DDT - Deambulações DeMentes Teóricas 50

The Serial Killer - Part XXX

Henry Howard Holmes was active between 1888 and 1894, targetting mostly younger women during the famous Chicago World's Fair. 

His father was a violent alcoholic, and his mother was a devout Methodist who read the Bible to his son. He claimed that, as a child, classmates forced him to view and touch a human skeleton after discovering his fear of the local doctor. The bullies initially brought him there to scare him, but instead he was utterly fascinated, and he soon became obsessed with death.

While attending university, he stole bodies from the laboratory, disfigured them, and claimed that the people were killed accidentally in order to collect insurance money from policies he took out on each deceased person. He moved to Chicago to pursue a career in pharmaceuticals. He also engaged in many shady businesses, real estate, and promotional deals under the name "H. H. Holmes".

He killed the women by enticing them to his custom-built "murder castle," which was tailor-made to kill large numbers of people using a wide variety of premeditated methods. To keep this secret, he fired all his builders and hired new ones before any one set of builders could ever finish one part of the "house." He sometimes murdered his victims on a day-to-day basis but usually slept with the victim first and devised a method in the morning. Actual body count is unknown, but it is possible that there could have been more than 230 victims, as the majority of the victims were completely dissolved into acid housed in a   gigantic pit built into his basement. In his biography he wrote he had killed 133 victims.

Following the World's Fair,  Holmes left Chicago and reappeared in Texas where he had inherited property from two railroad heiress sisters, to one of whom he had promised marriage and both of whom he murdered. There, he sought to construct another castle along the lines of his Chicago operation. However, he soon abandoned this project, finding the law enforcement climate in Texas inhospitable. He continued to move about the United States and Canada, and it seems likely that he continued to kill.

In July 1894, Holmes was arrested and briefly incarcerated for the first time, for a horse swindle. He was promptly bailed out, but while in jail, struck up a conversation with a convicted train robber who was serving a 25-year sentence. Holmes had concocted a plan to swindle an insurance company out of $10,000 by taking out a policy on himself and then faking his death. Holmes promised Hedgepeth a $500 commission in exchange for the name of a lawyer who could be trusted. He was directed to Colonel Jeptha Howe, the brother of a public defender, who found Holmes’s plan brilliant. Holmes's plan to fake his own death failed when the insurance company became suspicious and refused to pay. Holmes did not press his claim; instead he concocted a similar plan with his associate, Benjamin Pitezel.

In 1894, the police were tipped off by his former cellmate, whom Holmes had neglected to pay off as promised for his help in providing Howe. Holmes's murder spree finally ended when he was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, after being tracked there from Philadelphia by the Pinkertons. He was held on an outstanding warrant for horse theft in Texas, as the authorities had little more than suspicions at this point and Holmes appeared poised to flee the country, in the company of his unsuspecting third wife.
After the custodian for "the Castle" informed police that he was never allowed to clean the upper floors, police began a thorough investigation over the course of the next month, uncovering Holmes's efficient methods of committing murders and then disposing of the corpses. A fire of mysterious origin consumed the building on August 19, 1895, and the site is currently occupied by a U.S. Post Office building.

This is the typical case of a serial, born serial, but using his serial skills to gain profit from it. Not the true artist, for sure, but neither the lame one.