By Cara J. Spindler

Among the items in the Medler Crime Collection in the Clements Library is Holmes, the, Arch-Fiend, or A Carnival of Crime, the story of a Michigan alumnus who has the dubious distinction of being the first identified serial killer in the United States.

Herman Webster Mudgett (1861-1896) graduated from U-M Medical School in 1884 and moved to Chicago to practice pharmacy. He also began to engage in a number of shady business, real estate and promotional deals under the name "H. H. Holmes."

One of Holmes's partners, Ben Pitezel, took out a life-insurance policy on himself for $10,000 with Holmes as beneficiary. The plan was that Pitezel would "disappear" to Philadelphia and Holmes would produce a false corpse, identify it as Pitezel's and share the payoff with Pitezel's family.

Pitezel disappeared on schedule and Holmes collected the money. But someone tipped off the police about the scheme, and Holmes fled with the Pitezel's eldest daughter.

Telling Mrs. Pitezel that her husband was hiding in a nearby city, Holmes convinced her to follow him, and for months the trio moved separately and together around the United States and Canada, taking the four other Pitezel children with them.

During the group's wanderings Ben Pitezel's body was discovered in Chicago and Holmes was charged with murder. The police then searched a Holmes property in South Chicago, a three-story building he'd ostensibly built as a hotel for visitors to the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. The ground floor of the Holmes Castle, as it was dubbed, contained shops, offices, a hodge-podge of turrets and bay windows, and Holmes's living quarters. It also held, police discovered, concealed staircases, false walls and ceilings, airtight and soundproof rooms, and chutes leading to the basement. And in that basement were two sheet-iron tanks containing human bones and a large furnace, believed to be a crematory.

Meanwhile, still on the run, Holmes dispatched three of the five Pitezel children and hid their bodies.

Aided by Mrs. Pitezel, the police finally captured Holmes/Mudgett. He was tried, convicted and executed for the murders of Ben Pitezel and the three children. While awaiting execution, he received an offer from the Hearst newspaper syndicate to write a confession in which he claimed to have killed 27 people. Investigators could neither confirm nor disprove Holmes's assertion because the contents of the iron tanks and crematory, although recognizably human remains, could not be differentiated.

The Holmes "crime of the century" was also the subject of another work in the Medler Collection, The Holmes-Pitezel Case, a "true detective" story, published in 1896 in Philadelphia "by permission of the district attorney and the mayor."

Cara Spindler '99 was Michigan Today's 1998-99 student intern.