Forensics tests have resolved a debate surrounding the final resting place of H.H. Holmes, a Chicago doctor and mass murderer widely regarded as America’s first serial killer.
Holmes was sentenced to death in 1896 after admitting to dozens of murders and was reportedly executed by hanging in Philadelphia and buried at nearby Holy Cross Cemetery. Rumors about his fate have persisted for years, however, and a judge agreed earlier this year to excavate the grave and exhume its contents.
The producers of a cable television show documented the process and unveiled this week that the remains buried at the grave are most certainly those of Holmes, the so-called “Devil in the White City” attributed with turning a Chicago boarding house into a dastardly death trap notoriously known today as the “Murder Castle.”
Born Herman Webster Mudgett in 1861, Holmes moved to Chicago when he was 25 and a few years later began construction on the “castle,” a supposed hotel geared toward travelers attending the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Peculiarly built with windowless rooms, trap doors and false floors, the building was also outfitted with gas vents Holmes used to pump toxins into some of the rooms in order to asphyxiate his guests before gruesomely dissecting them.
“The atrocities of which he was convicted are almost unparalleled in the history of crime — shocking alike for their enormity and the cold-blooded, deliberate way in which they were committed,” the Chicago Tribune reported in 1896. “He attributed his natural relish for crime to the fact, as he put it, ’He was born with the devil in him.’”
Holmes went years without being caught for the Chicago murders and was eventually arrested for killing his business partner in Philadelphia before being subsequently executed and buried in Yeadon, Pa – supposedly.
“Within two hours of the hanging an undertaker’s wagon containing a casket drove out of the prison yard,” the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean reported in 1898. “That casket was supposed to contain the body of Holmes. Instead, it contained Holmes living.”
But University of Pennsylvania anthropologist Samantha Cox is among the forensics experts who exhumed the body for the episode of “American Ripper” broadcast by The History Channel this week and said the body they exhumed was nearly impossible to identify.
“It stank,” she said, according to NewsWorks. “Once it gets to that point we can’t do anything with it. We can’t test it, can’t get any DNA out of it.”
Ultimately researchers positively matched the corpse to Holmes through its teeth, she said.
Holmes confessed to 27 murders prior to his execution, though not all have been verified.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.