147. The Werewolf: H.H Holmes and His Murder Castle // MONSTERS SERIES

It was a cool and clear day in Chicago around the turn of the 19th century when a group of detectives walked down the dark steps into the basement of a looming three-story building owned by a man named H.H. Holmes. Holmes himself had been a mystery, stories about a charming man with a string of missing women connected to him had traveled all around Chicago. And now, Holmes himself was missing. Could this place hold any clues, they wondered? The basement was huge and it was dark, but investigators noticed it was also full of strange things, like surgical tools and old rags. There was even a surgical table tucked away in a dark corner. What on earth did a guy need a surgical table in his basement for? Next to it, there was a patch of churned up earth like something had recently been buried there. The detectives all had a really bad feeling about what may have occurred here, and one of them ended up going upstairs to Holmes's office where his walk in vault was. But when he opened the door to the vault, he found a room with no shelves, no money, just barely big enough for someone to turn all the way around in. And there, inside on the vault door was a footprint, like someone had been locked inside and kicked the doors hard as they could in a desperate attempt to get out. The detective pictured a young woman stepping inside the vault, laughing maybe because Holmes had told her to try the acoustics, and she wanted to be polite. He could see the door swinging shut behind her, the latch turning, and then her pounding on the door as she desperately tried to escape in time. The truth was, there were clues all over this place about what happened to Holmes and the women who went missing in his wake. And it wouldn't be long before it was dubbed by the media as a murder castle shortly after they made this discovery. But who was AJ Holmes, the man at the center of this mystery, and how did he come to build a murder castle? Welcome back to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horror's hauntings and mysteries, and as always, I'm your host, Kayla Moore. Today we are going to dive into the final episode of our monster series. This time we're going to take a closer look at one of the most notorious American serial killers, AJ Holmes. If you're new here, welcome to our community of the Darkly Curious. I love making Heart Starts Pounding here every week inside of the Rogue Detecting Society, and I'm very thankful that each one of you joins me here every week to make that possible. Now before we dive back in, I just wanted to give you a very quick reminder that we have a special limited time extended free trial for Heart Starts Pounding Premium going on on Apple Podcasts. So if you want a full 30 days to check out our back catalog of monthly bonus episodes, archived episodes, and more, you have until the end of October, which is honestly rapidly approaching. Also, this Friday is the finale of the special re-release of the Time Keeper, our horror audio drama. So if you need to catch up on that, you have two more days to go. Okay. We have a lot to cover in this episode, so let's get back to it. Now maybe you've read the book Devil and the White City about today's monster that we're going to focus on. H.H. Holmes. I know I absolutely love that book, but we actually put together this whole episode using completely different historical sources, which I'm actually very proud of. I love to nerd out about that. So this is maybe going to be a slightly different, but still historical telling of this morbid tale. But even if you feel like you know this story, you might learn something new, and please wherever you listen, comment if you do. But this spooky season, we've discussed a variety of monsters, vampires, sirens, bogeymen. But today, I want to talk about a monster that blends into society more than any of them, one that walks amongst us until a full moon rises and changes them into a beast. Because to me, that's what H.H. Holmes represents, a man with an insatiable monster living inside of him, a werewolf. Werewolf lore might be the oldest of all of the monster folklore we're going to explore this month. There's actually a wolf transformation that happens in the epic of Gilgamesh, and that was written 1500 years before the Odyssey, where siren folklore originated from. The transformation of humans into wolves was typically punishment from the deities in early western folklore, and the epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian goddess Ishtar, is said to have turned a shepherd who was her former lover into a wolf as a way of breaking things off with him, causing him to be attacked by his own sheepdogs. But over time, this lore changed, and the myth comes a little bit closer to what we have present day in the Norse saga of the wool songs from the 13th century, and that includes the tale of a father and son living in exile in the forest, who steal enchanted wolf skins from two sleeping men, and are transformed into wolves for 10 days, enabling them to rampage through the forest, killing many human men. And by the European Middle Ages, wolf transformations actually stopped being the domain of fables about the whims of the gods, and they became a very real fear that was shared by peasants and scholars alike. Just like how belief in witches became a proxy for society to deal with behavior they found socially unacceptable in women, the belief in werewolves became a proxy for society to deal with the behavior that they could not comprehend in men, and thus started the werewolf trials, where people across Europe stood trial for their crimes as werewolves. One of those people was Giles Garnier, the werewolf of Dole they called him. In the late 16th century, children in and around Dole France began disappearing with their bodies, sometimes turning up mutilated or partially consumed. People presumed that this was the work of a werewolf, so a hunting party that was deputized to catch the wolf discovered local hermit Giles Garnier crouched over a child's body, and they captured him. Giles ended up confessing to being a werewolf, and he said that he made a deal with a demon to obtain werewolf ointment so he could more easily hunt food for himself and his wife, not realizing that it would also cause him to eat human children too. As a result of this, he was burned at the stake in 1574 for his crimes. Over time, the werewolf paranoia has calmed down, and today the myth is typically tied to high school boys. It's less unexplainable carnage committed by town hermits, and more where the hell you been, Loka, if you catch my drift. But in the late 1800s, as police walked through, H.H. Holmes's murder castle, they wondered how someone who fit so well into society, who was described as being charming and witty, could have committed the atrocities that he had. It was like a beast had been unleashed from inside of him while no one was looking. Just like how Giles Garnier left a trail of blood behind him, so did H.H. Holmes, which is why in our monster series this month, he is our werewolf. But let's start at the beginning of his story. H.H. Holmes was born as Herman Webster Muget on May 16, 1861, to a farmer and a former school teacher in charming Gilminton, New Hampshire. He was the third of five siblings and a family well off enough to send him to school at the age of five. Both of his parents were devout Methodists, who took the phrase "spare the rod," spoiled the child quite literally. His father was a heavy drinker who beat Holmes and denied him food if he misbehaved. And his mother was a religious zealot who would sometimes wake him in the middle of the night to kneel in front of him and pray for his immortal soul. From infancy onward, both of his parents would hold kerosene-soaked rags over his face to quiet him when he cried. And today, we know that exposure to kerosene fumes can have negative neurological effects in addition to causing physical complications like pneumonia and vomiting. But I doubt that Holmes' school yard bullies were considering that when they were picking on him for just being an all-around odd kid. Now Holmes may have suffered from something called "stribusiness," which is also known more colloquially as cross-eyes, which caused him to avoid direct eye contact with people. And because of this, adults would often accuse him of lying with no proof other than the fact that he refused to look them in the eye. That made him a pretty easy target for bullies at the time, but there was more that they would bully him about. There was also the fact that he had a very strange obsession with death and dismemberment. Now some say that this started when Holmes was dragged into a local doctor's office in 1866 by two young boys, the story goes that they wanted to scare their strange little classmate by locking him in the office alone with a real human skeleton that hung in the corner. But instead of being scared, when he saw the human remains, the grinning skull, the dark empty eye sockets, it awoke something in Holmes. He left the doctor's office, not in tears, but with a dream. That one day he would have his very own collection of shiny scalples and the skills to wield them. And Holmes really stuck to that dream. He decided he wanted to become a doctor, but he developed his surgical skills by capturing stray pets and operating on them without any anesthesia. When the animals died, as they always did, he would keep parts of their bodies as mementos. Now, young Holmes' morbid impulses may have gone far beyond dissections and animal abuse. His childhood friend, Tom, reportedly died in a fall when the two were exploring an abandoned house one day. At the time, it was assumed to be a very tragic accident. People in the community always wondered if odd little Herman Muget saw Tom perched on a ledge and gave him a good shove. From a really early age, people could see that there was this darkness brewing inside of the boy. They just never really anticipated how dark it would get. At age 17, Holmes married a woman named Clara A. Lovering. She was a farmer's daughter whose family was much better off than his own. Clara paid his tuition even after their son Robert was born when they were just 18 years old. And Holmes was never really the guy to say thank you for a kind deed like this. He didn't actually say much to Clara ever, it seems, or really his son for that matter. At this time he was completely consumed by his life's path and he spent very little time at home. See, Holmes was obsessed with being in medical school. And even his classmates noticed his extraordinary enthusiasm for human dissection. His enthusiasm for corpses went far beyond what was normal among med students at the time. Early in his studies, he was delighted when a professor let him bring home a dead infant. He ended up leaving the corpse under his bed for so long that it began exuding black fluid, which nearly got him kicked out of the boarding house where he was staying. But as odd as he was, Holmes had this way of sweet talking people. And he was able to charm the woman who ran the boarding house into letting him stay, even when everyone wanted him kicked out for doing that. It didn't really help though that his grades at the time were not impressive at all. He was on really thin ice at the school, and it truly seemed like the corpses were the only thing keeping him interested in medicine. He loved the specimens and jars on his professor's table. He was obsessed with the fact that students had to go to the local cemeteries and dig up their own bodies for dissections. But other than that, the idea of opening up his own practice and helping people in his community just seemed totally unappealing. But so did life at home for him. Out in the world, Holmes was seen as this really smooth talking charmer. But inside of his marriage, he was an absolute monster. He would tell Clara all the time that he thought he could have done better if he just waited until after medical school to choose a wife. Clara was also seen with black eyes on several occasions after arguing with her husband. At some point though, in 1883, Clara decided she had enough. She looked at him and said, "You might be fooling everyone else harm in budget, but I know who you really are." In one evening, she took little Robert and moved back to New Hampshire. Holmes now found himself at this crossroad. Putting his life to medicine was still technically an option despite his horrible grades. Still, there were plenty of villages that needed a doctor and most patients were not going to ask about his grades in medical school. But another option had presented himself. See, back home at New Hampshire, Holmes was considered odd. He was considered untrustworthy, even low-class. But in Michigan, people saw him as handsome, as bold, as charismatic. Women found his waxed mustache and forward flirtatious behavior really attractive. He was a charming guy. And he found it easy to gain people's trust. And on top of that, he knew how to get a hold of human bodies. Soon enough, he put those two things together. And he came up with a way to make more money than he ever could as a doctor. Insurance fraud. Here's how his games worked. He would recruit an accomplice and take out a large life insurance policy in their name with himself as the beneficiary. Then he would steal a body from the medical school, and he would mutilate it badly enough that it was totally unrecognizable. That, for him at least, was the fun part. The last step was to report the insured person as dead, presenting the disfigured cadaver as proof. No one could actually prove who the body really belonged to. So Holmes and his dead accomplice could then split the insurance payout. One successful score netted him $12,500, which is the equivalent of more than $400,000 today. A country doctor, at the time, couldn't expect to make that kind of money in a decade. Now, this new money-making scheme blended everything he liked together - cadavers, confidence, and most importantly, money. But he knew that if he was going to continue on this path, he was going to have to go somewhere where he blended in a little bit more. Somewhere where his macabre crimes wouldn't be noticed. A big city. And in 1886, he started going by a new name. Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, or H.H. Holmes for short, now armed with a medical degree, a new identity. 24-year-old Dr. H.H. Holmes made his way to Chicago. The birthplace of the skyscraper and the epitome of the gilded age, where many of the country's most successful titans of their industries made their fortunes. Chicago, at the time, was really the perfect hunting ground for a con man with no conscience. There was enormous wealth alongside total squalor, plus a rapidly growing population. There were always more rich people to scam, and there were always more poor people desperate enough to become his accomplices. To ingratiate himself into the area, Holmes began working as a pharmacist at a drugstore located in the Chicago suburb of Inglewood. His new boss was a woman named Dr. Elizabeth Holton. She had studied at the Women's Medical College of Chicago, one of a handful of women's medical schools in the United States at the time. However, within a few months, somehow Holmes was the one running the drugstore, and Dr. Holton was nowhere to be found. There's a few different stories about how Holmes came to own Dr. Holton's business, ranging from proposing marriage and then refusing to follow through after she signed over the store to him to killing her and her daughter. But through our research, we found that Dr. Holton was already married and public records indicate that she did end up outliving Holmes, so it's likely at least we think that he bought her out of the business, though he probably did try to scam her in some way. But this drugstore, to Holmes, was just a stepping stone. He already had his eye on the next scam he wanted to commit. Across the street from the drugstore, there was a vacant lot, and even though there was nothing there, Holmes had a vision. And also, he had this insatiable appetite, like a werewolf that can't control when he changes shape and feasts on victims, Holmes pictured a place on that land where all of his darkest impulses could be acted upon. His vision was for a hotel. One that would welcome in the swarm of people coming to Chicago to start their new lives, people who were arriving solo, with no family to check in on them, people who would not be missed if they vanished. And at once, he got to work on what would later be called his murder castle. Holmes bought the lot on credit, saying that he was building a hotel for the 1893 World's Fair. He then took a second loan against the lot to pay off the first loan, both of which he knew he was never going to really pay off. It didn't matter though. He put the property under the name of his new wife, Murda Belna, though he was still legally married to Clara so this marriage was not legal at all, but when the bills came, the collectors would chase Murda and her mother while Holmes could vanish. Now, Holmes ran out of money from just buying the materials for the building, and he didn't really have anything left to pay the actual workers, so he kept construction going with this revolving con that he devised. He would lure in contractors to start without full payment. He dismissed them when they pressed for their wages, and he would hire new crews who didn't really yet know his reputation. The building itself was a huge jumble of a bunch of different things, there was a drugstore at the street level, there were rental rooms above that, and then there was a third floor that just never opened. But the constant turnover of workers had this side benefit. No one ever worked on the building long enough to see what the entire thing looked like on the inside once it was completed. Period tabloids interviewed various workers and associates about the parts they had worked on. The only full picture of the murder castle that we have is from those interviews, and they paint a very, very morbid picture of a place that wasn't just a boarding house for people coming to Chicago, but as a place where murder could be done swiftly and for enjoyment. Here's what some of those workers said, at least according to these tabloids. There was a giant stove, apparently, on the third floor. It was eight feet tall and three feet wide. Why there needed to be a stove up there on the floor where no one would ever visit was anyone's guess. In the basement, one worker had installed vats of quicklime, now quicklime was used in cement making, but it's also extremely corrosive, and back then it was used to dissolve bodies very quickly. Another worker mentioned that there was a special dumb waiter set up to carry cargo from the sealed off third floor to the equally secluded basement. Now the worker found it strange that it didn't stop at any of the more accessible floors in between. It was as if it was just for moving something in total secret. sacred, only to the most shadowy places of the castle. The worst part might have been the basement in general, where it was reported that Holmes had built at least what some of the workers referred to as a torture room. The papers reported that there was an operating room for Holmes to conduct medical experiments and that there was even lethal gas jets that allowed him to kill or incapacitate hotel guests in their rooms, all while he could watch through secret peepholes that he made to see them struggle. He also had this machine that was called the elasticity determinator that was designed to stretch out human bodies to their maximum capacity, eventually tearing them, limb from limb, straight out of a medieval torture playbook. Holmes even invented an alarm system that alerted him whenever people moved about the castle to keep his guests from escaping prematurely. Then there was the walk-in vault that was located in his office, the one where police found the single footprint. This was a place where he could lock women inside and just wait for them to suffocate. It was easy for him to ask an assistant helping him run the business to run into the safe and grab him something, and then just close the heavy metal door behind her and lock it from the outside. It would only take a few hours for her to suffocate, and if that didn't work, it would only take a few days for her to die from lack of water. One worker described another hidden room that could be entered only by a trapped door in the ceiling, and it was theorized that people could be dropped into it and just left to starve. By the way, it's worth mentioning that that secret room had another a little bit less morbid function. When Holmes bought the furniture that he intended to actually use to furnish his building, the seller sent an agent to watch the exits until Holmes paid in full. The whole furniture was removed from the building, so when the sellers showed up to collect the money, they planned to repossess everything if Holmes couldn't pay. But what they found was that the building was empty of all of the furniture. It's most likely that Holmes just moved the furniture into a secret room so that the creditors couldn't see where it was, and he moved everything back where it belonged once they had left. Of course, these are all just snapshots of the rooms Holmes had built. We don't know exactly what they were used for, but what we do know, for sure. Is that he had a proclivity for dissection. He had a pathological urge to make money, and he also had no empathy for anyone around him. And now he had a giant house full of out of towners where he could let his dark side completely take over. And that is when a woman named Julia Connor entered his life. In September of 1889, Julia Connor walked into the drugstore at the bottom floor of the murder castle to ask for a job. She had just moved to Chicago with her husband Ned Connor and their four-year-old daughter Pearl. The well-dressed, moustacheed Holmes offered her a job and immediately got to work on charming young Julia. He even offered Julia's husband Ned a job running the jewelry section of the drugstore. It seems like your husband can't really take care of your family. Holmes remarked, "But I can. He would always make sure that Julia and her family were taken care of, and he even offered her family room and board up on the second floor of the castle." It wasn't long before the neighboring apartments heard Ned screaming at Julia most nights. It was not a very well-kept secret that she was sneaking out of her room at night to go visit Holmes' room. Ned eventually moved out, and he filed for divorce, and Julia kept her daughter and stayed behind. Julia may or may not have known that her new boyfriend was already married to murder, and that he had just welcomed a two-year-old daughter with her, and she almost certainly didn't know that he was also really married to a woman named Clara. Merta often stayed at her mother's home in nearby Wilmet, and when Holmes started dating Julia on the side, he probably just encouraged Merta to spend more time away from the castle. On Christmas Eve of 1891, Julia came to Holmes with what she hoped was going to be good news that would make him happy. She was pregnant with his child, and also she wanted to marry him. Holmes gave her this big smile, the one he was known for, where his eyes wouldn't really crinkle, but then he got very serious. Don't you think we should be married first? He asked. This overwhelmed Julia, being Holmes' wife was all that she wanted. Yes, she would love to marry him before the baby came, obviously, but that's not exactly what he meant. He calmly explained to her that he would marry her, but only if she got rid of the baby. Good news though, he told her. With his medical training, he could take care of the problem himself if she just trusted him. This was not what Julia wanted to hear, but she was kind of in a tough position. She was recently divorced, working a ton to support her young daughter, and now she was pregnant without a husband, so she agreed to Holmes' plan. Because at least by doing that, she would have a husband, a second set of income, a father for her young daughter. So one evening, Julia accompanied Holmes down into the castle's basement underneath the drugstore. She saw what a dump it was down there. The dirt floor, the old medical equipment sprawled out and not cleaned. It was honestly like a scene from a saw movie. She went over, and she sat on the gurney, and Holmes followed her, giving her that smile he always gave, reassuring, but just a bit off. He then doused a rag in chloroform, which was the main anesthetic used in surgery back in the day. And before she even had a moment to understand what was happening, he held it over her mouth and nose. No one ever saw Julia conner after that. And no one saw her daughter Pearl after that either. Holmes would later claim during an investigation that Julia died, and he gave Pearl to an elderly couple afterwards who later poisoned her. But if that was true, it wouldn't really explain why bones believed to be pearls were later excavated from the castle's basement. Julia was just the start of a pattern for Holmes, using women until they became inconvenient to him and then just making them disappear. He did it again, less than a year later, to his secretary and mistress Emily Missa Grant. Emily disappeared without a trace, but one day, Holmes was seen carrying a large trunk out of the castle, and he wouldn't tell anyone what was inside. It was her skeleton, Holmes had stripped it of flesh and muscle and then sold it to a medical college. And then there was Minnie Williams, a Texas actress that he first met a few years ago in New York. She happened to be in Chicago for the 1893 World's Fair, applying for work as a stenographer. Holmes deployed all of the same tactics that he used on women. He hired her, and then he started sleeping with her. Minnie soon moved in, and she brought her sister, Nanny, along with her. The two essentially lived as husband and wife, and Holmes even at one point agreed to marry her. That's because she had something that Holmes wanted. Very badly. A piece of property and fort worth worth somewhere between $20,000 and $50,000. She ended up signing the land over to him because that was the only way he would agree to actually marry her. They ended up having a small ceremony with a priest, but Minnie wouldn't live long enough for the marriage to be legally filed. Both sisters vanished shortly after the wedding. Holmes would later attribute the footprint and the safe to Nanny. He locked the door behind her and left her in there, kicking and screaming on the inside while he finished up paperwork at his desk. Perhaps he also stripped her skeleton and sold it to a local university once he was sure she was dead. As for Minnie, he would later go on to say that he took her on a train journey, poisoned her, and then buried her body in the basement of a house just a few miles outside of Chicago. Neither of the William sisters' bodies were ever found, so how they died will always be a mystery to us, but we know why they were killed. Like Holmes' previous victims, they were former intimate associates, murdered as soon as they inconvenienced him. Now, there was never a lack of young attractive women coming to work at Holmes' castle. No one was reporting any of these missing women, and Holmes always had an excuse for any neighbor that may be started catching onto his plan. Oh, Julia and Pearl, um, actually they moved to California, don't worry about it. And it seems like all of these girls were really in on his scams as well. Nearly all of the women he hired were required to become certified as notaries, so that they could sign fraudulent documents for him, and those who maybe knew too much about his scams never left. But Holmes wasn't necessarily flying totally under the radar. It seemed like some of his past misdeeds were starting to catch up with him. The police would actually stop by the castle semi-frequently, usually to investigate reports of him cheating one creditor or another, and Holmes knew what they might find if they ever got a warrant and searched the whole place. I mean, God forbid they check his basement, but unbeknownst to the police officers he had an escape plan. The world's fair ended in October of 1893, and the steady flow of new people coming into the city began to slow down. There were less workers to scam, there were less young women with no family to employ, with multiple lawsuits pending against him, the cops starting to sniff around, and his sources of revenue all drying up, Holmes realized that it was time for him to let the castle go. From now on, Holmes realized he needed to stay one step ahead of his calling creditors. It's like when your university calls you and asks you for money and you have to kind of make something up as to why you can't give them $100 on the phone in that moment, that was Holmes but on a much bigger scale. And he decided the way he was going to do this was by never remaining in one place for all that long. I think that by him leaving the murder castle, it would set his life on a slightly different path, but it would actually be the start of one of the most depraved crimes that he would ever commit. He's tapping, tap tap tap. He's tapping on the door. He wants us to open the door. Then a narrow light turns on and then the narrow light turns on in a shape of a triangle. And I'd say it's probably about the length of a school bus, you know, right above my head. She had long, ratted hair. She was wearing a dress. Her ribs were showing, her fingers were long. She looked shriveled, partially decayed. "I'm starting to freak out a little bit. I'm pleading with him to just please let me out." These eyes started opening. They were pure white. And I lose it. Radio Rental returns October 23rd. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. For his next set of crimes, Holmes needed an accomplice and he had just the person in mind. Benjamin Petzl was 38, a handy worker with a melancholy streak, a drinking problem, and five children at home in St. Louis. He had worked on a couple of Holmes' schemes in Chicago because the checks, at least when they did, come in meant that he could put food on the table for his family. And Holmes liked that Benjamin never asked too many questions. Now, whether that was because he knew better or because he was not smart enough to really know what was happening, I'll let you decide. By November of 1893, Holmes was moving around a lot to avoid the police and the debt collectors. He skipped from city to city, Denver to Fort Worth to St. Louis. He married again under an alias, he stripped assets from all of his businesses, and he talked his way out of every corner he got back into. He ended up getting arrested in St. Louis when they caught him on a mortgage fraud scam in July of 1894, and he shared a cell with a train robber named Marion Hedgespeth, who said that he could help Holmes with an insurance scam. He'd give him the name of a crooked lawyer who would help him commit as many scams as he wanted, as long as Holmes kept bringing him bodies so they could trick the insurance companies. All that Hedgespeth asked for was a cut, and Holmes agreed to this. That's where Benjamin came in because he needed someone to help him commit these scams now. Holmes asked Benjamin to buy a $10,000 life insurance policy, which is $360,000 today. Then they were going to fake his death, go get a corpse, and use the lawyer to complete the scam, and after that they could just split the money. It was going to be easy. Benjamin thought that this was a way to bring money home for his family, to put more food on the table. He forgot that Holmes was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and nothing he ever did matched what he said he was going to do. Benjamin didn't know that this decision would inadvertently bring his family into Holmes' messed-up world, because Holmes decided that faking Benjamin's death was really not going to be good enough, to really do this scam. Benjamin was going to need to die. Following Holmes's directions, Benjamin set up shop in Philadelphia under an alias, B.F. Perry. Meanwhile, Holmes wrote these cruel, forged letters to Benjamin and his wife's voice, because he wanted to make it seem like the couple was having an argument that would set Benjamin off on an alcohol binge. On September 2nd, 1894, Holmes slipped into Benjamin's house when no one was expecting it, and whether Benjamin was drunk as Holmes later said he was, or if he was sober as the medical evidence indicated, the result was the same. Benjamin was chlorformed by Holmes, and then the store he was inside of was set on fire. All to make it look like a chemical explosion happened from a pipe that was installed incorrectly, and then that was that. The man Benjamin trusted was the man who ensured that his body would never be able to be recovered. Now, the insurance company needed to identify the body before it would pay out the insurance policy. Kerry Pytsel, who was Benjamin's wife, had been in on this plan the whole time, and she was under the impression that this was just a con that was going to keep her family afloat. So first and foremost, she thought that Benjamin was still alive, and second, she couldn't really risk the insurance company seeing through her plan. At Holmes' urging, she allowed her 14-year-old daughter Alice to travel with him to Philadelphia to identify the remains of her father. And poor, young Alice, she thought she was going to go visit Holmes and her father, she thought she was going to look at a stranger's body and just say it was her father, she thought that she was helping her dad take care of their family, she knew that her younger siblings were hungry, but that is not what happened at all. When Alice arrived at the morgue, she looked down at the charred remains and recognized what no teenager should ever have to. Her father's broken nose, a mole on his neck, the bent fingernail that he always had, she looked at Holmes in horror, she knew what he had done, but he just gave her a smile, and he told her to tell the insurance company what we talked about Alice and so she did, and the company paid out. And Holmes got his cut, the lawyer took his cut, and he never quite paid the share to his cellmate that recommended the lawyer. But then, after all of this, Holmes took something else, and that was custody of Benjamin's children. Holmes wrote to Mrs. Petzl to tell her that Benjamin was in hiding, but that Alice was safe with a kindly widow in Kentucky, and that their younger children should go join their sister just for now. And for whatever reason, Mrs. Petzl agreed to let their nine-year-old daughter Nelly and eight-year-old son Howard travel with Holmes. I think it was because she was frightened that she would jeopardize this plan if she didn't do that. Holmes also told her that he would protect her cut of the insurance payout, so along with the children, she sent her $7,000 that she had received. Holmes's schemes before this were completely unthinkable, but it was always clear that it was somewhat of a game to him. Whether he was lying to insurance agents or figuring out the best way to construct a vault so no one could hear a woman scream, there were other ways for him to make money and be able to mess around with corpses. He could have just gone and been a doctor. But no, he had a dark side that needed to be unleashed, one that enjoyed the game and the deception of doing frauds and murder and scams. And once he got Mrs. Petzl's children, for Holmes, the game was on. What followed was one of the saddest games of cat and mouse that I've ever read about. Because eventually Mrs. Petzl figured that everything had died down enough. The insurance companies had paid, no one was asking questions anymore, so she asked, could she please have her children, her husband, and the money back. But here's the thing, Holmes couldn't afford to pay her back at $7,000. And he didn't know what she would do when she realized that her husband was actually dead. So he kept making up excuses. At one point he stashed Alice Nellie and Howard in an Indiana boarding house, but he told Mrs. Petzl that they were being educated in Europe. It wasn't long before she was demanding to see Benjamin and her children. And on numerous occasions, Holmes sent Mrs. Petzl a train ticket ensuring her that she would meet her husband at her destination. And then told her when she arrived that the insurance company was actually sniffing around, and Benjamin had to flee. He did the same thing regarding her children. Every time he promised her a chance to see the three kids, he whisked them off somewhere else just before the planned reunion. It seemed like he really enjoyed taunting her and watching her become more and more frantic. Time after time she believed him, because not believing him meant admitting the unthinkable. Every time Holmes evaded Mrs. Petzl, he told her it was because the insurance company was closing in on him. And actually, he had no idea that that was kind of true. Investigators were actually closing in on him at this time, but it wasn't just the insurance companies. It was the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the famous Chicago-based private investigators. They had been contacted by that train robber that Holmes shared a cell with, Marion Hedgebeth, who was still mad that Holmes had stiffed him on his share of the insurance scam money. And this is one time in history where holding a grudge and being petty really paid off, let me tell you. Hedgebeth told the Pinkerton's everything about Benjamin's fake death for the insurance payout. He didn't know that Benjamin actually had been murdered, but he wanted to get back at Holmes. The Pinkerton's took on the case because it was especially gruesome. Holmes was smart, he was evasive, but he was no match for the Pinkerton's. And in Boston on November 17, 1894, the Pinkerton's finally grabbed him. Technically, they got him on a Texas horse theft warrant, but it didn't matter. They had him. The press swarmed the handsome doctor who had "cheated insurers with cadavers." The country was shocked when they read about his scams, and it didn't take long for reporters to do a little bit more digging into his backstory, and soon they were asking him about other names. missing women, and the three missing children that Mrs. Pitzel had gone to the press about. Holmes, of course, denied everything. He told one story and then he told another story. Eventually, he admitted that Benjamin was dead, but he said that it was a suicide and that he had nothing to do with it. That would not do anything to help him, though. Actually, things were about to get a lot worse for him, because in Philadelphia, there was a detective named Frank Geier. And Frank had recently lost his wife and his daughter in a fire. So when he heard Mrs. Pitzel's plea to help her find her missing children, he knew that he had to do something. He volunteered to help search for Alice Nellie and Howard. He didn't believe for a single second that the children were being educated in Europe. He had met plenty of men like Holmes and his career. And if Holmes was willing to lie about the death of the children's father, he knew that he was definitely lying about the children as well. So Geier followed Holmes's paper trail. He looked at the unscent letters that were found amongst Holmes' belongings. He looked at postmarks, hotel registers, real estate ledgers. And he was able to construct a map of everywhere that Holmes had taken the children. And reading through the paper trail was heartbreaking because he saw how many times Mrs. Pitzel would arrive at those locations just moments after Holmes had escaped with her children. She had been so close to saving them on so many different occasions. So Geier got to work. He started following the path that Holmes and the children took, asking witnesses along the way if they had seen the traveling group. And on July 15, 1895, after days of knocking on doors in Toronto, a real estate agent remembered a nervous tenant who asked to borrow a shovel. Now this wasn't really much of a lead, but it was at least something. He led Geier to the house on Vincent Street. And in the cellar, Geier noticed that the floor looked like it had recently been turned up. So he just started digging. And what he found made his heart absolutely drop. There were two small bodies in a shallow grave, Alice and Nelly. Geier then boarded another train for Indianapolis to look for the youngest boy Howard. And he was sure now that he was just searching for the boy's remains. Howard was a little bit harder to find. Geier searched again through neighborhoods that he had already canvassed and he followed near useless tips by the hundreds. But then finally, on August 27, he located a home that Holmes had rented with Howard. As it turned out, a doctor who was also just a really nice guy owned the place. And he was really horrified by the possibility that a body was being hit in there. So he joined in the search as well. Two neighborhood boys offered to help look through the house again also. And after hours of searching every nook and cranny, it was actually the boys who stuck their arms up the chimney pipe and pulled out a handful of ashes containing human teeth. They sifted through the chimney's contents a little bit more and they found a piece of a femur and a chunk of human skull followed by a baked mass of human tissue that appeared to be consistent with Howard's pelvis, spleen, stomach, and liver. Meanwhile, Chicago police searched through the building that was now being christened to the murder castle by the press. And it was a disaster. There were human remains in quick-lime downstairs. There were tiny bones that they figured belonged to Pearl. There were several pieces of damning evidence inside of the enormous stove, like a woman's shoe, two human ribs. One of them, which was described as being "partially consumed." There were buttons and human hair that they believed belonged to many Williams. There was bits of a purse, bits of a dress. But the search party almost seemed to be cursed. Because early on in their process, there was this one careless investigator who caused a gas leak in the basement. And then another man came down the stairs carrying candles. And the result was this massive explosion that injured five of the investigators. Prosecutors also faced this paradox. The papers had already just taken the story and run with it. They had basically convicted Holmes of dozens, if not hundreds, of murders. But the evidence, especially now that most of the castle was burned down because of the investigators, was really thin and scattered. In the end, Holmes was just charged with the death of Benjamin Petzel. He felt like he could represent himself and win the favor of the jurors as if he could charm them the way that he had termed so many people he had tricked before. But the jury was so convinced of his guilt, they hardly needed to discuss. They actually had to sit in silence for a while just to make it appear like they had really deliberated. But then they returned to the courtroom and immediately gave their verdict of guilty. Holmes was sentenced to death by hanging and he was executed on May 7, 1896. And per his own instructions, his body was buried 10 feet deep and cement was poured on top of it. After a lifetime of grave robbing and messing with corpses, Holmes did not want his own body dissected. H.H. Holmes has gone down in American history as being one of the most depraved killers of all time. But similar to tales that spread throughout Europe of werewolves, he has really been mythologized in a way. His story is almost like American folklore at this point. Before Holmes was executed, he sold a confession to the press for $7,500. That's almost $270,000 today, in which he claimed to have committed 27 murders. Now, didn't matter that many of the victims he named were proven later to be alive and well and not serial murdered by Holmes? No. Those names became interwoven in the myth of the man. Even when Holmes recanted his entire confession on the scaffold of his execution, it just didn't matter. Some of the fake confessions that we found while researching this episode was he confessed to killing a guy that he just called Rogers in 1888 by hitting him on the head with an ore during a fishing trip in West Morgantown, Virginia. All to steal his money. That could never be verified because there were no missing people in the area that matched that description. He also said that he once shoved a man named L Warner into a glass bending kiln, which burned him to death and reduced him to ash, and that was also he could clean out the man's bank accounts. Now, L Warner was found alive by investigators, but he did own the glass bending kiln that was inside of the murder castle. So maybe that was how Holmes made the connection and fabricated that story? He also said that he killed a young woman named Katie Dirkie by locking her in his vault until she suffocated so he could steal her money and her property, except that once again, investigators found that she was alive and well in Omaha. And in 1896, she actually issued a public statement swearing that she "was never killed by Holmes or anyone else." The two had met briefly and he did go on to use some of her names when he was forging documents, but that was really the only connection they had. But still, even after Holmes was executed, his myth continued to grow. Holmes' modern-day descendant, Jeff Mugget, believes that Holmes was also Jack the Ripper, which an episode that we put on our feed this month that I covered on clues, and that was a theory that was hard to contrive. It would have required Holmes to have faked his own death at the gallows, escape his grave, and then catch a boat to London. But still, in 2017, Holmes' descendant successfully petitioned to have his body exhumed and the DNA tested, believing that it would prove that the body was fake, and Holmes had once again done another successful body swap. But the DNA and the dental records confirmed that the body really did belong to Holmes, as did his signature mustache, which they said was still visible on his skull. So maybe Holmes wasn't Jack the Ripper after all, and maybe he didn't kill as many people as he said he did. But his myth will continue to live on forever, and it will continue to grow with every retelling of his story. And really, that's the thing with monsters, right? If I had to kind of put a bow on our monster series for the month, all of the monsters that we discussed, whether they're werewolves, sirens, vampires, or boogiemen, their myths are some of the oldest stories that we have here on Earth, and we tell them to each other over and over and over again, and they grow and they change and they morph. And so maybe Holmes' story is kind of a modern day version of that, where the more we tell it, the more it's mythologized, and baked into our society and culture and history, and the more that it will change over time. But that's the interesting part of sharing Holmes' story, right? Whether you're trying to debunk some of the myths about him, or whether you watch a video that's exploring and building up his mythologized version, it's just interesting to see how he's become folklore and is presented as a monster. But now I want to hear from you guys, which type of monster is the scariest to you. I still have nightmares about the boogiemen. I keep reading stories about German boogiemen folklore, and all of it is terrifying. I don't know how anyone in Germany ever sleeps at night, because some of that folklore is the scariest stuff I've truly ever heard. That is all I have for you today, though. If you want to hear more specifically about the myth of Holmes, you can join me over on the high council tier of Patreon. I'm going to go through some of his other confessed crimes, and how, for this episode, we decided on what was most likely a real murder and which ones he made up. And I will say in this episode, we really just focused on the ones that were verifiable. Also, you can join me here next week for another spooky season episode. This time, it's going to be some of the creepiest stories I've received from You guys are listeners. You can always send me your listener tails, heartscrcpounding.com. I love reading them And this one is gonna be just in time for Halloween So I'm really excited to have you here with me next week. I can't wait to see you then and until next time Stay curious Heartscrcpounding is written and produced by me Kayla Moore. Heartscrcpounding is also produced by Matt Brown Our associate producer is Juno Hobbs additional research and writing by Yelena war Sound design a mix by Pete Treesound special thanks to Travis Dunlap Grayson journey in the team at WME and Ben Jaffey have a heart pounding story or a case request check out heartscrcpounding.com Do you want more darkly curious stories in your life sign up for our patreon for free and get access to a rotating shelf of bonus content Our weekly rogue detecting society newsletter and the HSP book club paid members also get monthly bonus episodes and archive access Which I think is more than 40 episodes at this point You also get a cool jing sticker after your first three months and you can check it all out with a free seven day trial Link in the bio or go to patreon.com backslash heart starts pounding. Well, whatever you do, stay curious