Original subtitles

so right from that edge

i think it's nine feet

all the way to the headstone we measured earlier

we haven't found a body

and we're down to levels where it should be

there there there there there there there

the home story hasn't been told yet

this is just the opening chapter

oh this is crazy

previously on american ripper

from what we've learned there is not

as dramatic a difference between

these two killers as i had thought

all this stuff i believe

point to a connection with homes

have you ever heard of the homes

curse a lot of people involved with the case

mysteriously died after the execution

each of these are

jack the ripper style murders after holmes's execution

in cities that holmes has a link to

it's compelling evidence

that holmes escaped

his death and execution his estate

purchased two graves and they buried him in the center

but is it unusual for one person

to purchase two plots

it's very unusual the only way

i'm going to find out if

h h holmes may actually be jack the ripper

is to see what if anything is buried here

are you talking about actually

digging up your great great grandfather

i can't believe we're on the verge of actually

digging the grave up where my great

great grandfather is allegedly buried potentially

coming up with a major piece of evidence

former cia operative

amaryllis fox and jeff mudgett descendant of h h holmes

are investigating the life and death

of the notorious con man and killer i'm on pins and needles

they're seeking permission to excavate

holmes's grave site hunting

for answers to the mysteries

that have surrounded the case for over a century

we've been on this journey for so long

following every footstep of this man

to come

potentially face to face with evidence of the greatest con

he ever committed

really feels like an enormous next step

hh holmes

becomes america's most infamous

celebrity when he's finally arrested in november

eighteen ninety four

hearst newspapers pay him seventy five hundred dollars

to write his exclusive

confessions while imprisoned in philadelphia

the payout is equivalent to two hundred and fifty

thousand dollars today

a fortune that some believe holmes uses to bribe guards

prison officials

and possibly even enlist a body

double in a scheme to escape his death sentence

what's exciting for me as an investigator is that at most

crime

scenes you don't know whether you're gonna find anything

here at the grave site

really there are only three options

and every one of them tells us something

possibility number one

we open up the grave and we find a body

in there and that body is holmes holmes is in his grave

does that mean he wasn't jack the ripper not necessarily

but it does mean

that the baddie street

eyewitness who claims to have seen jack the ripper

twenty five years later

was not looking at holmes

and it does mean that the ripper style murders

after holmes was executed were not carried out by holmes

all right

number two a body is found

but it's not homes

right so this would be consistent with him switching

out the bodies at the gallows

like the newspaper article suggests that he did

and some other

completely anonymous poor cadaver is buried in his place

yeah so if that's the case

that would be a lot more consistent with

holmes being jack the ripper because then

holmes would have walked away able

to conduct all of those other jack the ripper

style killings that happened after holmes's execution

which walks right into

the holmes curse

central to the theory that holmes escapes his execution

is a strange series of events that occur in the years

following may eighteen ninety six

when the judge the prison superintendent

a witness for the prosecution

and at least eight others involved in holmes's case

die or disappear under unexplained circumstances

every one of those deaths

and mysterious accounts of those people

involved in his trial

they were visited by homes they were murdered by homes

there's a third possibility

alright possibility number three

there's nobody at all

now what difference does an empty grave

have with a different body than homes in the grave

the difference is probably just the scale of the conspiracy

i mean if that grave is empty

a whole lot of people were in on this

because there are media reports

that say he was lying in his coffin

the concrete was laid on top of him in front of

god and everyone

if all of those were

fabricated then we're looking at a big conspiracy here but

whatever is down there

the one thing that's

clear is that holmes didn't want us to find it

we know that he bought a double plot

that's unusual we know that it was dug extra deep

that's unusual

and we know that there seems to be concrete

designed to prevent us a hundred twenty five years later

digging it open it's evidence that holmes was trying to hide

something

yeah well all we can do is wait for permission to dig

and now we've got the ball rolling on the examination

i really want to get back into that box

of mementos that we found in irvington

i heard back from the facial

recognition expert who was comparing the photos

that his results are in

great let's go

so we built

a technology that can take a 2d image and build a 3d

structure from that 2d image

during their investigation into the murder of howard peitzel

jeff and amaryllis uncovered a collection of items

reportedly left behind

after holmes fled irvington indiana in october

eighteen ninety four

the box includes medical tools manufactured in england

a program from holmes's medical school graduation

and dozens of

photographs of people who appear to be linked to h h holmes

then we can also take

two separate images and then be able to compare

the two objects

they've enlisted a facial recognition expert

to authenticate the photographs

by comparing them to known images or sketches

of people involved in both the holmes and jack the ripper

cases okay so this is sort of like a control we have a real

sketch of minnie williams i suppose it's

in the newspaper and then this photo

the real photo of minnie and a sketch of minnie

so in theory this would be the kind of perfect match

control group that we'll compare the other matches against

yes

commercial photography is introduced in 1839

but printing technology is so limited at the time

that daily newspapers do not widely publish

photographs until the 1900s

to represent key figures in a news story

the papers rely on artist sketches

sourced from known portraits or photos

minnie williams was one of holmes's mistresses and

eventual victim

by comparing a known

photograph of her with a newspaper sketch

we can get a baseline for what a positive

match should look like

so first we're gonna take a look at the eyes

and the eyebrows and kind of start from top down and so

the things that are looking

similar here is the uh the eyebrow hair growth pattern

is is short and then

looking at the eye you know you have the upper eyelid shape

and then you also have this

area underneath the eye that's casting a shadow

so what kind of a score would this comparison earn

sixty four and a half percent wow so that's actually

a strong match if sixty four percent is between two known

likenesses of

the same person so that's what we're aiming for really yeah

if there's a positive match between any photo in this box

and one of holmes's accomplices or victims

makes it a lot more likely the box belong to holmes

okay so we're gonna take a look at pat quinlan

there's actually one photo in this box

who seems to look a lot like pat quinlan

and the only photo we have of pat quinlan is this sketch

quinlan was his henchman

at the murder

castle and i believe that's a courtroom drawing identified

by the newspaper as pat quinlan

you know what's interesting here is that chin

as i'm just looking at it

it's got a dimple in it

and the nose looks similar especially in the nostril flare

and our

morphological analysis comes up with

sixty two and a half percent whoa

so that's fairly high

it is fairly high when you take into account

the kind of imagery that we were using

we're using a very old photo with limited dynamic range

and then we're using a sketch with

kind of entirely different set of dynamic ranges

i've been researching my great great

grandfather for over twenty years and in all that time

i've never come across an original photo of pat quinlan

up until now the only surviving

image of him was this sketch

published in the newspapers during the holmes trial

so finding what could be the only known photo of him

in a place home spent time and receive photos

convinces me the box belong to holmes is there anything else

in the box of the photos that we sent you

that might tie

holmes with jack the ripper

i did find something interesting

that would be an enormous

leap forward for us in our investigation

so i'm gonna start by loading up a photo you sent me

the tin type photo

from the holmes box

we found in irvington yeah

okay so here's

um a woman the overall face shape is is very similar

all the way through the jawline and the chin

and and the shape of the mouth um as well as the nose shape

this is a known photo of elizabeth strider

one of jack's five

canonical victims she was number three

in the investigation to link jack the ripper and h h holmes

an analysis of photos that reportedly belong to holmes

himself reveals a surprising result

a potential facial match between an image in the collection

and a photo of a jack the ripper victim

what number did you come up with these two photographs

the pretty high score of sixty four and a half percent whoa

wait so we have a sixty four percent match

with one of jack's victims in a box

that's associated with h h holmes that's the highest score

we've had so far

except for when we compared two images of the same person

to each other right

we are a huge step closer

to nailing down that holmes was jack the ripper

if

holmes wasn't the ripper how would he have gotten a picture

at that time of elizabeth stride

there's no doubt that if that photo is elizabeth stride

this is very serious evidence in support of your theory

it's a strong match given the age of the photograph

when we started this investigation

i thought i knew everything there was to know about h h

holmes but we've uncovered so much i didn't expect to find

i'm now more convinced than ever that my theory is true

right now our best chance

of finally finding the evidence we need

is to dig up that grave

all we can do now is wait

the process to exhume a grave site can take months

and is strictly regulated

permission to dig requires both agreement from all surviving

relatives and a court order

from a presiding judge in the local jurisdiction

now i think the testimony went really well

i think the consent you got helped a lot

at the office of philadelphia attorney doug maloney

jeff and amaryllis received the long awaited verdict

the judge approved our petition

we're good to go you're kidding nope doug that's great news

it's the culmination of twenty years of work on my part

and quite frankly i never thought

we'd actually receive permission to exhume his grave

now we still have to comply with a lot of conditions

alright they were concerned about what happens

during the exhumation process

they want to make sure that the remains are treated

respectfully they want to make sure

that we conduct this in accordance with the best

scientific protocol available

we're gonna have the department of anthropology from penn

start the examination process within seventy two hours

seventy two hours are you kidding we better get started

now we're talking

breaking ground at the h h homes gravesite

for the first time since his alleged

burial one hundred and twenty one years ago jeff amarilis

and a team of archaeologists

are working to expose the secrets

behind one of history's greatest mysteries

we have no idea what's

gonna really be in there it's either going to be empty

which is a possibility

um or we could find

either a skeleton or a mummy it

amazes me that we're on the verge of opening up something

which was never to be opened again

nineteenth century

law enforcement thought that

holmes's murder spree ended on the day he was executed

may seventh of eighteen ninety six

but the jack the ripper

style killings we found in newspaper reports

continued after holmes's supposed execution

so one way of proving that holmes

was jack the ripper

is proving he escaped his own execution and burial

well i think this is a long shot

i'm gonna remain open minded

that's a really big what's that

what's that right there you sure that's not concrete

let's take a look

hey

that looks like concrete

i think it's just more clay solidified

we saw the cemetery records from eighteen ninety six

that revealed holmes's unusual last request

he purchased two burial plots

and insisted that his coffin be encased in concrete

i'm convinced that these bizarre requests were all part

of his plan to con his way out of his own execution

it's possible

as we keep going deeper

we'll get into

more of that gray and it could be the concrete that's never

set

alright joe start it up

quite often you dig up things in cemeteries

that are nothing what you expected them to be

might be the case here right

oh that hole is getting bigger yeah

oh we just went another foot yeah

so i'm seeing a crack over here in the wall

of the adjoining grave and it looks

it looks

dangerous to me and i don't think we should go any further

with this so i've got a shoring team

waiting and i'm going to go over and get them to work

so nothing else is disturbed on either side

ah keep it going

alright

all the records we found

indicates that holmes is buried in a concrete filled coffin

in this grave

we're at six feet down

and so far it's empty

how deep are the graves on either side

the graves on either side are eight

which really mean that you should be hitting

the top of the coffin

at least yeah absolutely we got one more foot

and we should be hitting

this is an important scoop

that is definitely a color change

oh oh oh oh don't go too deep

it almost sounded like you hit something solid

we've hit concrete

alright i think we should quit using the

backhoe and start getting down there a little more delicate

why don't we put it

what are you gonna watch shovels and buckets yeah

earlier in our investigation we uncovered that

holmes owned a cement factory back in chicago

and he was possibly encasing his victims in concrete

and dumping them in the river

so it's pretty strange to hear that his own bizarre

burial request included filling his own grave

with concrete

what we don't know is how the concrete was actually used

the ambiguity in the reports just deepens the mystery

about what if anything

is buried here

what are you seeing sam

we've got this really strong color change

yeah between the gray and the orange so

this should be where they dug the original grave

so that would be the grave cut we were looking for

yeah so this is what we've been looking for the whole time

i can just pop this off oh man look

there's the corner right there we got a corner

can you show me a corner

you know here's the corner

you can see we've already got the end of the coffin

so this is holmes's coffin that we're looking at right here

we've definitely found a box oh michael

six feet under an unmarked grave the team

uncovers the first sign of what could be the coffin

of america's first serial killer h h holmes

the question is

what if anything is buried inside

the only way we're gonna know is to keep digging yeah yeah

we found what we were looking for

a concrete filled coffin buried between two adjacent plots

just like the newspaper report said

we could be inches away from the body of h h holmes

assuming the body

was put in in the orientation we expect it to be

the head should be on this end

and the feet should be on that end so

we're expecting down there to try and hit the feet first

i'm hoping we can get the toes and then follow

follow the bones up the skeleton

from there follow that yep alright

the archaeological team

switches to hand tools to excavate the coffin

the plan is to remove the concrete section by section

to carefully expose any bones or remains encased inside sam

have you hit

bottom there do you have any sense of how deep it goes

we're down maybe

eight inches from the top of it

and so far we have nothing but concrete

no artifacts no human remains nothing okay how can i help

trying to keep an eye out really for just anything

that's different

cause we don't know what to expect in here and once we find

one

piece of human remains

will you then have a better sense of what you're looking for

for sure yeah

unearthing holmes's grave could overturn everything

history tells us

about this man and his crimes

dozens of unsolved murders took place

after eighteen ninety six

in cities where holmes was active during his life

where are you you bastard

so if there's nothing here

or if the body in the grave isn't holmes

we're one step closer to proving holmes is jack the ripper

we're getting pretty far down

hey guys could you hold up a moment

we know holmes was about five foot seven inches tall

i'd like to know where if his head is up against the end

where his feet should be at five foot seven

so we know the end of the box

is a little at least a little bit into this wall

so we are measuring

about six feet

and it's possible he moved around within the concrete

the wood framed concrete filled coffin is seven feet long

eighteen inches at the foot of the coffin

is clear of concrete

with no sign of remains

if five foot seven

h h holmes is buried in this casket the team

should be just inches away from the first evidence of bone

now i don't wanna push this you know my theory

but we haven't found a body

and we're down to levels where it should be

i don't disagree with you and it's getting

it's a little bit discouraging we haven't found one yet

as an archaeologist i know you want to find bones and

i really believed with

near certainty

that we would find them all the newspapers suggest

that h h holmes is buried here

all signs pointed to h h

holmes's feet being right here and his head

being right there

yep but i gotta say i mean we're we're down

to the bottom of this box and there's no sign of him yet

i

i i'm really dumbfounded

but i think the bastard might have walked away

at a cemetery six miles outside of philadelphia

eight feet deep beneath the surface of an unmarked grave

reported to be the final resting place of murderous con

man h h holmes

i think we're done

i guess that's it

the excavation of a concrete coffin reveals nobody

buried inside

at eight feet

deep we've come to the bottom of an empty coffin

without finding a single bone

which to me is proof holmes escaped his death

we're thinking that it's one of three options either

he escaped his own death

which is hard for a logical investigator to accept

he's buried somewhere else

or there's something even deeper in that grave

yeah i think the key thing you said is

that we're not at the bottom of holmes grave

the theory that h h holmes escaped his own death

seems outlandish to me

so far there is no evidence of a body but newspaper

reports from the time

and cemetery records suggest that holmes

requested to be buried extra deep

this coffin may not be the end

in the eighteen hundreds

bodies are usually interred six feet beneath the ground

now at a depth of more than eight feet the exhumation

pushes on

it's hard it's hard

wow wow okay

okay i mean for comparison if i lean on this

and i put it in here

wow that's not dirt it's hard but it's sticking alright

should i see if i can drill it is it wood or concrete

will it drill yeah try you can try it

oh did it go through something

wait it would just went through something

it just broke into

an opening yeah we have another box

i drilled it felt like wood

and it broke through into an opening

wait we broke through something

it broke through something another opening

so do you think that wood

the the second wood that you went through

could be his coffin

it's wood it it could be that is so weird

this is crazy

and we thought we were done

let's cut through the wood and see what's down there

beneath the floor of the pine box

is a second layer of wood

water water wow we got water

lots of water

the deeper the grave

the more vulnerable it is to water

backing up through the ground during heavy rains

at this depth

stagnant water can have a destructive effect on remains

what's underneath how deep is it

oh it's not very deep yeah what does it feel like

it's pretty it's hard it feels like concrete i mean it's

it's hard but it's not like totally smooth

we're almost at the bottom of a ten foot grave

and we have hardened

concrete which is exactly what the report said we'd find

we were basically just thrown off by a fake empty pine box

at the eight foot mark

he's a con man to the last

the excavation reveals a two foot deep concrete coffin

with no remains

which may have been a decoy to ward off grave robbers

beneath the pine box

it's a second layer of wood two inches thick

concealing another block of concrete

which appears to be hardened

yeah we got wood

uh yeah so you got the crack right here

and then

this is what

so i think this is the side

we've removed all the soil that was on this side

and we are down to what looks like the lid of a second

coffin

and then the really cool thing is we seem to have a latch

right here

that would be used to attach the lid to the coffin

the weird thing is that all the newspapers say

holmes's casket did not have the lid when he was buried

interesting i wonder if whether that was to hide

his body

from grave robbers or it was to hide some other secret

that might lie right beneath us

wow sam the upper box is really completely removed now and

from up here

it really looks like a lid to

a casket down there

every step we take another secret is revealed

and i really don't know what the final results

gonna be yet no i don't know that any of us do

i wanna see whether when we lift up

that casket lid

he's under there

or whether we have a second empty box on our hands

just take it real slow opening his front door right now

are you ready yeah here it comes here it comes

there you go

oh

there's chills going up and down my spine right now

eight feet beneath the surface

buried under a box of concrete two feet thick

a casket believed to hold the remains of h h

holmes is being opened for the first time

in one hundred and twenty one years

alright guys just just slow down a little bit now let's all

let's all stop a minute

that's not dirt

that's another concrete block oh boy

now let's all catch our breath let sam

figure out the smartest next move okay yeah

at every stage of this investigation

we've uncovered stories of holmes's single minded genius

always outsmarting everyone around him

from creditors to his numerous wives to law enforcement

and now maybe outsmarting us

i'm ready to start

drilling and get in there

at eight feet beneath the decoy box

sits a second casket

containing a solid block of concrete

okay here we go alright

a burro scope camera deployed through a hole in the concrete

provides a first look at what's buried below

yeah there you can see the water right at the bottom there

water water water

up pull back wait go back

a little more

yeah oh yeah definitely avoid

definitely avoid can you go in a little bit

yeah what's that

looks like rope

it looks like textile textile of some kind

i wonder if what this thing that i'm saying is

textile if it could be an intervertebral disc or something

you think we could be looking at backbone right there

that could be bone

i could be the spine are you me

we need to open up something that's big enough

we can actually see

a diamond core drill cuts through the hardened

concrete to reveal a larger window into the void beneath

that hole's pretty big let's get down there and take a look

ready start the pump we're ready

a pump

clears out four inches of stagnant water within the cavity

sam i see a bone

do you see that i do see a bone

is that a bone oh wait hold on

ten feet underground

at the alleged gravesite of infamous murderer h h holmes

yes oh yeah we got vertebrae wow and we have an arm

the investigation unearths a major discovery

there is a human body

in the slab of concrete right

now the question is is that your great great grandfather

h h holmes and is there any

evidence to suggest that h h holmes was jack the ripper

if that's holmes

it is certainly emotional and you know

it's really striking if it is holmes that after

killing so many innocent people

he met his end just like everybody else

here he lies just tissue and bone

i still believe that my great great

grandfather escaped his own death

and these bones are someone else's

but the enormity of this moment is overwhelming

if these are the bones of that evil man

and even more so if they're not

it has enormous implications for me

and everything

that i've been working toward these past 20 years

that was pretty

that's an amazing

recovery here's the lower jaw

and there's his upper jaw

when we get this out i can feel the skull rocking

there he is wow

there he is

we've now opened this up enough to be able to

take these bones get them to the lab at u penn and get

the final answer

are we looking at your great great grandfather and

is that man jack the ripper

once we have these samples

and if we can get some good

dna out of them you know what we

that data is there

and you can test it

against the catherine edwards

shell you can test it against anything else in the future

put science to work

to solve one of history's greatest unsolved mysteries

now that we have a body

and we don't know yet whether it's homes

i think we need to regroup

with what we do know so far in the investigation

are you any closer to believing

h h homes was jack the ripper

i'll be honest with you when you first

brought this theory to me

there were so many reasons that i thought it was impossible

but through the months of this investigation

i've been blown away

by the evidence that we've uncovered

the first thing i wanted to figure out was opportunity

could holmes have even committed these crimes

holmes was busy

he has more of a paper trail

than any cold case i've ever seen

and then the paper trail

bam goes completely dead right before the ripper murders

and his paper trail picks back up in chicago

in the beginning of eighteen eighty nine

when the river murders have suddenly stopped in white chapel

it's a pretty good indicator he wasn't in chicago

but doesn't mean he was in london

and that's why the passenger

manifests were the next amazing piece of evidence

we have not only

holmes's name but also holmes's known aliases

then the mythology of jack the ripper

says that he stopped killing

in white chapel in eighteen eighty eight

but what we found

in our investigation is there were many more ripper

style killings just not in white chapel

we have carrie brown a couple years later in new york

found only a few blocks from

astor house where holmes was staying

and then we found the corner

reports of victims killed in a ripper style in chicago

that mysteriously begin when holmes gets to chicago

and end when he leaves town

another objection i had at the beginning was

that the method of killing was completely different

right the mythology of the ripper is that he's

walking around the streets of london

slashing prostitutes to death homes

premeditated he's built a murder castle

these seem like very different methods of killing

but that's the mythology

what we found reading the autopsy reports

is that wasn't the case at all

the ripper asphyxiated every victim

before he dissected them

that seems similar to holmes methods of killing yep

when i talked with the coroner in london he estimated

that the ripper really had to have pretty significant

surgical skill

to be able to remove the organs

in the time that he had available to him so again that seems

closer to holmes the trained surgeon

than i believed when we got started

which was reiterated in some of the early police reports

we should talk about the physical evidence we discovered

well physical evidence

has been hard to come by but what's

interesting is that none of it

disproves your theory for example the letters dear boss

saucy jack

to hear the forensic linguist in london

say that they were probably written by an american

well that supports

scotland yard's theory that jack the ripper was an american

and maybe your theory that he was h h holmes

the linguist said

the very title of the letter dear boss

was an american trying to sound english

and then there's the handwriting

handwriting analyst says it's inconclusive

but the fact that a handwriting professional cannot

conclusively say that they were written by two different

hands is another piece of circumstantial evidence right

and we have thirteen

eyewitness accounts of what jack the ripper looked like

five foot seven roughly a hundred fifty pounds

twenty five to thirty five years of age guess what

holmes was five foot seven a hundred fifty pounds

twenty seven years of age during the jack the ripper murders

what really shook me

was seeing the composite

drawing based on those thirteen eyewitness accounts

and comparing it to real life photographs of homes

i mean that's a startling resemblance it's amazing

really rare

even in a modern case to have thirteen eyewitness reports

let alone in a cold case

i never imagined we'd uncover

this much circumstantial evidence that points to homes

there are literally hundreds of ripper

suspects out there and i doubt you'd find

half as much circumstantial evidence

pointing to any one of them as we found pointing to homes

but we're still missing that smoking gun

and as an investigator

until we have hard

proof that puts holmes at the scene of a ripper crime

or some other

damning evidence comes to light

that's been buried for over a century

i still can't say for sure that holmes was jack the ripper

but i also can't say he wasn't we have

a mountain of circumstantial evidence

we need to continue this investigation

we can't just stop here

now we just have to find out whether the body we dug up

is holmes or not

so this is our body

yeah this is for him

he looks incredibly complete

at the university of pennsylvania the archaeological team

analyzes the bones recovered from the alleged grave

site of h h holmes

well we've cleaned him up

some of the bones are in great shape

some of the bones are in not so great shape

the results of a dna test may finally prove

that either these are the remains of h h holmes

or that the master conman escaped his own death

a finding that if true

could support jeff's theory that h h

holmes is jack the ripper

it's a really emotional

moment to stand here and really be in the presence of a

human who was buried in h h

holmes's grave whether or not it's him in

what appears to be almost

the complete body

are you able to draw any conclusions

based on the report we have

of holmes's body at the prison and comparing that

to the bones we have in front of us yes so we can say

fairly sure that it's male

if you look at the most

telling part of the skeleton is usually the pelvis

men usually have narrower

longer hips women have kind of shorter wider hips

and so if you look at this shape and you can see it's

a pretty wide angle

and in females it's much

tighter and narrower and sharper

so in comparing this skeleton in front of us with holmes

we know that he's a male so check

did the teeth

give you any more

conclusive evidence

yeah so as you age and as you

chew and you use your your teeth the enamel

wears down and it gets flat so there's

you know a little bit of wear

so we know that the age on this skeleton

is consistent with what we would expect for somebody

basically in their mid mid to late thirties

okay so that checks out too now this body was supposedly

executed by hanging

is there anything to suggest

that actually happened with the the backbone or the skull

there is no evidence of it on here

and again that doesn't mean that it didn't happen so hanging

is something sometimes it causes trauma

skeletal trauma and sometimes it doesn't

can we determine his height based on the skeleton

you know it's funny that you ask

i did the height estimate using two different methods

and both methods

came out with a height estimate

that was a little bit shorter than what we would have

expected

really so the report says he is

five seven and a half and what i reconstructed gave

about five four to five

it's five that's a pretty

significant difference

he seems to be quite well

muscled too which i was a little surprised

especially looking at the photos

he just looks like a very kind of slender person

he sure does

that's interesting and there's pretty good muscle

musculature

muscle development a lot of these bones are pretty robust

so we know what holmes looked like from photographs

we know how tall he was

from media reports we know about his activity level and

the way that he conducted his daily life

and those things don't seem to match up as well

i feel like i've been investigating my ancestors

dark history for most of my adult life

holmes terrorized victims over two decades in chicago

new york philadelphia

indiana and possibly london

and if the bones from the grave site aren't his

we've only scratched the surface of this monster's story

so it sounds like we have some dna to extract

yeah we do we'll get set up and do that it's great

the best chance

to extract a clean sample from bones of this age

is to target the dense portions of the skeleton the team

removes a sample from the inner

ear which it will send to king's college in london

one of only three places in the world

with the technology to analyze ancient dna

there the lab will compare the dna

from the remains to the dna

sample from jeff to determine if the body recovered

is h h holmes

alright so that's our sample that powder there

either contains or does not contain

dna that matches you

we've come a long way in our investigation

so i think we're gonna get the dna sent off to the lab

and we'll let you know what they say

um i i appreciate your help

and i eagerly await the results

this doesn't deter me from my investigation

there are too many coincidences for this to be another

bogus theory at each stage of this investigation

we've uncovered new evidence which peels back

yet another layer

of this one hundred and thirty year old mystery

for some people the identity of jack the ripper is just

sensationalized true crime

but for me it's coming to terms with where i come from

my origins

i know that the evidence is out there to prove my theory

and i'm not going to give up until i find it