While H.H. Holmes may not be as well known as England’s Victorian butcher, Jack the Ripper, Holmes was perhaps the most evil, premeditated mass murderer to stalk the Earth. His great-great-great grandson, California trial lawyer and author of "Blood Stains", Jeff Mudgett told C2C on 8/20/15 that Holmes actually profited from many of his crimes – unlike most serial killers.
Mudgett told George Noory that Holmes, a University of Michigan medical school graduate, premeditatedly designed and opened a hotel with murder and profit in mind during the time of the 1893 Chicago’s World’s Fair Exposition. The so-called Murder Castle was specifically designed to kill women that Holmes seduced and lured from the fairgrounds. "He could seduce any women - mesmerize their husbands," Mudgett said. Among the women, a drug store owner, who sold the establishment cheap to Holmes after the death of her husband.
Across the street, Holmes erected his three-story labyrinth of death - a hotel ostensibly built to lure the clients from the Chicago fair. The ground floor contained the relocated pharmacy while the upper two floors were a maze of over 100 windowless rooms with doorways opening to bricked-in walls, stairways to nowhere and weirdly shaped hallways. Holmes was the only one who fully understood the intricacies of his personal charnel house.
After the hotel was completed, Holmes selected female victims from among his employees - many of whom, as a condition of employment, were required to take out life insurance premiums. While Holmes would pay the premiums he was also named the beneficiary. On his loathsome list of death was a steady stream of new lovers, strangers to the Chicago area visiting the Exposition and hotel guests who paid for their short stay with their lives.
Mudgett told C2C that after Holmes killed his victims, he threw them into acid baths and furnaces destroying all evidence of his crimes. With the flesh stripped away, Holmes sold the victim’s skeletons to various medical schools – turning a horrific profit! For more from this fascinating interview and the terrifying Holmes Curse and the killer’s connection to Jack the Ripper, be sure to listen to the entirety of Jeff Mudgett’s interview on the 8/20/2015 episode of C2C. Not yet a Coast Insider? Sign-up here.