H.H. Holmes: The original client from hell

In Chicago,sometime around 1890, Mrs. Strowers started taking in the laundry of a young doctor on occasion.

One day, the doctor approached Strowers with a business proposition: if she took out a $10,000 life insurance policy on herself, with him as the beneficiary, he’d pay her $6,000. This way, he told her, he’d make a profit of $4,000 whenever she died, and she’d have several thousand dollars to spend in the meantime.

Strowers, of course, was tempted. After all, $6,000 — the equivalent of about $150,000 in 2013 — was quite a windfall for a laundress. And the doctor — a well-regarded local businessman who charmed men and women alike — seemed trustworthy enough. He assured her the entire set-up was perfectly legal.

But then, as she stood there on the verge of accepting his offer, the man leaned in close.

“Don’t be afraid of me,” he whispered.

And Strowers quickly changed her mind.

A few years later — after Dr. H.H. Holmes was caught for insurance fraud, after his “Murder Castle” was raided by police, after the bodies were found — Strowers was no doubt glad of her choice. Many others, unfortunately, were not.

Holmes is thought to have killed anywhere from 20 to 200 men, women and children in his career as one of America’s first serial killers. Many of his victims were employees, tenants and guests in the block-long boarding house and hotel he ran around the time of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. And more than a few held life insurance policies with Holmes named as the beneficiary.

In fact, in an era before CSI, SVU and the FBI, it was life insurance fraud that eventually led to Holmes’ capture — and the grisly revelations that followed.

The makings of a monster

“Holmes” wasn’t even the man’s real name. His parents — Levi, a farmer, and Theodate — gave him the much frumpier moniker of Herman Webster Mudgett when he was born in remote Gilmanton, N.H., in 1861.

There he grew up as a self-described “mother’s boy” and spent most of his days in his bedroom, poring over treasures he hid in small boxes and inventing things. He had one close friend — Tom — who was killed in a fall while the boys were playing in an abandoned house.

At 19, Mudgett enrolled in medical school at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. It’s believed he paid his tuition by stealing cadavers from the school’s laboratory, arranging them so they’d look like they’d been killed in accidents and then claiming the life insurance he’d taken out on these “family members” as soon as the bodies were discovered.

Suspicious stories seemed to follow Mudgett wherever he went. In Michigan, he gained a reputation as a cad and, though he was already married, was said to have broken an engagement with a widow there.

After graduating medical school, he was hired as a school principal in Mooers Forks, N.Y., where rumors circulated that a boy seen in his company had disappeared. Mudgett denied the claims but eventually left town in the middle of the night — stiffing his boarding house owner on the bill.

In Philadelphia, Mudgett started working at a drugstore. Later, a child died after taking medicine purchased at the store. Mudgett immediately skipped town.

In 1886, Mudgett arrived in Chicago and adopted the alias of H.H. Holmes. He found a position at another drugstore, Holton Drugs in Englewood, where he worked for Mrs. Holton and her husband, who was dying of cancer.

When Mr. Holton died, Holmes kindly offered to take the burden of the store off his widow’s hands. He’d run everything for her, he said, and she could continue living in the apartment above the store.

Mrs. Holton agreed, and Holmes acquired the business at a bargain price. But when he failed to pay, Mrs. Holton filed suit. It wasn’t long before she disappeared.

Holmes told customers of the newly renamed H.H. Holmes Pharmacy that Mrs. Holton had gone to California to visit family. When she never returned, he told them she’d liked California so much, she’d decided to stay there.

The “Murder Castle”

In 1888, Holmes, using the fictitious name H.S. Campbell, purchased a large parcel of land across the street from his drugstore.

Englewood was booming at the time, and after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, lodging was still scarce. Holmes envisioned building a three-story structure on the lot, with a drugstore and retail shops on the bottom and apartments he could rent out to his employees and lodgers above. And a basement, of course. Definitely a basement.

Ever frugal, Holmes devised a way to have his building constructed cheaply while also keeping questions about extra features — say, hinged walls, trap doors, gas chambers — to a minimum. He’d hire workers through newspaper ads and, once they’d finished a portion of the work, he’d complain that it was shoddy and refuse to pay them. The workers would quit in anger, Holmes would hire new people to replace them, and the whole scenario would be repeated.

Even with the regular turnover, which also worked to keep anyone from learning the entire demented floor plan, Holmes aroused suspicions.

“I don’t know what to make of Holmes,” one bricklayer later recounted. “I hadn’t been working for him but two days before he came around and asked me if I didn’t think it pretty hard work, this bricklaying. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to make money easier than that, and of course I told him yes.

“A few days after, he came over to me and, pointing down to the basement, said, ‘You see that man down there? Well, that’s my brother-in-law, and he has got no love for me, neither have I for him. Now, it would be the easiest matter for you to drop a stone on that fellow’s head while you’re at work and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you do.’”

The bricklayer declined — and moved on to other work as soon as he could.

When the work was complete, Holmes furnished his building by buying fixtures on credit and then hiding them (sometimes in the building’s many secret rooms and passages) when his creditors came to repossess them.

It’s said Holmes once had a safe installed in his building and narrowed the room’s doorway afterward. When nonpayment forced its repossession, Holmes told the man he was free to take the safe back — as long as he didn’t damage the room in the process, of course.

Besides the drugstore, Holmes managed other ventures, as well, most of them fraudulent. He peddled a phony cure for alcoholism. He claimed to have invented a machine that turned water into natural gas. He sold miracle mineral water from a “natural spring” in his basement until the water company threatened legal action for tampering with its mains.

And to run all these businesses, Holmes was in constant need of help. He took out newspaper ads for employees, lodgers and — though he was already married to two different women at the time — potential wives.

He hired women of a certain type — young, pretty girls from small towns, experiencing independent city life for the first time. He often had them photographed “in the pose and dress affected by actresses” and displayed the portraits in his apartments. It’s estimated as many as 150 young women worked for him, usually as stenographers or notaries.