H. H. Holmes

The backstory

The insurance policy

On Nov. 9, 1893, the Fidelity Mutual Life Association, through its Chicago branch, issued a $10,000 policy on the life of Benjamin F. Pitezel, according to Frank Geyer, the Philadelphia detective who investigated the case.¹⁹ A Pennsylvania paper summarizing the case at the time of the execution reported that Mudgett and Pitezel had conspired to defraud the company of the $10,000 by faking Pitezel’s death.⁶ The Commonwealth’s theory at trial, as the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania described it, was “that the motive for the killing of Pitezel was to secure the insurance money.”¹

The death on Callowhill Street

In early September 1894, a carpenter, Eugene Smith, found a man dead in a house on Callowhill Street in Philadelphia.¹⁹¹¹ Geyer wrote that the first-floor store bore a sign reading “B. F. Perry, Patents Bought and Sold.”¹⁹ Smith later testified that Mudgett had keys to the premises, according to Joseph Tyson’s account of the trial.¹¹ The body was identified as that of “B. F. Perry” and buried as an accidental death; the insurer later learned it was Pitezel’s.² Geyer wrote that the coroner’s inquest found death due to congestion of the lungs from inhaling flame or chloroform or another poisonous drug, and that the coroner’s physician believed chloroform caused it.¹⁹ Tyson gives the date of death as Sept. 2, 1894, the date Mudgett himself gave in his memoir.¹¹²⁰

Geyer wrote that the company paid $9,715.85, the policy less its identification expenses, to a lawyer acting for Pitezel’s widow.¹⁹

The arrest and his account

Mudgett was arrested in Boston on Nov. 17, 1894, on a telegram from Fort Worth, Texas, charging him with horse stealing, according to Geyer.¹⁹¹¹ He was then brought to Philadelphia and tried there for Pitezel’s murder.³¹¹

By his own account to R. J. Linden, superintendent of police, as the Supreme Court summarized it, he found Pitezel “on the floor of a third story room in the Callowhill street house, dead,” after a note directed him to “search for a letter in a bottle in a closet.”¹ He told Linden he moved the body, “scattered some inflammable liquid over the face and beard of the dead man and set it on fire,” because “he felt that the appearances of suicide should be removed or a defense might be made to the policy upon that ground.”¹

The trial

The trial was held from Oct. 28 to Nov. 2, 1895, in the Court of Oyer and Terminer for Philadelphia, and the full record was published in 1897.³ Judge Michael Arnold presided.¹¹² District Attorney George S. Graham and Assistant District Attorney Thomas W. Barlow prosecuted; William A. Shoemaker and Samuel Rotan defended him.¹¹ Tyson writes that the defense lawyers asked for a postponement, saying they had not had time to prepare, and that Arnold denied it.¹¹

The Supreme Court wrote that “at one stage of the trial” he put himself at a disadvantage “by his own conduct in dismissing his counsel and assuming the responsibility of conducting his own defense.”¹ According to Tyson, he told the court on Oct. 31 that Rotan and Shoemaker would represent him for the rest of the trial.¹¹

The cause of death. The Supreme Court wrote that “the fact that the deceased came to his death by chloroform poisoning was practically conceded by the prisoner.”¹ The question was who gave it. Medical experts gave “two reasons why the chloroform could not have been self administered in the manner alleged by the prisoner,” the court wrote, one being that it had not affected the lining of the stomach: “it had been introduced into the stomach after death.”¹ According to Tyson, the coroner’s physician, Dr. William Scott, testified that Pitezel could not have died from an explosion, and Dr. Henry Leffman, a toxicologist, testified that Pitezel was dead when the fire burned him.¹¹

Against suicide. Witnesses testified that Pitezel had seemed in good spirits before his death, countering the claim that he took his own life.¹¹ The trial judge told the jury to acquit if the suicide theory was as consistent with the facts as murder, and the Supreme Court held that instruction adequate.¹

Georgiana Yoke. Georgiana Yoke testified for the prosecution, placing him in Philadelphia on Sept. 2, 1894, according to Tyson.¹¹ The defense objected that she was his wife and could not testify against him.⁴¹ The Supreme Court wrote that she “had been married to the prisoner by a clergyman in the city of Denver in January, 1894,” but that the “fair effect” of her testimony “was to show that no legal marriage had taken place, that Miss Yoke had been cruelly deceived, and that the legal wife of the prisoner lived at Gilmanton, N. H.”¹ It held that he bore the burden of proving a lawful marriage and that the trial judge, by leaving the question to the jury, gave him more than he was entitled to.¹

Mrs. Pitezel. Pitezel’s widow, Carrie Pitezel, testified that Mudgett falsely assured her that her husband was alive, took three of her children and took most of the insurance money, according to Tyson.¹¹ In the district attorney’s opening, as the Supreme Court described it, Mrs. Pitezel, three of her children and Georgiana Yoke traveled in separate groups, “housed at the same time in the same city, but always without meeting, until one by one the three members of one group disappeared.”¹ The Supreme Court held her account of searching for the children admissible as part of one connected story bearing on motive: “She saw them, or their remains, at last.”¹ Tyson writes that Judge Arnold sustained an objection to evidence about the children’s deaths as irrelevant to Pitezel’s.¹¹

The defense. “It must be borne in mind that the defendant called no witnesses,” the Supreme Court wrote.¹ Rotan argued to the jury that the prosecution had not proved guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.¹¹

The verdict and sentence

The jury found him guilty of murder in the first degree; Tyson writes that it deliberated about three hours.²¹¹ A Pennsylvania paper later summarized that he was “convicted early in November, 1895.”⁶ Judge Arnold refused a new trial, ruling that because Mudgett was already married when he wed Miss Yoke, that marriage was “null and void, and the evidence was admissible,” a wire report said.⁴ Asked whether he had anything to say, he answered, “I have nothing to say,” and Arnold sentenced him to be “hanged by the neck until you are dead.”⁴

The appeal

The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania heard argument on Feb. 3, 1896, and decided the case on March 4, 1896, in an opinion by Justice Williams.²¹ “This is a voluminous record,” the court began.¹ It rejected each of the thirteen assignments of error: on Georgiana Yoke’s competence and testimony, on the district attorney’s opening (to which, it held, the defense objected days too late), on Mrs. Pitezel’s testimony, and on the judge’s instructions about chloroform, suicide and reasonable doubt.¹ Of the charge as a whole, it wrote, “we cannot agree that it is inadequate or that it is wanting in fairness of spirit.”¹ It overruled all the assignments of error, and “the judgment appealed from is affirmed.”¹

The Pitezel children

Three of Pitezel’s children, Alice, Nellie and Howard, were in Mudgett’s care in the fall of 1894 and disappeared.¹¹¹ The Commonwealth’s theory, as the Supreme Court described it, was that “the killing of Alice and the two children who were with her grew out of his desire to prevent Mrs. Pitezel from knowing of the death” of her husband.¹ The court did not rule on that theory; it decided only the questions raised on appeal.¹

On July 15, 1895, Geyer, working with a Toronto detective, found the remains of Alice and Nellie in the cellar of a house at 16 St. Vincent Street in Toronto, Spacing reports from Geyer’s account.¹⁶ Remains later identified as Howard’s were found in the chimney of a cottage Mudgett had rented in Irvington, near Indianapolis, and Mrs. Pitezel testified before the Marion County coroner, according to the Indiana State Library’s Hoosier State Chronicles.¹⁷ He was never tried for the children’s deaths.⁹ The sources reviewed for this page do not establish what charges, if any, were filed against him in Toronto or Indianapolis.

The execution

He was hanged at Moyamensing Prison, the Philadelphia county prison, on May 7, 1896; the Pottsville Republican reported that the trap fell at 10:12 a.m.⁶¹¹ On the gallows, the Pine Grove Press Herald reported, he said, “I am not guilty of taking the lives of any of the Pietzel family.”⁶ Newspapers reported that he acknowledged responsibility for the deaths of two women after operations he performed.⁶¹¹ The Philadelphia Times reported that, by his instructions, his body was encased in cement in a grave at Holy Cross Cemetery.⁶

The sources reviewed contain no statement from Pitezel’s family about the execution.

Personal backstory

Early life

Herman Webster Mudgett was born on May 16, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire.¹⁸¹⁵ Smithsonian notes that reliable documentation of his childhood is sparse.¹⁰ In his own 1895 memoir, written while he awaited trial, he described his parents as “loving and religious,” and wrote that he attended the village school and later taught while preparing for college.²⁰

First marriage

At 17, in 1878, he married Clara Lovering before a New Hampshire justice of the peace, and the couple had a son, the New England Historical Society reports.¹⁸ He later married twice more without divorcing her: Myrta Belknap, whom Tyson describes as his second “wife,” and Georgiana Yoke, in Denver in 1894.¹⁸¹¹¹ The Supreme Court of Pennsylvania’s account of the trial evidence put his “legal wife” in Gilmanton.¹

Medical school

By his own account, he spent a year at the University of Vermont and then transferred to the university at Ann Arbor, Michigan, where “in June, 1884, our examinations were passed.”²⁰ WDIV reports that he entered the University of Michigan’s medical school in 1882.¹⁵ He is reported to have stolen bodies from the school’s anatomy laboratory to collect on false life insurance claims; WDIV reports that he later admitted it.¹⁵ The sources reviewed contain no court record of those claims.

Chicago and the frauds

He moved to Chicago, took the name H. H. Holmes and built a building with shops and apartments that he said would include a hotel for the 1893 World’s Fair.¹⁵⁹ Historian Adam Selzer describes the hotel plan as a way “to swindle suppliers and investors and insurers,” and Smithsonian reports that he hid furniture from creditors.⁹¹⁰ The theory of the Pitezel case, as Pennsylvania newspapers summarized it in 1896, was an insurance fraud that he and Pitezel planned together.⁶

Mental health

The sources reviewed contain no trial testimony or court finding about his mental health.

In custody

While awaiting trial he published Holmes’ Own Story, an account of his life written in his own defense.²⁰¹⁰ On April 22, 1896, he was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church, the Lykens Register reported.⁶ On April 12, 1896, the New York Morning Journal published a confession over his signature describing “the twenty-seven murders.”⁵ Selzer writes that different versions appeared in different newspapers and that the Philadelphia Inquirer printed a note from him calling the other versions false.²²

The grave

In 2017 his great-great-grandson obtained a judge’s permission to open the grave, Penn Today reports.¹² The work was tied to the History series American Ripper.¹³¹² Penn Museum scholars found the coffin encased in concrete and identified the remains in part by their teeth, which matched a prison medical report.¹²¹³ The remains were reburied at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon.¹³