Herman Mudgett and the Chicago 'Torture Castle'

Mudgett researched his dreadful pastime at America's Ann Arbor medical school. An expert in acid burns, he boosted his student allowance by body snatching. He would steal corpses, render them unrecognizable, then collect on the life insurance policies he had previously taken out under fictitious names. He got away with several of these frauds before a nightwatchman caught him removing a female corpse and the errant student fled.

Mudgett next turned up in Chicago where, under the alias 'Dr H.H. Holmes', he ran a respectable pharmacy without a hint of scandal. So successful was he that in 1890 he bought a vacant lot and set about building a grand house. But this was no ordinary home. It contained a maze of secret passages, trap doors, chutes, dungeons and shafts. Suspicion was averted during the construction of what later became known as the 'Torture Castle' by the expedient of hiring a different builder for each small section of the house.

The house was finished in time for the great Chicago Exposition of 1893 when the city filled with visitors, many of whom were to be Mudgett's prey. He lured girls and young ladies to his 'castle' where he attempted to seduce them before drugging them. They were then popped into one of the empty shafts that ran through the building. The hapless girls would come round only to find themselves trapped behind a glass panel in an airtight death chamber into which would be pumped lethal gas. The bodies would be sent down a chute to the basement which contained vast vats of acid and lime and, in the center of the room, a dissecting table. Here Mudgett would cut up the corpses, removing particular organs which took his fancy and disposing of the rest in the vats.

Mudgett later admitted to having murdered 200 girls during the Chicago Exposition alone, and the orgy of bloodletting might have continued for much longer but for the phoney doctor's greed. He had murdered two visiting Texan sisters and, rather than quietly dispose of their remains, he set fire to the house in an attempt to gain the insurance money and make good his escape from Chicago. The insurance company refused to pay and the police began an investigation into the blaze. Strangely, the police work was not pursued vigorously enough to produce any evidence of Mudgett's bloody activities; but the killer did not know this, and he fled.

This time he went south to Texas, where he traced relatives of the sisters he had so clumsily murdered. Having ingratiated himself with them, he tried to swindle them out of a $6o,ooo fortune. They were suspicious so Mudgett again took to the road, this time on a stolen horse. Police caught up with him in Missouri where, using the name H. M. Howard, he was charged with a further fraud attempt. With the help of a crooked lawyer, he was granted bail; and promptly absconded.

Mudgett next turned up in Philadelphia where an associate in crime had been operating insurance frauds at the mass killer's behest. In an apparent accident one day in 1894, this co-conspirator blew himself up. In fact, he had been murdered by Mudgett who ran off to Toronto with his victim's wife and their three children. Their young bodies were later found in the basements of two rented houses.

It was not any of his many murders that finally brought Mudgett to justice but the jumping of bail in Missouri and the theft of a horse, a capital offence in Texas at that time. Detectives traced Mudgett through his aged mother who was happy to give them the whereabouts of the son of whom she was so proud. The mass killer was arrested with his mistress in Boston and was charged with horse stealing and fraud. It was only at this stage that police searched the burned-out Chicago Torture Castle.

They pieced together the remains of 200 corpses. Mudgett confessed to the murders of all of them. He was hanged on May 7,1896.