Holmes had heavily insured the building and its contents with no fewer than four insurance companies, all of which refused to pay his claims, and which sued him for insurance fraud. In August of 1893, during the height of the Columbian Exposition the Castle, which Holmes had been advertising as the World’s Fair Hotel, caught fire on its third floor. The Castle was described in newspapers without evidence Newspapers created the myth of the Murder Castle based on speculation and sensationalism. He was not charged with any other murders. He was convicted of two crimes, insurance fraud, to which he pleaded guilty on the second day of his trial, and the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, convicted by a jury. Several other missing persons were traced to Holmes, yet he continued to deny all knowledge of any murders until be provided his sensational confession to Hearst after he was convicted of murder, in exchange for cash which was sent to his then 18 year old son with the first of his three wives. When the charred remains of Pitezel’s son were discovered in Indiana Holmes denied all knowledge of them, as he did when the decomposed bodies of the two girls were found in Michigan. It was then that Minnie Williams reappeared in his story, according to Holmes she was in London, where she had custody of Pitezel’s children. He claimed Pitezel had left a note asking him to distribute the insurance money to his children, and to make it appear as if he had died in an accident. He confessed to Detective Geyer that he willfully participated in the insurance scheme, first claiming that the body had been a cadaver he had obtained for the purpose, later identifying it as Pitezel, whom he claimed he had found after he committed suicide. Fearful that the charge was considered a capital offense in Texas and unaware that Pitezel’s death was being investigated as a murder in Philadelphia, Holmes voluntarily returned to face what he thought would be insurance fraud charges in Pennsylvania. When Holmes was finally arrested in Boston he learned that a charge of horse theft awaited him in Texas. Holmes’s story to Philadelphia detective Geyer changed many times At his hanging Holmes denied killing anyone, other than accidentally during performance of abortions.Īlthough Holmes later boasted of luring victims from the White City, during questioning by Detective Geyer he denied involvement in any murders. Nine murders have been confirmed with Holmes being the likely killer, including that of Benjamin Pitezel, for which he was convicted. By the twenty-first century Holmes was accused of being not only America’s first serial killer, but the Whitechapel murderer known to history as Jack the Ripper as well, though the Ripper killings took place in 1888, a time when Holmes was in Chicago, frequently in court as a result of lawsuits over construction of the Castle and his non-payment of loans. The high number was attested to by the ever more graphic descriptions of the Murder Castle, which was so efficient in the disposing of bodies that it was implied that the number was likely even higher than that. A neighbor of the Castle told a Chicago newspaper that he had long suspected Holmes as the murderer of a woman who died sometime later of heart failure, as attested by her physician who issued a death certificate.ĭuring the 1940s the number of murders attributed to Holmes was frequently recorded as being upwards of 200, without references or sources being identified. The fiction that he killed the Horton’s emerged in his “confession”. ![]() Hearst paid Holmes for his “confession” during his trial and Holmes obliged with tales admitting to 27 murders, some of them of people who were still alive. ![]() He started the exaggerations himself, at a time when lurid stories of the Murder Castle appeared in the yellow journalism of the day, with each newspaper trying to out sensationalize their competition. Holmes is often referred to as America’s first serial killer – he wasn’t – and the number of murders attributed to him have been wildly exaggerated over the decades. The huge crowds which visited the White City during the Columbian Exposition led to wildly exaggerated body counts assigned to H.
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