18 HOLMES from 15
developing a wind-powered device that would scare birds out of the fields. He kept his favorite things in small boxes, including his first ex- tracted tooth and a photo of a 12-year-old girl he described as his sweetheart. And he may well have kept
other more sinister things in those boxes, including the skulls of small animals that he had captured and then dissected alive in the woods around his home. He became a teacher after
graduating from school at the age of 16, teaching first in Gil- manton and then in Alton. Mud- gett was only 17 when he mar- ried Clara Lovering in Alton, on July 4, 1878. Their son, Robert Lovering Mudgett, was born on February 3, 1880, in Loudon. (As an adult, Robert was to become a Certified Public Accountant, and served as City Manager of Orlando, Florida.) Mudgett graduated from the
University of Michigan Medical School in June, 1884. While en- rolled there, he stole bodies from the laboratory, disfigured them and claimed that the people were killed accidentally in order to col- lect insurance money from poli- cies he took out on each deceased person. He then moved to Chicago to pur-
sue a career in pharmaceuticals, where he also engaged in many shady businesses, real estate and promotional deals under the name “H. H. Holmes.” On January 28, 1887, while he
was still married to Clara, Holmes married Myrta Belknap in Minne- apolis, Minnesota. Their daughter, Lucy Theodate Holmes, was born on July 4, 1889, in Englewood, Illinois. (In adult life, Lucy was to become a public schoolteacher.) Holmes lived with Myrta and Lucy
in Wilmette, Illinois, and spent most of his time in Chicago tending
terfront Productions. to business. He married Georgiana Yoke on
January 9,1894, in Denver, Colo- rado, while still married to Clara and Myrta. He also had a relation- ship with Julia Smythe, the wife of one of his former employees. Julia later became one of Holmes’s victims. There is already one movie out about the serial killer. “H.H. Hol- mes: America’s First Serial Killer’’ an hour-long DVD produced by John Borowski in 2003 for Wa-
Utilizing a documentary style, the film contains historic news- paper photos and articles about Holmes’ castle, his childhood home in New Hampshire andhis interviews with the press as he awaited his trial in Philadelphia. Last fall, WMUR Channel 9 vis-
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ited Gilmanton to show film of the Mudgett homestead while they were doing a segment on a book published last year by Jeff Mud- gett of California, “Bloodstains,” in which Mudgett says that he is a descendant of Dr. H.H. Holmes, and, through comparing the handwriting of Holmes with notes left by Jack the Rip- per, concludes that they were written by the same person. Whi le the true
identity of Jack the Ripper remains the subject of continued speculation and has been the subject of many articles and movies, the death toll inflicted by Lon- don’s famous mur- derer was only five,
THE WEIRS TIMES & THE COCHECO TIMES, Thursday, February 16, 2012
all in the year 1888, which pales in comparison to the number of victims that Holmes would claim. And it appears from what is
known of Holmes activities, that he was in the Midwest at the time of Jack the Ripper’s rampage. Larson’s book does however sug- gest that Holmes was well aware of the Ripper’s crimes. According to a Wikipedia biog-
raphy, in the summer of 1886, Holmes took a job at Dr. E. S. Holton’s in the Chicago neigh- borhood of Englewood. Holton suffered from cancer and died. Holmes then used his well-prac- ticed skills of charm and persua- sion to comfort and reassure the grieving widow, convincing her to sell him the drugstore. She then disappeared with Hol- mes telling people that she had moved to California. She was never heard from again. “Holmes purchased a lot
across from the drugstore, where he built his three-story, block-long “Castle” - as it was dubbed by those in the neigh- borhood. It was opened as a hotel for the World’s Colum- bian Exposition in 1893, with part of the structure used as commercial space. “The ground floor of the
Castle contained Holmes’s own relocated drugstore and various shops, while the up- per two floors contained his
personal office and a maze of over one hundred windowless rooms with doorways opening to brick walls, oddly angled hallways, stairways to nowhere, doors openable only from the outside and a host of other strange and labyrinthine constructions. Hol- mes repeatedly changed builders during the construction of the Castle, so only he fully under- stood the design of the house, thus decreasing the chance of being reported to the police. “After the completion of the
hotel, Holmes selected mostly female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of em- ployment to take out life insur- ance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), as well as his lovers and hotel guests. “He tortured and killed them.
Some were locked in soundproof bedrooms fitted with gas lines that let him asphyxiate them at any time. Some victims were locked in a huge soundproof bank vault near his office where they were left to suffocate. The victims’ bod- ies were dropped by secret chute to the basement, where some w e r e
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