Holmes and His "Castle" - Leslie's Illustrated Weekly June 1895

Holmes and His “Castle.”

Piecing together the fragments of information so far obtained regarding the career ofthe man known in Chicago as H. H. Holmes, and whose real name is Herman Mudgett, it would appear that he is one of the most versatile and accomplished villains of the century. His birth of respectable parents in a quiet New Hampshire village, Gilmanton, gives no clew to any theory of the inheritance of his criminal tendencies. His parents were God-fearing people, and his associations were unobjectionable. The boy graduated from the village academy, married a girl of good family, taught school, and became a student in the University of Vermont. He then went to the University of Michigan and studied medicine, and here, it appears, in the dissection classes sprouted the latent spirit of devilishness in the young man's mind. From robbing graveyards he appears to have adopted schemes of life - insurance frauds, and after spending a few months with his family in New Hampshire, he went to Chicago and adopted the name of Holmes and the general career of swindler. He worked under various aliases, and carried his operations as far as California. A fertile, restless brain and a plausible manner made him a successful promoter of bogus companies and fraudulent schemes, and it seems to have been easy for him to dupe many careful and conservative men. Returning to Chicago, he found an old Ann Arbor friend whom he induced to takeout a policy of insurance for ten thousand dollars. The friend “died," and Holmes collected the money. According to Holmes's statement it was a fraud, pure and simple, the friend was an accomplice, who disappeared. The job was repeated with success, but the swindler alleges there was no murder. Bodies were secured for the purpose, and the insurance companies were satisfied. In Wilmette Holmes  married another wife, and a successful speculation in Denver netted him twenty-seven thousand dollars, with which he erected a doubleb uilding in the principal street of Englewood, in the Thirtieth Ward of Chicago. The building was put up in 1892, by day's work, and Holmes superintended the job and often changed the workmen. The street floor was let for drug-store, restaurant, shops, etc., and the two upper floors were reserved, for what purpose no one knew, and his young wife, a Texan girl of some property and education, occupied a flat nearby. They changed their residence very suddenly and went to the Holmes “castle,” as it was called, where the girl acted as Holmes's stenographer, for Gordon was Holmes, and the girl was Minnie Williams. She wrote to her sister Annie that she was married, with an invitation to visit her. Annie came, and soon afterward disappeared. In a few months two men calling themselves Lyman and Pratt, appeared in Fort Worth and placed on record a deed of certain property in that city from Minnie Williams to Lyman, who was personated by Holmes's confederate, one Pitzel. Pratt wasHolmes himself. The two then fleeced the FortWorth people out of some twenty-five thousand dollars by fraudulent mortgages and notes, and “skipped.” Inquiries were made for the two sisters, but no trace of them could be found. During the World's Fair year Holmes ran a restaurant on the ground floor of his “castle”, and was engaged in various schemes which had little or no reality in fact. Meanwhile he was quietly prosecuting insurance frauds on the one hand, and supplying skeletons to medical colleges on the other. The man Pitzel appears to have been Holmes's trusted accomplice. He had a wife and five children. Finally it appears that Pitzel himself was insured, in July, 1891, in the Fidelity Mutual of Philadelphia, for ten thousand dollars. In September the charred body of a man was found in a house on Callowhill Street, Philadelphia, which had been rented by a man giving the name of Perry. Holmes, with Mrs Pitzel and her daughter Alice, went to Philadelphia and identified the body as that of Pitzel,and the wife claimed the insurance. It appears that she really thought that the body was that of a stranger, but she was placed in the singular position of recognizing the body of her own husband, whom she had unwittingly conspired to destroy. The policy was paid, and Holmes kept the greater share of the money. After his arrest it was discovered that Holmes had led the wife and three eldest children of his victim a devil's dance about the country that nearly upset the reason of the weak and deluded mother. It is believed that he intended to murder them all. They went to Indianapolis, where the boy Howard, aged nine, disappeared, and then to Cincinnati, Detroit, and Toronto. Finally the girls, Alice and Nellie, eleven and twelve years of age, were separated from their mother, who was left to wander about the country alone now ordered here, then told to remain where she was and be silent under peril of her life. Holmes suddenly appeared in his old home, had an interview with his first wife, to whom he appeared as one risen from thedead. Here he might have remained, under his original name, buried to the world, but he went on to Boston, where he was arrested, as was Mrs. Pitzel, a few days afterward. Then came the discovery of the bodies of the two girls buried in the cellar of a. house in Toronto, and the distracted mother was called upon to idenfify the bodies of her children. The boy Howard has never been heard from, and his fate is still a mystery. These disclosures caused an examination of the Englewood “Castle,” and it was found to be as complete man trap, or woman trap, as ever existed in the imagination of the most lurid writer of “sleuth” fiction. Not a room but had two or even three exits, intricate passage ways, trapdoors, chutes that led from the upper floor to the cellar, rooms with padded walls; a dummy vault which the detectives say is useless for any purpose but to stifle a victim; secret stairways, a crematory furnace and an acid vat. In the cellar human bones were found, and fragments of bloody clothing, and in one of the upper chambers a bench with stains of blood and marks of a sharp knife. But nothing more. The curious part of the whole horrible story is that, although the man is believed, from circumstantial evidence, to be a multi-murderer, no direct evidence of his guilt has yet been discovered.

John T. Bramhall.