Episode 460: H.H. Holmes Part 4

I'm Dan Taberski. In 2011, something strange began to happen at a high school in upstate New York. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast. What's the answer, and what do you do if they tell you it's all in your head?

Hysterical, a new podcast from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios, binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad-free on Wondery. Plus. Hey weirdos, I'm Alina.

I'm ash and this is morbid.

Yeah, it sounded like you were going to say, morbid. You're like, this is morbid. No, I was just saying it annoying. No, this is morbid.

You're never annoying, never. I had just quite the moment while we were getting set up here. Yeah, Ash was knocking shit over, she was falling out of her seat.

Mikey's computer started and it did the like. And I thought he burped. And I was like, Oh my God. And then I was like, Wait, that's a computer, that's a computer, that's a computer. And then my fucking iced coffee went sailing across the galaxy.

And I'm just sitting over here in my seat with the microphone in my laptop, and I'm like, Can we start? She's like, I'm ready, I'm ready to go. She's like, This is why I don't do group projects. People like you, ash.

People like you, I always was that bitch at a group project, just like, Ah, just a wreck, knocking shit over. My iced coffee's falling, it's falling, all right.

Um, so, so, we're in part four. Um, yeah, she is gonna make it five. Yeah, I apologize, I can't.

I just can't cram it all into this episode. It would be too much, too much for you to comprehend, too much for me to comprehend, really, and it's definitely too much. I'm not going to cram it into one episode just to do that.

It would be, it would be not as good, I think, in my opinion. Uh, so I am going to make it five and I'm going to keep the Jack the Ripper stuff for part five. Because I. I want to find a ship manifest that I've been seeing rumblings of, but I can't seem to find the actual ship manifest. Which seems to be a lot of the, uh, issue in the Jack the Ripper theories is a lot of people say stuff, but it's not backed up, no one's got any documentation to back it up. So it's like, Oh yeah, I think there was a Holmes on a ship on the way to UK, like during that whole thing.

And you're like, Whoa? And then it's just like, Brian, where's that? it's like? And it's also like, Holmes was a very common name back then. Exactly that's why he chose it.

So it's like, I don't know about that, but we'll get to it. We're going to get further into that next episode. We will end at five. Don't worry, I'm not going to take this like the longest series we've ever had.

Um, we'll just tie it with Jack, we'll just tie it with Jack, it's it's pretty much up there, um. But in this one, we're going to talk about several murders that he committed. Uh, pretty brutal ones, they're all pretty brutal, but these ones involve children.

So yeah, he's a real monster. like a real monster. Well, I mean, he murdered his, uh, pregnant mistress, so yeah, he's fucking terrible. That'll do it and the child in that situation, yep.

Uh, poor Pearl, I know, you know, I I can't stop thinking about that name ever since we it's such a cute name, yeah.

And like, those kind of names are coming back now, yeah, like old timey names, the cute old lady names, yeah.

But you know what, when we last left you guys? I'll give you a little recap because I know there's a lot to take in in this series. So I think it's probably helpful to be like, this is what happened in the last one. I need the recap, even if you don't.

I need it, even if you don't. Uh, Holmes married again. Yep, he's married again.

Remember, he is, uh, still married to Myrta, still married to Clara, and now Georgiana. Georgiana is now his new wife. Uh, he fake married Minnie, who he killed, and her sister, he real married Georgiana, though, right?

He real married Georgiana in Colorado. Yes, look at me, there you go.

So he has plot, so he married again. He's plotted to take the inherited land from his new wife, Georgiana. She stands to get some inherited land from her dead grandmother, so he's plotting to take that. He has sent Benjamin Pytzel to Fort Worth, Texas, to start getting the new Texas Murder Castle underway.

Like, he's ready to start this whole process over with a whole other murder castle. Yeah, same way. Yep, um, he's doing that on the land that he made Minnie Williams transfer into He and Benjamin's aliases names after he, and then he murdered her.

Uh, now he's seeming to begin to turn on Benjamin a little bit after. They both decided collectively to defraud an insurance company. By faking Benjamin's death and using another corpse to pretend it's his, I feel like it's not gonna be fake. Yeah, it's looking like Benjamin's time as his Lackey is coming to a tragic end, yeah.

At this point, I had a feeling this episode was going to be Pytz-centric. Yeah, Pytz-centric. It's not. It's not great for that entire family.

To be quite honest, uh. By the time Holmes and Georgiana arrived in Fort Worth to claim the land deeded to him by Minnie, Uh. Pytzel had already been there for a few weeks, he was there with his young son Howard, just getting things together. So when he first got to Texas, Pytzel had to receive the land deeded to his alias, Benton Lyman. And he had to transfer it back again to Holmes. Okay?

Now, initially, I'll I'll just give you a little rundown of how it initially happened. So you remember? Minnie was to transfer it into Holmes's alias, who she didn't know. She. She thought this was another buyer, then that alias of Holmes was deeding it into Benjamin Pytzel's alias of Benjamin of Benton. Lyman Yes.

So now that Benton Lyman has it, he now has to deed it back into Real Holmes's name. It's funny, I wonder if any of I don't know exactly how any of that works. But if somebody looking at that deed, switching hands constantly, like, thought anything about that? Yeah, I think, honestly, I think it's just the time period.

They were able to get away with this a lot easier. Nowadays. It would be like, flagged, you would think, right, the first time it went into an alias. I think people would be like, Wait a second, what's going on there, right? It would at least be like, looked at.

This time, instead of like, H.

H. Holmes, They put it into Harry Holmes's name. And this deed, like this deed, has been like, boop, boop, boop, boop. Like you said, like somebody you would think somebody would maybe catch. But again, I think it's just the time period. Even back then, though, I'm like, damn, you didn't think that was weird?

It's been like, six times, yeah, cause like this deed has been around more times than a Broadway show like it truly has. And from there, Peitzel selected a parcel of land on the corner of 2nd and Rusk Streets.

And that's where they were going to put the murder castle. The castle was going to be built under the watch of Construction Superintendent H.M. Pratt. And guess who that was, uh, h.h.

HOLMes Yep, that was another one of his aliases. This is messy as fuck. How did he keep track of them all?

He has 40 plus aliases, that's so crazy, and he basically started doing the same shit he did in Chicago. With the construction of this one. He wanted to build another murder castle, so he had to be weird and sneaky about it. So he would fire the workers every now and then to keep the plans from being fully realized.

He did, however, switch up his game a little and he started out actually paying people, huh? That's, which is shocking, that's weird. But then he was right back on his bullshit and stopped.

He was like, That sucks, yeah, he was like, Oh, I don't like that, I don't not like that. And he had a million excuses for why he couldn't pay on time.

And he also went back to taking out loans and buying furniture and fixtures for the building on credit. And then he would just not pay, and then he would just hide the items from the creditors when they came to take them back. This man gives me so much anxiety running from these creditors, yeah.

And he's just, and he's doing the most, because he's made places in this castle now where he's hiding all these furnishings. Yeah, exactly, now. Unfortunately for him, Holmes was not going to stick around in Texas long enough to see this castle actually come to fruition. What happened? In the spring of 1894, he and Pitezel began that scheme.

This is the beginning, not of the insurance fraud scheme, it's the beginning of the scheme. That would kind of unravel everything for him. The scheme before, the scheme, after that scheme, and around the time of that other scheme, this scheme was. They would travel around the state buying horses, and they would buy these horses with worthless promissory notes and deeds, not cash, so like bad checks, essentially.

Basically. And then they would sell them for cash and move on before the seller figured out that they'd been scammed. But this plan fell apart when they were both arrested. Like idiots, oh shit, yeah.

Once they were, because it was a shitty plan to begin with, somebody was going to catch on. And once they were out on bond, investigators now were like, huh, we should begin looking into these guys a little bit more? Because Holmes? They were like, Yeah, he has a few things on his records here, so it was definitely going to bring more detectives on his tail.

And he doesn't want that. And gathering up just some of their belongings and all the money that Holmes had managed to raise at this point for the castle. Holmes and Georgiana fled out of Texas for St. Louis, with a brief stop in Denver along the way. Okay, so they're running all around.

And does she know she knows about the scheme? Obviously, because now she's on the run with him. We don't know what she knew. Okay, it's one of those things where, like, I don't know, yeah.

I don't know what she knew. Yeah, that's fair, maybe she didn't know, I'm not real sure.

Georgie didn't know she knew something, but I don't know what she knew. Okay, at this point, Holmes was on the run now for two crimes.

He was on the run, still from Chicago, for the arson of the original. Oh my god, I literally forgot. Yes, and now he's on the run for horse thievery.

Horses and arson, I'm saying horses and fire, the 1800s with it all. So you would think he would run as far away as possible from the two places he committed. The two things he's on the run about. One was Chicago and Texas.

But no. After he fled Texas, they went to St. Louis, and St. Louis is four hours from Chicago, technically.

Don't you think he would just like go to Europe? And it's like, that's the thing, and it's 12 hours from Texas? Obviously, these two things are in like car, you know, which, like, at the time, it's not really relevant, but it's like, they're not crazy far.

It's not like, across the country, you know what I mean? So it's like, that's weird that you didn't go further away. I guess that's the thing, like, even try California.

Yeah, just somewhere, even like Massachusetts, like, get out of there, yeah.

He's already been there, like, go back, but I mean, don't, I don't want you here. But he probably didn't want to because he has a wife there.

That's true, and his new wife might not like that, his old wife is there. There's a lot going on, but he had to have a reason for, like, going to St.

Louis. And that reason was that Georgiana was turning 25 in the fall. And that was when she was going to inherit the rest of the estate left to her by her grandmother in Indiana. So he was obviously planning to take the entire inheritance for himself alone, so he wanted to stay closer to Indiana. To wait and then pounce on that. When she turned 25..

And he was just going to, like, throw her down a chute. He's so gross. He really is well in St. Louis, he called himself. Is it St.

Louis or St. Louis, I say St. Louis, I say St.

Louis I'm sure I will get yelled at for that, but like, I don't know, I think it's probably interchangeable. I'm asking Mikey about it.

I think it's St. Louis, you know, what I always think of, Meet me in St. Louis.

Isn't that like a musical or something? I don't know. I feel like that's a musical. I believe you, you have more musical knowledge than I do.

Am I thinking something different? Now? I feel like I need to confirm this with myself. I think of fucking Jennifer Hudson in Sex and the City, that's what I think of Meet Me in St. Louis.

Hold on, I'm going to just check this really briefly, real time. Doesn't it have Judy Garland, isn't it?

I'm pretty sure you're asking the wrong girly about a musical. Yeah, it's a thing, okay?

But now I'm like, is it called Meet me in St. Louis or Meet me in St. Louis? Throw on the pronouncednames.com for the people in the back.

Pronouncednames.

Com St. Louis. This is real time right now.

I feel like this is going to prove me wrong and it's going to be upsetting. St. LOUIS Yeah, oh fuck.

Guys, and I always believe that guy because he sounds like Jacques Pepin, I believe everything he says. I believe that man, I do too.

So St. Louis, so that French guy, I believe, and he said, St. Louis, I don't know.

It could be either one. Maybe if it's like, if you're from there, you say it, maybe I don't know, and I'm not from there.

So it's not, you know, it's not my business. We're from Boston, but St. Louis. I'll say now, okay.

I've said it both ways now, so I've covered all bases. So here we are after arriving in settling in St. Louis.

In the St Place, yeah, so while he's there, he called himself H..M. Howard.

Are you sure it's not howard, howard, maybe howard?

Howard as H..M. Howard. He bought a drugstore again on the corner of 14th and North Market Streets. Because, remember, he's taken money that he raised for the murder castle. He didn't do that.

He's run to St. Louis, St. Louis, and now he has bought another place, a drugstore, to run, when he bought it.

It's a quote-unquote run, yeah, quote-unquote run into the ground. When he bought it, he told the seller that he just wanted something to quote-unquote occupy his attention and that he really didn't care a lot about profits.

Because he was just, he's well off, he doesn't give a shit about that. He's in it for the fun, he's in it for the fun of a drugstore, the fun that a drugstore can provide.

This is a great fucking time, all right, you can get anything you need there. I'm saying, that's what he's in for it, and he used a little cash to buy it.

But then he bought the rest of it with ding-ding-ding, useless, promissory notes and stock. Also, you have the money to spend and plenty left over. Just do it the right way. Brother, he's greedy as fuck him.

He is Scrooge McDuck. literally, he is swimming in a bunch of gold coins and he's not giving them up, but he's not cute, scrooge McDuck is.

No, he's not, that's true, but yeah, he did the same old thing. He bought furniture and fixings for this store on credit, no intention of paying for it.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Soon after arriving and settling there, Benjamin Peitzel joined them. He had moved there with his wife Carrie, and their five children. Uh-oh yeah.

This was when Holmes let Benjamin's wife, Carrie, in on the plan that he and her husband were working on. They needed her help with it. Uh-oh. Their plan was to defraud the Fidelity Mutual Insurance company by faking Ben's death. They needed her in on it because they needed to fake his death.

Yeah, they needed her to help. You're not going to fool fidelity mutual. And they did not. I don't feel.

But meanwhile, Holmes was also already on the path of selling the pharmacy and then running away from the massive debt that he had compiled with the pharmacy everywhere. So he's just like, Oops, that sucked and now we're going to run away from that and it's on to the next thing. It's just amazing.

The anxiety right? Filled life he must have lived like it created for himself. And he just keeps inviting, yeah.

But I don't think he, I think. In the end, it seems like he became anxious and he became he had to have paranoid, and it started to. In the beginning, I think he was having a fucking blast with it because I don't think anything was catching up to him in the beginning. Well, and I think in the beginning there was less to keep track of, and then it just kept piling on. And now he's basically like negating states out of his available paths of escape, he's snowballing.

Yeah, like, it's getting, the mess is getting bigger and bigger as it rolls down the fucking hill. He's blacklisting himself out of several states, and it's like, I assume there's not going to be many left. My gosh, and they're all, like, in the middle, yeah.

Like the Midwest happening. But Holmes and Beitzel bought found a buyer for the drugstore. But in order to buy the store, the man had to take a loan from a supplier. And when he did this, he had to promise that supplier that they would be his main supplier. That was kind of the part of the whole thing.

That makes sense. And that was in exchange for the money they were going to pay. The problem, however, was that Holmes already had a mortgage on the store, which meant that any additional mortgage on the same property would have been illegal and invalid. So when the new buyer became aware of the situation, he immediately alerted authorities. And he was like, This guy is trying to fucking scam me.

And Holmes was arrested on fraud charges. Oops, and this is in St. Louis, St. Louis.

St. Louis, St. Louis, St. Louis. This is when he was, so he bought this drugstore, had no intention of running it properly.

He did all the same shit, bought it with worthless notes, bought the fixings for it with all bullshit credit that he wasn't paying. And then he tries to sell it to somebody illegally. And he doesn't think that this person. He thought he was so much smarter than everybody around him, that was. It's pretty par for the course. With serial killers, I feel like they always think they're smarter than everybody and no one's going to outsmart me.

And it's like, you're a fucking idiot, it's narcissism, you're not smart. No, you're cunning.

And there's a difference and you are a shithead, but you are not smart, right? Like, there's not, you're an idiot.

And it's like, And you're greedy, you're gluttonous and that, and it gets, and it's going to catch up to you. It will always catch up.

And it does because this guy who was buying the pharmacy was like, Fuck you, you're trying to swindle me, you dick. So he called the authorities and Boom arrested authorities.

Authorities Hello, hello, this man's trying to scam me, this man is trying to swindle me.

They're like, Sir, this is St. Louis Lewis. why are you got an accent like that? I'm like, Are you all right? But this is not Great Britain.

Like a fake like transatlantic accident that, like, doesn't exist. He's like, Madonna, Yeah, what's what's going on right now?

So is this like a bit? So he's like, No, I'm really, this is SNL. I'm really upset.

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In 2011, something strange began to happen at the high school in Leroy, New York. I was like at my locker and she came up to me and she was like, stuttering, super bad. I'm like, stop around, She's like, I can't. A mystery illness, bizarre symptoms and spreading fast.

Like doubling and tripling, and it's all these girls with a diagnosis. The state tried to keep on the down low. Everybody thought I was holding something back.

Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah, well, yeah, now it's hysteria, it's all in your head, it's not physical. Oh my gosh, you're exaggerating. Is this the largest mass hysteria since the Witches of Salem?

Or is it something else entirely? Something's wrong here, something's not right. Leroy was the new dateline, and everyone was trying to solve the murder. A new limited series from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Hysterical.

Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and add free right now by joining Wondery Plus.

So he was in jail for two weeks and was finally bonded out by Georgiana. Oh man, that's why I say, I don't know what Georgiana knew. You know what we say about Georgiana? hmm.

Hmm, I say I'm just going to stroke my chin a little bit about it. I'm not going to say I don't know what she knew, because I'm not in Georgiana's head. I'm going to put my sunglasses on, roll up my window and say, I don't know her, I don't know her.

So I don't know. But the day she bonded him out, they went to the train station and were intending to flee right back to Chicago. But you're wanted there too, brother. And what they were going to do there was regroup, kind of formulate the next part of a giant, fucked up plan. But their plan was not going to happen. Because before the train even left the fucking station, they were stopped by a police sergeant.

And the police sergeant said that he was afraid the proposed trip would have to be postponed and then he placed Holmes under arrest again. After. He literally just got out, like that morning, literally, like, got out, walked to the train station and they were like, No, they're like, back to jail. This is monopoly. According to news reports at the time, Georgiana Quote protested in the most indignant manner and became almost hysterical and denounced the arrest as persecution.

Georgie, calm down, so off, he goes back to jail. And they set bail at $800, which at that point was $50,000. At present. They were like, you're fucked up and we're not letting you out of here. No one had that cash at the time, so Georgiana went to Indiana and retrieved the deed to some of the land she was going to be inheriting.

And that was going to be accepted as sufficient collateral. OK, it was. It's old timey. They were going to hand over a deed to land, makes sense. He was released from custody the next day.

Damn so. He had only spent a couple of weeks in jail before that, but he made some networking moves once he was in there. Because we know Holmes always is closing, he's working on a pyramid scheme, even in the walls of the prison. He's an idiot, but he's a hardworking idiot, cunning.

He connected with other inmates and he started getting them into future schemes with him, like promising them things that he couldn't deliver. Of course, one of these convicts was a outlaw and bank robber named Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes told him about his scheme to defraud the insurance company by faking Pitezel's death, passing off another body as his. And then he was like, we're going to flee the country after that.

Because I've kind of used up a lot of these states and I should probably get out now. According to Hedgepeth, Holmes offered to bring him in on the scheme, but he was like, No, I'm good, like even he was like, I think you're dumb.

Like, I don't think this is going to work out for you. There was something about Holmes that he was concerned about. And like, there was also, like, a pesky little detail that Marion was serving a 25 year sentence. So like.

You don't really know how we're going to cut you into this. He wasn't going to be scheming outside of those walls anytime soon, not for a while, but he did direct Holmes to a very.

Morally gray lawyer Oh, a lawyer by the name of Jepta Howe, this lawyer agreed to help Holmes and Pitezel pull off the insurance scheme once they arrived in Philadelphia. That'll get you debarred.

He was morally gray, maybe an understatement, the morally corrupt.

Very unscrupulous, I would say, Oh, I love that word. Yeah, it's a good word, unscrupulous. But Hedgepeth later told reporters Quote I am now convinced that he would sooner or later have murdered me had I been able to accompany him on his intended trip abroad.

Which one said This hedgepeth 25 year sentence? Yeah, I was like, I don't think you got to worry you weren't getting out of jail, my guy.

But so, on July 29th, Benjamin Pitezel left St. Louis, St. Louis, and he told his wife, I'm just covering my bases. He told his wife he was taking a brief trip to purchase some lumber in Chicago. But he was actually headed to Philadelphia, where he was going to meet up with Holmes. Oh, yeah.

Now, meanwhile, as soon as Holmes was bonded out of jail, he and Georgiana left St. Louis, St. Louis, and headed to Philadelphia to meet with Benjamin Pitezel. Along the way, they stopped in Indiana to visit Georgiana's mother, where Holmes told her they were going to be traveling to Germany to look after his uncle's property. Woof.

So she, she shouldn't be alarmed at all if she doesn't hear from Georgiana for a while. He was fully planning on murdering Georgiana, and she was fully planning on spending the rest of her life with him. Even like in his outlawish ways, yeah, now Georgiana did stay behind in Indiana a little bit, just for a little while, just like visit with family.

While Holmes went straight to Philadelphia after this to start the whole scam, so Benjamin Pitezel got to Philadelphia on August 17th, 1894. Within a couple of days, he opened a business, and it was a patent business under the name B..F. Perry, another alias.

Another, another one. Yeah, this is what Holmes had told him to do once he'd established himself. The plan was that Howe, the unscrupulous, the morally gray lawyer, was going to help them get a fresh corpse that was similar looking to Benjamin.

Why does this lawyer have a corpse connect? Not real? sure, a lot of people had corpse connects back then. Yeah, we don't love that. The plan was to place this body, this lookalike corpse, in the patent laboratory in the building that he owned. Then cause an explosion in the building, disfiguring the corpse so much that they could pass it off as Pitezel's body without a lot of suspicion.

And then, once they'd faked his death, Pitezel was going to go into hiding, and Holmes and Pitezel's wife, Carrie, would split the $10,000 insurance payout. Yeah right, baby Holmes is taking that full 10 sounds great.

But where are you? Yeah. On the morning of September 1st, the doorbell rang at the apartment Holmes was sharing with Georgiana, and he went downstairs to open the door. And it was the police.

He came back inside and he told Georgiana that the man at the door was from the Pennsylvania Railroad company. He said he had been working with them on a contract to sell copiers. Chris Remember he had a weird copier business at one point? No, I literally forgot he. like, it was a fake copier business like ABC Copiers or something like that.

But he's like, Oh yeah, he's this guy, he's like, works for the railroad company. We're going to sell copiers. That's what he told Georgiana. That's why I say, I don't know what Georgiana knew.

She knew some things, but he would lie to her about a lot of things. Totally, because. Later, Holmes told investigators that this man was actually Benjamin Pitezel at the door, and he had come to tell Holmes that. Unfortunately, his youngest child, Wharton, was sick, and his wife had asked him to actually return to St. Louis St.

Louis and help with the children. Yeah, so he was like, I can't do this scheme with you, I have to leave and take care of my kid. This was really going to fuck up Holmes's plans.

And immediately, he made the decision that Pitezel was not leaving Philly. Oh shit. So this man comes to Holmes and says, My youngest child is sick, and this in Holmes is like, you're not leaving, and I'm going to make sure.

Do you think that? He was worried that Pitezel was starting to freak out and was going to, like, alert authorities? He was probably worried of that and he was pissed. Yeah, because his plan was fucked up. One thing about Holmes was like, don't double cross him.

Don't fuck with him, don't fuck with his schemes, if you even show slight backing out, or, and even for valid reasons. Even if you're saying my kid is sick, I got to leave. He's like betrayal, like he immediately looks at that.

It's like, you don't value our shit here as much as you should. I know other people like that too. Yeah, that don't understand when your kid is sick, yeah.

And then they're like, Hmm, betrayal, fuck you, betrayal. I'm going to fuck you over now. Put that on a list somewhere, exactly.

It's crazy, so that's exactly what happened. Was. He was like, Oh, your kid is sick, I'm going to fuck your world up now, and it's like, Oh, OK, he's just trying to go home and be a dad.

But OK, but like, fuck him right, yeah, fuck him. So he was. I think he was just really fucking mad that he fucked up his plan.

And he figured that actually killing Benjamin would probably be easier than faking it at this point. And since he was mad already, he was like, I want to kill him now. So then you have to worry about his whole family, which I have a feeling he will. Yeah, he's not too worried about his whole family.

In his later confession, Holmes said that Pitezel sent quote discouraging letters purporting to be from his wife that caused Pitezel to begin drinking heavily. OK, then he claimed that on the second September, yeah, September 2nd, he showed up at the B..F. Perry Laboratory and found Pitezel in a drunken stupor. That's what he's claiming in his confession.

So the next day, he said he was upset about his wife and what was going on. And then we found him in a drunken stupor at the laboratory. And he said, quote. This was an easy matter as I was acquainted with his habits, and so sure was I of finding him thus incapacitated. That when the day came upon which it was convenient for me to kill him. Even before I went to his house, I packed my trunk and made other arrangements to leave Philadelphia in a hurried flight immediately after his death. Wow.

So he's literally like, it was very convenient for me to kill him the next day because I knew he was so upset about his child that he was going to be drunk at the laboratory. And I was already on my way, and I was already ready to kill him, so I figured I'd just pack everything up and be ready to go.

You got a friend, yeah, like, Holy shit, Jesus Christ. So, according to the confession, Holmes said, he entered the.

He entered the building, he went to the second floor, and that's where he found Pitezel passed out, he said. Quote Only one difficulty presented itself. It was necessary for me to kill him in such a manner that no struggle or movement of his body should occur.

That's the only issue, not that you're murdering your longtime friend and associate. Basically in Father of five, Yeah, seriously, basically. He had to kill him and make it look like an accident or suicide instead of murder, and that was his concern.

So he tied his hands and feet, and then he soaked his entire body in. Like in, I think it was Ben, was a benzene, it was like some chemical, and then he just burned him alive. Yeah, that'll look like suicide.

Burned him alive, that's so horrific, he burned this man alive. Like, didn't light the building on fire, just burned him alive first. And then was going to light the building on fire. So didn't even bother to light the building on fire and leave.

He burned this man alive in front of him. I feel like he had to have done something like, so fucked up, like that to somebody before. Like, more obviously, putting somebody in that enclosed room is fucked up. But even like, more than that. Because you don't just burn your fucking friend and associate and just be like, Well, moving on well. In his confession, he said So horrible of this torture that, in writing of it, I have been tempted to attribute his death to some humane means. Not with us. Not with a wish to spare myself, but because I fear that it will not be believed that one can be so heartless and depraved.

So do you think he really did do that then, or do you think he's bluffing? He definitely did that? Oh, he definitely did, it's like.

It's like, proven, yeah. So, once the body was sufficiently disfigured and basically burned beyond recognition. Holmes claimed that he removed the bindings from his wrists and ankles. And then, he said he quote poured into his stomach one and one half ounces of chloroform. So that, at the time of the postmortem examination, the coroner's physician would be warranted in reporting that the death was accidental, what?

So once he'd burned the body, Holmes threw things around and ransacked the room to make it look like an accidental explosion had caused damage to the remains. Then he went further, and he had, like, a detailed narrative to the scene. He broke the bottle of chloroform and benzene that he had used, then left an extinguished match near the spilled liquid. So it made it look like Peitzel had attempted to light his pipe too close to the flammable liquids and caused an explosion.

That actually is like, like I would never think to do something like that. It kind of worked, it makes sense like it was a.

This is what I mean, like, he's a fucking idiot, but he's, but he's cunning, but unfortunately, he's smart when it comes to fucking terrible shit, street smarts.

Yeah, now, with Peitzel dead and murdered and the scene looking to be an accident. He rushed back to the apartment and told Georgiana that he closed the deal on the copiers and they would be leaving for Indianapolis immediately. So he'd already set that, that whole thing up, like, Oh, I close that deal that I told you about yesterday, and in his mind he's like, Yeah, I close the deal.

He also also told her that if anyone asked, she should tell them that they were bound for Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. OK, and he explained this by saying that the St. Louis, St. Louis stuff wasn't fully settled. And if too many people knew where they were, he could be arrested again.

MM Hmm, so off the. And she was like, OK, so off. They went that evening and they boarded the 1025 p..m. train to Indianapolis. You have to imagine she probably was scared of him.

Oh, for sure, and that's probably why she didn't. If she didn't question things, she wasn't going to ask. She was just like, you know what, I don't want to be part of this.

Let me keep my nose clean now. Two days later, Peitzel's body was discovered by Eugene Smith, who was a local inventor in the area. Who'd been in to talk to and see B..f. Perry Peitzel a week or so earlier. Now, he had stopped in to speak with Perry a few times since. The man had opened the patent laboratory. And he was really excited because they had kind of talked about him making money off of some of his inventions.

Now they're going to patent some of them. So the morning of September 4th, he tried to walk into the Patent office to speak to him, but the door was locked. This was strange to him because it was during working hours, so he called the police, They sent Officer George Lewis and he broke down the door.

He found Benjamin Peitzel's rotting body on the second floor of the apartment. And as far as anyone knew, B..F. Perry was last seen alive on Saturday, September 1st. That's when the last people had seen him alive besides Holmes.

I think it was a delivery boy that had brought a message that day, that was the last person who had seen him.

That message that was brought to him, it's like even worse. Because that was a telegram, they believe, from Carrie Peitzel informing him of Wharton's illness. So they think the last person to see him besides Holmes was that little message, boy, the Telegram boy, that Telegram was the real Telegram, saying that Wharton was sick. Oh, no.

It's just like, really sad, because he was trying to get home to that child. Peitzel was discovered, quote lying on his back on the floor, with his right hand clasped over his heart and what appeared to be blood about his head. Given the way that the scene looked to detectives, it was pretty much assumed that he had been holding in his right hand a bottle of benzene and was in the act of lighting his pipe. When a terrible explosion occurred, knocking him to the floor, the body was brought in for an autopsy and the coroner, he was not so sure.

He could not identify the cause of death. He was like, I can't say for sure what this cause of death is. I feel like it could be something else. Why? why did he pour chloroform into his stomach?

I think it was like, I don't know if it was, because it meant like it would look like he inhaled the chloroform. When the when that happened, he did it too close to the liquids. OK, or maybe he was trying to make it look like a suicide as well.

Like, maybe it would muddle the findings a little bit, OK, there was an inquest in the corner, Dr. William Scott testified. Quote I went to the house expecting to find a man burned to death or blown to death by an explosion.

Instead, we found the face discolored and distorted. Or full of pools. The odor was terrible, his tongue was swollen and stuck out of his mouth and red fluid issued from his mouth. Any little pressure on the stomach or over the chest here would cause this fluid to flow more rapidly. It just didn't make sense to him as it was being presented as an accident.

Right? He said. The state of the room didn't really jive with him either. He thought it was very staged, didn't look like an explosion caused everything, he said. It looked like somebody had just thrown shit around, yeah.

But it was the chloroform in the stomach that actually set off the most alarm bells that I had a feeling, because it's just random as fuck. So yeah. So, as a coroner, he was aware that if Pitezel had ingested the chloroform before his death. The harsh chemical would have caused a lot of irritation to the stomach lining, but when the stomach contents was observed, there was no irritation. That's because it was put in his body after his death, and it was clear.

Now, Scott couldn't be certain what specifically had caused the man's death because it was so badly disfigured. But they were pretty sure it had happened suddenly and was not the result of an explosion. Now, despite this testimony by this coroner, the jury delivered, quote, a verdict of death from inhalation of flames or from some poison, the character of which is unknown. I can understand why the jury was confused, because there's just so many elements to that to understand well. And what's worse is, his body was held at the morgue for a few days, and then it was just buried in an unmarked Potter's grave. Oh, because nobody knew that he was Pitezel.

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So at the time, it's kind of seeming like his plan is going to work here because he's going to be able to use this, right, you know? Yeah. So while this was all happening and a jury is trying to determine whether this man they know as Bf Perry was murdered or killed by accident. Holmes is on his way back from Indianapolis to St.

Louis, St. Louis now, where he's going to meet Carrie Pytel, because, remember, she was there, she was trying to get Pytel back to St. Louis St.

Louis, and she knows about the plan now. Unfortunately for Holmes, word of Pytel's death had reached the family before he could get there to break the news, and he found Carrie Pytel inconsolable. Oh, like, inconsolable, I can't imagine.

Now Holmes decided because people knew that, like he was using that alias, so it was getting around people back home. Yeah. So Holmes decided to just lie to Carrie and insisted that her husband was actually alive and that he was in hiding. Until they were going to be able to get that $10,000, so he was basically like, No, this is no, the plan is going in court.

Like, don't worry that we want you to believe that it was him, that's the whole plan. But they said we need to get the $10,000 first. Once we get that from the insurance, then he'll come out of hiding and then, he said. But in order to do that, someone has to go to Philadelphia and claim the body as Benjamin Pytel.

OK, he's so fucking evil. He is giving her hope that she's going to get find her husband again. Yeah, now. Carrie was concerned about traveling to St.

Louis, from St. Louis, St. Louis to Philadelphia. Because her child is sick. And also he didn't want her to go there because that could muddle some things. So he was like, who can we get?

That can be like a little bit down a level from Carrie, a little more innocuous, so Holmes convinced her to send in Pytel's teenage daughter, Alice. I knew he was going to use a kid, and he even claimed that the girl could stay with his cousin.

No, Minnie Williams, No, no, no, no, no, she's dead, yep.

Well, she was in Philadelphia, No. This way, he could still stay on track to get the money from insurance. But in the meantime, Jepta Howe the Gray. Why are there so many characters?

The morally gray lawyer, the morally corrupt Jora Howe. He started drafting documents that would give him power of attorney over Carrie. That would be necessary to claim the entire $10,000 for Holmes, not a P..O...A.

Nope, so. Six days after his death, Fidelity Mutual Insurance received a telegram reporting that the dead man from Philadelphia, known as B..F. Perry, was probably Benjamin Pytel. I mean, this is so, how did you even fucking research? It's insane.

And they said, Benjamin Pytel has actually a large insurance policy with your insurance company. So the death was still looked at as suspicious. So agents at Fidelity Mutual were like, we would like a little more information before we pay out this policy, right? So they looked further and saw that the only other name listed on the policy was H..H.

Holmes, his actual name, his actual name, so they went about finding Holmes, and to do this, they sent a letter to Myrta in Wilmette.

His wife, Myrta's still alive, she's still alive, right? OK, I don't know what happened there. But after a little bit of a delay, Holmes did get in touch with Fidelity Mutual.

I don't know if Myrta just called him and was like, Hey, I just got this letter. Was he like, Do you know it? Was he keeping in touch with her? I think he was slightly. She was still under the guise that they were married.

Only a little bit. I think it was one of those things where it was like, they, she probably knew that he was gone. Yeah, but like, it's weird.

OK, but after my oh my, yeah, exactly my oh my is correct.

Now, Holmes replies to the Fidelity insurance company and tells the agent that he'd only just learned that the body was in Philadelphia. So he said, I'll go there immediately and we will identify this man and get back to you. OK now again, Holmes wouldn't allow Carrie to identify the body, and Carrie really didn't want to leave her kid anyway.

And she probably wouldn't have wanted to see that body. Yeah, so he told the. He told the insurance company that he she was too ill to come and you know, he was going to have to go.

But they were like, No, you can't just go. And that's when they were like, you need to bring a family member. And he was like, I'll bring Alice. Especially because he's the one listed. So of course he's going to be like, Yeah, that's him, yeah, that's totally fine.

On September 20th, Holmes met Alice Peitzel and Jepta Howe in Philadelphia, and she wrote a letter to Carrie, her mother, later, and she said of meeting Holmes. She referred to him as Mr. Howard, she said. Quote I don't like him to call me babe and child and dear and all such trash. She's like, Fuck this guy. She thought he was a pig.

Yeah, like she knew right away she had his number, yep. A few days later, Alice and Howe, the lawyer, show up at the Fidelity Mutual Office. Holmes joins them there.

And they all provided the agents with like, some, like, notable, like things that would that would basically identify. But yeah, exactly, I was trying to think of a word that would identify this as Benjamin Peitzel. Things of this were like he had a mole on his back, he had a scar on his leg.

He had a twisted fingernail that had occurred out of an accident. Oh, that's interesting, and he had very unusual dentition, he had a lot of spaces in his teeth. Oh, OK.

So a lot of very particular things is dentition just what your teeth look like. Yeah, I've never heard that word, really.

Yeah, it's the way, it's a nice word, it feels like dentition, you have nice dentition over there.

Anything that ends in shun, yeah, I always feel, has a nice like. The body had been exhumed now, and when they got to the cemetery, it had been moved to a shed and was being examined by Dr.

Mattern nice and so. And that happened a lot, that happened a lot with Jack the Ripper case, I know.

I remember you just always being like, Yeah, the body in the shed, yeah, and the coroner's just doing an autopsy in a shed, vibing in the shed, Dr.

Mattern was the other coroner who was with Dr. Scott that did the original autopsy. By that time, his remains were in an advanced state of decomposition. One would think, and they were given the description, the unique marks on the body.

But Mattern insisted the state of the remains kind of made it impossible to positively identify the body at at once. At one point, the doctor couldn't find the big scar that they were talking about that was supposed to be on his leg. Holmes was present for this and he got frustrated and impatient, and he grabbed the leg. Apparently rubbed the flesh so that the burned layer of skin moved away and then revealed the scar.

He's a fucking monster. And then was like, Do you see this is Benjamin Pitezel? We told you? Leg was pissed and was like, Here it is. I figured it out.

Like, Oh my God, who who like, show us that, show us how money hungry you are without doing that.

Who amongst us does that? Not? I not. Even the coroner was willing to do that. He was like, No, OK, but at that point they were like, all right.

And poor Alice being there and having to see that that's her father, yep. And they were like, OK, cool that you think it's him, Alice, what do you think?

You're the determining factor. If you say this is not your father, it's not. She must have been scared. Yeah, so apparently again, Pitezel had that unique set of teeth.

Yeah, so a lot of spaces which were very easily identifiable. And apparently, Dr. Mattern was the only one who actually gave a shit about Alice. And they had to present this body to her and have her look at the teeth. And they said, before doing that, he removed quote as well as he could, everything that was repulsive from the mouth.

And then he asked Alice to look at the teeth, and she said she looked into his mouth. And she told the doctor that the teeth quote appeared to be like her papa's. And then she left the shed immediately. Now, the agents from Fidelity Mutual waited a full day and then they let Alice and Howe know that they found Alice's identification satisfactory. So typically, these kind of claims are very slow and methodical to be processed.

But for good reason. Lawyer Howe there, he appealed to the agents and he said The Pitezel's are very poor, they have a sick kid. They could use the money as soon as possible. Can you? Can you expedite it? Yeah.

So after a little discussion, they agreed to pay the claim immediately. And they took out any of the costs that they had to use to identify the remains. You know, everyone in that Fidelity office was like, what the fuck is going on? They were like, some shit is going down, the break room was popping, it was.

The water cooler was bubbling, the coffee was filled to the brim. They were all like something stinks here. You want to go to the pub later to talk about this shit, seriously?

So right away, a check was written to Carrie Pitezel, but that check was given right to Holmes. And the check was in the amount of nine thousand, seven hundred and fifteen dollars and eighty five cents. Because they took out the costs that they had to use to exhume and identify the body. Back then, that must have been so much, a lot of money. So with that check, Holmes immediately boarded a train for St.

Louis, St. Louis. And he was going to deliver that check to Carrie, but have her immediately give the money back to him. So he wrote a letter to the company also, by the way, and he wrote it as Carrie, thanking them for the prompt payment. And they used that letter and promotional materials for a little while. Oh my God.

Yikes, they used a fucking letter from H..H. Holmes. They had no idea. Oh no.

Now, Holmes's plan had always been to claim the money from the insurance scam and then flee to Europe, right? And that's where he was, you know, none of the creditors, nobody was going to be able to get him there. So it's strange that during this return trip from Philadelphia, he sent a letter to his brother in Gilminton to let him know that he would be returning to Gilminton in the coming days. I didn't even remember that he had a brother.

Yeah, Holmes told his brother he'd been on a trip to Minneapolis in 1888, and when he was there, a train crashed. And for the six years that followed, he'd been suffering from amnesia. Incorrect?

And he said he'd regained his memory and he was planning to return home to just resume his life with Clara and Robbie. What is this about? What? Because he had, like, no, he didn't have any plans to do that, he had no plans to do that.

Was he just bored on a Tuesday? Just be the dick now. When Holmes arrived in St. Louis, St. Louis, with the money from the insurance payout, he gave two thousand five hundred dollars to Jephthah Howe as payment.

I'm surprised he even did that. And he only gave five hundred dollars to Carrie, and he said that the remaining six thousand, seven hundred for himself. Was because her husband had owed him money and had outstanding debts, and that was he was going to take it. What a piece of absolute dung.

Yeah, cow dung, and she just had to accept it, elephant dung, how about that?

Now, what's worse is Carrie's husband Benjamin now has to be in hiding and they have to go get him out of hiding. But he's still in hiding right now. And she's got five kids that she's trying to support that now she has, like, almost no income, doing right.

So she's panicking, she's like, I can't do this, oh, my God. And Holmes is like, you know what? It might be better if I took your 12 year old Nellie and your eight year old Howard. And they could come live with their sister Alice in Indiana for a little while.

And they can be looked after by my cousin Minnie Williams, who's dead until Benjamin comes out of hiding and then you can all rejoin together. So what you're telling me is? He was like, I'm going to kill these kids now. Carrie Pytel agreed, because she probably had no other choice at that point, Yeah.

And on September 27th, she transferred custody of Nellie and Howard to Holmes. And he sent a telegram to Alice in Indianapolis, telling her to be ready to leave the following day. Because they were going to go stay in Indiana, they were going to go stay with Minnie Williams now. On September 28th, Alice met Holmes and her two younger siblings at the train station in Indianapolis, and the four of them went to Cincinnati.

OK, I know now we're in Ohio. Once there, he registered at the Atlantic House under the name Alexander Cook. And he got the kids settled. And then he wired Georgiana and asked that she come to join them all. So he explained that he had come into some money.

Because, remember, Georgiana was staying with some family in Indiana. So he explained that he had come into some money from someone purchasing the land in Fort Worth. OK, I know there's a lot. That's what I mean when I say I'm not cramming everything into one episode because there's enough with just this.

No, there is just enough places, enough people. He's traveling everywhere. Do you see my eyes every now and again? Just like adding it up in my head, like, OK, that's where we are.

And that's why I'm like, it just needs to be consumed in bits so that you can understand where he is at any given time. No, I'm happy about the way that you're doing it. Because I would turn off at some point and just be like, I don't know, that's it. This one's different from Jack the Ripper, obviously, in a lot of ways, but like very layered, Jack, the Ripper was at least like Whitechapel.

Yeah, right, we are in Whitechapel, we're in fucking Massachusetts, then we're in New Hampshire, then we're in Ohio, then we're in Philadelphia, then we're in so many other places.

Colorado, Chicago, Texas, Indiana, Cincinnati, St. Louis. See, what I knew of the H..H. Holmes story was just the murder, just Chicago.

Like, that's all I knew, because he's known as like the Chicago serial killer, but really, he was the everywhere killer he was now. It was at this time that Holmes was becoming really paranoid.

I can. As you can imagine, a lot is being piled on now. And I feel like he let too many people in on this way, too many people. He's done it across way too many states, yeah, he's caused way too many wires to cross.

He's been in jail a few times now. Yeah, he's starting to crack a little bit. And, according to Adam Seltzer, who we linked that source in the in the show notes. Holmes claimed that he received tips that detectives were on his tail right and it was starting to get to him.

I don't know how much he knew, whether he was, you know, just operating purely out of paranoia, or he was actually, like, had the facts. But he was being pursued by a lot of different agencies. So, and now the Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company was added to that list. Because now they were like, something's awry here now. What made them feel that way? So I'll tell you.

So in early October, the lead detective with the Fidelity Mutual Insurance Company W.

E Gary got a telegram. It's not a telegram, not a telegram. This telegram was from Lawrence Harrigan, who is the chief of the St. Louis.

St. Louis Police.

This telegram from the Chief of Police was letting him know that a prisoner in St. Louis, St. Louis, had come forward with information that basically alluded to the fact that the Fidelity insurance company had recently been defrauded in a big way. I knew that motherfucker was going to come forward and try to get some shit off his 25 year sentence.

Yeah, right, it was from Marion Hedspeth, Holmes cellmate. Why would you not think like, if you're going to tell anybody, tell somebody with like, three years? So they have something to look forward to, but this guy's got nothing to lose.

He doesn't give a shit and everything to gain because he's giving information, thinking like, Oh, let me help you out and get a couple of years off my sentence. Yep, and the letter? The Telegram gave all the details of a scheme that Holmes had told him about how they were going to fake Pite's cell's death for money. And at the time, he had offered Hedspeth $500 for his part in it, which would be to recommend an attorney of ill repute.

Which he did. Hedspeth claimed that he really didn't think Holmes would attempt it. He thought he was just like all talk, bluffing. But then, a few weeks later, his lawyer, Howe, told him Quote that he had never heard of a finer or smoother piece of work. And that he was sure to work, and it was sure to work.

And that Howard H.

H. Holmes was one of the smoothest and slickest man that he had ever heard tell of. So Howe was already singing his praises, like weeks later. So Marion Hedspeth likely felt compelled to inform authorities of this. Just to get something out of it, obviously.

He was also salty because he was never given his $500.

And it seemed to him like every one of the schemers had just got what they needed from him and then abandoned ship. Right? He's like, I got snacks to buy on this commissary, so he was out to fuck them over.

But detectives did believe him and the details he gave. And the superiors at Fidelity Mutual, they thought, actually that Hedspeth may be lying. And a few days had passed before they finally were willing to believe this. And that they were like, you know what we're going to give W..e. Gary, the detective for Fidelity Insurance.

Thank you. They're going to give him approval to pursue Holmes. But it took a few days for them to, like, investigate it because they had just paid this out. They don't want to believe that they just got fucked over. Yeah, that's a lot of money.

They looked into it and they were like, I think this guy is telling the truth. Yeah, what'd you say? It was like $9,000, right? Yeah, it was a lot of money.

It was almost 10.

It was actually almost 10, it was $9,700, I think somewhere in there round up. But Holmes had been lucky that his previous issues with the law were under so many aliases.

And there had been so much time between them that they were kind of tough to connect the dots. But this scheme was so fresh and so big that it was much easier to trace, and he had left too many missing pieces. So now Detective Gary is on Holmes's tail and he....

Why is Detective Gary so funny? Detective Gary is hilarious. I think all I can think of is Gary from below deck. Yeah, no, any like Mr. Gary. like, that's Detective Gary.

It just doesn't sound, right? But now Holmes is having to shuttle the Peitzel children all over Cincinnati for the remainder of this time. Yeah, and then he ships them to Indianapolis for the first few weeks of October, and in Indianapolis, Holmes and Georgiana checked into some like very fancy like swanky hotel.

Like, penthouse situation, yeah. And they had the Peitzel children at a hotel down the block, and they registered them as the canning children when they put them in the hotel. Weird. A few days later, he moved them again, this time to the Circle House, which was another hotel in the city.

He's like shuttling them everywhere. They must have been like, what the fuck is going on? They were so con like, They were like, what the fuck is happening here? Like, I just want to go home.

And Alice, I feel like, was on to him a little bit. Oh, she was like, What the fuck is going on?

Now, even though he was on the run from many, like law enforcement agencies, many.

A multitude. He made time during this whole thing to attempt another scam. What? While they were in Indianapolis, Holmes and Georgiana began touring properties with a realtor.

This realtor thought that they were a couple who wanted to buy a house in the city, yeah. Holmes had told the realtor that his wife had inherited some property and they were planning to trade the title to that property for something in Indianapolis that he could then sell for cash. OK, this sounded insane to me when I read it.

But apparently the bank had already approved this exchange. Like, in reality, weird. The problem, however, was that the offer had an October 10th expiration date. OK.

And the property wouldn't have officially been accessible to Georgiana until her 25th birthday, which was not until October 17th. Oh, shit, so. Holmes abandoned the realtor and never went through with the plan. But he was planning to try to get go through with this before it was going to be legal and after he was arrested, the realtor. Who who scammed here? told the Press Quote Holmes was a good looking fellow, but had a kind of uneasy look in his eyes.

So he tried to fuck over this other person. While he's on the run, like the heat is on, the heat is like the heat is on, it's more than on. Yeah, it's real on.

Well, while he toured the city with Georgiana trying to set up some other schemes, the Peitzel children were just spending their time in a hotel room alone. That's so sad. And during this time, they were writing daily to their mom. In St. Louis at St.

Louis and they were concerned because they never received anything back. And on October 6th, at one point, Alice wrote to her mother and said, Why don't you write to me? I've not got a letter from you since I have been away, and it will be three weeks day after tomorrow. Carrie Peitzel had been writing to her children, She had written back to every single letter.

Holmes just kept them what he just kept them from the kids, just to fuck with the kids. Why would you even do that? Because he's an actual monster?

Evil, yeah. So in October, they're mourning the loss of their father being shuttled to all these new places, and now they think their mom just abandoned them. Yeah, holy fuck.

It's awful. He is like, truly torturing them, and I feel as though it's going to escalate. Yeah, I just can't believe that's their last days, yeah.

Holmes went to a reality, a real, why can I never say reality, reality, realty, realty, realty.

Why can I not say that word that tripped me up in the last one? I did, Yeah, right.

Some people say realtor, but it's just realtor, realtor, realty, that's what it is, realty.

A realty office? It's losing all meaning, but it really is. I don't know. Sorry everybody. I don't know why my, like, my brain knows it, but my mouth won't say it.

Say, a real estate office, a real estate office in Irvington, which is a suburb of Indianapolis. Yeah, and he started making arrangements to rent a house called the Lancaster House. It was a small cottage on Union Avenue.

I would not rent that house. He got very hostile, which was rare for him to do in public. Because, remember, he is Mr. cool, calm and collected now at this point. Because he was demanding the keys be given to him now, and he was like, I'm in a big hurry, I need them now.

I'm not going through any of the shit I have to go through. Like, lost his mind. And the realtor later said. Quote I remember the man very well because I did not like his manner. I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.

That's amazing. Respect your elders, I'm old, I don't know why he was mean. But a few days later, Holmes had a large oak stove delivered to Lancaster House because he did rent it. And also dropped off a case of surgical tools in town to be sharpened.

A large oak stove and sharpened surgical tools. That sounds normal, so everything's fine. Oh no. In the afternoon, on an early like in early October, Holmes brought Howard Peitzel in his trunk of belongings.

Howard is the 10 year old son, you know, belongings to the Lancaster House, and, according to his confession later, they arrived a little after 8 p...m. and Holmes called Howard into the house. And he told him that he had to go to bed at once, and then he said he gave him the first, the fatal dose of medicine.

And he said, he, he like, poisoned him essentially, and he said, as soon as he had ceased to breathe, I cut his body into pieces that would pass through the door of the stove. And by the combined use of gas and corn cobs. And proceeded to burn it with as little feeling as though it had been some inanimate object, what? That was his own confession.

That's a 10 year old. I poisoned this 10 year old boy and I cut up his body and then put him in a stove. And I felt such little feelings about it that he might have been. Well, it's been an inanimate object. Oh my God.

Yeah.

So it's most likely that he had poisoned his food to kill him. That's what everybody thinks, poor sweetie. And when they searched the property after he was arrested, they found a bottle of cyanide, an amount of wolf's bane, and there was also.

He had purchased a cocaine solution from a pharmacist a few days earlier, once he had disposed of Howard's body. He went back at the train station by 9 p...m. So that all happened within an hour, according to him. And he got his mail and he boarded a train for Chicago so the next day, and I don't know what he did there. But he returned to Indianapolis the next day. And he got Georgiana and the other children and put them on separate trains.

Georgiana on one, children on the other, bound for Detroit. We're going to Michigan, so when they were going to Michigan, like, why are we going another place? When they arrived in Detroit, Holmes checked himself and Georgiana into the hotel Normandy under the name G. Howell and wife.

I love that back then, you didn't need a name as a wife, you were just wife, yeah, and then once you're like, we don't need your name.

And they went a few blocks away and checked Nellie and Alice into the new Western hotel. Then, the next day, they moved them to a boarding house run by a woman named Ray May Ralston. Holmes was definitely starting to fray at the seams, starting to come apart, the children were starting to lose it. Being alone all the time, not understanding where Howard is now, not understanding what's going on. He's dragging them all over the place, leaving them all alone for days at a time.

Alice wrote letters to her grandparents, and on October 14th, she wrote We have to stay in all the time. Howard is not with us right now. All that Nell and I can do is draw, and I get so tired sitting that I could get up and fly almost.

I'm getting so homesick that I don't know what to do. I wish they had just run away now. A day after she sent that letter, Carrie and Wharton Pytzel Wharton was the younger son that was sick. They arrived in Detroit and checked into a hotel just a few blocks away from the boarding house, where they didn't know that Alice and Nellie were staying. Holy shit.

Holmes had written Carrie, telling her to come there where she could finally be reunited with Benjamin and her children. Oh my God, when they got there, what the fuck is wrong with this guy? He's fucking awful.

When they got there, he goes, Oops, sorry, can't reunite you yet. Because it's like too heavily populated here, so you're going to have to wait a little longer. Oh my god, he is just fucked up. A few days after coming to Detroit. He rented a small house on East Forest Avenue, which he told the landlord was for his sister and her children. Which he was probably going to pass Georgiana and the kids off. He then dug a four foot by three foot hole in the backyard.

OK, neighbors noticed. So this was clearly where he was intending to kill Alice and Nellie. No one is sure why, but he decided not to murder the girls there at this time. Instead, he told Carrie Pitezel that Benjamin was waiting for her now in Toronto, Canada, and she should travel there.

And he was going to, and so he sent Alice and Nellie back to Indianapolis, where they were going to be waiting for them. When she and Benjamin returned from Canada, Canada, OK, this is when Carrie was like, what the fuck is going on? and she was concerned.

And this is when she was like, Where the fuck are my kids? like, Where are they? And he was like, Don't worry, they're being cared for by a widow lady. But he wouldn't give any more detail. Yeah, that sounds totally fine.

Now, as all of this is unraveling and he's losing complete control of this situation, clearly. I also just feel like he's going insane. Oh, he is. It seems like he's going mad because he's just doing like. None of this makes any sense. It's chess moves that make no sense at all.

He's just sending her up there, he's sending, he doesn't know what he's. He was just definitely lateral moves.

Yeah, and he was definitely intending to kill Nellie and Alice in that house in Detroit, but then he didn't. I don't know why. I wonder if one of the neighbors, like, came by or something, I wonder if a neighbor saw him digging.

You're right. And was like, Hey, what's that about? and he was like, Oh, nothing. But Detective Gary had enlisted. That's so funny.

And Detective Gary is like the real MVP here because he got the Pinkerton Detective Agency on the case. And they had made a lot of progress in finding homes. They'd narrowed him down to the Detroit area, and this is why I believe maybe he left like me. It could have been that he was planning to kill them or the police were coming in. Hot, but I think they came a little hotter.

Sure, I don't know how aware he became of that situation, but the but thinking now, like the fact that he moved so quickly out of there. I think he may have been tipped off somehow, and that's probably why he abandoned the whole plan. Maybe he saw some kind of police presence.

He could have, so. They made it to Canada, and as soon as they got there, Holmes checked Kerry and Wharton into the Union House under the name Mrs. Adams. Then he disappointed them again.

And he said, Oh, you just miss Benjamin. He said Benjamin had received word of detectives looking for him in the city and he had actually fled to Montreal. Now. Oh, my God. And Holmes then returned to the train station. He got Alice and Nellie at the train station and brought the girls to the house he'd rented on Vincent Street.

And he told the neighbors he had rented this one for his sister as well, who was going to be coming from Hamilton, Ontario. And this is a different house than the one he dug. Yeah, that's true, OK? The house had been rented on a six month lease, and the neighbors later told investigators they thought it was real strange that the man had rented the entire house. Yet he only had a bed frame, a trunk and a mattress a dog wouldn't even sleep on.

Oh, what does that mean? So, Holmes then got Georgiana at the train station and they went off to Niagara Falls, where they stayed one night in the Imperial Hotel. Before they went back to Toronto and checked into the Palmer House hotel. As H. Howell and wife, Oh, the Palmer House is super haunted there you go, probably from him.

Probs so. On October 24th, Holmes went to the house on Vincent Street, where he put Nellie and Alice. He borrowed a shovel from a neighbor neighbor, telling him, I'm going to fix a place in the cellar to hold potatoes. The fuck. And he went into the basement of the house and dug a fresh grave.

No, after he did this, he went back to Carrie Pitesel and told her, Oh, shit, Howard's not there yet. And he said, Oh, you got to go to Ogdensburg, New York, because Benjamin had fled there. Now, at this point, I'd be like, you're not sending me another fucking place. But he put Carrie on the train.

She also misses her husband, so she's just trying to get her family back together. God puts Carrie on the train and he went back to the Vincent Street house. Holmes was, strangely, when he confessed to this, he was less sensational than he normally is.

Really, the story of Nellie and Alice's murders is less dramatic and less like. He was less excited to tell this story. I feel, huh? In his confession, he said he had taken a large trunk to the house on Vincent Street.

He'd cut a small hole in the trunk, large enough for a hose to fit. Uh-huh, this is pretty awful. It sounds like it will be. He wouldn't explain how, but he got both girls in the trunk, alive, alive.

And he, quote, ended their lives by connecting the gas with the trunk, so he gassed them in a trunk. Holy fuck. Once they were killed, he opened the trunk and he found them. In his words, quote their little blackened and distorted faces, Oh my God.

So he then took them out of the trunk, he stripped them of their clothing, then buried their bodies in the grave in the basement in the Vincent House. Oh my God. And he said, quote Without a particle of covering save the cold Earth, which I heaped upon them with fiendish delight. That's the only time he got like.

He just gassed two children to death and two little girls buried them in fiendish delight. Mm-hmm. I don't know how he dies, but I hope they did something brutal to him well. And what's worse is, so you listen to that story and you're like, That's fucking terrible, yeah.

But Adam Selser, he says, there's a problem with that story, and he said he did kill these little girls, of course. But that house on Vincent Street was not set up for gas, and so, he says the claim of poisoning them with gas was probably not true. Unless he did it somewhere else.

OK, and then what's worse is that he was like, he probably poisoned their food, like he did Howard, but then he just told this story. That's even worse, which is even worse.

And he's like, I don't, no matter what. He killed, brutally killed two little girls and buried them in the basement, right? But the fact that he is making up a worse story from something that's even gross, like still gross, is like, you just wanted to tell that story, like, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Well, I wonder if it's like, almost he can't now that he's in prison and he knows he's got God. He can't kill anybody anymore. So now he's killing people differently in his mind, yeah, like he's living vicariously through his own fantasies, exactly just going with it.

It's like, Wow, dude, that is, yeah, what the fuck did he have? Yeah, like, seriously, what was going on with him?

Now, the next day, he returned the shovel to the neighbor. And then he stuffed the girls clothing and any belongings they had into the chimney and put a fire in the fireplace to try to burn them all. So sad. But unfortunately for him, he'd packed the items too tightly into the chimney. So large pieces of clothing were still in there even after the fire went out. Oh, damn.

And he didn't realize it, no, also, the stupid idiot hadn't even been very thorough when he gathered up their belongings. Because he had ended up leaving several of Alice's belongings, including a bag, out in the apartment when he left. And you can't imagine she even had that many belongings at that point, exactly.

By the time the new tenants arrived a few days later, oh my God, they found the random clothing scraps and remnants left behind. But by this point, Holmes was back and he had already left Toronto and he wasn't coming back. And is he sorry? Is he the landlord of that house or no?

He just rented it, No, he just rented it just to do that. Now, eventually, this man would tell so many stories about the missing children. It would be almost like it's like it's something out of fiction, he would say. Benjamin, Benjamin, the father, was in South America.

He told Carrie The kids were in South America, he told them Now they were in Chicago, in Detroit, they were in England.

They were anywhere else. But reality. He was just driving her insane. Yeah, he was trying to drive her insane. And that is where we're going to leave. Part four Fuck you.

I did not see that coming because what?

Because he should have stayed in Canada and he didn't, OK. I'm happy to know that once he returns to the United States, that's when shit is going to go down for him. And I don't want to start the going down process. I would like, I would like episode five to just be us all high fiving in the fact that this motherfucker gets got.

Oh, I can't wait to hear how, because I actually, I don't have any idea. Yeah, how he gets caught or what happens to him after he's caught, so this is him, he's leaving Toronto.

He's leaving Canada, he's coming back to the United States like a big fucking idiot. Yeah, he has killed kids in Canada, he's killed kids in the United States.

He has killed women in the United States, he's now killed a man in the United States, and he's coming back. And the Pinkerton Detective Agency, guys, they are on his fucking tail. I'm so excited.

They're right here. He would have been much better off staying in Canada. Oh, thank goodness he didn't. Thank goodness, he's a fucking idiot. I'm so glad he is.

Oh so, we're going to talk about his arrest, we're going to talk about the trial, we're going to talk about the wild confession. And we're going to talk about the theories that he is Jack the Ripper, which I don't agree with, but we'll talk about it.

But the theories, when you put them out there, you can understand why people are interested. They are slightly compelling. OK, but very interesting. And we're going to talk about his execution. Ah, it's all coming in part five.

It's all happening. Sheena Shea The end, The climax of this series is part five. My goodness, yeah, all right.

Well, we hope you keep listening, and we hope you keep it. Weird, but not so weird that you go all around the world doing H..H. Holmes type shit, because, like, don't keep it so weird that you're Detective Gary.

Yeah, just keep it that way in a world full of H.H Holmeses. Be a detective, Gary, and with that we leave you.

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