Chapter 1Gilmanton

Foreword

Four.

That is the number of killings H. H. Holmes was ever proved to have committed, and it is the number this book has to spend twenty-two chapters getting a reader to accept, because the number everyone carries is twenty-seven.

Benjamin Pitezel, an alcoholic accomplice and the father of five, killed in a rented house on Callowhill Street in Philadelphia in September 1894 for a ten thousand dollar life policy. And then three of his children: Alice, aged thirteen, Nellie, aged nine, and Howard, aged seven, moved by rail through four cities across two countries in October and November of that year and killed in a cellar in Toronto and a chimney in Indiana.

Twenty-seven is not a count. It was a price.

On April 12, 1896, in a cell at Moyamensing Prison, under contract, against a deadline, for a reported fee, H. H. Holmes wrote out twenty-seven murders in longhand for a newspaper syndicate. Several of the people he confessed to killing were subsequently shown to be alive. He retracted almost all of it on the scaffold on May 7, hours after being paid.

That document is a sale, not a disclosure, and it is the most successful fraud of his career, because it is the only one still working a hundred and thirty years later.

The argument of this book is that he has been read backwards ever since.

He was not an architect of a murder machine who happened to commit fraud on the side. He was a career fraudster in credit, property and insurance — a man whose actual daily work was chattel mortgages written on goods already mortgaged, suppliers left unpaid, property transferred between aliases, and a steady stream of small lawsuits from creditors who could never locate the same man twice — and who killed instrumentally, cheaply, and mostly to close a hole in a scheme.

Twelve chapters pass before a body is proved. That is deliberate and it will feel inverted to any reader arriving from the most famous book on the subject. The argument only works if you have watched a man learn to turn paper into money before you watch him turn a corpse into money, because the second is the same operation as the first and it is not intelligible on its own.

Now the building, which is the thing everybody knows about and which this book handles in a way that will not satisfy everybody.

He put up a two-story block on Wallace Avenue in Englewood in 1887, shops below and flats above, and added a third floor in 1892 which he sold to investors and suppliers as a hotel for the coming World's Columbian Exposition. He rotated contractors so that no single builder ever saw the whole plan. He kept blind rooms holding furniture bought on credit and hidden from the men who still legally owned it.

Chapter 5 argues that this is the architecture of non-payment rather than the architecture of murder. It also gives the counter-case its weight in the same chapter, because there was a walk-in vault, there was a basement, and an innocent explanation of a floor plan is not an alibi for a building.

What can be said is narrower and it is in Chapter 10. The third floor was never finished. No hotel register has ever surfaced. And in a hundred and thirty years nobody has succeeded in attaching a single missing-persons cluster from the Exposition to him — not one name, not one family, not one police report.

Twenty-seven million people came through the Court of Honor between May and October 1893. Two miles south on Sixty-Third Street there was an unfinished floor.

The Castle — the airtight vault, the body chute, the gas chamber, the basement crematorium — has a birthday, and Chapter 17 places it in the weeks after July 15, 1895.

In July 1895, within days of Detective Frank Geyer opening a cellar in Toronto, Chicago police began digging out the Englewood basement while reporters stood on the sidewalk, and inside three weeks the Tribune, the Times-Herald and the Inter Ocean had printed all of it. On the night of August 19 two men were seen leaving the back of the building and it burned, and no arsonist was ever identified.

Note the order, because almost everybody gets it backwards. The legend was in print before the fire, not because of it. By 1896 a Philadelphia publisher had it between covers.

Against all of that, this book puts the one thing in the case that is unambiguously admirable.

Detective Frank P. Geyer of the Philadelphia police left Philadelphia in late June 1895 with photographs of three children and the letters Alice had written home — letters she had handed to Holmes to post, which he had put in his pocket and kept. Geyer worked Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Chicago, Detroit and Toronto, boarding house by boarding house, door to door, for nine weeks, using a thirteen-year-old girl's correspondence as a map.

On July 15 he found the cellar at 16 St Vincent Street.

That is the finest police work of the American nineteenth century and it is the sole reason any of this was ever proved rather than merely believed. Five chapters of this book are the Pitezel case, from the St Louis jail cell where the whole scheme was set in motion to the verdict, because in the popular literature those four killings are an epilogue and they are in fact the entire evidentiary foundation.

Three things I want to say about what this book does with the literature.

It is not an attack on Erik Larson. The Devil in the White City is a superb piece of construction and it did what it set out to do. Chapter 21 examines what its Holmes chapters rest on, which is thin in places, and does so without imputing anything to its author. The same applies to the Ripper identification advanced by Jeff Mudgett: it is stated fairly, answered on the record, and no imputation is made against the man making it.

It relies heavily on Adam Selzer's 2017 archival work, which established that people Holmes confessed to killing were alive, and which almost nobody read.

And it accepts a correction to its own marketing category. The Bender family of Kansas came first, so "America's first serial killer" is false on its own terms. Selzer's further objection — that killings with a clear instrumental motive are not serial murder in the modern sense — is answered rather than adopted, because a man who kills to close a hole in a fraud is still choosing to kill.

In May 2017 the concrete at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon was broken open, the coffin was lifted, and the body was found intact down to the mustache. The teeth matched.

That answered the only question in this case that was ever answerable, and it is the trivial one.

Chapter 1 · Gilmanton

Herman Webster Mudgett was born on May 16, 1861, at Gilmanton, in the hills of New Hampshire, to Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Mudgett. The household was Baptist and it farmed. The town had a school in it, Gilmanton Academy, and the boy was educated there. He was not yet H. H. Holmes. That name came later, and it was acquired rather than inherited.

That paragraph is very nearly the whole of what can be established about the first phase of this life without borrowing the material from him.

Two of its facts are names and nothing more. Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Mudgett can be placed in Gilmanton, in a household, with a son, and beyond placing them this book cannot go. What they believed, how they raised him, what either of them made of what he became — none of it survives, and the silence is not the kind of gap that further work in an archive is likely to close. Another of its facts is a name that did not yet exist. He is called H. H. Holmes on the spine of this book because that is the name the world kept, but he will not be Holmes for years yet, and until he is he is Mudgett: the name the town clerk wrote down, and the name he himself put on the title page of his first book. When the change comes it will not be a colorful detail in a criminal life. It will be one of the instruments, taken up for a reason, at a moment, to solve a problem.

For the years the record calls his Gilmanton childhood — 1861 to 1878 — the surviving documentation is town and census records, and nothing else. There is no diary. There are no letters. No schoolmate set down a recollection while it was still only a recollection about a farm boy, and no teacher at the academy left an account of him that anyone has since produced. What town and census records can do, they do, and it is not trivial: they establish that the household existed, who was in it, and where it stood. What they cannot do is describe it. Whether Levi Mudgett was a hard father or a mild one, whether the boy was loved or let alone, whether anyone in Gilmanton thought him peculiar — none of that is in the file. Any account that supplies it is not drawing on a source. It is writing.

A great deal of writing has been done. This subject has attracted more novelization than almost any American criminal, and the childhood is where the novelizing is easiest, because nothing is in the way. For a hundred and thirty years the Gilmanton years have been read backwards out of the Philadelphia ones — the boy assembled out of the man, cause fitted to effect, the farmhouse furnished from the gallows. It is worth being exact about where the furniture comes from. Almost everything ever written about these years derives from two documents. He wrote both of them.

The first is Holmes' Own Story, published in Philadelphia in 1895 by Burk & McFetridge Co. and issued under his birth name, Herman W. Mudgett. He composed it between his arrest and his trial: in custody, on a capital charge, with a jury not yet drawn. The book is entirely self-exculpatory. Its subject is a wronged businessman, harassed by creditors and misread by police, and it was written to be sold. That last clause is not an insult and it is not a figure of speech. It is a description of the transaction. There was a publisher, a printer, a distribution, and a market, and the market was at its hungriest in precisely the months the book was made.

The second document is the confession. He wrote it out longhand in a cell at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia, against a deadline, under arrangement with a newspaper syndicate, for a fee. It was published on April 12, 1896, and it enumerated twenty-seven murders. It is the reason anyone outside Philadelphia has ever heard the name. He was convicted of exactly one murder, that of his accomplice Benjamin Pitezel, and almost nobody remembers that one. The list of twenty-seven includes people who were afterward shown to have been alive. That fact travels with the number in this book every time the number appears, including this time, because a list of names published as the dead is a serious thing to reprint and the status of the names is part of the list.

Two features of that document have to be flagged at the front of the book rather than at the back, because the reader is entitled to know the condition of the evidence before the narrative starts leaning on it. The fee is one. The figure given almost everywhere is seven thousand five hundred dollars; it is cited universally and this book has not traced it to a contract, an accounting entry, or any instrument that would make it a fact rather than a repetition. It is reported here as reported, and nothing in the argument depends on the amount. The vehicle is the other. Secondary accounts disagree over whether the confession's primary carrier was the Philadelphia Inquirer, Hearst's New York Journal, or both by syndication. That disagreement is not resolved in this sentence and will not be resolved by assertion later.

The relation between those two documents is the most useful thing about either of them, and it is the reason a book arguing about sourcing can afford to begin in a town where nothing happened. The two are eight months apart. They cover overlapping ground and they do not agree about it: the same events are narrated in both, and the narrations are incompatible. Neither can be checked against an independent witness in most instances. But they can be checked against each other, and when they are, the result is not a puzzle about which version is true. It is a demonstration that the author was writing to the market rather than from memory. In 1895 the market wanted a wronged businessman, and he supplied one. In 1896 the market wanted the other thing, and it was willing to pay for it, and he supplied that. The later document is not a correction of the earlier. It is a second product, sold to a different buyer, by a man who had by then established that the account of his own life was a commodity with a price that moved.

That comparison is the spine of a later chapter and it will not be conducted here. What belongs here is the warning it produces. No statement of his has standing because he made it twice, and none has standing because it is vivid, circumstantial or well told. Holmes' Own Story is not an obscure text; it was reissued by J. D. Crighton in 2018 and a reader can go and get it. A reader who does, looking for the childhood, will find the childhood — detailed, coherent, readable, and told by the only person who has ever told it.

Somewhere inside those two documents lies the origin story, and it is the first thing in this life that the reader has to be taught how to hold.

He told it thirty-four years after that birth in Gilmanton, in a cell. Its elements are these: older boys, the office of the village doctor, and a skeleton hanging in that office. He is taken there by the other children and made to stand in front of the thing. It is offered as an origin — the hinge, the episode from which the direction of everything afterward is supposed to follow — and it has been quoted, retold, dramatized and illustrated more often than any other single incident in the whole of his New Hampshire childhood.

For that story, the only source in existence is the defendant.

There is no second account of it. Not from another boy said to have been in the room. Not from the doctor whose office it is said to have been. Not from a parent, a neighbor, a schoolmaster, or any other resident of Gilmanton, at the time or afterward. No contemporaneous note has been produced, no local newspaper item, no letter, no recollection collected before the name became worth something. The episode enters the historical record for the first time in his own handwriting, long after the date it assigns to itself, written by a man under indictment for murder who was at that moment professionally engaged in explaining himself for money.

It does not follow that the story is untrue. This is the discipline the book has to hold from here to the end, and it is harder than either of the two positions it sits between. The absence of corroboration is not disproof. Children are taken places by older children; a doctor's office is a plausible place for a skeleton to hang; nothing in the story is impossible, or even improbable, and it is entirely possible that it happened in exactly the terms he gave it. The correct finding is not false. It is unverified, and — given what survives of Gilmanton from that period — probably unverifiable. Those two verdicts get collapsed into one another constantly in this literature, in both directions: a tradition that treats his uncorroborated statements as substantially reliable, and a correction that treats them as substantially fabricated. Both are working from the same evidence, which is his word, and neither has any more of it than the other.

The symmetry of that error is worth holding onto, because the second version of it is the fashionable one now and it is no better than the first. A man who is proved to have killed is not thereby proved to have killed everyone he was accused of killing. A man who is proved to have lied is not thereby proved to have lied about everything, and a document shown to be false in many of its particulars is not shown to be false in the remainder; it is shown to be worthless as evidence, which is a different finding and a weaker one. The corrective scholarship on this case has done real and necessary work, and the way it did it was by finding people alive in censuses and directories and marriage registers years after he said he had killed them. That is a positive finding and it retires a name. Nothing of the kind is available for a boy standing in a doctor's office in a New Hampshire village on an unrecorded afternoon. Nobody can be produced alive from that room, and nobody can be produced dead from it either, because the room itself has never been shown to have existed outside his account of it.

What can be examined, in the absence of the event, is the document that carries it, and there the questions are answerable. When was it written? After the arrest. For what audience? Buyers. In what condition was the author? Facing a capital charge and in need of a public that would consider him something other than what the police said he was. What does an origin story do for such an author? It performs the one service no denial can: it makes him legible. A man who is merely accused is a hole in the newspaper; a man with a childhood that explains him is a character, and characters are worth money. Whether the boy in the doctor's office ever existed, the story containing him arrived at the precise moment its author had a use for it and a buyer for it. That is not proof of manufacture. It is the reason the story cannot be taken on its face, and it is the reason this book will keep asking, of every claim that originates with him, what the claim was for.

There is a smaller correction to make here too, and it belongs in the first chapter because it demonstrates how completely the legend has absorbed the facts. The confession is routinely attached to the wrong year. There is no 1893 confession. 1893 is the World's Columbian Exposition, which is a different chapter and, as this book will argue, a largely unrelated one. The confession was published on April 12, 1896. The two events have fused so thoroughly in the retelling that the dates migrate between them, and the migration is diagnostic: it shows a story that has stopped being a chronology and become an atmosphere, in which the Fair and the murders and the confession are all simply then, all simply Chicago, all simply him. A biography that cannot keep 1893 and 1896 apart cannot keep anything apart, and the whole argument of this book is a matter of keeping things apart — of establishing which claim rests on a court record, which on a property deed, which on a newspaper of a particular date, and which on nothing but a man in a cell with a deadline.

So the method is worth stating plainly, once, at the start, rather than being left for a reader to infer from somewhere deep in the narrative. This book grades its evidence on the page, in the sentence, as it goes. Where a source is his own writing, the sentence says so. Where a claim is documented but unproved, it is called that, and the distinction between a disappearance and a death is maintained even when it is inconvenient and even when everyone already knows how the paragraph is supposed to end. Where the record simply stops, the book says the words we do not know, and does not fill the space with a reconstructed scene. His thoughts are not available. Nobody wrote them down, he is not a reliable reporter of them, and no amount of narrative confidence will convert an inference about a nineteenth-century interior into a fact.

The standard the grading is measured against is a printed volume of 1897: The Trial of Herman W. Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes, for the Murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel, published in Philadelphia by George T. Bisel. It is the only place in the entire case where any allegation against this man was tested under adversarial conditions — witnesses sworn and open to cross-examination, evidence entered, a defense heard, a verdict returned by people who had to sit and listen to all of it. Everything the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania ever proved about H. H. Holmes, it proved inside that volume, and what it proved was one killing. That is the floor of the book, and everything else is arranged in relation to it. A claim resting on the trial record stands at one level. A claim resting on a property deed, a mortgage filing, a hotel register, a marriage certificate or an insurance application stands at a second, because those documents were made for other purposes by people with no stake in this story and they cannot be argued with. A claim resting on a Chicago newspaper of a particular date in the summer of 1895 stands at a third, and the date is not decoration — in that particular season the date is the whole of the evidence. And a claim resting on him alone stands at the bottom, which is where the skeleton in the doctor's office is, and where a substantial proportion of what the reader already believes about this man will turn out to be.

Applied to Gilmanton, that method yields a very short list. Established: the birth, the date, the place, the parents, the Baptist farm household, the schooling at Gilmanton Academy. Weak, and to be described as weak whenever it appears: the childhood skeleton episode, sole source the accused. Not known, and not knowable from anything now surviving: what that household was actually like, what kind of child he was, when he first understood that a statement could be made to do work that the truth would not do. The last of those is the question a biography of this man most wants answered, and it is the one the record most completely refuses.

That refusal is worth sitting with rather than stepping over, because it establishes the shape of everything that follows. The shape of the evidence in this case is the opposite of the shape of the legend. The parts everyone knows are the least documented; the parts nobody knows are documentary, dull, and conclusive. A reader arriving from the popular literature expects a childhood full of omens, and there is not one omen in the file. There is a farm, a town, a school, a census, and a boy about whom, from any independent source, essentially nothing is recorded until he begins signing his name to things.

Which is the point at which he becomes visible, and it is the point at which this book can begin working. Herman Webster Mudgett left almost no trace as a person and an enormous trace as a signatory. The record of his life is a record of instruments — marriage certificates, enrollment registers, deeds, chattel mortgages, promissory notes, insurance applications, aliases, and at the end of it a book and a confession, all of them paper, all of them produced to obtain something from somebody. That is not a metaphor for the man. It is the literal composition of the archive. And it means that the first honest sentence in a biography of H. H. Holmes has to be a sentence about sourcing rather than about character, because the alternative is to start the way almost every previous account has started: with a small boy, a doorway, a skeleton, and a narrator who was standing in a Philadelphia cell with a publisher waiting.

The reader should take from this chapter one habit and carry it forward. Every time a striking detail appears in this story — an overheard remark, a room, a number, a motive, a moment of recognition — ask where it comes from. In a surprising proportion of cases the answer will be: from him, later, in writing, for money. That is not an accusation leveled at a single document. It is the condition of the entire record, from the first page of his life to the last, and it is why a book about H. H. Holmes has to be built the way a fraud investigation is built rather than the way a murder story is built — out of instruments, dates, filings and payments, in the order they were created, with each one graded as it is entered.

Gilmanton is where that begins, and Gilmanton gives up almost nothing. A birth on May 16, 1861. Two parents with names. A farm, a faith, an academy. Town and census records exist; nothing else does. Everything beyond that which has ever been said about the boy in the New Hampshire hills — the fear, the fascination, the older boys, the hanging bones, the making of a monster in a doctor's front room — comes to us from a man who, by the time he said it, had spent fifteen years producing documents for money, and who was producing one more.