Latest / 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories / True Crime Blueprint - Building a Murder Business: HH Holmes and the Industrialization of Death

Transcript

True Crime Blueprint - Building a Murder Business: HH Holmes and the Industrialization of Death · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hi, it's Joe, and what you are about to hear
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: is a sample of an episode from a new podcast
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: I created called True Crime Blueprint. Now, if you like
• 0:09
  Speaker 1: it it vibes with what you're looking for in a
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: true crime podcast, go over and subscribe to the new one.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: You can find links if you need them in the
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: episode notes of this episode. I'll be releasing weekly episodes there,
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: full deep dives, no ten minute restriction. So again, if
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: you like this new podcast and you want to hear
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: the full episode, it's very important that you search for
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: or go to the episode notes of this episode to
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: find the links for True Crime Blueprint. There's this assumption
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: that serial killers are driven by compulsion, by sexual sadism,
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: or rage, or psychotic delusions, that they're fundamentally broken in
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: a way that makes them kill. But what if I
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: told you about someone who started out as a straightforward
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: con artist running insurance scams and frauds and sort of
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: drifted into murder because it was more efficient than the
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: cons that's H. H. Holmes. He had a business problem
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: and murder became his solution. This is True Crime Blueprint.
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: Before we get into who Herman Webster Mudget became We
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: need to understand what he was trying to do. This
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: was eighteen eighties America and the country was building systems
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: faster than it could secure them. Life insurance is becoming standardized,
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: but companies in different states don't talk to each other.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Railroads mean you can be in three different cities in
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: a week using three different names. The postal service is expanding,
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: but there's no way to verify who's actually sending these letters.
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: Herman Mudget looked at all of this and saw an opportunity,
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: opportunity to make money. When he enrolled at the University
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: of Michigan Medical School in eighteen eighty two, he was
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: already running minor cons He'd take out small loans using
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: fake names, buy things on credit, and skip town standard
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: grifter stuff. But medical school introduced him to something new,
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: the cadaver trade. Medical schools needed fresh bodies for dissection.
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Legal sources were limited, so there was this whole underground
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: market for corpses. Mudget got involved, and somewhere in that
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: process he had a realization a dead body was a commodity.
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: It had value, and more importantly, it could represent anyone
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: you claimed it was. His first insurance fraud was almost
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: elegant in its simplicity. He'd take out a life insurance
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: policy on a person who did not even exist, and
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: then acquire a cadaver, disfigure it enough to make identification difficult,
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: and then report that death. The insurance companies would pay out,
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: and then he'd disappear with the money. This is a four.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: There's no fingerprint database, no forensic dental records, and no
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: system for verifying claims across state lines. He was making
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: money and nobody was getting hurt, at least not yet.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: Between eighteen eighty seven and eighteen ninety two, Holmes constructed
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: his three story building at sixty third in Wallace in Inglewood,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: And I need to be really clear about what this
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: building actually was, because the newspapers of the era, and
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: honestly most retelling sense have turned this into a gothic
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: nightmare castle with hundreds of rooms and torture chambers. What
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: Homes built was a processing facility. The first floor had
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: legitimate retail space, the pharmacy, some shops. That's where the
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: money came in. The second floor had apartments where he
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: could house employees and women he was courting. That's where
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: he maintained control over people, and the third floor was
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: supposed to be a hotel, but it was never actually completed.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: That was the future expansion of the operation. The hidden
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: features tell you what this building was really for. Holmes
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: constantly changed contractors during construction. He'd hire someone to build
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: one section, then fire them and hire someone else. He'd
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: claim there were mistakes, demand changes, refused to pay. The
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: points was that no single person ever understood the full
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: layout of this place. The second floor had rooms that
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: could be locked from the outside and sound proofed. There
• 4:30
  Speaker 1: were gas jets homes could control from his bedroom to
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: asphyxiate people quietly in their rooms. There were huts that
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: led from the second floor directly to the basement, so
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: you could move a body without being seen by other tenants.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: And the basement was where the disposal happened. There was
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: a dissection table, a furnace large enough to cremate human beings,
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: vats of acid and quicklimeb for dissolving flesh. Some accounts
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: suggest that Holmes had surgical equipment down there, though exact
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: image was never fully documented. Here's the thing Holmes had
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: learned in medical school that articulated skeletons had value. Medical
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: schools would pay for them, so he was processing bodies
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: for multiple purposes. The acid would strip the flesh, he'd
• 5:15
  Speaker 1: articulate the bones, bleach them. Whatever he actually sold to
• 5:19
  Speaker 1: the medical schools was debated by historians, but the equipment
• 5:22
  Speaker 1: to do so was definitely there. This was infrastructure. The
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: sound proofing meant that he could work without interruption. The
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: gas jets meant that he could kill without physical struggle.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: The disposal system meant that he could eliminate evidence efficiently.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: Target identification happened in the pharmacy. Isolation happened on the
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: second floor the apartments, execution happened in the soundproof rooms,
• 5:46
  Speaker 1: Processing and disposal happened in the basement, and through it
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: all he was generating revenue at every single stage. By
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: eighteen ninety four, Holmes had been operating this way for
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: nearly a decade, and then he reconnected with Binge and Pitzel,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: a carpenter and con artist he had worked with before.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: Pitzel was very good at forgery, good at playing roles
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: in insurance scams, but he was also drinking heavily and
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: became completely unreliable. Holmes decided they'd do one more job together,
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: a big one. The plan was to defraud the Fidelity
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: Mutual Life Association for ten thousand dollars, which would be
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: over three hundred thousand today. They'd fake Pitzel's death, use
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: a cadaver to stand in for his body, disfigure it
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: to match Pitzel's description, and his wife Carrie would collect
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: the insurance. Then Pitzel would disappear to start a new
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: life somewhere else, and they'd split the money. Except Holmes
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: changed the plan because why go through the trouble of
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: finding a suitable cadaver when you could just kill Pitzel himself.
• 6:48
  Speaker 1: It was cleaner, fewer loose ends. On September two, eighteen
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: ninety four, in Philadelphia, Holmes killed Pitzel using chloroform and
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: burned his body with benzene to make it look like
• 6:59
  Speaker 1: an accidental lab explosion. And here's where the con artist
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: fully becomes the monster. After killing Pitzel, Holmes went to
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: his widow, Carrie and told her that her husband was
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: still alive, but in hiding. He said they needed to
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: keep moving to avoid insurance investigators. Holmes took custody of
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: three of Pitzel's children, Alice, Nellie, and Howard claiming that
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: he was taking him to meet their father in London.
• 7:25
  Speaker 1: For months, he moved Carrie and her two remaining children
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: through the northern United States and Canada, staying in different cities,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: always a few days behind the group with the other
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: three children. The kids kept writing letters to their mother
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: asking when they'd see her. Holmes would intercept these letters
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: and write fake replies. He kept everyone separated and confused
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: while he figured out what to do with them. He
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: killed all three children. They were starting to ask questions
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: about where their father was, and if anyone started investigating,
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: they might be able to identify Pitzel's body. They were
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: loose ends in the fraud scheme, and Holmes eliminated those
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: loose ends. Alice and Nelly were asphyxiated and buried in
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: a basement in Toronto. Howard was killed and his body
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: partially burned in a chimney in Indianapolis. Those were the
• 8:11
  Speaker 1: costs of doing business with H. H. Holmes. Holmes finally
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: got caught because of a completely different crime. He was
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: arrested in Saint Louis for a horse theft scheme, and
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: one of his accomplices, Marian Hedgepeth, decided to rat him out.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Hedgepeth told the police about holmes insurance fraud plans, which
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: led investigators to look into the Pizel death more closely.
• 8:34
  Speaker 1: They realized the burned body in Philadelphia really was Benjamin Pitzel,
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: and once they figured that out, they started wondering where
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: Carrie's three missing children were. The Philadelphia Police Department assigned
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: Detective Frank Geyer to find them. Geyer's investigation is fascinating
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: because he approached it like you'd approach a financial audit.
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: He started with Holmes's paper trail, every train ticket, every
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: rental agreement, every hotel registry. Holmes had been careful about
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: using aliases to cover his tracks, but he'd also been
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: keeping receipts because he was fundamentally a businessman. He tracked expenses,
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: he documented transactions. Geire followed that paper trail across six states,
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: visiting every city where Holmes had stayed. He used newspapers
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: to spread information about the missing children, essentially crowdsourcing the
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: investigation before that was even a concept, and slowly, methodically
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: he reconstructed Holmes's movements. In Toronto, a landlord recognized the
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: description and remembered renting to a man with two little girls.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: Geier searched the property at sixteen Saint Vincent's Streets and
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: found Alice and Nelly's bodies in a shallow grave in
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: the cellar. In Indianapolis, neighbors remembered a boy who stayed
• 9:46
  Speaker 1: briefly at a cottage Holmes had rented. Geyer found bone
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: fragments and teeth in the chimney. The discovery of those
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: children's bodies was what broke the case open, because Holmes
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: could explain away a lot of things he blame. Pitzel's
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: death was accidental. He could say the insurance claim was
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: a misunderstanding. But you can't explain away three dead children
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: burned in your rental properties. Holmes is trial in October eighth. Okay,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: that's just a sample of what you can hear over
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: at True Crime Blueprint. If you liked what you heard,
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: you can look in the episode notes right now of
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: this episode, or just search for True Crime Blueprint and
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: it'll be right there. And thanks for giving it a try.