shit I did in college. That is fine. Just fine. Don't worry about me. Worry about yourselves. Mm hmm. He decided to take a respectable day job after college, right?

That's Mr. Grave Robert to use. Yeah, exactly. Literally, he's like, I didn't spend seven years of grave robbing medical school to be called Mr. Grave Robert. What? What do they call the guy who robbed the fewest grades who graduated medical school? Doctor. So he briefly worked at the Norristown State Hospital in Pennsylvania.

Oh, no. Yeah. But he didn't like that job. He started working at a drug store. Because it was a fucking Norristown? Probably. Then he worked in a drug store in Philly. What's the drug so neat adults at full?

Like you could just fucking give out anything if you're a pharmacist at that point. I guess I guess the store sent out a bad prescription, which killed a kid. And then although HH Holmes claimed not to be involved, he fled the city for Chicago. Right. I did read a bit about his early life and it contains the phrase left town a lot. Yeah. Yeah. Frequently, frequently going somewhere else.

But I believe this is the first time he actually changed his name. He became, he went from, what's his face? Mudgeon. Mudgeon. Yeah. I became Henry Howard Holmes. Right. Man, you could just get away with every crime.

I mean, you could still get away with every crime if you're white, but like. I think he was white and a doctor. Yeah. And like there was basically no cops yet. How the fuck did he ever get caught for anything? Especially at the time when pharmacists were just dispensing anything. Gellignite, cocaine, heroin, strictening, inventing Pepsi. I mean.

Nitroglycerin. Yeah. Yeah. Like one glass jar full of nitroglycerin tablets, please. Yum yum. Delicious. And a bag of Gellignite for my wife. Pepperton, you son of a bitch.

Holmes took a job at a drug store near 63rd and Halstead streets in Englewood, Chicago. Right. Hmm. And after a fairly short period of time, he bought the store and also a vacant lot across the street from the store. A lot of people say this is the point where we get to the thing where it's like with some with some help from his parents and we'll go. Sing a line, Bert.

Yeah. You know what? I actually have no idea. Especially since he could have gone. You got to remember he's doing crimes this whole time, mostly insurance fraud and other kinds of fraud. Not sensing huge amounts of competence from this guy, though. So is he competent enough to have money with it?

I suppose he could have it in like an old timey suitcase that's like he drags around and just a few dollars sort of fly out the back. Sort of sort of sort of a sort of a music man type situation. Yeah. I don't know where he gets the money from, to be honest. I know he buys the store legitimately. A lot of people say, oh, he murdered the honors. No, they outlived homes by like a couple of decades.

It was the most devious murder plus of all. The most devious murder plot of all. The one where you don't murder the people to catch you. It takes a lot of patience, but eventually they will die. It takes the village to kill a child. This is my plan to murder Henry Kissinger. And you know, it's not working so far, but I'm keeping the faith. H.H.H.Homes had some big plans, right?

He was going to build a bigger store with apartments on top. There's going to build a five over one. Of such things are the Coca-Cola Corporation builds off, you know, like enterprising pharmacists. Yes. All right. So it was finished in 1887 and the contractor sued him for nonpayment in 1888. Deals are my art form.

This guy does some deals. This guy loves some deals. Mr. Musk. You made it. They call me Dr. Deals. Yes. Now, after the building is finished, Holmes finally gets down to the hard work of murdering people.

There he goes. Yes. After a while, you have to like generate your own corpses to grieve for all, I guess. This is true. What was his plan with the murdering? Did he just decide he needed the corpses or was he just fancying it? I'm pretty sure he just murdered people when it was convenient for him to murder people. So the first murder, and so I drew a lot from historian Adam Seltzer,

who wrote a book about H.H. Holmes about five years ago, which I don't have the name of on this slide, but I do on the next slide. Because he's sort of debunked a lot of the sensationalism around H.H. Holmes. H.H. Holmes, the true history of the white city devil. Yes. Lots of details are sketchy, of course, because he was grifting everyone constantly. But the first likely murder was Julius Speith. And Julius Speith was the wife of a man named Ned Connor,

who worked in Holmes's pharmacy and then rented an apartment above the pharmacy from H.H. Holmes. Fucking landlords. Yeah. What if your landlord was your boss and also killed your wife? What are they good for? Yeah. Absolutely nothing.

Oh, I know there's Ned Flanders voice in my head, but I can't quite do it. Don't do that. I can't quite do it. How about if you killed Mord Flanders? Yeah, exactly. With a t-shirt cannon. Holmes was not content to simply claw back the wages from Ned. He had an affair with Ned's wife.

Oh, piece of shit. Yeah. He was like a serial bigamist, wasn't he? Because every time he would marry a woman and then leave town on account of his many crimes, change his name, marry another woman, rinse and repeat. Yes. Yeah, he did that, I think, about four times. I'm not blaming the victims here.

But if a mysterious drifter with no past wanders into town, I cannot emphasize enough, do not marry that stranger. It's the 1890s. Everyone's a stranger. Yeah, that's everyone. That's everyone. I got 22 brain. Yeah, that's true.

I would say. Very good advice. I'm scared. Do not have an affair with your husband's boss and landlord. No. Don't do that. Unless you're doing that thing that that woman did with members of the SS where she slept with them and then shot them to death in fields, you can do that.

Different context, very different context. Yeah, but it's what we call like a relationship power dynamic fucking problematic. This is the opposite of relationship anarchism. Yes. Yeah. It's unethical nonmonogamy. In fact, it's anti-ethical nonmonogamy. Yes.

That's trash. Yeah. He's a murderer. So homes had an affair with Julia and Ned was, of course, completely fed up at this point is like my boss and my landlord and my wife. If we if we go back a slide to just look at this dude. What was the big situation here that he was able to get married? It's thunderous.

I mean, like a two but tennis balls hanging there. Just truly, truly unremarkable. My guy was slanging dog. Can't can't have been charming. Like he probably smells of graves. He has to keep leaving town. He killed a child. That's true.

Yeah. Yeah. He'll have a lot of mud under his fingernails. He's a doctor. I bet his fingernails are a. Yeah. Some people like to play the dirt. And what we're going to do is it's fine.

It's fine. We're not dirt shaming podcast. That's not even a tip. That's not even top 10. The most shit I've said on this podcast. Fantastic. I said some truly disgusting things. Now what I'm saying is Lou is your friend.

And back to what you were saying, guys. So thank you, guys. Ned, Ned was pretty fed up about this. And he just left about his landlord. Fucking his wife. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking his wife.

Yeah. Just like coming into work kind of awkward, you know. And so this is the motive here is unclear because Julia stayed behind. And so did her. So did her six year old daughter. And neither of them were seen after Christmas Eve, 1891. Oh, check out six year old. Yeah.

He just, he just gets like bored. I guess now that it's not forbidden for us. What do you mean? She calls me dad. Yeah. Well, Holmes later claimed this was she was killed as part of a botched abortion. He performed. Oh, I'm the six year old as well.

That's early. Really. I brought my present executor. Reminding me here of the surgery with the 300% mortality rate, which is the guy's amputating a limb. He like amputates the guy's limb. Guy dies. He nicks the assistant with a sore assistant gets tetanus dies.

Guy watching in the operating theater gallery falls, hits his head dies. We shouldn't laugh, but it's pretty funny. That's pretty fucking impressive. Oh yeah. A hundred percent. You get like a kill street. You get like a UAV. If you do that a couple of times.

You get a funny little up ping noise in your heads up. Yeah, that's it. He has a couple. He is, I think, at least one more murder in the original format, murder castle. Play the hits. Murder castle, the original series, murder castle, the next generation. I'm dwelling on that. Holmes claiming that he's desperate as a result of botched abortions.

He's claiming that the six year old died as a result of a botched abortion. So he's really late there in the most horrific way. That's bad. He also killed, may have killed Emmeline Segrande. Also claimed that was a botched abortion. You gotta stop doing it, man. What trimester is six years old, by the way. That's the fact to say.

18th or so. 18th trimester, yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a theme. When he kills someone, he also kills their kids for basically no reason. Just to be thorough, I guess, that's kind of fucked up. But Holmes had bigger ideas than murdering people, right? He wanted to make some money.

He's in Chicago, and Chicago has secured the 1893 World's Columbian exhibition. Can read a big Thomas pension novel about this if you want to. As Louis Sullivan said, the damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date. If not longer, it has penetrated deep into the Constitution of the American mind, affecting their lesions significant of dementia. All right, dude, fucking take a breath. Would have been a great poster back in the day.

Louis Sullivan would have some good posts. Oh, yeah. So yeah, the World's Columbian exhibition, this is 400 years since Columbus discovered America and then murdered everyone there. It's going to be held in Chicago, South Chicago, Jackson Park, not far from Englewood. Hordes of tourists from around the world would be there to gawk at all the big dumb white plaster buildings.

It's going to be sort of this Bozar model city, a bunch of big name designers. They got Daniel Burnham, John Willburn Root, Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Atwood, and so on and so forth. It's very, very funny to imagine when you say big name designers, this being sort of like a sort of K-pop level of fame. It's like screaming for Frederick Law Olmsted. Yeah, just women screaming so hard that they faint because they're so excited to see these guys.

Yeah, yeah. It's funny, they let Louis Sullivan design the transportation building and in reaction to the entire white city theme, he used a total of 44 colors on the building. Good for him. Good for him. I regret that color photography was not really in the state that it should have been.

I was about to say that there had been some good pictures of that thing. So about 27 million people attended the exhibition during the six months run. This was the first World's Fair that made money and one of the last. These people needed to be accommodated somewhere so Holmes had an idea. Why don't we put another floor on the building for a hotel, right? So like most ethical Airbnb owner. Yes. Oh, my wrong though.

Now, this floor was not necessarily to actually use as a hotel, but to fleece investors and contractors, right? Most ethical Airbnb owner. Yeah. This results in a final form of the quote unquote murder castle. So we saw this slide earlier. The murder castle. There's lots of things with your rumored about it.

Does it have over 100 rooms? Do you think you can fit 100 rooms in that? No. Really? A lot of floors. Yeah. Closets. Many closets.

Yeah. A bunch of sort of phone booth size rooms. Hold my murder. If you'll just hold still. It's just 100 suicide boosts from Futurama. Well, like the idea of this murder castle, right, is that you enter into it under force pretenses and then HH Holmes pops up and he's like, nah, you have entered into my complex web of traps, right?

Yeah. Like a sob movie. Yeah. Like a sob movie. Yeah. That's what's meant to be happening here, right? And the rest of the story is like unaware. So there's also pipes to gas people on the press of a button.

Soundproof rooms are killed to cremate corpses. That was also not in the building. I mean, technically any pipe can be a pipe to gas people on the press of a button as long as you have the right button, you know? The other thing is it's maze like with trap doors and secret passages and stairways nowhere. No, that also wasn't true. Has anyone ever built a fucking maze like trap door, secret passage, stairway to

nowhere house? Now that I found out that the fucking Winchester Mystery House is also largely a myth. I'm getting more and more annoyed. Yes. Yeah. Scottish Baroneal Castles. Honestly, that shit is amazing. They really did build all the crazy secret like paintings that slid to one side and

little passageways. They were all fucking paradise fuck. It's good stuff. Go to Craftus Castle or Huntley. They're good fun. Love to live in one of those. I just need to save up about the same deposit as for like a studio flat and zone too. There were shoots in a dumbwaiter, but that was a normal thing in a building like this,

you know, for moving moving stuff up and moving trash down. But it did not go to a killing floor or torture chamber. Just imagine putting a full size like an adult body in a dumbwaiter. Like it's meant to hold like two trays max and you're fucking squishing it in there. Did you not learn from his grave digging? How hard is your body? So there's there's two stages of construction on this. He builds the storefront and the first floor first.

And then to capitalize on the Colombian exhibition, he builds the third floor. The second floor is apartments. The third floor is going to be the hotel. Looks pretty crummy for a hotel to be honest. The hotel was only ever partially completed. Inspectors came and look at the building and their foot went through the floor, brand new floor in multiple locations. That thing was that that that was that floor was never completed.

The idea that it was like inspected as well also kind of puts the light to the sore like complex maze of traps. Just yeah, just just the idea that like we'll just go fuck ourselves. It's fine. Just the idea that like a guy in this sort of 1890s equivalent of a hive is like shows up with a clipboard and looks around. What happened?

Well, what happened? So this is this is largely a very ordinary mixed use building of its time. There were a couple of secret rooms in there, but those were used for storing furniture that HH Homes brought on credit and didn't want repossessed. Yeah, who amongst us, you know? He just he just loves fraud. He loves to do fraud.

Here's a fixation with defrauding people. He's juggling his plate spinning so many crimes. He's doing so many crimes constantly. It's great. It's very funny to be like there actually is like a complex web of traps, but like full furniture. I like the idea of spitty plate crimes. It's a complex web of traps, but only for creditors.

Leave me alone. God damn it. This guy didn't do so many murders. He would be the greatest guy. You'd be a national hero. So how do we know this building was ordinary? Alice, you still with us? Yeah, it's Alice.

Can neither of you hear me? I can hear you. I can't. Let me just refresh the phone. Oh, it's timed again. Incredible. Do you want me to reload? I have my local going.

All right. How about now? How about now? Yes, yes, yes, yes. All right, Alice is back. All right. I heard it. Jesus, calm down.

Oh, we've been to Alice. Yeah. I love you so much. How do we know the building was ordinary? The answer is, oh, wait, no, let's do some speculation first. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's do some speculation. In an 1890s, Hivas went around it and didn't find any, like, sacks full of corpses or whatever.

Yes. That is part of it. Also, competence is not a word I would use to describe this Joker. I do not think he has the wherewithal to even assemble one trapdoor. Let alone be my dad. C minus murder at best. In a time before like YouTube tutorials or like DIY books, you're not building your own trapdoor. Also, as we've learned from like Jeffrey Dahmer or Ted Bundy or any number of other serial killers,

it's quite difficult to kill people unobtrusively, particularly when you're living like in an urban environment, because people fucking smell bad when we die. And like, you've got to get rid of all of the stuff that a person is or used to be. And that takes a lot of like garbage bags and shit like that. And eventually someone's going to see you coming out of your creepy murder hotel with a trash bag with an arm sticking out of it. And then they're going to call the fucking 1890s cops. So we're going to chase you with truncheons. Yeah.

If they see you herding pigs in and out the back door repeatedly, they're going to be confused. Fucking Chicago and brick top there. The other thing is, I don't think the tradespeople would be in the building long enough without him murdering them. We've already worked out he's got a fix. I don't think tradespeople could be in there long enough to build these trapdoors. Insatiable appetite for murder. It ruins his ability to do longer term planned murders. The main reason we can tell that the building was fairly ordinary is that there was a big legal battle over non-payment from the contractors.

Because he loves the Sims. He loved them. So all the plans for the building. Live by the gun, die by the gun. All the plans for the building were on file in the Chicago archives and no one bothered looking for them. Until again, we mentioned Adam Seltzer. He dug them up in 2016. Are you saying that we had fucking as built of the murder house?

Yes. And this never like came up until the inventor of Seltzer fucking. Adam Seltzer. Adam Seltzer, yeah. As built for this, but not for, oh my God, so many other things. Jesus. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these. So let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for. It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes. So you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one.

Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want. Or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. So around this time, Holmes meets and befriends a man named Benjamin Pitizel. Yeah, I was I was I was not sure about this pronunciation either.

I wasn't sure it was Heitzel or Pitizel. I don't know what the dumbest one is. Pizza. Pizza. Yeah, could be pizza. He's a carpenter and he assists them in the construction of this building and also in defrauding people. He's the guy who knows how to build the trap doors. But the trap doors are like storing hidden furniture that he wasn't going to pay off.

Yes, exactly. He's the guy to the bullshit top floor that we can see in the picture. Yeah. Well, this is again after the first fire. So the cornice fell off and apparently there was a shitty temporary roof back here. Now H H H Holmes was pretty well known in the community for constantly being sued and visited by the police and so on and so forth. He's this sort of neighborhood character. Oh, so so when the cops find all of the bodies, they're not going to be like he kept himself to himself.

I never would have suspected it. Oh, that guy situation. Oh, is that guy? Yeah, he's a man about town. He didn't notice all the people disappearing, but they didn't notice this. Oh, this guy. Oh, he's fun. Oh, he's a funny guy.

Yeah. I mean, Jimmy Saville for fucking 70 years. Yeah. You know. Well, this is this is this is Benjamin Pitazelle up here. This guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, so anyway. Many Williams moved to Chicago in 1893, found homes in an employment office. Holmes offered her a job as a stenographer, but then learned that she owned land in Fort Worth, Texas. Right. What are you? What are you stenographing in a pharmacy? Like pass. Yeah.

Yeah. Also, what does he want with land in Fort Worth, Texas? Is he going to build another murder house? Just franchise the murder house. Yeah. Franchising. Yeah. Oh.

Oh. Shit. I hate to be the Ray Kroc of murder houses. Do you? Yeah. It's too industrialized. It loses its soul, you know. I believe they had some sort of affair and Holmes convinced her to sign the deed to that property over to Alexander Bond, which was an alias of yes.

It was an alias of Holmes. Holmes Bond. Wait a minute. Yeah. It's good on here. He did. He did name himself after Sherlock Holmes. Yeah.

Oh God. He did because that's contemporaneous. He literally. Oh my. What a prick. It's fucking awesome. I just put that together just now when you said that. That's so fucking annoying.

So it's like the most fucking Napoleon of crime. They were doing whatever they were doing. Williamson Holmes rented an apartment. And once William's sister Annie came to visit, neither of them were seen ever again. So between this and the woman with the six year old kid, I'm now envisioning. Invasioning. I'm envisioning more every day. That's the female version.

That's right. I'm envisioning a sort of like King of Queens situation. But the first sort of like quotidian laugh track family annoyance thing, he murders everyone else. Yeah. The kids like, hey, can you teach me to shave? He's like murder. Oh, my sister's coming to town. Murder.

My parents are coming to town. Murder. Lost my keys. Murder. And so on. There's around six other people close to Holmes that disappeared without a trace while the quote unquote murder castle was operating. Whether the murder castle was actually involved is unclear.

Murder castle involved murdering. Yeah. That's some New York Times pros. So in late 1893, the castles, the murder castles unfinished third floor burnt down. He tried to collect the insurance money and the insurance company was like, no. That was arson. It's it. You did that again.

This guy was burning all the bodies. So they'd be in the attic at that point. Could just have been shitty construction. This is a true crime podcast. After all, I'm going to sleep. That's a good point. True crime. Let's do some wild speculation.

Let's do some wild speculation. Yeah. I do think it's really funny that the insurance company, the insurance fraud catches up with him at the one point where he has actually suffered like a material loss, even if he did it to himself. Nothing else. He's just been borrowing dead people. The first thing that actually like puts him out of pocket and they go, wait a second.

I recognize you. We're a true crime podcast. So I think we can all agree that a lot of respect there for the police and for the insurance company, you know, doing do do do do do diligence. Yeah. That's his next murder. You got him. So now he's on the run from the insurance company.

So Holmes left his murder castle for greener pressure. We left it behind. Yeah. Fort Worth, Texas. Franchises the murder castle. Yeah. He started to put up another building with Ben, with, with his friend, Ben Peterzell, right?

Who followed him down there. Yeah. This one, you know, because we also have to talk about how insanely easy it was to disappear and never be found at that time. You could just like move one state and then just be like, yeah, I'm actually Dr Moriarty now. No one would know. He didn't even change his name.

Oh, fuck me. This guy's a lazy. He's lazy. He is. You know, that's the thread. Forget the murders. The thread that I'm seeing running right the way through his career is laziness. Just not good enough.

The press in Fort Worth even was even was all over him. He was like, oh, yeah, he had a murder castle up there. He's going to have a murder castle down here. Anyway, which is where that was. That was a couple of years after this. But anyway, so he goes down to Fort Worth. He puts up another building, right? The thing is, the people of Texas, the good upstanding people of Texas would not tolerate

a man not paying the contractors. So it was sold out from under him at auction in 1894. And Holmes turned to a new business, which was stealing horses in Fort Worth and selling them in St. Louis. Inspired. Not necessarily just the horses. I believe he was imprisoned for selling, selling stolen goods in St. Louis. Not the horses, though.

But the thing is, his reputation was now besmirched by an actual conviction. So he starts to formulate a plan, right? He's going to fake his own death, collect the insurance money. He's going to collect the insurance money and start a new life. And in jail, he meets the outlaw, Marion Hedgepeth, also known as the handsome bandit. So they call him, hey. Yeah. Oh, thank you.

And Hedgepeth gives him the contact details of a lawyer who he thought would be amicable to the plan, right? This lawyer is Jephthahawi, right? And after he's bailed out of jail, he enacted the plan. He faked his own death. And the insurance company didn't pay out. No. Yeah.

Oh, no. Why not? But undeterred, Holmes, now deceased, talked to his friend Pietzel. What if the scheme was reversed? He faked Pietzel's death. Oh, I don't feel good about Ben right now. Yeah. Yeah, Ben's going to have some issues.

So I want to have, there's a word here on faking your own death, right? Very risky business to do alone. Also risky with a friend. But when your friend wants you to fake your own death, all kinds of things can go wrong, right? You probably should structure it in such a way that you don't actually get killed. And there's some consequences for your friend if they go ahead and kill you in the process, right?

Yeah. And Pietzel did not set up these safeguards. Did we lose people? I'm still here. Okay. I'm just waiting on Alice to rejoin us. Oh, my God. Oh.

And I'm back. All right, incredible. We were waiting. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. It wasn't long. I'm going to go back into my spiel here. Faking your own death, right?

Yeah. Risky business to do alone. Also risky with a friend. Very, very risky when that friend is asking you to fake your own death. And then you're splitting the insurance money. Yeah. You want some kind of a safeguard there. You want some safeguard there that, you know, your friend doesn't just straight up kill you.

Right? Yeah. You want maybe some consequences there. You want a better safeguard than my friend is a nice guy. He won't do that to me because he isn't. He probably will. He probably will. Yeah.

Also, do you like the image of like people who have tried to fake their deaths that I put up here? Yes. I've got Tupac. I've got Elvis. I've got John Stonehouse. John Darwin, the canoe guy. I was loving John Darwin. I was so glad John Darwin is on here.

Oh, my God. Very, very fond of memories of that particular news story. And of course, Radovan Karadzic, the president of the Republic of Serbska. Yes. Fuck that guy. While he was on the run for war crimes, disguised himself as a sex therapist and grew a massive beard. Incredible. So, Peter Zell did not set up these safeguards.

It's a trusting man for a sort of repeated fraudster murderer. Yeah. Peter Zell and Holmes would go to Philadelphia. Peter Zell would set himself up as an inventor named B.F. Perry. Oh, boy. Working in some kind of storefront laboratory, right? Just a normal thing that you could do back then. Yeah.

That was like a normal thing to do. Like loads of people were inventors. Podcasting at that point. That's how they invented so many things back then. That's why we don't do that now. Yeah. They would swap in a cadaver and then blow up the lab so badly the body couldn't be identified. Oh, that's hard.

They have to dust off one of their left three corpses from the insurance fraud. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they gotta get it off by the hits. How do they never get caught grave robbing, by the way? Because they do so much of it. And no one gives a shit. They just have like a dead guy wrapped up in a carpet or something.

Absolutely amazing. The dead tell no tales. I mean. Yeah, but when you've got 80 or 90 of them on a list, that starts to go. You got like a whole, you pull the train up to the graveyard and you're just dumping corpses on a flat card, putting a tarp over them. Pedazelle's wife would collect the payout and split it 50-50, right? How much does your wife like you, man? Because that's going to be a really sort of like determining factor here.

Yeah. How much does she like you relative to the guy who, as we've established, had the sort of monster dick game? Yes, the world's largest penis. Slanging wood, baby. Well, Holmes apparently decided to skip the cadaver part and simply knocked out Pedazelle with chloroform and then blew up the lab. Oh, wow. Again, see, like the ready availability of weird chemicals just makes for a sort of a wackier crime. Like, you could just get chloroform whenever and they didn't know it was carcinogenic and if they did know, they wouldn't have cared.

Oh, it worse than that. He burned a body with benzene. It's pure benzene. Tasty. Why am I teeth falling out? Don't worry about that, it saves the weight. Yeah, it saves the weight. So now somehow throughout this, Pedazelle's wife is not aware that Pedazelle is dead.

Bullshit, she knew. This is part of the scam, right? She had to have known. Like, he comes out of the, like, burning building, less her husband, and she's like, okay, I have no questions here. Yeah, they were definitely getting it on. Well, he convinces Pedazelle's wife to give him custody of three of her five kids. Jesus fuck. What?

Why? I don't know. This is unclear to me. What? This guy had no, oh my God, either he was playing 3D chess or, more likely, he had no idea what was going on. It was just reaching any given moment for the nearest possible thing he could. Yeah, so like, heavily fucked up on benzene fumes. Like, I don't know.

I need your kids. Exactly why this happened. I need your kids right now. A fleet of Michigan and then to Ontario. And he gets back into his old bad habit and he kills the kids. Oh, Jesus. He's all bad habit and he kills the kids. This, like, one slice of life thing happens and he's like, right?

Back to the knives. Oh my God, this guy. How is he killing these people, by the way? Do we know? Like, what's his vibe? What's his deal? I believe two of the kids, he suffocated in a box in Toronto. Jesus.

And the other one was some kind of something else in Indianapolis. Maybe just exposure to Indianapolis. Oh my God. Now, in the meantime, our friend Marion Hedgepath, the handsome bandit. He's pretty mad. Hey, oh, I miss, I miss gendered Marion. Well, you gotta have your pronouns. You gotta have a little, like, sheriff stuff with your pronouns.

I lose a lot of points there. That's bad. So Marion Hedgepath was promised a commission for recommending the lawyer. He never got it. I'm amazed that he wasn't killed, though. I'm amazed that when he recommended the lawyer, it wasn't, as Alice said, and he got immediately knocked off. He just, like, keeps dodging the, like, chloroformed rag.

He's, like, turning around. Oh, that's your trick. That's your trick. Oh, yeah, yeah. He was in jail and people liked him. Yeah. So he told the police. He didn't get his commission.

He told the police about the plant fraud. And investigators in Philadelphia got word of it. Oh, boy, I got a cat on my desk. Milk shake. He's blocking the notes. So this then, you know, is an opportunity for the thin blue line. Philadelphia's finest. Yeah, the best boys.

Yeah. First off being screamed at. Philadelphia detective Frank Gayer. Place calls to Toronto. The second of three brothers. Yeah. But he already left Toronto, but he found the remains of two of the kids on a home on St. Vincent Street.

And the third, he tracked that one down to Indianapolis and found, I think it was remnants of bone and teeth in the chimney. I mean, relatively competent police work. Yeah, I was going to say not to do too much true crime here, but that is actual, like, cop stuff he's doing, right? That's not bad. Yeah. I mean, you know, detectives pretty good sometimes.

Sometimes. Not all the time. Yeah. If your job description is more than just beating up black people, you know, I mean, that's. It's one of those things that like people who want to defund or like abolish the police want to do is like separate out stuff. Like you need some investigatory function,

if only so you can catch Mr. chloroform ragman here. Like in Scotland, the procurator fiscal. Which works really well. I'm only a police that ever helped me out or detectives. So. Yeah. Yeah. Now, simultaneously, the Pinkerton National Detective.

Oh, no. This is the alternative. This is the alternative. You don't like you don't like a public police force. Bad news. The best alternative we can do is a private police force. We never sleep. They were also looking for homes because Texans don't take horse theft lightly.

Sort of Al Capone on tax evasion, you know, the IRS really wants you to pay your taxes and Texas really wants you to pay for your horses. Yes. So he was arrested in Boston on November 17th, 1894. And he was like, OK, I have two options. He's like trying to figure out which of the many crimes they've arrested him for. And like a guy in a big steps and walks in, he's like horses. It's the horse thing.

Gotcha. Yeah, the horses. Yeah. He's like, do I go to Philadelphia and stand trial for insurance fraud? Or do I go to Texas and get executed for horse theft? They were very strict on that sort of thing back then. Don't touch the horses. Where's insurance fraud?

It's kind of a victimless crime. You know, then and now. Yeah, that's just true. Yeah, except for the part where he murdered a guy. Well, whatever. Commitments of other crimes. Yeah. Yeah.

So he was like digging in the comments. He's like, actually, my dad is an insurance adjutant. He didn't even shut the hell up. Actually, my dad is a horse thief. Here's the thing. He's a respectable job in my country. He's not being charged with murder yet. Right.

So he's just going to like brazen out the insurance theft thing without anyone finding out about any of the dead bodies and he's good. Right. Yeah. So he has the option of being extradited to Philadelphia, which he takes. Right. Not knowing that Detective Frank Gayer had already discovered the murders. Well, get your mother fucker.

Go birds. We'll get you. So and of course, word came from what's his name? The handsome bandit. Marion. Yeah, Marion. Yeah, Marion. Yeah, Marion, that this was definitely a fraud situation.

Quickly found himself facing a murder charge in October. He was sentenced to hang at Moyamensing prison. In October, 1894. Haunted and also now an ACME. Actually, no, it must be 1895. Never mind. Yeah. We have to talk about the press, though.

Yes, the damned yellow press. I put in a couple of things here, which will, I think help to explain why Holmes immediately as soon as they charged him with murder, started confessing. He confessed to different things to different people at different times. He told a lot of like contradictory lies about everything that he'd done. Confessed to murdering people who were like, obviously alive. And part of the reason for this is the kind of headlines that we have here.

This is from a Hearst paper. I don't remember which one. And they they had to they had to struggle to pick between four headlines. So they ran all of them at once. Yes. It's headline number one. Holmes confesses 27 murders. Number two, the most awful story of modern times told by the fiend and human

shape. Number three, every detail of his fearful crimes told by the man who admits he is turning into the shape of the devil. What? What? That. That's it. And a number four.

Even for yellow journalism, that's a little much. And number four, the tale of the greatest criminal in history. I just want to say, I just want to say this font, fucks. Oh, this is a great font. Yeah. Go try and like ever such a slight seraphic. Very nice. Yeah.

Need to try and like the angles. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's bring this back for font makers. Make it happen. Bring this back. Yes. Yeah.

Let's be. I forget what the word is. If you if you make fonts is a cool word. No. It's a. You're a printer on you. You're just a printer. No, no, no.

It ends in Smith. I want to say. Type Smith, a word Smith. It's not a word Smith. I know that. Smith. I don't know. If you know one.

If you know that. I know a couple. Right. Right. If you know, if you know a cool word for the guy who makes fonts. If you are that guy, make this. You are that guy. Yes.

Make this one. Yes. Send us whichever this one is. I want it a lot. Yes. So. Homes decides to hammer the fuck up after he was convicted. Right.

So, you know, he confessed 27 murders, including murdering people who were conferred to be alive as well. The Hearst company paid him $7,500 while he was on. Oh, the Hearst. I thought he said Hearst. I was like, that's confusing. He was giving them a lot of deals. They're like taking a lot of business.

Yeah. They paid him $5,500 when he was on death row. For the confession. What an endorsement deal. Yeah. Nice. Which was almost entirely fabricated. The stories of the murder castle originate from both the confession and just

outright lies from the press, including this. This highly implausible diagram. From the world. On August 11th, 1895. I've just been working this out. I paid him about $225,000 for the story. I wonder why he would construct all those stories. What would you do with that?

There was just so much money back then. Yeah. What are you going to spend it on? I'm not going to hang you. What? Yeah. Better news. It went into his old timey suitcase that he'd been dragging around the whole time.

Showing this sort of frankly impossible floor plan, like all these rooms are so tiny. You couldn't do anything in there. I mean, you need space to murder people. It's not like basic ergonomics. You need room to swing an axe or like a chloroform rag or whatever. You need to be able to trick people into a hotel room that's large enough that they want to stay there before you gas them.

It's like, oh, here's your closet. Yeah. You want to go in there? No, that's travelage. It's never definitively concluded how many people he murdered. But again, I'm referencing Adam Seltzer here. He puts it at probably nine people total. Right?

And like not in a spree, not ostensibly for like depraved reasons other than money. Yeah. No, it was just like this. Yeah. He loved killing kids. He did love killing kids. He did for the love of the game at some point. Mostly he killed people who were inconvenient to him and also their kids.

Anyway, the press handed up to he systematically killed over 200 people. All 200 of those people were young women who Holmes had taken out life insurance policies on. It's very lurid, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, very. That's a good job. We don't do that nowadays.

Oh, good job. There is an entire genre of podcasts. Sexy murders. Yes. And sort of similar stories about he sold the cadavers to medical schools or skeletons to the medical schools because he should be to his early work. Scraped all the flesh off. You know, I mean, you know, this is also probably fake.

You know, if Holmes just murdered anyone who was made his life more difficult. Yeah. But I mean, that's how the press used to work even more than it does now, right? And it's weird because it's not like there's a shortage of like grisly details in the real world. But, you know, if you don't have them for the thing that you're being told to write, you supply them. And so why not?

But also you got paid a lot more for it back then. Yeah, for sure. You had a lot more purchasing power, but it was worth like $50,000. Yes. Genuinely, 35 times as much as much purchasing power at that point. Yeah. Wow. And so anyway, you know, a major press sensation doesn't help him out.

He was hanged here at the South Filiacomy on May 7. 1896. That's what he gets for wearing a cowboy's jersey to court. Yeah. That's true. Cowboy's jersey. That's how I said that. It's a grim sight from the gallows, isn't it?

I've bought beer here. And food. He was hanged here at the South Filiacomy on May 7, 1896. That's what he gets for wearing a cowboy's jersey to court. Yeah. That's true. Cowboy's jersey. That's how I said that.

That's how I said that. That's how I said that. That's how I said that. That was the handsome bandit, not the very well-spoken bandit. True. The quote-unquote murder castle suffered a fire shortly afterwards. And a lot of sources say that destroyed it. Yeah.

It was actually made up the floor plan. It was his ghost trying to claim the insurance money. It was actually a pretty minor fire that the building was repaired and remained in use until 1938 when it was demolished for a new deal post office. FDR just disrespecting the genre of true crime in order to... FDR is not staying sexy. No. No.

Disrespecting the legacy of true crime in order to build the minimum viable American socialism. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have a nice post office in Englewood. H.H. Ohm's request to be buried in a concrete lined coffin so as to thwart grave robbers. Oh. It's not so nice when it happens to you, isn't it? Yeah.

Yeah. It was about to say. Live by the grave robbery, die by the grave robbery, as far as I'm concerned. You're dead perhaps by the grave robbery. He's in a fucking elevator on the graves. You just take him out, put him back in again. He's in Holy Cross Cemetery in Yadon, which is just west of where I am. But nevertheless, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology dug

him up in 2017 to confirm that he didn't fake his own death, which he didn't do anything. He didn't. It was definitely the guy apparently remarkably well preserved. Yeah. He's still at the moustache. Yeah. Still at the moustache. Yeah.

The moustache. It's all about preserving oils leaching out of that. It's funny to see some local character in this one. I will say that. Several days have seen local characters. It's been great. So this is the story of H. H. Holmes as it actually probably happened. He had a major effect on popular culture.

Oh, yeah. Right? The legacy of this guy, because he's often described as America's first serial killer. Very often, yeah. It's debatable whether or not you can call him a serial killer within the meaning of the legal, the pathological meaning of the term. Not least because he didn't kill people in one continuous course of conduct. It mostly seemed to be based on inconvenience.

But also, the reason why he gets written about so much is because he's also a fringe suspect candidate for the most depraved true crime people on Earth. Ripperologists. Oh, my God. At some point, maybe, since we're a true crime podcast now, we're going to have to do an episode about Jack the Ripper. No, about Ripperologists. Well, yes, because as an unsolved series of horrific crimes and nominally the world's

first serial killer, it's not the case, but it did play a large part in normalizing it as a phenomenon that then created the next big waves of serial killers. Like, people became obsessed with detecting the identity of Jack the Ripper. They still are. They do it in a way that's tremendously disrespectful to basically everyone involved. I highly recommend Halle Rubinhold's book 5, The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, for some victim-centric history there. But so, essentially, because Jack the Ripper got away with it because he was anonymous,

because he was probably anonymous in life as well. People don't like that for much of the same reason that they don't like believing that Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. They think it has to be someone important because only an important person can do important things. And so, they just, like, name famous Victorians, or Victorians they've heard of. So, you get, like, Walter Sickert, or Prince Albert Victor, or fucking, you name it. Benjamin Disraeli.

Yes. Thomas Cream is another one with a prodigious moustache, another American. But yeah, so, because he was alive at the right time, people have suggested that H.H. Holmes was Jack the Ripper. He was not. However, I think it's worth talking about because it's part of a sort of, like, a major problem that I have with true crime as a genre, which is that it's content to sort of, like, trample any sort of investigatory or empathetic instinct in the pursuit of always having to

say something new so you can sell books, sell podcasts, or the rest of it. He wasn't fucking Jack the Ripper, is what I'm saying. He was not fucking Jack the Ripper. The other thing about true crime is, you know, I always feel like, you know, there's a pathological thing there where it's like, I want to be murdered by this guy. Sure. What if this guy was, like, murdered me in, like, a sexy way as opposed to the repulsive way?

And even when they try to make them repulsive, it just means that people think the repulsive thing is sexy, like people fucking buying Jeffrey Dahmer's glasses because of the Netflix show or whatever. It just doesn't work. You can't, it's very difficult to make a show or a movie or something like that about someone who is genuinely antagonistic to humanity in the way that a serial killer is. Make it from the victim's perspective. Yes.

Murder is horrible. Stop glamorizing it. Television. Books. Yeah. And I like some murder fiction, you know? It's a guilty pleasure for me sometimes. But I think even when you try and deconstruct it, even when you try and, like, do a feminist

serial killer thing, like, say, the fall, I think you end up, well, falling into much the same, the same traps, the same poles. Did Liam drop out? Liam. No, I'm eating. Okay. Oh, sorry. I was wondering when we were going to drop in.

Because this is a wonderful household. I was wondering when we were going to drop in with our theory that murder should be legal. Oh, yeah. I mean, Justin, we've already discussed this, but only on the basis of automobiles. Well, I mean, I rapidly came to develop this theory independently in an Avanti West Coast quiet car that was not that quiet from London to Glasgow, where I was sitting across from two Tories who kept making Scottish jokes. Oh, absolutely destroy those people.

You have to blow those people up. I became a Scottish nationalist, first of all, and then I came to the conclusion that murder should be not just legal, but required. You need to turn those guys into toothpaste. That's an honor killing. I will say, suck that shit. Crime chunky is the one. Yeah, I mean, you're purely anarchist theory of murder, right?

Is that every murder is subject to a sort of popular referendum. Yes. And if people don't like it, then you have a problem. But if you just kind of like murder someone and everyone kind of agrees that you had a good enough reason, then it's fine. Yeah, it's like, if that guy had a comment, sure. Who are my actual threats last time? I'll list those off on there. Because they've all changed now because none of them can keep a...

Yeah, they can't have a reshuffle. They've all jogged around. Ridiculous. Yeah, no, this is the thing, I'm too much of a status. I think at some point you do need big government, big mommy government to come in and say that you can't always kill the people that you want to kill, even if they have it coming. You probably shouldn't just murder people in general. It's not a specially ethical thing to do. You're not the state.

And the state does a pretty poor job of it. And I'm not saying the state should be the one that's murdering people. I'm saying no one should have that power, essentially. Besides me, we should absolutely have that power. I'm on the fence there, yeah. I think if they put us in charge of who gets murdered, it would make some pretty good choices. I think if we're getting into the fifth hour of the train journey and you're making brave heart jokes as we had Norse... Oh my God.

Just paced. Fucking turn them into just paced. And yeah, I mean, what the fuck? What do we have to say about true crime as a genre rather than stop it? Stop doing it? Yeah. Stop doing it. This is our annual anti-true crime podcast podcast.

People won't because people enjoy living vicariously and it makes you feel alive. And it's like a cheap thrill, right, exactly. And even people who were in groups targeted by the thing, women fucking love true crime about murdered women. And I don't know how to explain that phenomenon, really. Other than that, it's... Women be crazy. Well, that too. Yeah, fucking, let's go with that.

All right. Here's the question. How is our podcast different from a true crime podcast, though? We're making jokes. Because I think I've made this exact joke about the podcast. But the vibe of our podcast is stay sexy and don't get social murdered, right? Yes. In this life.

I feel like there's a difference between individual criminal malfeasance in the way that that's treated by the criminal law and the kind of malfeasance that we deal with that is typically not. It's a large sort of structural murder that happens constantly around us. So as a mostly viewer and listener, like anyone who actually isn't a moron who's listening to the show understands that actually you're... Through Gallo's humor, you're treating all the victims of the disasters, but systematic engineering or other. You're treating them with actual great care because the whole point is that you're pointing out through an accessible format of humor that these people have been let down. So I don't think it's glamorizing the way that true crime is like. Look at these sexy murders.

You're all off the hook. It's fine. Thank you. Thank you, Gareth. Thank you, Gareth, for being the conscience of the podcast. Yes. Well, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. Oh, I don't like this image. Oh, why is this here?

No, thank you. Hello. This is just... I've just ruined it. Sorry. I've just been reminded of when we were on a train and there was an advert for willing participants in a pain experiment. Yes. It's pretty good. To the point where I'm going to look... I took a picture of it. I'm going to look up so I can read it out of her face.

It's pretty good. I didn't know they were advertising for my electrolysis sessions. Oh, no. Hello. I'll come in. I'll jump in later. Hello to Alice and Justin. Yay to Liam and welcome to any guests. Yeah, I'm here.

Now to this time, you know. Faultless. I worked in a pain research lab. Oh, shit. Where safety was the third priority. Following publishing papers and cutting costs. Surely fourth, because causing pain had to be in there, right? Yeah.

In the years before I started, the machine which induces pain, one that had been regulated as a medical device and research device, broke down and was replaced with a much cheaper, uncertified device. Jesus. What? Yeah, a hammer. Here's the thing, right? Right. I don't want to know this, but I feel obliged to ask,

what does a regulated pain causing device look like? And please don't say a hammer with an accelerometer attached to it. It's attached to a torque wrench. Well, if the picture from the advert is anything to be judged by, it looks kind of like a VR headset. What's that? No, thank you. Participants needed for pain research.

That was the advert. Well, my eyes involved in this situation. Yeah, they jab your eyes. That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Research was unable to proceed, as the research protocols had to be translated to the new machine, which also had to be interfaced with the MRI machine. No, no, listen.

First of all, you got to be hooked up to the pain machine. The unauthorized pain machine, second of all. Third of all, you've got to be in a fucking MRI, the thing that's already terrifying, even when you're not hooked up to a pain machine. This is some final destination shit right here. I'm like two breaths away from a panic attack hearing about this shit. Jesus Christ.

The new machine, which had to be interfaced with the MRI machine so that synchronous brain images could be taken alongside the application of pain. Is that not a significant confounding factor, the fact that we've put you inside the claustrophobia washing machine while we're applying the pain to you? Oh, my God. I had an MRI once and it was fine,

but I was not hooked up to a pain machine. I've had an MRI before once as a very young kid. I didn't like it at all. I think it probably would have significantly lowered my pain tolerance. I've only ever been hooked up to a pain machine in a purely recreational setting. And you had safe words. But exactly, I'm going to say,

trust me that those pain machines were thoroughly regulated. It will be not as medical or research devices. There was some oversight going on there. There were systems in place, right? Exactly, exactly. And just like, oh, yeah, we got this thing. We're pretty certain it hurts getting the MRI. Yeah.

Not fun with mice. Setting up the system and interfacing with timing signals was my job. Jesus. I have attached an MS Paint drawing of the area of the hospital where the following events occurred. It's not a helpful diagram. You see, there's a room here where the MRI is. There is pain machine control down here.

There's other rooms over here. Ah, this makes more sense. I thought it was a diagram of pulley systems. And then there's a window to the MRI over here, right? Now, this green area is where you aren't affected by the magnet. But you can't see the window from the pain machine control. That seems like a serious oversight. Yeah.

Put another window. Yes. This involved plenty of sketchy things, including having to work with tools I brought from home, which were absolutely magnetic. So I had to carefully make my way around the edge of the MRI room. The panel in the back. Have you ever seen a video of an MRI grab something?

This is one of about 7,000 reasons why I'm terrified of an MRI is despite knowing that I won't have anything metal on me if I go in there because they check. What if you forget? What if my dentist has fucked up right somehow and left a little bit of metal in there or something? And the first thing I know about it is I am being flung across the room onto the electromagnet, you know?

What if that? Answer me in the comments. What if that? What if that? I have a metal cap. I mean, I must not be able to get an MRI because it'll go straight through my fucking brain. I don't like this.

This is my least favorite safety third. I am not happy. No. So I had to carefully make my way around the edge of the MRI room to a panel at the back where I could cut holes for cable runs. What cutting hole? Oh, boy. It's doing some light cutting.

Because another thing about MRIs, if you're not familiar, is that the magnetic field, right, the magnet itself, you can't turn that off. It's not energized in any way. It's just inherent to the thing. It's like while it's installed, it doesn't matter. You can't cut power to it. There's the zone where if you enter that zone,

you're going to get attached to the fucking magnet. Well, you can cut power to it. It just means you can't use the MRI again. They're very expensive machines. Yeah. Also, my other favorite MRI fact is that they're called using helium, which is not what you would call a commonplace chemical perversely.

One that we have a very finite supply of on Earth and one that is also used for making your voice go funny and refueling balloons. Yeah, blimps. Back to the blimp episode. Yes. My high school physics teacher relayed an anecdote to me once that was about like, yeah, you can do all kinds

of these fun stuff with liquid nitrogen. You dip your finger in it. You can do all that stuff with it. Liquid helium, though, you can't fuck around with. It's too cold. It does other things. Look into the US strategic helium reserve. Yes.

It's not as big as you think it is. Our first test of this resulted in our cables acting as an antenna for local radio broadcasts, which ruined the MRI images. You're in the MRI. You're getting fucking hit with the pain machine. And all they're getting on the screens is like the wave form like you're listening to 97.9 with the fucking device.

It's going to be like fucking fucking rush Limbaugh. You know that. I installed hand-soldered hand-soldered filters into this multi-million dollar MRI machine and our discount pain-inducing machine. I'm aware as far as I'm aware of this equipment still operating within my design spec. This brings us to capital T, the incident.

We haven't got none of what we've heard is the incident yet. That's just all preamble, you know. My heart rate is elevated. A colleague and I were performing some last checks and I wanted to test the device at its highest power to see if it caused interference or artifacts given that it had not passed the ordinary set of regulatory tests. We also needed to test it on a live person.

That's not a sense. No, thank you. These tests could not be run at the same time as the power test would be run at a pain-inducing temperature 10 degrees Celsius higher than the highest pain tolerance threshold measured in any experimental subject. Wait, so this pain device is a toaster?

Wait, no, hold on a second. I'm rotating this shit in my mind. If you're measuring temperature there, I have a nasty feeling that what you're doing is literally electrolysis. What you're doing is literally putting radio waves into the fucking person until it raises the skin temperature. This has got to be like the same thing as that thing

they have for dispersing crowds now where it's just a great thing. Yeah, it must be the same thing. Can I turn your insides into glue? I thought it did. You're only doing it for a short period of time. I've calmed myself down here. This is an overgrown electrolysis machine.

I get one of those every two weeks. I wouldn't like having it at an MRI and it hurts, but okay, that's reasonable. Okay. After running the power test, a man I had never seen before wearing a medical gown poked his head into the monitoring room where I was working and said,

wow, you really hurt people with that thing. Yeah, that was a incentivize. Yes. Again, sentences I don't like the sound of. A man I had never seen before wearing a medical gown. Oh, finish play. Yes, let's do this. My colleague had procured a volunteer

who had the misfortune be working nearby in the hospital so we could run the test simultaneously and save time. When you say procured, how's that procurement happening? Hey, do you want to try? Yeah. Do you want to test the highest level of our unlicensed pain machine? Listen, you're going to experience some pain.

The question is whether you want it to last. Come with me. This is horrible. Fortunately, he was a good sport about being subject to a level of pain equivalent to the record set by us fucking around while drinking whiskey after hours and did not report us. That's a record?

That's like a leaderboard? I thought I was a master. The idea of these guys just hanging around after hours. Yeah, exactly. I didn't do that, too. I know myself. I couldn't get enough of the hand-tortrait device. I took my hand and felt like, ow!

Hey, do you want to know what a hand jar from a Golem feels like? It's like two assholes getting drunk. They put their hands in this thing occasionally. The other one calls them a pussy. This goes on for like three hours. The opposite of the ladies from Dune. We're trying to make the universe's supreme redneck. The thing about science, right?

And the scientific method is that it's fucked because there's more than enough pain in the world already. Anyone will tell you this. And yet, in order to test it empirically, someone decided that the dictates of this model required that they build a pain machine so they could pain people up objectively enough. Instead of just taking any of the existing pain

and seeing if it worked on that, they're like, no, we've got to have the hammer. We've got to do it this way. Doctors say that chronic pain isn't real, so you can't use those pain. They're pretending. I left the job shortly after this incident for a number of reasons,

and not being liable for a preventable workplace accident was on that list. Okay. I will never again work in a heavily scrutinized and controversial area of research involving inflicting intentional harm with unlicensed equipment and a bunch of hooligan students,

and I strongly recommend to all the listeners that they also not do that. Yeah, no kidding. I feel like the incident has happened, and everyone was complicit in this incident. Yeah, you just grabbed a guy from work and you just put him in the pain machine. Well, you want to go on a pain machine?

No, in fairness, in a college environment, I could 100% see getting an actual volunteer for that. It's the same people who eat hot chilies or whatever. To be fair, as a student, I was being paid a fiver or a tenor to do psychology. I had a psychological experiment done on me. Oh, yeah. When you turn into the unabomber in like 25 years...

Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll be your character when this is done. I was about to do a joke that was like, yeah, I'm never going to work in a heavily scrutinized controversial area of research again. I'm going to go somewhere where I can inflict really lasting pain with no one scrutinizing me, a university psychology department.

Yes, that's exactly it. But, you know, being a student in the UK, I need to eat. I did not like this safety third at all. I mean, the person who did it, fine, it was funny, but I've listened to every single safety third, and I do not like this. I've become more scared of MRIs after this.

Oh, for sure. I thought it was really funny. This is one of the funniest ones. I really enjoyed this one. You freak. I think I have a clear division of labor on this podcast between which of us would volunteer for the pain machine. Oh, yeah.

What are you going to do? I surprised myself, you know, I blinked first. Look, no lasting harm, no foul. Anyway. That was safety third. Our next episode is on the Boston molasses disaster. Doesn't even have any commercials before we go. Go follow Gareth on Twitter.

Yeah. Yeah, listen to 10,000 losses. Listen to trash feature. Listen to lines led by donkeys. Yeah. Subscribe to the Patreon. This is the bonus episode as well. Yeah, absolutely.

If the people want more Gareth, where can they find more Gareth? Good God on Twitter, where I do not... At the moment in Philadelphia. Yeah, that's true. I mean, in Philadelphia, you can come find me for a diminishing number of hours. Probably negative hours by the time this goes out. Yeah, I've left. I've gone.

I'm probably back in the UK having flown over the Atlantic again. Yes. Well, what are the lights? Yes. All right, good night everybody. See you. Bye, everyone. Thanks for editing this one together, Devin.

It's my first Devin edited episode. Thank you, Devin.