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from what he had left behind in Chicago. Holmes, it seemed, had quite a list of murders to his credit. Attributing four to him was only the beginning.

The Mind of a Killer
    Holmes had arrived in Chicago during the 1880s, already married to two women. The city was preparing for the world’s fair, or Great Exposition, which meant there was plenty of opportunity for a clever man to commit fraud and theft. Some twenty-seven million people went through the exposition during its six-month run, which overtaxed the city’s resources and inspired crime, most of which the police could not investigate. Holmes was among those who took advantage, and his scheme was probably the most well planned and devious of the lot.
    He had foreseen the many visitors who would be searching for lodgings as close as possible to the fair, knowing that among them would be the most vulnerable prey: single, naive women who would easily succumb to the charms of a successful and charming “doctor.” He presented himself as a graduate of a prestigious medical school and a man of means. In fact, he had gained these credentials with other scams, and possibly with murder.
    Holmes’s first Chicago employment was as a prescription clerk at Sixty-third and South Wallace streets, but he soon took over the business from Mrs. E. S. Holton, who then “went to California” with her daughter. No one ever heard from them again, but Holmes took control of the shop. Across the road was a property that he purchased. Soon he was gathering funds through fraud to build his three-story, hundred-room “castle,” as he referred to it. When he eventually felt the need to leave, he tried to burn it down to collect insurance, but did not succeed. Before that, he clearly used the place for his favorite pastime: torture.
    Given the news about Holmes’s murder of the Pitezel girls, the police began an investigation of the property in July, even before Howard was found, relying on reports of missing women known to have been there with Holmes. The first floor consisted of shops and offices, but the second floor and cellar yielded something that exceeded the worst expectations. From reconstructions, it seemed that Holmes had tortured and murdered many women, disposing of their corpses in a massive furnace in the cellar or defleshing them and selling the skeletons to medical schools.
    Holmes’s castle included soundproof sleeping chambers with peepholes, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, sliding walls, and vents that Holmes controlled from another room. Many of the rooms had trapdoors, with ladders leading to smaller rooms below. One asbestos-lined room appeared to be used to incinerate its occupant alive. There were greased chutes that emptied into a two-level cellar, in which Holmes had installed a large furnace, and an asbestos-lined chamber with gas pipes and evidence of something having been burned inside. It seemed that Holmes placed chosen victims in special chambers into which he pumped lethal gas and then watched them react. Sometimes he’d ignite the gas, or perhaps even stretch a victim on the “elasticity determinator,” an elongated bed with straps. When finished, he might have slid the corpses down the chutes into his cellar, where vats of acid awaited them. Searchers discovered several complete skeletons and numerous incinerated bone fragments, including the pelvis of a fourteen-year-old child. Some bone fragments, and a woman’s slipper and hair, were found in the large stove he kept in his third-floor office.
    Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Holmes insisted that he had nothing to do with any murders. Those people had either taken their own lives, he claimed, or someone else had killed them. Nevertheless, the Chicago Tribune announced that “The Castle is a Tomb!” and the Philadelphia Inquirer described many bones removed from the “charnel house.” It wasn’t long before true-crime pulp paperbacks were published to slake the public’s thirst for