THE MURDER CASTLE - America's First Serial Killer & The Building That Became a Legend

🏰 THE MURDER CASTLE: H.H. Holmes - Myth vs. Reality 💀

🎪 Three miles from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, Herman Mudgett built a hotel. The newspapers called it the Murder Castle. The legend says 200 victims. The truth: 9 confirmed deaths.

🔍 TONIGHT WE COVER: 💀 Holmes' real background vs. the mythology 🏨 What he actually built (acid vats were real, "100 rooms" weren't) 👥 The 9 confirmed victims by name—including the Pitezel children 🕵️ Detective Frank Geyer's 3-month hunt across North America ⚖️ Holmes' $7,500 confession to Hearst papers & gallows recantation 🏢 The post office that stands there now (employees won't go to basement)

Part of the White City Series exploring the dark side of the 1893 World's Fair.

🏠 Kansas connection: The Bloody Benders family killed travelers on the Kansas prairie 20 years before Holmes—they were never caught.

From medical school body-snatcher to America's first documented serial killer—this is Holmes' real story, told with respect for his actual victims.

Perfect for fans of: True crime, serial killer documentaries, Chicago history, The Devil in the White City, detective stories

#JustKillingTime #HHHolmes #MurderCastle #TrueCrime #SerialKiller #Chicago1893 #WorldsFair #ElizabethStanton #DetectiveFrankGeyer

💀 Alice. Nellie. Howard. Pearl. Julia. Emeline. Minnie. Nannie. Remember their names. 💀

🎧 Send Time Killer Files: JustKillingTimePodcast@gmail.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:17

May 7, 1896. Moya Mensen Prison, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He asked them to stop. The assistant sheriff was fitting the noose around his neck when Holmes put his hand up. Don't be in a hurry, Alex, he said. The man doing the hanging paused, and the sixty witnesses in the room watched. Holmes turned to face them. Gentlemen, he said, I have very few words to say. In fact, I would make no remarks at this time, but for my feeling that in not speaking, I would appear to acquiesce in my execution. He had said that he had killed only two women. He said they died during criminal operations, the language of the era for abortions. He denied all the other murders, every single one. He had, though, confessed to 27 of them the previous year, sold the confession to the Hearst newspapers for $7,500, and now standing on the gallows with a rope around his neck, he recanted. They put that black cap over his head, and at 10 12 AM, the trap fell, his neck broke, and he was pronounced dead thirty minutes later. And then he had made one final request. He asked to be buried under ten feet underground in a cement-filled coffin, with two more feet of concrete poured over the top before the dirt was replaced. He was afraid, his lawyer said, of grave robbers, of body snatchers who would dig him up and use his corpse for dissection. The Mick, who had stripped flesh from his victim's bones and sold their skeletons to medical schools, wanted to make sure, absolutely certain the same thing did not happen to him. He was 34 years old. His real name was Herman Mutster Mudget. Sorry. Herman Webster Mudget. An awful name, which I guess is why he changed it. And tonight we're gonna go inside the building he built. You're listening to Just Killing Time. I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a true crime and conspiracy podcast and stories that keep us up at night. Last episode, we talked about the White City, the 630 acres, the 27 million visitors, Tesla's electricity, and the first Ferris wheel at a fair that ran for only six months and left almost nothing standing. And I told you about a man who lived three miles away and used that fair as a hunting ground. Today we're going to go deeper. This is the Bull H. H. Holmes episode, who he actually was and what the building actually contained, which parts of the story are actually documented, and which parts are invented by newspapers that have discovered how well murder sold papers. I'm going to tell you what's the truth and what we don't know to be the truth because I think Holmes deserves it. Not for his sake, but for the sake of his victims, the real ones, the ones whose stories are specific and documented and whose deaths deserve to be told accurately rather than buried under legend. So let's start at the beginning in a small town in New Hampshire in 1861. Herman Webster Mudget was born May 16th, 1861, in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, the third child of Levi and Theodade Mudgett. His family was relatively well off by small town standards. His father was a farmer and a house painter who, by multiple accounts, said this. He was a heavy drinker who beat his children. And his mother was deeply religious. From an early age, the people who knew Herman described him as exceptionally intelligent, frighteningly so, they said. He graduated high school at 16, two years early, and he read everything the local library had. He was bored. And there's stories about his childhood that are difficult to verify, but keep appearing in every account of his life. There's a story about his classmates bullying him. They forced him to stand in front of a human skeleton in a doctor's office. They pressed its hands against his face to brighten him. And the story goes that instead of being frightened, something else happened. He became fascinated. There are stories about animals, experiments, a childhood friend who died in a fall from a building that some accounts suggest was not entirely accidental. And none of these childhood stories are provable. I'm just telling you they exist and that you should weigh them accordingly. What is documented? He was married at 17, secretly to a girl named Claire Loveringley. In 1878, they had a son named Robert, who would grow up to become a certified public accountant and the city manager of Orlando, Florida. That detail somehow makes the whole story stranger rather than more. The abusive father, the skeleton in the doctor's office, the dead friend in the field. I want there to be a narrative arc that explains how you get from a farm in New Hampshire to a building in Chicago that newspapers will call a murder castle. I'm not going to give you that arc, because the truth is that lots of people have abusive fathers and lots of children were fascinated by anatomy. Lots of people grew up in difficult circumstances and did not build acid bats in their basement. The origin story satisfies us, but it doesn't explain anything. And I think being honest about that is more important than giving you a clean narrative. So he enrolled in the University of Vermont first and then transferred to the University of Michigan Medical School in 1882. His academic performance by official records was mediocre, but his extracurricular education was another matter entirely. He worked in the anatomy lab. He learned the value of human bodies, specifically the value of human bodies to medical schools that needed cadavers by dissection and skeletal articulation. He learned that a well-prepared skeleton could be sold, and he learned that an insurance policy taken out on a dead person could be collected. He combined both of those lessons. In 1882, Holmes transferred to the University of Medicate's Department of Medicine and Surgery, despite his mediocre uh academic performance. And this is all according to Wikipedia. Holmes graduated in June of 1884. While enrolled, he worked in that anatomy lab and was said to have engaged in facilitating body snatching to supply medical cadavers. Now, while he was still a medical student, Mudget was stealing cadavers from the university's anatomy department, disfiguring them to prevent identification, and then collecting insurance money on the fake policies he'd taken out in the cadaver's name. He was committing insurance fraud using the body of strangers in medical school while studying to be a doctor. He graduated, like I said, in 1884, and he was 23 years old. He had a wife and a young son in New Hampshire whom he was already abandoning. He had his medical degree and he was working knowledge of human anatomy, the insurance fraud, and the institutional blind spots of the American medical system now. And he spent the next two years moving from town to town. He went from Moors to New York, Philadelphia, various short stops across the Northeast, running small cons, leaving debts, disappearing when questions got too close. And then August of 1886, he arrived in Chicago, and he changed his name. Now, according to that's from the West End Museum, Holmes moved to Chicago in August 86, which is when he began using the pseudonym H.H. Holmes. He intended to pay homage to Sherlock Holmes with that name, though he may have changed his name to avoid being caught for an earlier crime. H. H. Holmes, named possibly for the great fictional detective, the man who saw everything the man who could not be deceived. I want to think about that name choice. There are two ways to kind of read it. The charitable reading, he admired Sherlock Holmes and saw himself as a man of superior intellect and perception. But the darker reading, naming yourself after the one person who could not be fooled, is the move of someone who needs to believe that they're always the smartest person in the room, who needs to make their identity permanent, who was terrified underneath the chart and the name and the doctor's coat of being found out. He was found out. It just took longer than it should have. Holmes arrived in the Inglewood neighborhood on the south side of Chicago and took a job at a pharmacy at the corner of South Wallace Avenue and West 63rd Street. The owner was Dr. Edward Poulton, a fellow University of Michigan alumni. Holmes was charming, competent, and reliable, and Holmes liked it. Then Dr. Poult got sick. His wife, Elizabeth Holden, took over management for the pharmacy, and Holmes was helpful, attentive, and he offered to buy the pharmacy from her. The sale went through. Elizabeth Colton told neighbors she was planning to move to California. She was never seen again. Holmes told anyone who asked that she'd moved as planned, and he didn't know her forwarding address, and he was very sorry he could not be more helpful. He now owned the pharmacy. He was twenty six years old, he had a base of operations, he had the trust of the Inglewood neighborhood, and he had a vacant lot across the street. Construction of the building across the Holmes pharmacy began in 1887. From the beginning, Holmes approached it with a strategy that served multiple purposes at once. He hired contractors and then fired them before they completed their sections. He hired new contractors who wouldn't know what the previous ones had built. He ordered materials on credit and refused to pay for them, cycling through suppliers who would eventually sue him and lose him and move on to the next unpaid creditor. Holmes hired and fired those several construction crews for two reasons. So that no one would have a clear idea of what was going on, and so that he could claim bad workmanship and refuse to pay for services. The police determined that he had never paid a cent for any materials that had gone into that building. The building? Ground floor held retail spaces, a drugstore run by Holmes himself, plus rental spaces for other merchants, and the second and third floors were the hotel. The basement was the base. Holmes told the city he had planned on building a hotel for the world's fair visitors. Construction ran from 1887 to roughly 1892. The fair opened in May 19 or sorry, 1893. He'd been building this specific structure for its specific purpose for five years before the fair arrived. Now here's where I need to be careful, and where I'm going to be more careful than most people who tell this story. After Fulns Arost in 1894, the newspapers, particularly the yellow press of the era, Joseph Pulitzer's world and William Randolph's Hearst's papers, they published increasingly sensationalized accounts of what the building contained. Secret passages, trapdoors, gas chambers controlled from Holmes' bedroom, a room lined with asbustus-coated steel plates, hundreds of rooms arranged like a maze where victims wandered buttons starved. Some of that was real. Some of it was invented, separating the two manners because the real story is terrible enough without the embellishments. And because the embellishments had, over time, obscured the identities and stories of Holmes' action victims. It's my belief that probably all those stories about all the visitors to the World's Fair who were murdered in his castle were just complete cinch sensationalistic fabrication by the yellow press. And that's Harold Schlechter, author of Depraved, the Definitive True Story of H. H. Holmes, quoted in history.com. That's what he had to say. And then Adam Seitzer Seltzer, author of H. H. Holmes, The True History of the White City Devil, quoted in History.com. This is what he said. There's a total of nine people we can say with some confidence he probably killed. He confessed to 27 at one point, but several of them were still alive at the time. The inflated numbers up to 200 victims likely started with a pulp book published in 1940. So nine confirmed. Possibly more. Investigators found evidence suggesting a higher number, and 50 people reported missing were eventually traced back to the building. But the specific number matters less than being honest with you about what's being documented and what is mythology. And I want to be transparent about why I'm being so precise. It would be easier and more dramatic to tell you that Holmes killed 200 people in a building that was basically a medieval torture cast. That story is more grippy. It's also less true. And I think the people who actually died in that building deserves the truth more than they deserve a good story. There are nine people whose deaths are confirmed and documented. Each of them had a name, a life, a reason for being in Chicago in the early 1890s. Nine people is not a small number. Nine people is a catastrophe. And I'm going to tell you about them by name. What investigators confirmed though when they went through the building in July of 1895? The second floor contained more than 50 rooms, many of them small with unusually low ceilings. Some rooms had no windows. Many rooms, and this part is confirmed, could only be locked from the outside. A person inside one of those rooms had no way to lock the door against someone trying to enter. There were gas pipes connected to at least some of the rooms. Holmes controlled the gas connections from a mechanism in his own bedroom. Whether this was specifically designed for murder or was a remnant of the building's gas lighting system that Holmes repurposed, it's not definitively established. But it's confirmed that the connections existed and that Holmes had control of them. There was a chute in the building. Newspaper accounts described it as a body chute used to transport victims to the basement. Holmes defenders have pointed out that many buildings of that era had laundry chutes connected to the basement. Both things can be true. The chute existed and Holmes used it for purposes beyond laundry. The basement. This is where the confirmed evidence of Holmes' crimes were concentrated. The cellar was perhaps the most remarkable section of the building. It was fitted with operating tables, a crematory, hits containing quick lime and acidance, surgical instruments, and various pieces of apparatus which, resembling medieval torture racks, never were satisfactorily explained. And that's the Chicago CBS, citing contemporary accounts of the investigation. So a basset, a lime pit, a dissection table, a crematorium, and human remains, fragments of bone, a tuft of human female hair found in the chimney flu, burned watch chains and buttons that investigators believed belonged to specific victims. Not torture racks, not a stretching device designed to create a race of giants as though, particularly one creatus, newspaper claimed. Not hundreds of hidden rooms accessible only through trapdoors in the floor, not elaborate death machine built from maximum suffering. What Holmes built was efficient, clinical, and purposeful. He built a building where people could be isolated without witnesses, killed without sound reaching the street, and disposed of without bodies being found. He built it in the way a doctor with a medical degree and an intimate understanding of human anatomy would build it. Not like a monster from a gothic novel, like a methodical profession. That is somehow more frightening than the gothic version. The gothic version, the torture castle with hundreds of rooms and a furnace big enough to hold multiple bodies, requires you to imagine a kind of theatrically a performance. A villain who knows he's a villain and has decorated accordingly. What Holmes actually built requires you to imagine something quieter. A man who looked at a problem of disposal the way an engineer looks at logistics challenges. He designed a solution and built it over five years, tested it, refined it. Who was when he walked out of that building and onto the street? Entirely indistinguishable from any other well-dressed physician in Eaglewood. The Gothic version is easier to protect yourself from. This version is not. Oh. Not the legend, not the 200, the ones we can confirm. The ones who had names and faces and reasons for being in that building at 63rd and Wallace in Inglewood, Chicago. There was Elizabeth Holton, the woman who sold Holmes the pharmacy. She told neighbors she was moving to California and she was probably Holmes' first victim in Chicago. Nobody was ever recovered, and Holmes gave her the same answer he gave every family that came looking. She'd moved on. He was very sorry, he didn't have a forwarding address. She's never been confirmed as a murder victim because no evidence was ever found. But investigators who went through the building's history believed she died there and she was never seen again. Then there's Julia Connor and Pearl Connor. Julia Connor was the wife of Ned Connor, who ran a jewelry counter in Holmes' ground floor retail space. Holmes hired Juan to work in the building. He began having an affair with her. When Ned Connor eventually found out and left, Julia stayed, but she had nowhere else to go, and Holmes had made himself indispensable in her life. Julia and her six-year-old daughter Pooh disappeared around Christmas 1891. During his various confessions, Holmes alternately denied killing Juan and admitted to killing her accidentally during what he called a criminal operation. That means a botched abortion. And during the investigation of the building, a piece of human bone was found that may have been Julia's. The remains of a child, possibly Pearl, were also discovered. And like I said, Pear Connor was six years old. I need to stop here for just a moment. Pearl Connor was six. Whatever happened in that belief happened to a six-year-old child who was there because her mother had no options. I don't want to move past that too quickly. Her name was Pearl. She was six. And she's one of the nine people whose deaths we can speak to with some confidence. There's Emeline Seagrand. She came to Chicago in 1892 after Holmes placed a classified ad for a secretary. She was described by people who knew her as bright and ambitious. She'd been working her way toward a career and saw Chicago as an opportunity. She began working in Holmes Building in May of 19, sorry, 1892. She appeared and dis disappeared in December of 1892. My dyslexia likes to come out when it comes to the numbers. So in this podcast, you're gonna hear me botch the numbers and have to reado them because my brain and my mouth don't work at the same speed, apparently. So she disappeared December 1892, and Holmes later told her family she'd married a man named Robert Phelps and moved away. He produced larger letters, allegedly from Emiline, assuring her family she was well, and investigators later concluded the letters were forged. Emiline Seagrand was one of at least four women who came to work for Holmes in that building and were never seen again. Minnie Williams and Nanny Williams. Minnie Williams was a young actress and a real estate voter from Fort Worth, Texas. She owned property there, land that Holmes convinced her to sign over to him in 1893. He may have married her, he may have told her they were engaged. The legal status of their relationship was as murky as everything else about Holmes. Now Minnie's younger sister Nanny Williams came to visit in July of 1893. She was 18 years old. She wrote to her aunt on July 5th, 1893, saying she planned to accompany Brother Harry to Europe. She signed off with the message, Brother Harry says, You need never trouble any more about me, financially or otherwise. He and sister will see to me. I hope our hard days are over. And that's cited from Wikipedia. Neither Minnie nor Nanny Williams was ever seen again. When investigators searched the murder castle in 1895, they found burned clothing believed to belong to Minnie. Holmes in his confession claimed he killed Minnie in Moments, Illinois, poisoning and burying her there. Although the body was never found. Nanny Williams, like I said, was 18 years old. Then there's the Pietzel family. Vincent Pietzel was Holmes accomplice. He was a carpenter by trade, a petty criminal by inclination, a father of five children, and a man who trusted Holmes more than anyone else in his life. That trust killed him. The scheme was straightforward. Pietzel would fake his own death, collect $10,000 in life insurance from the Fidelity Mutual Life Assurance Association of Philadelphia and split the money with Holmes. The plan required a convincing corpse. Holmes said he would supply one from his medical connections. Instead, Holmes killed Pietzel himself. He burned him to death and collected the insurance money alone. He then told Pietzel's wife Carrie, who knew about the fraud scheme, that her husband was alive and hiding in London. He convinced her to let him travel with three of her five children. Alice, age 15, Nellie, age 11, and Howard, age 8. He said he was taking them to meet their father. He murdered all three of them in separate states. Howard Pyatzel was killed in Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indiana. His charred remains were found at a cottage Holmes had rented. Allie and Nellie Pietzel were killed in Toronto, Canada. Detective Frank Eyer found their bodies buried in the cellar of a house Holmes had rented under an assumed name. The coroner believed he'd locked the girls in a large truck and filled it with gas from a lane bowel. Alice was 15, Nellie was 11, and Howard was eight. I want to stay with the Piazole children for a moment because in the legend of H. H. Holmes, the murder castle, the acid bots, the 200 victims, it's easy to lose these three specific children. Allie, Nellis. Allie, Nellis, Nellie, and Howard. They trusted an adult who their family knew and who seemed to be helping them. He took them away from their mother, who had no idea what was actually happening, and he killed them across three states and three counties, countries, and then buried them where they wouldn't be found. Detective Frank Byers spent three months following Colm's trail, city by city, assumed name by assumed name, one step behind the whole time, and when he finally found Allie and Nelly in the Toronto cellar, he'd been searching for them for weeks. And I want you to know Frank Geyer's name. He's one of the people in the story who did everything right. Holmes was not caught because of the murders. This is part of the story that gets lost in the gothic legend. He was not undone by an investigator who noticed a pattern of missing women. He was not caught because a witness came forward. He was not brought down by a Pinkerton detective following a trail of bones. He was caught because of a horse. In 1894, after he left Chicago, following arson and insurance investigations closing in, Holmes traveled to Texas where he stole forces and attempted to sell them across state lines in Missouri. A veteran crime. He was arrested in Missouri for a force swindle and placed in jail. In jail, he met a career criminal named Marion Hedgepath. And Holmes, in an unusual moment of trust, or perhaps arrogance, told Hedgepath about his scheme to take Pietzel's money for the $10,000 insurance payout. He even asked Hedgepath to recommend a lawyer. Holmes cheated Hedgepath, never paid him the $500 he promised for the lawyer recommendation. So Hedgepath went to the authorities. Insurance investigators were alerted to the fraud by Hedgepath, and Mudgett was arrested in Boston, Massachusetts in 1894. He was tried in Philadelphia for the murder of Pienzel and was sentenced to death by hanging. And that's Encyclopedia Britannica about H.H. Holmes. So Holmes was arrested in Boston on November 17, or 1894, by Boston police and a Pinkerton agent. He'd been using the name H. M. Howell from Denver, Colorado. The Pietzel investigation began unraveling everything else. While Holmes was in custody, Philadelphia police detective Frank Geyer was assigned to find the three missing Pietzel children. All he had was Holmes' trail of assumed names, rented rooms, and railroad tickets across five states and two countries. Geyer spent three months following land trail, city by city, boarding house by boarding house. He interviewed landlords and neighbors and railway workers. He was the entire time one step behind. He found Howard Pietzel's remains in Indianapolis, charred in a cottage that Holmes had printed. He found Alice and Nelly Piazzle in Toronto buried in a cellar, dead, the coroner estimated from asphyxiation. The discovery of the children's spotting made national news and effectively ended any remaining public oblivions about who and what Holmes was. Holmes was tried in Philadelphia for the murder of Benjamin Pienzel in October of 1895, and he represented himself for part of the trial, which was a significant tactical error. He was found guilty and he was sentenced to death by hanging. Following his conviction, the Hearst newspapers paid Holmes that $7,500 for his full confession. He wrote it in prison in his own hand and he ran across multiple front pages. In it he confessed to 27 murders across Chicago, Indianapolis, and Toronto. He also at various points claimed to be possessed by Satan. He wrote that his physical appearance was changing, and that his face was literally becoming the face of the devil. He described himself as having every attribute of a denigre and a moral idiot. He said, I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a bird of no more than a poet can help the inspiration to see. That line, I was born with the devil in me, became the most quoted thing Holmes ever said, and it's been reproduced in virtually every account of his life for 104 years. What's often less quoted is what happened next. On the morning of his execution, standing on the gallows with the noose around his neck, Holmes recanted the entire confession, said he'd only killed two women and denied everything else. A man who had spent his entire adult life selling people whatever version of himself they most needed to believe. Sold his wife the version that he was a good doctor, sold his victims the version that he was a charming employer, sold Hurst Newpaper the version that was the most dramatic murderer of the century. Was the confession true? Was the recantation true? Was either of them anything other than another transaction, another thing being sold to whoever was willing to pay? Holmes lied so consistently and so fluently that I'm not sure the question of what he actually believed is answerable. And I think that's the most disturbing thing about him. Not the bodies, not the acabats, the fact that somewhere along the line, truth and performance became the same thing for him. And that line between what he was doing and what he was saying about what he was doing kind of just dissolved entirely. That's not a gothic villain, but something more ordinary and more refraining. Holmes, I said, was executed May 7, 1896. The murder castle, which had already partially burned in the 1894 fire, was sold. There were plans to turn it into a tourist attraction. It burned again in 1895 before it could open. A suspicious number of fires for one building. Post office employees have reported strange experiences in the basement of the building for decades. Sounds unexplained cold. The feeling of being watched. Several employees have refused to go into the basement alone. The post office doesn't officially acknowledge the history of the site. There's no marker, no memorial, no acknowledgement that the ground beneath the male sorting room is the same ground that Holmes spent five years turning into something no one had a name for yet. Holmes was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Philadelphia, in the cement filled coffin he had requested, ten feet underground, with two feet of concrete poured before the dirt was replaced. For more than a hundred years, rumors circulated that Holmes had faked his own den, that he paid a guard to hang a substitute, that he had escaped to South America. The rumors were persistent enough that in 2017 his descendants requested that the grave be exhumed. The grave was opened. DNA testing confirmed what the records had always in. Herman Webster Munchin was in that grave. He had not escaped. He had not outwitted the law one final time. He was just I find the concrete coffin request the most revealing things Holmes ever did. He understood exactly what he had done to his victims. He knew what the assabouts were for. He'd sold those skeletons to medical schools, and his last act, his final negotiation with this world was to make sure that the same thing could not happen to him. There's a version of that which is simply practical. A man who knew the anatomy trade wanted to protect his remains. That's the churnal reading. The reading I keep coming back to is different. He didn't want to be reduced to material. He wanted to remain whole. He'd spent his entire life reducing other people's to just material, to be bodies that were sold, assets to be lit liquidated, names on insurance policies. And in his last moments, what he feared most was being treated the same way. The title America's first serial killer has followed Holmes for 130 years. It's the first thing most people learn about him. And it's not accurate. There are documented serial killers in America before Holmes. There was the Bloody Benders, a family in Kansas who operated a roadside inn and murdered travelers between 1871 and 1873. They were killing people in the Kansas Prairie 20 years before Holmes opened his hotel in Englewood. They were never caught. They're another Kansas story, and they're one I intend to tell in a future episode on this show. Now, what Holmes was and what the first label's really pointing out was the first documented serial killer in the industrial urban area. The one that used the systems of modernity, insurance fraud, real estate transactions, classified advertisements, urban anonymity as his method. The first who understood that in a city of a million people, no one was keeping track. And that's what makes him significant. Not his body count, not the architecture of the building, the fact that he was a product of the moment, that the same forces that built the white city, the anonymity of the industrial city, the movement of millions of people across the country, and the displacement of young women from family networks into urban labor markets made what he did possible. To keep coming back to that word possible, what Holmes did was made possible by Chicago in 1890. By the same conditions that made the world's fair possible, the city was too bad big to track. The population was too mobile to notice absences. Women were moving into cities in enormous numbers for the first time in American history. And the systems that might have protected them, you know, family proximity, community knowledge, institutional awareness of missing persons, hadn't yet caught up with the scale of the migration. Holmes didn't invent predatation. He didn't invent murder. He just understood it with the cold clarity of someone who'd been studying systems since medical school and how to use the gaps in those systems. And that was new enough that nobody had mapped the vulnerabilities yet. And that's a lesson that doesn't belong in 1893. It belongs in every era. Every time a new system emerged, a new city, a new technology, a new way of connecting people across distance, the gaps appear before the protections do. And somebody is always studying those gaps. Time killers, I know that this one, it was a lot. Um here's what I want from you. I want you to look up the Pienzel children, Allie, Alice, Nellie, and Howard, um, read Frank Geyer's account of Finding them, his book, The Holmes Pienzel Case was published in 1896, and it is public domain. It's the account of a man who spent three months following a monster across North America trying to reach three children before it was too late. He didn't reach them in time, and he wrote about it anyway. That document deserves to be read, I believe. And for my Kansas time killers, I mentioned the bloody benders tonight, a family from Kansas who were doing what Holmes did twenty years before Holmes, on the Eggwood Prairie. If you have any family stories about the Benders, I want to hear them. I promise you and read every single one of them. And for everyone else, what question did this episode leave you with about Holmes, about the system that let him operate, and about what we do then we don't learn from these cases like this. So send me your Just Killing Time files to Just Killing Time Podcast at gmail.com. His name was Herman Mudget. He told people he was Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, and he told people he was a doctor, which he was. He told people he was a hotel keeper, which he was. He told people he was a husband and a businessman and a friend. And he sold twenty-seven murders to a newspaper for $7,500, and he recanted them on the gallows. And he asked to be buried in concrete so his body couldn't be used in the way he'd used the bodies of others. He was caught because of the force swindle. He was convicted of one murder, and he's remembered for a building that newspapers turned into a legend that's larger than the truth and smaller than what actually happened in it. What actually happened in it at least nine people went in and did not come out. Some of their names we know and some of their names we won't. The building was a post office, and the post employees don't go into the basement alone. Next episode we're moving to 1901 to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, where a president was shot. And we're on the same midway and premature babies were being kept alive in glass incubators by a man who wasn't actually a doctor in a building that the medical establishment had refused to build for themselves. So two stories on the same fairground. What about death of power? And what about survival? Powerless. I'm Elizabeth Stanton. This has been Just Killing Time. Thanks for killing time with me.

SPEAKER_01 41:10

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrails. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.