Original subtitles

Humanity has achieved great heights.

We have landed on the moon,

place a powerful computer in our pockets,

cured numerous diseases,

and brought the world the most evil

and deranged serial killers.

There are very few that stand out quite as much

as H.H. Holmes and his murder hotel.

In fact, his notoriety is so great

that Hollywood embarked on a blockbuster about him.

Now it has even claimed that Britain's

most notorious serial killer, Jack The Ripper

was none other than Holmes himself.

He presided over The Castle,

a devilish, architectural creation in downtown Chicago

made specifically to murder people.

Trap doors, chutes, false doors

hidden passageways and spy holes

made the Murder Castle the infamous building of its age.

Many victims were beaten to death,

some were strangled, others gassed,

and yet more were tortured on racks

before they lost their lives.

When he was finally caught,

he confessed to 27 murders.

Although it is believed by many,

that he murdered over 200.

Somebody help me. Someone help.

Please help us.

But it is not the number of deaths

that is the cause of his devilish fame.

It is, in fact, the methods he used.

This is the tale of the evil dark lord

of the murder hotel, guts and all.

His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett,

and he was born in 1861.

He has become one of America's most famous serial killers

under the name of Dr. Henry Howard Holmes.

But his tale is not so easy to decipher.

Of the 27 people he claimed to have murdered,

there was a problem.

Some of them were in fact still alive when he confessed.

Of the 200 he supposedly killed,

we discover that this myth originated

in a pulp magazine from the 1940s.

It is stated he murdered his victims in the murder hotel

close to the 1883 World Fair.

In fact, the hotel itself

was never truly opened to the public.

So what is the truth?

What did this enigmatic evil man really get up to?

The other side of Holmes was as a con artist and bigamist

with over 50 lawsuits in the Chicago area alone.

But beware because not only was Holmes a con artist

but much of that is claimed about him

is equally based on fiction.

His own life was a lie,

and so too are a great many of the stories about him.

In order to unravel the mind of the murderer,

we need to understand his character and background.

Unlike the police of the period,

we need to be more like FBI agents and profile him.

This involves understanding his early life,

what created him, what forces pushed him

towards the life that he decided to lead?

His life began in Gilmanton, New Hampshire

on May the 16th, 1861.

Both of his parents were descendants of English settlers,

and Herman was the third child.

In all, he had an elder sister and brother

and a younger sister and brother.

He was the middle child, nothing special.

The family were foreigners.

They would do whatever they needed to in order to survive:

farming, trading, and even painting houses.

Along with the majority of people of the period,

they were devout Christians,

and in their case Methodists.

There is no evidence that he was in any way cruel

or even abused during this time.

These are things we would have expected,

and indeed these are things that have been claimed

and found to have no basis in fact.

Herman lived a perfectly ordinary childhood

as far as we can tell.

He graduated from high school at 16

and proceeded to take on teaching jobs in Gilmanton

and nearby Alton.

He eventually met Clara Loving,

and they married on July the 4th, 1878.

They had a son, Robert Loving Mudgett two years later.

Robert would himself go on to live a perfectly ordinary life

and become an accountant and city manager

in Orlando, Florida.

After a short time under the

apprenticeship of Dr. Nahum Wright,

where he learned about human dissection,

Herman managed to get himself into

university in Burlington, Vermont when he was only 18.

But spent only one year there

due to being dissatisfied with the university itself.

In 1882 he enrolled into the University of Michigan

in the Department of Medicine and Surgery.

During his time there,

he worked in the anatomy laboratory under Professor Herdman.

He graduated in 1884.

His time around anatomy and human cadavers would later

enable him to use them to defraud insurance companies.

By 1884 Clara left Herman and moved back to New Hampshire.

She never saw him again.

Their housemates would later state

that Herman was violent towards Clara.

Herman then moved to Mooers Forks, New York.

Where things started to emerge.

Rumors started to circulate

that he had been seen with a young boy.

He never denied this.

When the boy disappeared he claimed the boy had

simply gone back to his parents in Massachusetts.

There was no evidence that could stick

no boy, no body and so there was no investigation.

Herman fled town soon after.

He ended up in Philadelphia

and managed to get a job as a keeper

at the Norristown State Hospital.

It lasted a few days and he resigned.

He then appears to have landed a job at a drugstore.

Again things turned sour when a young boy died

from drugs sold to him at the very same store.

Herman was accused and again denied any wrong doing.

He fled again and just before he arrived in Chicago,

he changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes.

It is obvious that this was to avoid having himself

linked by anybody to previous misdemeanors.

Later in his confession

Holmes claimed that about this time

he had killed his former classmate

Dr. Robert Leacock for insurance money.

In fact, Dr. Leacock died in Watford, Canada in 1889.

At the same time as this fictitious murder,

Holmes in fact married Myrta Belknap

while still married to Clara.

He did actually file divorce papers after marrying Myrta

alleging Clara had cheated on him.

There was no evidence that Clara ever saw the papers

or that she committed adultery,

and the divorce never happened.

He did go on to have a daughter with Myrta.

Her name was Lucy,

and she would become a school teacher later in life.

They all lived together in

Wilmette, Illinois for a short while.

But Holmes was getting into a habit,

and on January the 17th, 1894,

he married Georgiana Yoke in Denver, Colorado

while still being married to Clara and Myrta.

However, we must go back to 1886 and Chicago in order

to get to the more interesting element of his life.

It was this year that he arrived in Chicago

and where he discovered the drugstore at the

southwest corner of South Wallace Avenue

and West 63rd Street in Englewood.

It was owned by Elizabeth S. Holton,

and she gave Holmes a job.

Amazingly he proved himself to be a hardworking employee

and eventually a deal was struck and he bought the store.

Some have claimed that Holmes murdered Mr. and Mrs. Holton.

But the truth is that both lived out their lives

in Englewood into the 20th Century.

Another example of the fiction surrounding Holmes,

and a warning for us about believing

everything claimed about him.

Business boomed for Holmes,

and he soon purchased an empty plot opposite the drugstore.

He had plans.

By 1887 construction on a

two-story mixed use building began.

His intention was for apartments on the second floor

and retail space on the ground

with a super new drugstore on the first.

In 1888 he was already being sued

for nonpayment to the architects and steel company.

But by 1892 he was adding another floor.

His plan he told his investors

was to turn the upper portion into a hotel

for the upcoming World's Columbian Exposition.

In fact, the hotel portion was never completed.

As if the world of Holmes couldn't get anymore bizarre,

this is where the sickness begins to reveal itself.

The supplier of his furniture investigated

because of nonpayment and found that he been

hiding their materials in hidden rooms

and passages throughout the whole building.

In fact, it was such a scandal

that news of the investigation hit the press.

Investors were shown these articles by a jeweler

from the building and they pulled out.

Then another twist.

The third floor strangely caught fire

on August the 13th, 1893.

The only people believed to be in the building at the time

were residents and long-term employees.

It transpired that Holmes had taken out insurance policies

on the building with no less than four companies.

They all sued him.

The life of Holmes thus far

appears to be as a bigamist and con artist

with a couple of possible child murders thrown in.

But what about the serial killing?

Where did all that begin?

One of the earliest victims we know of is Julia Smythe.

She was the wife of Alex Conner,

a resident of the building and employee.

She was also the mistress of Holmes himself.

Conner discovered the affair.

He resigned and left his wife and daughter behind

to the fate of Holmes.

Smythe and her daughter remained at the Holmes hotel

and continued her relationship with him.

Then Christmas 1891 they both disappeared.

Holmes would later claim

that she had died during an abortion.

It was never discovered exactly

what happened to both mother and child,

but it is known they both suffered at the hands of Holmes.

In May 1892 Emeline Cigrande started working at the hotel.

She too began an affair with Holmes,

and she too disappeared the following December.

The same thing happened to Edna Van Tassel

who simply vanished off the face of the Earth.

For a time Holmes worked at the Chemical Bank building

on Dearborn Street where he met Benjamin Pitezel

a carpenter who was exhibiting a coal bin invention.

The two became close friends,

and with Benjamin's criminal record there is little wonder.

Together they plotted

and conceived various criminal schemes.

In fact, Benjamin was nothing more than the tool of Holmes

as the district attorney would later state.

Minnie Williams had been an actress.

She moved to Chicago and soon she landed a job

with Holmes at his hotel as his stenographer.

Through his persuasive ways,

he had soon convinced Minnie to sign over

the deed to her property in Fort Worth, Texas

to a man named Alexander Bond.

This man was in fact Holmes.

Holmes served as the notary

and later signed the deed over to Benjamin Pitezel

under the name of Benton T. Lyman.

Following this Holmes and Minnie rent an apartment

in Lincoln Park as man and wife.

Minnie invited her sister Nannie over to stay.

She wrote a letter to her aunt

that she was off to Europe on a trip.

Neither Minnie nor Nannie were ever seen again.

Even as all of this was happening,

it is believed that his victims

in the Murder Castle were piling up,

gassed, tortured, beaten, and worse.

Most bodies would never be found,

and the exact number of his victims unknown.

Most were probably sent down the body chutes

into the basement where they were incinerated

or disposed by acid baths.

Some were skinned and kept for observation,

and others reduced to bones which he sold.

But things were not looking good for Holmes.

His various criminal activities

were beginning to reach a peak point.

Insurance companies were after him for arson.

In July 1894 he fled Chicago for Fort Worth

to take up property he had inherited from Minnie and Nannie.

He had learned nothing

and decide to begin erecting yet another castle or hotel

in the same vain as the one in Chicago.

He proceeded to con several suppliers.

For the very first time Holmes was actually arrested

on the charge of selling mortgage goods,

goods he did not own.

Every area of his life has its opportunities.

While in jail he found friendship

with the convicted outlaw Marion Hedgepeth.

Holmes had a cunning plan to con an insurance company

out of a massive $10,000.

He would take out a life policy on himself

and then proceed to fake his own death.

All Hedgepeth had to do was give Holmes the name of

a lawyer who could be trusted with such a devious plan

and in return he'd get a $500 commission.

He was guided towards a lawyer in St. Louis

called Jeptha Howe,

who was in practice with his elder brother.

Neither of the brothers had any links to Holmes or Pitezel,

and so there could be no connections.

It was perfect.

Jeptha thought the plan was inspired,

and they proceeded to carry it out.

However, the insurance company soon became suspicious

and refused to pay out.

The matter went no further.

Instead Holmes turned back to Pitezel

with the exact same plan.

This time it would be Pitezel's death and not Holmes.

Pitezel set himself up as an inventor

under the name of B.F. Perry in Philadelphia.

He would be killed and mutilated in a lab experiment.

Holmes was to find a cadaver

that could be used as the mutilated corpse.

What actually happened is much more on the realms of karma.

Holmes actually did kill Pitezel.

He used chloroform to knock him out

and then set him on fire.

Later when confessing to the crime,

Holmes stated that Pitezel was alive

when he was set on fire.

But the evidence actually showed the man was dead

even before the chloroform was administered.

It had in fact been a very poor attempt

to make it look like suicide.

The plot worked and Holmes collected the insurance money.

It was never enough.

He proceeded to convince Pitezel's widow

to allow three of her children to be in his custody.

He traveled with them across

the northern states and into Canada

while at the same time meeting and traveling

with Mrs. Pitezel along a parallel route.

He had told her that Pitezel was actually alive

and hiding in London.

She had no idea where her children were.

Holmes later confessed to murdering Alice and Nellie.

He forced them into a large trunk and locked them in.

He then drilled a hole through which he forced a hose.

He then gassed the poor little girls.

He proceeded to bury their nude bodies

in the cellar of his rented house in Toronto.

But there was a detective on his trail.

Frank Geyer was from Philadelphia

and he'd been on Holmes' trail for a while.

He dug up the cellar

and found the decomposed bodies of the girls.

Nellie's feet had been removed and Frank wondered why.

He then discovered she'd had clubbed foot.

It turned out that Holmes had removed her feet

to stop the bodies being identified.

Frank followed Holmes to Indianapolis.

Holmes had rented a small cottage

and had recently purchased the same drugs

he had used to murder Pitezel.

He'd also been to a repair shop

to have his knives sharpened.

In fact, the third child had now been murdered,

and his bones and teeth were later found

in the chimney of the cottage.

There was no longer any escape for Holmes,

and on the 17th of November 1894 he was arrested in Boston.

He had been tracked all the way by the infamous Pinkertons.

Initially he was held on an arrest warrant for horse theft

a small matter but one that

allowed the authorities to hold him.

They suspected he was about to flee the country

along with his unsuspecting third wife.

It was soon after this arrest that Alice

and Nellie's bodies had been found in Chicago.

Soon reporters and police alike

were looking more closely at his property in Englewood

which had now become known as The Castle.

There were copious claims made about The Castle

but no evidence.

Claims of torture equipment found in the building

remained just that: Claims.

The evidence does not back this up.

By October 1895, Holmes was standing trial

for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death.

It was obvious that he'd also murdered the children.

He then proceeded to confess to the murder of

27 people in Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto.

Some of the people that he claimed to have murdered

were in fact still alive.

Bizarrely the Hearst newspaper

paid him $7,500 for his confession.

Even at the point of near death,

Holmes could not help himself

and he spun a story for the people

that were happy to be conned.

The confessions were very quickly

brushed aside as full of fantasy.

Money well spent.

Yet, the legacy of his fiction continued.

Even today books, articles, TV shows, and movies

continue to repeat the so-called facts.

Throughout the whole thing

Holmes continued to spin his tales.

He gave several accounts of his life

all of them contradicted each other.

On the one hand it was completely innocent,

and then in the next breath he was guilty

and working for Satan himself.

His statements cannot and should not be taken into account

because even those experts who interviewed him

knew he was lying.

Holmes himself wrote whilst in prison

that his facial features had changed

and that now he resembled the devil.

On May the 17th, 1896

the devil was hanged at Philadelphia County prison.

Until the end he was calm and friendly.

He showed no signs of fear or depression.

He did ask one thing,

something that takes us right back to his early days

when he worked in anatomy and dissection.

He requested that his coffin be buried 10 feet deep

and covered in cement.

He feared the grave robbers and subsequent dissection.

Amazingly there would be some

strange karma in this as we shall see.

At the final hour it turned out that his neck did not snap,

and so he was strangled to death instead.

It took 15 to 20 long minutes for him to die

as he twitched and moaned.

The death surrounding this serial killer

did not seem to end there.

The prisoner Hedgepeth, who had helped Holmes

was shot dead on New Year's Eve 1909.

The caretaker of The Castle a Mr. Quinlan

appeared to have committed suicide with strychnine.

He left a note that simply said,

"I could not sleep."

He had been haunted by hallucinations.

In 1895 The Castle itself

was almost destroyed by a mysterious fire.

Two men had been seen entering

at the back and leaving again.

A half empty gas can was later discovered.

Today the building is completely new and a post office,

and so we arrive at the modern era

and the fantasies that have emerged

surrounding the con artist and bigamist

who liked to murder people.

Claims that Holmes had in fact never been executed

were so strong that in 2017 his body was exhumed.

The world awaited the results.

The cement he had so strongly insisted on

having cover his coffin actually helped the investigators

because the body was well preserved.

His clothes and mustache were intact.

His teeth records and DNA analysis

researchers proved beyond doubt

that the body they exhumed was that of H.H. Holmes.

But as ever the conspiracy theorists will not rest.

Belief is a powerful thing.

But let us just step backwards a moment

into the infamous murder hotel, The Castle.

We now know that using his abilities

as an expert con artist,

he managed to build the so-called Murder Castle.

It is the method of construction

which begins to open our eyes.

Over the period of building,

Holmes hired and fired a series of construction crews.

He held the architectural plans close to his chest

revealing what he needed to.

Nobody seemed to know the whole plan except him.

In the building there was a basement,

a series of shops at street level,

and two-stories sitting on top of the shops

that comprise the hotel.

His intention was to have the property finished

by the time of the World's Fair

also known as the Columbian Exposition.

When complete the hotel was a amaze of hallways,

soundproof rooms that often locked from the inside,

and gas pipes that were controlled by a panel

in Holmes own closet.

Additionally, closets had peepholes

and secret panels that led to passageways

which Holmes passed through.

Trap doors in floors and ceilings

and horrifying greased chutes

that funneled his hapless victims

to the basement of the building.

When police finally raided the building

after Holmes' arrest,

they found a human sized oven

that could heat up to 3,000 degrees

turning his victims to untraceable ashes.

While many who went missing

after checking into Holmes' hotel

simply disappeared forever,

Holmes was also known to sell skeletons to medical schools.

It's unknown how many of those prepared cadavers

were actually his victims hidden in plain sight.

Because of all this uncertainty

and the devilish fantasy he wove around himself,

we will actually never know the entire truth

about the Murder Castle.

We will never know how many victims and who they were.

This was the 19th Century

and records of births and deaths

were not what they are today.

As if the whole story of Holmes was not difficult enough,

it now turns out there is another twist to the tale

and one that has a lot of people convinced H.H. Holmes

was none other than London's Jack The Ripper.

Yes, you heard right.

Let us just take a moment

to delve into the world of Jack The Ripper

to remind ourselves of this particular serial killer.

The year is 1888.

The location Whitechapel, London.

The name came from a letter sent to the media

claiming to have been written by Jack himself.

It is believed to be a hoax and yet the name stuck.

From Jews to Irish immigrants, the East End of Whitechapel

had swelled in numbers during the 19th Century.

It was overcrowded, poor, and in a terrible state.

Violence, theft, murder, alcohol abuse,

and prostitution were rife.

Whitechapel was notorious and grew worse when

in 1888 a series of horrific attacks

occurred on prostitutes.

Nobody knows how many women were killed by Jack himself.

There were so many.

We know of 11 murders between April 1888 and February 1891

that were included in the official police investigation.

Five of these are known as the canonical five

and known to be his work.

There are certain indications that give him away.:

deep slashes to the throat,

abdominal and genital mutilation,

removal of internal organs, and facial mutilations.

We need not run through all the victims and circumstances.

Instead we'll take a look at the canonical five.

Their names were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman,

Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.

Nichols' throat had been cut.

Her lower abdomen ripped open.

Chapman's throat cut.

Her abdomen slashed open and uterus removed.

Stride and Eddowes were similar.

A clear cut to the throat.

Stride's body had no mutilations to the abdomen

leading some to claim the Ripper had been interrupted.

Witnesses all gave conflicting accounts

of a man they thought they had seen.

Smart, shabby, fair, dark nobody knew.

In fact one theory claims that there

never was a single Jack The Ripper.

Eddowes body was the same,

throat cut, abdomen ripped open.

Her left kidney and most of her uterus removed.

Graffiti found nearby seemed to implicate the Jews.

Fearing anti-Semitic riots,

the police had it washed away.

Kelly's body was found in bed.

The throat cut down the spine

and the abdomen emptied and the heart missing.

All these murders happened at night.

The mutilations seem to have been getting worse.

Although Kelly is considered by many

to have been Jack's final victim,

there are others who believe he continued.

These later murders were all record.

These include decapitations,

torsos ripped open and more gruesome atrocities.

The Pinchin Street torso for instance

was headless and legless and found beneath a railway arch.

She was never identified.

Vigilantes started to roam the streets

because quite simply the police were dumbfounded.

A great many were suspected.

Butchers, surgeons, doctors,

and even occult ritual practices were blamed.

A report from Inspector Swanson to the home office

confirms that 76 butchers and slaughters were visited

and that the inquiry encompassed all their employees

for the previous six months.

Even the queen herself

thought the murders pointed to a butcher.

Jack The Ripper is in fact the earliest

police profiling on record.

Police surgeon Thomas Bond investigated the process

and surgical skill of the Ripper.

He wrote, "All five murders no doubt

"were committed by the same hand.

"In the first four the throats appear

"to have been cut from left to right.

"In the last case, owing to the extensive mutilation

"it is impossible to say in what direction

"the fatal cut was made but arterial blood

"was found on the wall in splashes close to where

"the woman's head must have been lying.

"All the circumstances surrounding the murders

"lead me to form the opinion that the woman

"must have been lying down when murdered,

"and in every case the throat was first cut."

Bond refused to accept that the Ripper

had descent surgical knowledge.

Holmes would have had from his training.

He believed that Jack was a solitary man

who had periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania.

His attacks may have derived from a revengeful

or brooding condition of the mind

or that religious mania may have been the original disease,

which I don't not think either hypothesis is likely.

Soon psychologies believe that the

penetration of the victims with the knife

leaving them on display in sexually degrading positions

with the wounds exposed indicated that Jack

derived sexual pleasure from the attacks.

It is true that the majority of the poor victims

that succumbed to the brutality of H.H. Holmes were women

just as in the case of Jack.

Nobody knows who Jack The Ripper was,

and there is an almost annual claim offered in the media.

There are well over 100 suspects now,

and we are still no closer to the truth.

But there is another theory.

Holmes' great, great grandson

has recently so come forth with so-called evidence:

two diaries he claims were inherited

from his great, great grandfather.

Experts, who we do not know, analyzed the handwriting

and concluded that they were indeed

written by the devil incarnate himself.

It details several of his murders

and a tale about how he was raped as a child by a priest.

It also claims that he was never in fact hanged.

That he staged his own execution.

Of course we now know that he was hung and buried,

and so this piece of evidence is in fact not true.

We also know that Holmes was the world's biggest liar.

The diary states that Holmes

knew the identity of Jack The Ripper.

What is the problem here is simple.

That this statement is being over-egged

to reveal that Holmes was Jack the Ripper

and that he didn't die.

We are being asked to believe the words of a dead con man.

We are also, with next to no evidence

being asked to believe that Holmes

was in London during the Whitechapel murders.

The diary describes them as training sessions.

But it could also be the ramblings of an egotist.

Yet, Holmes can be shown to have committed fraud in the

United States at the time of most of the Ripper murders.

In fact, Holmes apparently had a trainee

who was instructed to carry out murders on prostitutes

and to mutilate their bodies.

Why would Holmes do this?

Apparently to distract the world from his own barbarism.

Is this stretching the imagination too far?

While it is a wonderful story that catches headlines,

it is in fact as ridiculous as Robin Hood

having popped over the pond to help the poor English

before returning to America to become Abraham Lincoln.

The problem is that Holmes was a massive liar,

and nothing in his diaries can be trusted.

So no matter how logical some of it may sound,

it is being manipulated to sell books.

Indeed the author of this new theory himself

describes his own visions of the ghost of Holmes.

Alarm bells should ring.

True hardened Ripperologists

could literally rip the story apart

from dates, methods, and motives

to the sheer fantasist Holmes himself

and it seems subsequent believers.

It was finally killed with the discovery

that Holmes was in fact executed and buried.

The Ripper murders were not as is commonly

and falsely believed

precise murders carried out by a surgeon.

They were frenzied and no better than a butcher.

All the evidence proves this.

The Ripper went out for his kill.

He stalked the streets.

Holmes lured his victims.

He didn't stalk.

He was precise with his murders.

He took his time over them.

Paper evidence proves that Holmes is carrying out fraud

and building his castle in the United States

at the time of the Ripper murders.

There are a lot of claims being made

that there was no evidence of Holmes in Chicago in 1888.

But they are simply not true.

It is also claimed that the Ripper's handwriting

was proven to be the same as the handwriting of Holmes.

Again not true because there are no proven records

of the handwriting of Jack The Ripper.

There are dozens of different examples

and none of them are proven.

Indeed the whole Holmes' story

has and is becoming a new fantasy in the media.

It seems to have been this way

since the first news stories about the Murder Castle.

There have been dozens of books on the subject,

and they all seem to contradict each other.

There have been copious documentaries,

TV plays, theater productions, and movies.

There has even been an opera.

We began this investigation in an attempt to be forensic

to analyze the mind of the man

through his actions and deeds.

We have discovered that his life

was one very big lie from beginning to end,

and the lies continue even after his death.

Was he really bullied in school

and forced to stand before a skeleton?

This it is claimed was the reason

for his fascination with cadavers.

Problem is we have only his word on this tall tale.

The facts we have reveal he was born into an ordinary

hard working Methodist family of farmers nothing more.

We do know that his fascination with cadavers

seems to have begun just prior to university

and it was there that his ability to use

the corpses as methods of making money began.

Somewhere his moral compass went wrong

and started pointing in every direction.

It is difficult to know where

but sometimes just the simple necessity to survive

can cause humans to do terrible things.

When those crimes have proven to work and nobody's any wiser

then the temptation to proceed to up the game increases.

Could it simply be that Holmes was a opportunist

who kept taking the risks

until the final one was one too many?

It is a pattern in crime.

It is also a pattern with psychotics

that they secretly wish to be caught,

to be known, to be famous.

He definitely had little empathy

for his fellow human beings.

He mimicked it because he was an excellent con man.

Psychotic people are very often believed

to be friendly, intelligent, and methodical.

Holmes has all those traits.

His methods of making money was so well planned

that he constructed a building to extract money and bodies.

He had no compassion for the people.

It was a challenge to his psychotic mind.

His building had 51 doorways that opened unto brick walls,

100 rooms without windows, stairs that led to nowhere,

chutes for bodies, gas holes, secret passageways

and a huge incinerator.

It was planned and executed very well.

It was a castle of fantasy for a psychotic fantasist.

It was a mirror of his own mind.

The true psychological analysis of H.H. Holmes

does not come from his lies

but from the bricks and mortar of the Murder Castle.

It reflects him.

During his confession in Chicago in 1896 he said,

"I was born with the devil in me.

"I could not help the fact that I was a murderer

"no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing.

"I was born with the evil one

"standing as my sponsor beside the bed

"where I was ushered into the world

"and he has been with me since."

We cannot believe his confessions.

We cannot believe his so-called diaries

if indeed they are real.

We can only believe the evidence.

Holmes was a bigamist, fact.

He was a superb con man, fact.

He was a serial killer, fact.

He was Jack The Ripper, extremely doubtful.

In the 21st Century nothing has changed

from the 19th Century when his evil deeds emerged.

Within his own lifetime people were

making up tales about him and his life.

In subsequent generations those lies have been spread

altered, improved upon, and regurgitated.

Just because his words are spoken

it does not make them truth.

Just because they are repeated

it does not make them gospel.

Just because they are turned into documentaries and movies

it does not make them gospel truth.

The facts are the facts.

He was an egotistical liar

who believed he was superior to the rest of mankind

just as is the case with the vast majority

of serial killers modern and ancient.

We place them on the silver screen

and make icons out of them and their Chinese whispers.

He was evil but he was not Satan.

He was mentally deranged.

But he was not Jack The Ripper.

That story is yet to be revealed,

and it will be an eye opener.