Some say he was Jack the Ripper, but Herman W. Mudgett, alias Dr. H. H. Holmes, was far too busy piling up corpses on this side of the Atlantic to have ever traveled abroad. The basement of his infamous Chicago "Castle" (which The Chicago Times described as a "murder factory") boasted a crematory, lime pits, acid vats, and torture devices. Also in the basement was his "human elasticizer," a basic torture rack that he believed could be employed to create a race of giants. Born in Gilmanton, NH, in 1860, Mudgett/Holmes attended medical school at the University of Michigan, graduating with the class of 1884. To finance his studies, he took out life insurance policies on people he knew, and then delivered a corpse in order to collect...a con on which he would fall back many times during his short life.
When the Holmes Castle was searched in 1895, the police found evidence of as many as 200 bodies. The job as "typewriter" at the Castle was truly a dead-end job. Most of the pretty young women who entered his employ became his lovers, and then his victims.
Holmes' final confession began with these words:
"Yes, I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than the poet can help the inspiration to song, nor the ambition of an intellectual man to be great. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since."
An incredible and chilling true story, Devil's Disciple: The Deadly Dr. H. H. Holmes, is the biography of a real-life Jekyll & Hyde, told in the killer's own words whenever possible.