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The Horrific True Story of H.H. Holmes’ “Murder Castle” on 63rd Street · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: Imagine you are stepping off a train into the absolute
0:03
just sensory overload of Chicago in the summer of eighteen
0:08
ninety three.
0:08
Speaker 2: Oh, it must have been completely overwhelming, right.
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Speaker 1: You're engulfed in this thick, colt choked air. There's the
0:15
deafening roar of the elevated trains and just the sheer
0:19
crush of humanity. I mean, you are surrounded by twenty
0:22
seven million people who have traveled from across the globe
0:25
to see the World's Columbian Exposition.
0:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you have to remember, for a lot of
0:29
these people, it's their first time in a city like that.
0:31
Speaker 3: Exactly.
0:32
Speaker 1: You are likely young, You are probably traveling alone for
0:35
the very first time in your life, and you're seeking
0:37
a piece of this gleaming modern independence. But you know
0:42
you need a place.
0:43
Speaker 2: To stay, which is the immediate vulnerability.
0:45
Speaker 1: Yes, And standing right there offering you a room in
0:48
this massive, newly built hotel in the Inglewood neighborhood is
0:52
a well dressed, incredibly charming man and he introduces himself
0:56
as a doctor.
0:56
Speaker 2: So immediately you trust him, right.
0:59
Speaker 1: You trust him hand tomearbacks. You walk through the doors
1:02
of his hotel and you are stepping into a machine
1:05
that was secretly designed to legally, financially and physically erase
1:09
you from existence.
1:11
Speaker 2: It is honestly one of the most chilling scenarios in
1:14
American history. And it's precisely because it didn't look like
1:17
a nightmare on the surface. It looked like progress. It
1:21
looked like a booming commercial enterprise in a city that
1:24
was basically inventing the future.
1:26
Speaker 1: So today we are taking this massive stack of historical
1:30
sources you brought to us, and I have to say,
1:32
as someone who clearly loves to learn and gather multiple perspectives,
1:36
you really handed us an absolute gold mine.
1:39
Speaker 3: For this deep dive.
1:39
Speaker 2: It's a fantastic collection of materials, it really is.
1:42
Speaker 1: So we are going on a mission today. We're going
1:44
to explore the labyrinthine legend of HH Holmes and his
1:48
infamous murder Castle. But and this is the crucial part,
1:52
We're going to actively separate the sensationalized tabloid ghost stories
1:56
from the actual documented reality.
1:59
Speaker 2: Which is so neat with this specific topic.
2:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, because when you strip away the cartoonish myths,
2:05
what you're left with is a story about how predators
2:08
use the cover of modern society to operate in.
2:11
Speaker 2: Plain sight, and that separation of fact from folklore. That's
2:14
the most vital part of understanding this history, because the
2:17
reality is profoundly more unsettling than any dime novel.
2:21
Speaker 3: Oh for sure.
2:22
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is that Holmes wasn't just some isolated
2:25
monster born in a vacuum, you know. He wasn't this
2:28
creature of the night lurking in an alleyway.
2:30
Speaker 3: Right, he's wearing a suit exactly.
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Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: He was, in many ways the prototype of the modern
2:35
cereal predator, someone who specifically exploited the vulnerabilities of the
2:39
Gilded Age. I mean, he saw the rapid industrialization of America,
2:43
the newfound anonymity of the booming cities, the lack of centralized.
2:47
Speaker 1: Record keeping, and the rise of life insurance too, Yes, the.
2:50
Speaker 2: Rise of the life insurance industry, and he just weaponized
2:53
all of it. He is basically a dark, distorted reflection
2:57
of the era's own unchecked capitalist ambition.
3:00
Speaker 1: So, okay, let's unpack this. How does someone develop that
3:03
level of systemic, cold blooded calculation. Because a predator who
3:07
looks at the chaotic, booming metropolis of Chicago and sees
3:11
a massive financial opportunity in human lives. They don't just
3:14
spring out of the ground fully.
3:16
Speaker 2: Formed, No, they definitely don't.
3:17
Speaker 1: To understand the architect of this so called castle, we
3:21
really have to look at the blueprints of the man himself.
3:24
Where does a person learn to view human beings strictly
3:27
as commodities?
3:28
Speaker 2: For that, we actually have to travel back to an
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environment that is the complete opposite of industrial Chicago. He
3:34
was born Herman Webster.
3:35
Speaker 1: Mudget, not HH Holmes right, that came much later.
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Speaker 2: The historical records usually cite his birth date as May sixteenth,
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eighteen sixty one, though some census documents suggests eighteen sixty.
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But he was born in Gilminton.
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Speaker 3: New Hampshire, h Okay, so a small town.
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Speaker 2: Very small, and his origins heavily contradict that stereotypical profile
3:53
of a martialized, abused outcast that we so often associate
3:57
with violent criminals. Gilton was a quiet time farming.
4:00
Speaker 1: Community, so if he wasn't exactly living in squalor not
4:03
at all, his family was relatively prosperous and well respected.
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Speaker 2: His father was a strict Methodist, a farmer, and even
4:10
a local official, and by all accounts young Hermann was
4:14
highly intelligent.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, the sources say he was an avid reader, showed
4:18
a lot of bright intellectual promise.
4:20
Speaker 2: Exactly. He was completely immersed in this idyllic pastoral setting.
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Speaker 1: But you know, the sources also point to some incredibly
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dark shadows early on. There are these disturbing accounts of
4:31
him torturing animals in the woods, and there are even
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rumors that he was involved in the death an older
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childhood playmate who supposedly suffered a fatal fall while they
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were playing in an abandoned building.
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Speaker 2: And this is where we run into a major historiographical problem.
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We have to view these sources through a highly critical lens.
4:51
Oh so well, yes, cruelty to animals aligns with what
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modern behavioral science understands about the psychological development of violent predators.
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Donald Triad, for instance, points to animal cruelty as a
5:03
major red flag.
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Speaker 3: Right, that's pretty well documented.
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Speaker 2: It is, however, that specific rumor about the childhood playmate
5:10
that is a classic example of retroactive villain building.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. I actually have to challenge the historical record on
5:16
that one too, because it feels a bit too convenient.
5:20
I mean, think about it, if he really killed a
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kid in a prosperous, tight knit New Hampshire town where
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everybody knows everybody's business. How did he just casually pack
5:29
his bags a few years later and go off to
5:32
a prestigious medical school.
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Speaker 2: Exactly?
5:34
Speaker 1: People talk, Right, If you have a kid in town
5:37
who everyone suspects pushed his friend to his death, he
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doesn't just get a glowing letter of recommendation. It sounds
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to me like society retroactively projected this pure innate evil
5:47
onto his childhood, only after he was caught and exposed
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as H. H.
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Speaker 3: Holmes.
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Speaker 2: That's got on.
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Speaker 1: Did the people of Gilmanton actually remember him as a
5:55
murderous child or did they just need to invent that
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memory to make sense of the monster he became.
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Speaker 2: You're hitting on the exact friction point of late nineteenth
6:02
century journalism. When society is confronted with access horrific as
6:07
the ones Homes eventually committed, there's a desperate psychological need
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for a linear narrative.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, they want a simple explanation, right.
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Speaker 2: People want to believe the monster was always visibly a monster,
6:19
complete with horns, because it is deeply terrifying to accept
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that a charming, seemingly normal well educated boy from a
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good family could harbor such profound darkness without anyone noticing.
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Speaker 1: So they fill in the blanks with what makes them
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feel safe, because if he was always a monster, then
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they aren't to blame for missing the signs.
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Speaker 2: Precisely so, when reporters flooded his hometown decades later looking
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for the origin story of a killer, people were more
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than willing to supply dark rumors that fit the narrative.
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Speaker 3: That makes total sense.
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Speaker 2: But if we want to look at what is absolutely
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documented and what actually served as the training ground for
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his future crimes, we really have to look at his
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time at the university medical school.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so he goes to med school, Yes, and this.
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Speaker 2: Is where the theoretical darkness becomes a highly practical functional methodology.
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Speaker 1: Because he graduates in eighteen eighty four. But from what
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you're showing me in these sources, his time in medical
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school wasn't about learning how to cure illnesses. It was
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basically a masterclass in macab opportunism.
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Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely, he was.
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Speaker 1: Actively engaging in grave robbing, but he wasn't doing it
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just for anatomy practice, which was somewhat common at the time.
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He was stealing corpses to defraud insurance companies.
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Speaker 3: Yes, I mean, can you walk me.
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Speaker 1: Through exactly how a college student pulls that off? Because
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the logistics of that seem insane.
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Speaker 2: The mechanics of it are incredibly revealing about both his
7:42
audacity and the systemic flaws of the era. You have
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to understand that in the eighteen eighties the life insurance
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industry was booming, but it was incredibly immature in terms
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of fraud prevention.
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Speaker 1: Like no background checks or anything very few.
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Speaker 2: It relied heavily on trust paper certificates and the word
8:00
of local doctors. Mudget realized this immediately. As a medical student,
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he had access to the anatomy labs, which meant he
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had access to cadavers right. Sometimes he would steal bodies
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directly from the university, and other times he would employ
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resurrection men basically grave robbers, to source fresh bodies from
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local cemeteries.
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Speaker 1: Which is a whole terrifying industry in itself.
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Speaker 2: Oh, it was a massive black market. Medical schools were
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desperate for bodies, but Mudget took it a step further
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than just selling them to schools. He would take out
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a life insurance policy on a fictitious person or maybe
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a co conspirator. OK, he would pay the premiums for
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a few months. Then he would take a stolen cadaver,
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strategically disfigure it to obscure the identity, and stage a
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fatal accident.
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Speaker 3: Wow, like what kind of accident?
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Speaker 2: A carriage crash, a fire in a barn, something catastrophic
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that ruins the face. Then, acting as the medical authority
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because he's a med student, he would identify the body
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as the insured person, file the paperwork, and collect the
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massive payout.
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Speaker 1: I want you to really picture this because it fundamentally
9:00
reframes how we should view him. He goes to college
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supposedly to study medicine, but he treats it like a dark,
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twisted startup.
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Speaker 2: That is a perfect way to describe it.
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Speaker 1: He looks at the medical field, he looks at the
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insurance field, and he pivots. He realizes the real monetization
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strategy isn't in treating living patients. It's in monetizing dead
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bodies through administrative loopholes. He is essentially doing the nineteenth
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century equivalent of hacking the system. He figures out how
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to convert human remains into a financial instrument.
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Speaker 2: And the fact that he got away with it is
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the critical turning point in his psychological development. His medical
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training didn't teach him empathy. It taught him clinical detachment.
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Speaker 1: Right, there's objects to him exactly.
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Speaker 2: It taught him the precise mechanical value of a human body.
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It established his lifelong modus operandi, use people as assets,
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extract their maximum financial value through complex fraud, and then
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casually discard the physical evidence.
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Speaker 1: But clearly, running insurance scams with stolen bodies in a
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college town has a shelf life. I mean he's eventually
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going to run out of cemeteries or the insurance companies
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are going to start noticing a statistical anomaly of highly
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insured people dying in mysterious carriage accidents near the university, which.
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Speaker 2: Is exactly why he had to move. A small town
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or a university campus was never going to be a
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large enough theater for Mudget's ambitions.
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Speaker 3: He needed a bigger pond.
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Speaker 2: He needed chaos. He needed a place with high turnover,
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where people arrived and vanished every single day without raising suspicion.
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He needed a booming metropolis.
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Speaker 1: Which brings us to the next massive shift in the sources.
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The Chicago Frontier by the mid eighteen eighties, his personal
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life is a complete wreck.
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Speaker 2: Well, Chronlin's a disaster.
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Speaker 1: He has married a woman named Clara Lovering. They have
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a young child, and he just coldly abandons them, just leaves,
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just walks away, and he spends a few years drifting
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around different states, running small time scams and constantly facing
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breach and promise lawsuits from women he has courted and
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financially defrauded. He is leaving this messy, litigious trail behind him.
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Speaker 2: He's burning bridges everywhere he goes.
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Speaker 1: Right, So, in eighteen eighty six he arrives in Chicago,
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and this is where Herman Webster Mudget functionally ceases to exist.
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Speaker 3: He adopts a brand new alias, doctor H. H.
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Speaker 2: Holmes, and the creation of that alias is a master
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stroke of psychological manipulation. The sources note that he likely
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took the name Holmes from Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective
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Sherlock Holmes, who is just beginning to gain massive international
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popularity at that time. Oh, that's interesting, But the real
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genius is putting the title doctor in front of it.
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Speaker 3: Why is that so crucial for him?
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Speaker 2: Because in a transient city filled with strangers. By introducing
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himself as doctor H. H. Holmes, he instantly granted himself
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unearned respectability.
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Speaker 3: It's an instant trust hack.
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Speaker 2: Exactly, if you are sick, or if you are vulnerable
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in a new city, a doctor is the person you
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are socially conditioned to trust without ues. Jin he weaponized
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a professional title to bypass the natural skepticism of the
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people he met.
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Speaker 1: Think about this in the context of our modern world.
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If you want to commit identity fraud today, you have
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to bypass biometric security, two factor authentication, global databases. You
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leave a massive digital footprint everywhere you go.
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Speaker 2: It's almost impossible to truly disappear.
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Speaker 1: Now, right, But in eighteen eighty six, moving three states
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away and buying a nice suit was basically the equivalent
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of hacking someone's entire life. You could completely erase your past,
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your abandoned wife, your lawsuits, your history of grave robbing,
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just by stepping off a train and saying hello, I
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am doctor Holmes.
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Speaker 2: It's terrifying how easy it was to hit the reset
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button on reality back then.
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Speaker 3: It really is, and it was.
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Speaker 2: The ultimate vulnerability of the Gilded Age. There were no
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national databases, no photo identification. No way for a local
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bank or a landlord to verify your background. If you
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look the part, spoke with educated confidence, and paid your
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first month's rent, they're exactly who you claimed to be.
13:01
Speaker 1: And he definitely looked the part.
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Speaker 2: Oh, Holmes wielded charm better than almost anyone. Yeah, he
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was highly articulate, meticulously dressed, and physically magnetic. He completely
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subverted the public's expectation of what a criminal look like.
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Speaker 1: Right, because people expect a criminal to look like a
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thug exactly.
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Speaker 2: He wasn't a brooding back alley brute. He was the
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charismatic professional offering you a steady hand.
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Speaker 1: And he puts that charm to work immediately. He gets
13:28
a job as a pharmacist in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago,
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right at the bustling corner of sixty third in Wallace.
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The drug store is owned by a woman named Elizabeth Hulton.
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The neighborhood trusts her. She has a thriving.
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Speaker 2: Business, a very solid establishment.
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Speaker 1: Now, the sources note that shortly after Holmes arrives, Elizabeth
13:46
Holton conveniently vanishes and Holmes just takes over the pharmacy.
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Speaker 2: I mean, come on, it's incredibly suspicious.
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Speaker 1: He just shows up, she disappears, He suddenly owns her
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entire livelihood, and nobody in eighteen eighty Chicago asks for
14:00
a paper trail. How does he explain this away to
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the neighbors who bought their medicine from her every day.
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Speaker 2: It's a brilliant example of how he used plausible deniability.
14:10
There were absolutely rumors and suspicions in the neighborhood. People whispered,
14:14
I would hope so, But Holmes was a master of
14:16
the mundane explanation. When customers asked where missus Holton was,
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he calmly explained that she had grown tired of the city,
14:24
that she had decided to move to California to be
14:26
with relatives, and that she had quietly sold the business
14:29
to him before she left.
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Speaker 1: And people just bought that just oh, okay, she went
14:32
to California.
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Speaker 2: They bought it because they wanted to, and because he
14:35
made it easy for them to accept. He likely forged
14:38
a bill of sale just in case authorities ever asked,
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which they rarely did unless a family member pressed the issue.
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But more importantly, he was standing right there behind the counter,
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looking handsome, smiling and flawlessly mixing their tonics and dispensing
14:52
their medicines. He provided a valuable service to the community.
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Speaker 3: Right they needed their prescriptions exactly.
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Speaker 2: The neighborhood essentially just that a polite, reliable new doctor
15:02
was worth ignoring a few unsettling questions about the previous owner.
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Speaker 1: The cognitive dissonance there is just wild. You have this
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pillar of the community, this handsome guy you trust to
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mix medicine for your sick child, who secretly harbors this
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utterly remorseless, predatory nature.
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Speaker 2: It's chilling.
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Speaker 1: You're buying cough syrup from a man who views you
15:24
as nothing more than a walking bag of assets. But
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securing the pharmacy wasn't his endgame, was it.
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Speaker 2: It was just an anchor, just a stepping stone, because.
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Speaker 1: Once he had that corner established, the sources say he
15:35
literally looked across the street, saw an empty lot and
15:38
visualized a much much larger canvas for his operation.
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Speaker 2: Which brings us to the focal point of the entire legend.
15:46
The construction of the building that would become known to
15:48
the world as the Murder Castle.
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Speaker 3: Here we go.
15:51
Speaker 2: Construction spanned roughly three years, from eighteen eighty nine to
15:55
eighteen ninety two. It was built on a massive one
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hundred and fifty by fifty foot lot right across from
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his pharmacy. It was an ungainly sprawling three story.
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Speaker 1: Structure right And this is where we need to aggressively
16:08
separate the tabloid myth from the architectural reality, because the
16:12
story of this building has become completely unmoored from the
16:15
facts over the last.
16:16
Speaker 2: Century, completely distorted.
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Speaker 1: Let's look at the actual blueprints. The ground floor was
16:21
designed as a legitimate retail space. He moved his drug
16:24
store over there. He leased out space for a candy shop,
16:27
a jewelry store, a restaurant. From the street level, it
16:30
looked like a bustling modern commercial hub, very normal, and
16:33
the upper floors were designed as apartments and lodging rooms.
16:36
But the legend, I mean the legend, paints this building
16:39
as a purpose built mechanized torture maze right out of
16:43
a horror movie.
16:44
Speaker 2: The tabloid myth, which was largely constructed by the Yellow
16:47
Press after his arrest, is extraordinary in its sensationalism. The
16:51
newspapers described a building rigged with cartoonish supervillain traps like
16:55
what they wrote about trapdoors in every single bedroom. They
16:59
described soundproof chambers lined with iron and asbestos. They claimed
17:03
he had gas lines piped directly into the guest rooms,
17:06
controlled by a master valve in his office, so he
17:09
could asphyxiate sleeping tourists with the flick of a wrist.
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Speaker 3: It sounds like a movie script.
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Speaker 2: It really does. They described secret passages, blind hallways, and
17:18
greased shoots that led directly from the bedrooms down to
17:20
a basement equipped with massive vats of acid, a custom
17:24
dissecting table, and a human crematorium.
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Speaker 3: Good grief.
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Speaker 2: The overarching narrative was that he was an evil architectural
17:31
genius who designed a machine exclusively to devour human beings.
17:36
Speaker 1: But when you actually read the historical sources, the real investigations,
17:40
they actively dismantle that tabloid exaggeration. They do the reality
17:44
of the castle's strange, confusing architecture wasn't because he was
17:48
an evil genius designing a labyrinth to trap people. The
17:51
irregular design, you know, the hallways that turned weird angles,
17:55
the stairs that led nowhere, the doors that opened into
17:58
solid brick walls, All of that was caused by a
18:01
much more mundane but incredibly revealing reason. He was constantly
18:06
hiring and firing contractors to avoid paying them.
18:09
Speaker 2: And this is a vital economic reality to understand. Holmes
18:13
was first and foremost a serial swindler. Building a massive,
18:17
three story commercial structure is incredibly expensive.
18:20
Speaker 1: And he didn't want to pay a dime.
18:22
Speaker 2: Holmes had no intention of paying for it. His method
18:25
was to hire a construction crew, have them build a
18:28
section of the framing or lay down a floor, and
18:31
then right before their payment was due, he would aggressively
18:34
fire them.
18:34
Speaker 1: Wow.
18:35
Speaker 2: He would claim their work was shoddy, threaten them with
18:38
lawsuits if they demanded their wages, and just chase them
18:41
off the site.
18:41
Speaker 1: It's basically the Winchester Mystery House, but instead of trying
18:45
to confuse the ghosts of gunshot victims, he's just trying
18:48
to confuse unpaid drywallers and plumbers.
18:50
Speaker 2: That is a perfect analogy. He kept changing the blueprints
18:54
on the fly, and he ensured that no single worker
18:57
and no single foreman ever saw the complete plans, so they.
19:00
Speaker 1: Didn't even know what they were building exactly.
19:03
Speaker 2: A carpenter might be hired to build a staircase and
19:05
then fire the next day. A new crew comes in,
19:08
doesn't know where the staircase was supposed to lead, and
19:10
just boards it up to build a wall. The chaotic
19:13
layout was a direct byproduct of a massive, rolling financial fraud.
19:18
He was stiffing the mechanics, the brick layers, the suppliers.
19:21
Speaker 1: But wait, I have to push back here, because I
19:23
don't want us to swing the pendulum so far the
19:25
other way that we accidentally sanitize what happened in that building.
19:28
Of course, yes, the tabloids invented the master gas valves
19:33
and the greased death shoots to sell papers, but the
19:36
police did find incredibly strange features when them finally.
19:39
Speaker 3: Searched the place.
19:40
Speaker 1: Right they did, he still repurposed this badly built, confusing
19:44
hotel into an actual slaughterhouse. He had a furnace in
19:48
the basement. He didn't build a kiln down there to
19:50
bake pottery.
19:51
Speaker 2: You are absolutely right to make that distinction. We are
19:54
not saying the building wasn't a sight of horror. We
19:57
are clarifying how it became one. He didn't sit out
19:59
to build a murder machine. He set out to build
20:02
a free building through fraud. But once he had this massive,
20:06
completely chaotic, unsupervised space, he adapted his environment to suit
20:10
his predatory needs.
20:12
Speaker 3: So the weird layout actually.
20:13
Speaker 2: Helped him tremendously. The confusing layout, with his dead ends
20:18
and isolated rooms, proved incredibly useful for separating victims from
20:22
the rest of the tenants. If a woman screamed in
20:24
a room at the end of a walled off hallway,
20:27
the legitimate renters on the other side of the building
20:29
wouldn't hear it.
20:30
Speaker 3: God, that is terrifying.
20:31
Speaker 2: And yes, he absolutely installed a massive furnace in the basement,
20:34
ostensibly for heating, which he heavily utilized for the disposal
20:38
of human remains.
20:39
Speaker 1: So why does society, well over a century later still
20:43
prefer the myth of the evil architectural genius over the
20:46
reality of a greedy, opportunistic swindler who just improvised the
20:50
slaughterhouse out of a shoddy construction project.
20:53
Speaker 2: Because the concept of an evil genius is terrifying, but
20:56
it is ultimately entertaining.
20:57
Speaker 3: It's a better story, exactly.
20:59
Speaker 2: It's a thrilling narrative structure. It elevates the killer to
21:03
a mythological status. A guy who ruthlessly murders women for
21:06
their bank accounts and stiffs his plumbers is banal, ugly,
21:11
and depressingly common.
21:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, nobody wants to read about a cheap swindler.
21:15
Speaker 2: The yellow journalism of the late nineteenth century was fiercely competitive.
21:19
There were dozens of papers in Chicago alone fighting for
21:21
daily readership. They needed the Castle to be a gothic
21:25
nightmare factory to sell copies. If the headline reads local
21:29
fraudster builds poorly designed hotel to avoid paying construction costs,
21:33
nobody buys the paper, But the Castle of the modern
21:36
Bluebeard that sells out every newstand.
21:38
Speaker 1: It's sensationalism overwriting reality. And it works so well that
21:42
we are still trying to untangle it today. And what
21:45
makes this entire setup so devastating is the timing. Yeah,
21:48
because he finishes this giant, confusing, deadly building right at
21:52
the exact moment that the greatest influx of potential victims
21:55
in the history of Chicago is about to arrive at
21:57
his doorstep.
21:58
Speaker 2: Yes, the eighteen ninety three War World's Columbian Exposition, the
22:01
World's Fair. This is a watershed moment in American history.
22:05
The Fair completely transformed Chicago. It was designed to showcase
22:10
American exceptionalism to the globe. It brought an estimated twenty
22:13
seven million visitors to the city over a six month period.
22:17
Speaker 3: That number is just staggering.
22:19
Speaker 2: To put the sheer scale of that into perspective, twenty
22:22
seven million people was roughly half the entire population of
22:25
the United States at the time. Wow. The city was overflowing,
22:28
and Holmes, ever the opportunist, heavily marketed his bizarre, massive
22:33
building as convenient, affordable lodging for tourists visiting the fair.
22:37
Speaker 1: But here's where the story gets deeply, deeply tragic, and
22:40
where we have to look closely at who he was
22:42
actually targeting. Because he wasn't just pulling random tourists off
22:45
the street. The sources make it very clear he was
22:48
primarily targeting young, vulnerable women.
22:51
Speaker 2: Yes, that was his primary demographic.
22:53
Speaker 1: And to understand how he got away with this, we
22:55
have to look at the socioeconomic context of what it
22:58
meant to be a woman in eighteen nine.
23:00
Speaker 2: This period marks a massive societal shift. For the first
23:04
time in American history, you had large numbers of young
23:06
women experiencing genuine systemic independence.
23:09
Speaker 3: Which was unprecedented.
23:11
Speaker 2: They were leaving their rural hometowns, their farms, and the
23:14
strict patriarchal oversight of their small communities. They were traveling
23:18
alone by train to a major metropolitan center. They were
23:23
seeking employment as stenographers, clerks, or typists.
23:26
Speaker 3: They were looking for a life of their own exactly.
23:28
Speaker 2: They were seeking adventure, and they were seeking the cultural
23:31
spectacle of the fair.
23:33
Speaker 1: So they're stepping out of a world where everybody knows
23:35
their father, everybody knows their pastor, and their entire life
23:39
is socially monitored, and they are stepping into the utter
23:43
crushing anonymity of a massive industrial metropolis. Yes, and Holmes
23:48
is standing right there waiting for them. He represents everything
23:51
they are supposed to trust. He is wealthy, he owns
23:55
a massive business. He is articulate, and he is a doctor.
23:58
He is the ultimate predatory seducer.
24:00
Speaker 2: And his methodology with these women was chillingly consistent and
24:05
heavily psychological. He didn't just grab them in the dark.
24:07
He courted them, He reeled them in, He hired them
24:10
to work in his pharmacy or his offices. He dazzled
24:13
them with his apparent wealth. He would often propose marriage,
24:17
getting engaged to them to secure their ultimate trust.
24:20
Speaker 3: Oh that's so manipulative.
24:21
Speaker 2: And then Once that emotional bond was formed, the financial
24:25
extraction began. He would convince them to transfer their savings
24:28
to him for investments, or he would persuade them to
24:32
take out substantial life insurance policies naming him as the
24:35
primary beneficiary.
24:37
Speaker 3: And once the.
24:38
Speaker 1: Ink was dry on those documents and the assets were
24:40
legally transferred to his control, he would eliminate them.
24:44
Speaker 3: It is so cold.
24:45
Speaker 1: Can we look at some of the documented victims from
24:48
this period, because they perfectly illustrate this tragic, calculated pattern.
24:52
Speaker 2: Emily in Segrand is a heartbreaking example. She was a young,
24:56
intelligent woman who came from Indiana to work as a
24:58
stenographer for him. She was actually engaged to be married
25:01
to someone else, but she came to Chicago for independence
25:03
and a good salary. Right she worked in his building,
25:06
she lived in his building, and then she simply vanished,
25:09
just gone. Or consider Minnie and Anna Williams. Minnie was
25:12
a woman of independent memes who owned valuable property in Texas.
25:16
Holmes discovered this aggressively pursued her, romantically manipulated her into
25:22
transferring the deeds of the Texas property to a fake
25:24
company he controlled, unbelivable and then he invited her sister
25:28
Anna to Chicago to celebrate. Both sisters vanished within weeks
25:32
of each other. Their remains were later definitively linked to him.
25:36
Speaker 1: And then there is the incredibly grim, highly documented story
25:40
of Julius Smythe and her young daughter Pearl.
25:42
Speaker 3: This one is just sickening.
25:44
Speaker 2: It's arguably the worst one.
25:45
Speaker 1: Julia was married and she came to work at his pharmacy.
25:48
Holmes essentially initiates an affair with her. Her husband, perhaps
25:52
sensing the danger or just defeated by the affair, mysteriously
25:55
abandons her and vanishes from Chicago. Holmes immediately steps in,
26:00
promising to marry Julia, and then suddenly Julia and little
26:03
Pearl disappear. Holmes coldly tells the neighborhood that Julia tragically
26:07
died during an illegal abortion procedure, which he likely performed
26:10
to ensure her death, and that little Pearl subsequently died
26:13
of a sudden illness.
26:14
Speaker 2: Which raises the massive logistical question, how did he explain
26:18
all of these sudden disappearances. You have fiancees, stenographers, mistresses,
26:23
and entire families just vanishing into thin air around this man.
26:27
Speaker 1: That's exactly what I want to know if my sister
26:29
moves to Chicago and stops writing letters, I am getting
26:32
on a train and finding her boss. How does he
26:34
deflect that level of scrutiny.
26:36
Speaker 2: Well, they absolutely did ask questions, and families did write
26:40
letters demanding answers. But Holmes was an absolute master of
26:45
the bureaucratic run around. Hey, you mean you have to
26:47
remember the era. There are no quick phone calls. Everything
26:50
is done vious low mail. When a family wrote to him,
26:53
he would write back a very polite, deeply sympathetic letter
26:57
on professional doctor Holmes stationary.
26:59
Speaker 1: Oh reaonizing the doctor title again exactly.
27:02
Speaker 2: He would claim that the young woman had unexpectedly eloped
27:05
with a mysterious man, or that she'd grown tired of
27:08
Chicago and moved to the West Coast for a better job,
27:11
but she hadn't left a forwarding address.
27:13
Speaker 1: And because the letters are coming from a respected doctor,
27:17
it carries this massive weight of authority.
27:20
Speaker 2: Yes, a letter from a wealthy doctor explaining that a young,
27:24
independent woman had simply exercised her right to move on
27:27
was often enough to completely stall a police investigation or
27:31
satisfy a distant family for months, if not years. By
27:35
the time anyone realized he was lying, the trail was
27:38
completely cold.
27:39
Speaker 1: And what he did after he successfully stalled those investigations,
27:43
what he did with the bodies of these women, is
27:46
arguably the darkest and most revealing part of this entire
27:49
deep dive. It's horrific because he didn't just hide the
27:52
bodies in the basement and pour concrete over them. He
27:55
monetized the murders from the very beginning to the absolute end.
27:59
He stole their property, he collected their life insurance, and
28:02
then he took their physical remains, disposed of the flesh
28:05
using the basement furnace or chemical baths, and he meticulously
28:08
articulated their skeletons to sell to medical schools.
28:12
Speaker 2: And this is where his medical background at the University
28:14
of Michigan comes.
28:14
Speaker 3: Full circle, right back to the cadavers.
28:16
Speaker 2: The process of articulating a skeleton is incredibly gruesome, time consuming,
28:21
and requires specialized anatomical knowledge. You had to strip away
28:25
all the tissue, boil or bleach the bones, and then
28:28
painstakingly wire them all back together into a standing educational model.
28:33
Speaker 1: And he's doing this in the middle of a bustling city.
28:35
Speaker 2: Right there in the building he had established connections to
28:38
medical schools, and because there was a massive shortage of
28:41
legal cadavers for study, these schools were willing to pay
28:44
premium prices for articulated skeletons with absolutely no questions asked
28:49
about where they came from.
28:50
Speaker 1: It is a completely closed loop of horrific unrestricted capitalism.
28:54
He is running an assembly line. He treats human lives
28:58
with the exact same cold legitsticle calculation as a factory
29:01
processing raw materials.
29:03
Speaker 2: That's exactly what it was, a factory.
29:05
Speaker 1: Think about the steps intake the victim using charm, extract
29:08
the initial financial assets to be a property transfer, terminate
29:12
the victim process that remains in the basement, and finally
29:15
package and sell the physical byproduct to a university for
29:18
a final profit. Every single ounce of the human being
29:21
is converted into capital.
29:22
Speaker 2: It is staggering. And he is doing all of this
29:25
while operating in a city of twenty seven million transient visitors,
29:29
with people coming and going every single day. He was
29:31
operating within a perfect storm of urban anonymity.
29:34
Speaker 1: But the wild irony of this story, the thing that
29:37
ultimately brings his entire terrifying empire crashing down, is that
29:40
he wasn't caught by the family of a missing tourist.
29:43
He wasn't caught by a clever Chicago detective noticing a
29:46
pattern of missing women.
29:47
Speaker 2: Oh none at all.
29:48
Speaker 1: While he thrived on preying upon vulnerable populations, his insatiable,
29:53
arrogant greed eventually led him to target someone inside his
29:56
own criminal circle. He targeted a partner, and that was
30:00
the strategic error that destroyed him and tour Benjamin Pitzel, Yes,
30:04
tell me about Pizzel.
30:05
Speaker 2: Pizzel is a fascinating figure in this narrative because he
30:08
is not a victim in the traditional sense. He is
30:12
a fellow con man and a crucial long term accomplice
30:15
to Holmes. They had partnered on numerous scams.
30:18
Speaker 1: Together, so they were tight.
30:20
Speaker 2: Barry Pittzil helped him build parts of the castle. He
30:23
helped him run interference with creditors, He knew about the bodies.
30:26
They were deeply entwined, and in eighteen ninety four they
30:29
hatch what is supposed to be their biggest insurance fraud yet. Okay,
30:33
the plot, by their twisted standards, is relatively straightforward. Pittestell
30:38
is going to travel to Philadelphia. He's going to use
30:40
his skills to fake his own death, likely by finding
30:43
a cadaver that roughly matches his description, and then Holmes
30:46
and Pittzil are going to slit a massive ten thousand
30:50
dollars life insurance pay out.
30:51
Speaker 1: But Holmes, being true to his nature, looks at this
30:54
plan and sees a way to optimize his profit margin.
30:56
He looks at Potitzil and things, why go through the
30:58
massive hassle of finding a stolen corpse, faking a death,
31:01
and then splitting the money fifty to fifty when I
31:04
can just actually murder Benjamin and keep one hundred percent
31:07
of the money.
31:07
Speaker 2: That's exactly his thought process. So the betrayal is executed,
31:11
Holmes travels to Philadelphia. Instead of bringing a stolen corpse
31:14
to the rendezvous point, he murders Benjamin Pittzel himself, likely
31:18
using chloroform. He then horribly disfigures Pittzel's face with chemicals
31:22
so that the body is visually unidentifiable to the authorities,
31:26
but still matches the general physical description required for the
31:30
insurance company to process the claim.
31:32
Speaker 1: I want to pause and look at what this means
31:34
for his overall strategy. For years, he was a localized predator.
31:38
He lured people into his domain, his castle in Chicago,
31:42
where he controlled every variable. He controlled the exits, the
31:45
sound proofing, the basement furnace. But now he is traveling,
31:50
he is committing mobile, multi state premeditated murder.
31:54
Speaker 2: It's a massive escalation, and it proves that Holmes had
31:57
absolutely no loyalty to anyone. Petzil wasn't a naive tourist
32:02
stepping off a train. He was a hardened associate who
32:04
knew exactly what Holmes was capable of. The fact that
32:07
Holmes killed him shows that he viewed literally everyone in
32:10
his life, even his closest allies, as entirely expendable assets.
32:14
Speaker 1: It's like a classic mafia movie betrayal, where the boss
32:17
eliminates his right hand man to keep the entire cut
32:19
of the heist, but in trying to secure the bag,
32:22
he completely bungles the aftermath.
32:23
Speaker 2: Oh, he bungles it horribly.
32:25
Speaker 1: Because Petetzel wasn't a lone drifter. He had a family.
32:28
He had a wife, Carrie, and he had five children.
32:32
And to keep Carrie from getting suspicious about her husband's
32:34
sudden silence, and to maintain absolute control over the insurance money,
32:39
Holmes does something incredibly reckless. He takes custody of three
32:42
of the Potetzel children, Alice, Nellie, and young.
32:45
Speaker 2: Howard, and he does this under completely false pretenses. He
32:49
tells Carrie Petetzel that Benjamin is successfully in hiding, waiting
32:53
for the insurance heat to die down, lying right to
32:55
her face. He tells that Benjamin desperately wants to see
32:58
his children, or that the children that need to be
33:00
moved to protect them from investigators. He manipulates a grieving,
33:03
confused mother into separating from her kids, and then Holmes
33:08
begins a frantic, grueling, terrifying journey across the United States
33:12
and eventually into Canada, traveling by train with these three children.
33:16
Speaker 1: This part of the source material is genuinely hard to read.
33:19
Speaker 3: It's harrowing.
33:20
Speaker 1: I want you to imagine the psychological terror of those children.
33:24
They are young, they are confused, and they are traveling
33:26
city to city train ride after train ride, sleeping in
33:30
strange hotels, completely isolated from their mother. Unimaginable, and the
33:35
man holding their hands buying them train tickets is the
33:38
man who brutally murdered their father, and they are completely
33:41
unaware of their impending doom. Meanwhile, he is juggling letters,
33:47
keeping the mother moving on a separate train route so
33:49
she never intersects with the kids, constantly lying to her
33:52
about where they are.
33:53
Speaker 2: It is a logistical nightmare of deception, and ultimately it
33:57
ends exactly as you would expect with Holmes. He realizes
34:00
the children are a massive liability, They are expensive, they
34:03
are noticeable, and they tie him to the Pitta fraud.
34:05
Speaker 1: So he just decides to do it to them, so
34:07
he murders them.
34:08
Speaker 2: He kills the two young girls, Alison Nelly, in Toronto, Canada,
34:12
and buries their bodies in the basement of a house
34:15
he rented specifically for that purpose. He then travels to Indianapolis,
34:19
where he kills young Howard and disposes of his remains
34:22
in a rented house there.
34:23
Speaker 1: This is where I have to ask, what was he thinking?
34:26
This seems like incredibly sloppy work for a guy who
34:29
operated with such calculated precision in Chicago for years.
34:33
Speaker 3: Why take the kids at all?
34:34
Speaker 1: If you are willing to murder your partner, why not
34:37
just disappear? Was it pure arrogance? Did he genuinely believe
34:41
he was so highly intelligent that he could simultaneously juggle
34:44
a suspicious, grieving wife, a skeptical team of corporate insurance investigators,
34:49
and three young children, all while crossing international borders on
34:53
public trains.
34:54
Speaker 2: It was absolute, blinding hubris. This is a common psychological
34:58
trap for predators who evade capture for long periods. They
35:01
developed a dangerous sense of invincibility.
35:03
Speaker 3: They think they're untouchable.
35:05
Speaker 2: Think about his track record up to this point. He
35:08
had talked his way out of brooch of promise lawsuits.
35:11
He had finessed dozens of angry, unpaid contractors. He had
35:15
successfully explained away missing fiancees to concerned families. He had
35:19
stolen bodies from universities. He genuinely believed his intellect and
35:23
his charm formed an infallible shield.
35:26
Speaker 1: But the reality is moving three distressed children across the
35:29
country while actively committing high profile life insurance fraud is
35:33
logistically impossible to keep quiet. You are creating witnesses every
35:37
time you buy a train ticket or check into a hotel.
35:39
Speaker 2: Exactly, he broke his own cardinal rules. He left the
35:43
safety and control of his chaotic, confusing building in Chicago,
35:47
and he stepped out into the light.
35:48
Speaker 3: Huge mistake.
35:49
Speaker 2: He left a grim, highly visible geographical trail of hotel registries,
35:54
train conductors, and rental agreements stretching from Philadelphia to Toronto
35:58
to Indianapolis Country.
36:00
Speaker 1: Sloppiness, combined with the fact that he was finally dealing
36:03
with entities that actually had the financial resources and the
36:05
motivation to track him to the insurance companies, brought the
36:08
law right.
36:09
Speaker 3: To his doorstep.
36:10
Speaker 1: The unraveling is fascinating because it doesn't start with a
36:13
heroic police detective. It starts with corporate bureaucracy. The Fidelity
36:18
Mutual Life Association grows highly suspicious of the Potetzel claim.
36:21
Speaker 2: Because the body was.
36:22
Speaker 1: Disfigured right, the body in Philadelphia was a little too
36:25
conveniently disfigured. They start digging, and then a ghost from
36:29
Holmes's past surfaces at the absolute worst time, a criminal
36:33
associate named Marian Hedgepeth.
36:35
Speaker 2: Hedgepeth is the wild car that Holmes never accounted for.
36:39
Hedgepeth was a convicted train robber whom Holmes had met previously.
36:43
Holmes had promised to pay Hedgepeth a five hundred dollars
36:46
commission for recommending a corrupt lawyer who could help facilitate
36:50
the Pitzeaux insurance scam.
36:51
Speaker 1: But Holmes, being constitutionally incapable of paying anyone what he
36:55
owes them stiff's Hedgepeth, he takes the lawyer's info, runs
36:58
the scam, and never pays the five hundred dollars.
37:00
Speaker 2: He just couldn't help himself.
37:02
Speaker 1: So Hedgepeth, who is currently sitting in a jail cell
37:05
in Saint Louis and has absolutely nothing to lose, reads
37:09
a newspaper article about a suspicious insurance claim in Philadelphia
37:13
involving a dead man, and Hedgepeth essentially tells the guards, Oh,
37:18
you want to know about that Philadelphia insurance claim, let
37:20
me tell you about a guy named doctor Holmes.
37:22
Speaker 2: That tip was the loose thread that unraveled the entire sweater.
37:27
The insurance investigators, led by a relentless detective named Frank Geyer,
37:31
use hedge pets information to track Holmes's movements. They follow
37:35
the agonizing trail of the Pittetzel children across the country,
37:39
eventually uncovering their graves in Toronto and Indianapolis.
37:42
Speaker 3: It's so sad.
37:43
Speaker 2: Meanwhile, the Pinkerton Detective Agency is tracking Holmes himself. They
37:46
finally corner him and arrest him in Boston. Initially, he's
37:49
just held on outstanding warrens for horse theft and fraud
37:52
in Texas.
37:53
Speaker 1: But once they have him in custody, the police begin
37:56
to dig into his background. They look at his aliases,
37:59
and inevitably, they look back at his property in Chicago.
38:02
They go to sixty third and Wallace. They walk into
38:06
the massive, empty castle, and this is the exact moment
38:09
where the mythmaking machine of the American media goes into hyperdrive.
38:13
Speaker 2: The Chicago police begin excavating the building and they find
38:17
the absolute nightmare that Holmes left behind. Yeah. They dig
38:21
into the basement and find human remains mixed into the
38:24
ashes of the kiln. They find bone fragments, they find
38:27
women's clothing, they find teeth. They find the definitive physical
38:31
proof of a slaughterhouse.
38:32
Speaker 1: And while the police are literally pulling bone fragments out
38:35
of the dirt, the reporters are swarming the site. The
38:38
press is actively writing the mythology of the Murder Castle
38:41
in real time. This is when the elaborate floor plans
38:44
with the fictional trap doors, the imaginary acid vats, and
38:47
the gas chambers are splashed across the front pages of
38:49
every newspaper in the country. The public is captivated and horrified.
38:53
Speaker 2: But despite the horrific discoveries in Chicago, Holmes isn't actually
38:58
tried for those victims. Legal jurisdiction is too complicated and
39:02
the physical evidence in Chicago is largely fragmentary.
39:05
Speaker 3: Interesting.
39:06
Speaker 2: Instead, he has moved back to Philadelphia and in October
39:09
of eighteen ninety five, he stands trial for the one murder.
39:13
They can absolutely conclusively prove the murder of Benjamin.
39:17
Speaker 1: Putzel, and the trial itself is a spectacle in true
39:21
unadulterated narcissist fashion. Holmes actually dismisses his attorneys for parts
39:26
of the trial and acts as his.
39:28
Speaker 2: Own lawyer, which is incredibly revealing of his pathology. It
39:32
shows that even while sitting in a courtroom facing a
39:35
mountain of forensic evidence and the literal gallows, he still
39:38
genuinely believed he was the smartest person in the room.
39:41
Speaker 1: He still thinks he can con his way out of it.
39:43
Speaker 2: He thought he could cross examine witnesses and charm a
39:45
jury the exact same way he charmed the vulnerable women
39:48
in his pharmacy. He believed his intellect was superior to
39:51
the entire judicial system.
39:53
Speaker 1: But the charm finally fails. The jury sees right through
39:56
the facade. He is swiftly convicted of first degree murder.
40:00
He is sentenced to death, and this brings us to
40:03
what might be the most audacious part of his entire life, his.
40:06
Speaker 3: Time on death row.
40:07
Speaker 1: Oh, this part as while, because even while waiting for
40:09
the hangman, he manages to pull off one final ultimate grift.
40:13
He is sitting in Moyemencing prison and he sells an
40:16
exclusive confession to the Hearst newspaper syndicate for ten thousand dollars.
40:20
Speaker 2: Ten thousand dollars in eighteen ninety six was an astronomical
40:24
sum of money. It would be hundreds of thousands of
40:26
dollars today.
40:27
Speaker 3: That is insane.
40:28
Speaker 2: And what did he actually give the newspapers in exchange
40:30
for that fortune? He gave them pure, unadulterated sensationalism. He
40:34
claimed he had killed twenty seven people. He fabricated wildly
40:38
impossible details about his cross He.
40:39
Speaker 3: Just made it all up.
40:40
Speaker 2: He confessed to murdering specific people who were later proven
40:45
by police to be completely alive and living comfortably in
40:47
other cities. He was weaving fictions to satisfy the public's bloodlust.
40:52
And most famously, in that confession, he claimed that he
40:56
was born with quote the devil in me, stating that
40:59
he could not help the fact that he was a
41:01
murderer any more than a poet can help the inspiration
41:03
to sing.
41:05
Speaker 1: So we have to analyze this final act. By confessing
41:08
to twenty seven murders, including people who were still alive.
41:12
Was he just trolling the authorities one last time? Was
41:14
he just trying to make fools of the police, or
41:17
was he actively trying to ensure his own infamy. I mean,
41:20
modern historians believe the confirmed number of victims is around nine,
41:24
maybe a few more that couldn't be definitively proven. But
41:27
he claims twenty seven. And because of his lives the
41:30
paper started speculating that he might have killed up to
41:32
two hundred people during the World's Fair. He essentially swindled
41:35
the entire American media apparatus.
41:37
Speaker 3: From his death row cell.
41:39
Speaker 2: He was a con man to his very last breath.
41:41
He understood exactly what the hearst newspapers wanted, and he
41:44
understood what the public wanted By feeding the press the
41:48
devil and me narrative. He gave them a supernatural, unfathomable monster.
41:53
He ensured that he would not be remembered as a pathetic,
41:56
greedy swindler who murdered innocent people for their life insurance payouts.
42:01
He elevated himself into a legendary dark figure. He mibulated
42:05
his own legacy, ensuring that we would still be talking
42:07
about him today as an evil genius rather than a
42:10
mundane fraudster.
42:11
Speaker 1: He was executed by hanging on May seventh, eighteen ninety six,
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and the sources point out this incredible poetic irony regarding
42:18
his final arrangements. A man who started his entire criminal
42:22
career as a medical student digging up graves in the
42:25
middle of the night, stealing corpses to defraud insurance companies,
42:28
and who later murdered women to sell their articulated skeletons
42:31
to universities makes a very specific, terrified final request for
42:35
his own burial.
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Speaker 2: Yes, he was absolutely terrified that his own body would
42:39
be stolen from the grave, sold to a medical school,
42:41
and dissected on a slab.
42:42
Speaker 3: Imagine that, so.
42:43
Speaker 2: He demanded to be buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in
42:47
a coffin that was to be encased entirely in solid cement.
42:51
He spent his entire adult life turning human beings into commodities,
42:55
treating flesh and bone as nothing more than raw capital,
42:58
and in death, his greatest fear was that the capitalist
43:01
machine he exploited would finally commodify him.
43:05
Speaker 1: So, after unpacking this massive stack of historical documents, what
43:09
does this all mean for you, the listener today? Why
43:11
spend an hour dissecting the crimes of a man who
43:14
died over a century ago. The core takeaways here are
43:17
incredibly stark, and they have very little.
43:19
Speaker 3: To do with haunted houses.
43:20
Speaker 2: Very true.
43:21
Speaker 1: We've seen that the Murder Castle, with its cartoonish trapdoors
43:24
and mechanized death shoots, is largely a product of a
43:26
sensationalist media that needed to sell papers to a terrified public.
43:30
But the documented truth is actually far more unsettling and
43:34
far more relevant. J. Holmes was a devastatingly charming opportunist.
43:38
He didn't use a cartoonish layer to trap his victims.
43:41
He used the very real, stemic vulnerabilities of a rapidly
43:44
changing society.
43:45
Speaker 2: He weaponized the anonymity of a booming industrial city. He
43:50
exploited the lack of centralized regulation and the burgeoning insurance industry.
43:55
He understood the legal loopholes of property.
43:57
Speaker 1: Transfers, and he used all of it against them.
44:00
Speaker 2: Magically, he preyed upon the independence of vulnerable young people
44:03
who were stepping out of their small towns, seeking a
44:06
better life and trusting the authority figures they met along
44:09
the way. This history is an absolute master class in
44:12
information literacy. It is a powerful reminder of how easily
44:16
sensationalism can override documented facts, and how true predators rarely
44:22
hide behind the mask of a movie villain, right. They
44:25
hide behind the mundane facades of respected businesses, professional titles, charm,
44:30
and the promise of progress.
44:32
Speaker 1: Exactly, the monster wasn't hiding in a secret passageway in
44:35
the basement. He was standing right in front of you,
44:37
behind the pharmacy counter, smiling, asking about your day, and
44:40
offering you a room for the night, which brings us
44:43
to a final, really chilling thought for you to maul over.
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Speaker 3: If Holmes was purely.
44:47
Speaker 1: A product of his environment, if he was a predator
44:49
who thrived specifically because he exploited the chaos of a
44:52
rapidly expanding city, lacks regulations, the lack of background checks,
44:57
and the total anonymity of the Gilded Age.
44:59
Speaker 2: The to turn that lens on our own era and
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ask ourselves, what does the Gilded Age look like today?
45:05
Speaker 3: That's the real question.
45:06
Speaker 2: In our current era of absolute digital anonymity, of rapid,
45:10
unregulated technological booms, of cryptocurrency, deep fakes, and vast online
45:16
spaces where identity is completely fluid, how many subtle modern
45:20
day castles are being built right now? Only this time
45:23
they aren't being built with shoddy drick and mortar in
45:25
a Chicago neighborhood. They are being built with lines of code,
45:29
complex algorithms, and digital facades that are designed to extract
45:32
our data, our assets, and our identities.
45:35
Speaker 1: It really makes you wonder about the blueprints of the
45:37
platforms and the people we blindly trust every single day.
45:40
Thank you so much for bringing these incredible sources to us.
45:43
It has been an absolute thrill to explore the complex
45:46
space between the myth and the monster with you. Keep
45:49
questioning the blueprints and keep diving deep