Four days before H.H. Holmes’ execution on May 7, 1896, the Chicago Chronicle published a lengthy diatribe condemning the “multimurderer, bigamist, seducer, resurrectionist, forger, thief and general swindler” as a man “without parallel in the annals of crime.” Among his many misdeeds, the newspaper reported, were suffocating victims in a vault, boiling a man in oil and poisoning wealthy women in order to seize their fortunes.
Holmes claimed to have killed at least 27 people, most of whom he’d lured into a purpose-built “Murder Castle” replete with secret passageways, trapdoors and soundproof torture rooms. According to the Crime Museum, an intricate system of chutes and elevators enabled Holmes to transport his victims’ bodies to the Chicago building’s basement, which was purportedly equipped with a dissecting table, stretching rack and crematory. In the killer’s own words, “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.”
More than a century after his death, Holmes—widely considered the United States’ first known serial killer—continues to loom large in the imagination.