H.H.HOLMES AMERICA'S FIRST(FAKE) SERIAL KILLER

Save your cash on this one,it is busted before it can make it to the big screen...

H. H. HOLMES America’s 

First (Fake) Serial Killer 

by David Kasady and Leaf Garrit 
@http://mileswmathis.com/updates.html

First published November 12, 2018 In 2010, Leo DiCaprio bought the film rights to Erik Larson’s bestselling novel The Devil in the White City, which tells the story of World’s Fair serial killer Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes. He is the “devil” of the book’s title, of course. DiCaprio has tapped long-time collaborator Martin Scorsese to direct the film. This should be your first clue that the H.H. Holmes story is another hoax. Scorsese’s involvement is significant, for reasons I’ll explain later. With this steaming pile of propaganda set to hit movie-goers’ retinas in the next year or two, I decided to read the book and do my own research on H.H. Holmes. Miles briefly touched on the Holmes story in his paper on the Scopes Monkey Trial, but I will offer a fuller treatment of the hoax to really nail the coffin on it. 

All the mainstream sites tell us Holmes killed “up to 200” people before he was caught, tried for the murder of one person, and sentenced to death. Despite historians admitting the 200 number is a complete fabrication, the number has become fixed in the public imagination, and most people – including several coworkers I’ve talked to who have read The Devil in the White City – continue to believe he really murdered that many men, women, and children. 

Let’s linger on this fact for a bit, since it’s really the loose thread that unravels the whole wool fleece. His Wikipedia page states that Holmes had 9 “known victims”, with estimates “from 20 to 200.” But as I just told you, he was tried for the murder of one person – his partner in insurance crime, Benjamin Pitezel – and sentenced to death without any other convictions. Since our country’s laws assume innocence until guilt is proven in a court of law, no one can factually say that Holmes had “9 known victims”. Even Wikipedia immediately backpedals by stating that “only nine could be plausibly confirmed.” Since none of this “plausible confirmation” happened in a court of law, the phrase is meaningless, and the entire story of “America’s First Serial Killer” becomes the story of a single homicide, which, last I checked, does not constitute “serial” murder. 

To be accurate, the entire Wikipedia page needs to be rewritten to remove the word “serial” and state that Holmes had one known victim, and that victim was a man Holmes killed for business reasons. Any mention of Holmes raping, torturing, and dismembering for psychosexual pleasure any women at any time should be removed, since no court of law even tried – much less convicted – Holmes of such crimes. Not to mention there is exactly zero evidence of it to this day. 

In fact, of the 27 murders to which he confessed, several of his victims were still alive at the time of his trial, meaning he lied about killing them. Given that, why would historians assume he was telling the truth about the other murders? We are told that after he was sentenced to death, “Holmes was paid $7,500 ($221,000 today) by the Hearst newspapers in exchange for his confession, which was quickly found to be nonsense.” The real nonsense is that sentence, since a man being sent to the gallows would have little need for a quarter-million dollars, and a newspaper certainly wouldn’t shell out that much money knowing it would be useless to Holmes. 

Here’s another strange fact that tears another giant hole in the fabric of this story: If Holmes confessed to these other murders, the laws of this country would demand that justice be carried out for every victim Holmes claimed to have murdered. If there were truly nine deceased or missing persons, do you think their families would have stood idly by and let Holmes be executed without a full investigation into the fate of their loved ones? Which would have necessitated Holmes being tried for each of those murders, as well. Instead, we find him being tried and quickly sentenced to death for one murder, with no follow-up on any of these other victims. These alleged victims included three of Pitezel’s own children. Shouldn’t Holmes have been tried for their murders along with Pitezel? Four family members die under mysterious circumstances, and they arrest and try a man for the death of one of them? Even Wikipedia says that by the time Holmes was tried for Pitezel’s murder, “it was evident that Holmes had also murdered the Pitezel children.” Evident to whom, the police? If so, wouldn’t they try Holmes for their murders, as well? Even more unbelievable is that Larson tells us none of his victims’ family members filed missing persons reports with the police. From the book: 

About 7 o’clock in the evening Holmes came out of his office and asked two men who were living in the building if they would not help him carry a trunk [containing victim Emeline Cigrand’s body] downstairs.... Mrs. Lawrence later claimed at this point she became convinced Holmes had killed Emeline. Yet she and her husband made no effort to move from the building, nor did they go to the police. No one did. Not Mrs. Lawrence, not Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cigrand, not Ned Conner, and not Julia’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Smythe. (189) 

Seriously? We are led to believe they all assumed the Chicago Police Department was too swamped with the high volume of other missing persons and homicide cases at that time to be of any real help, so they either did nothing or hired private detectives instead. How incredible!

Equally incredible is Holmes’ murder trial, in which he chose to represent himself. This Harper’s article from 1943 tells us that “A journalist noted the spectators’ opinion that the evidence against Holmes really was not strong enough to convict…” But we’ve already been told that “it was evident that Holmes had also murdered the Pitezel children.” So in one version, we’re told his murder of Pitezel and his children was a foregone conclusion, and in another version, they struggled to even convince the court that Holmes killed Pitezel! Since Holmes represented himself, it’s not like they were up against a really good defense attorney. The trial should have been a slam dunk. Then Harper’s says this: 

The case is not wholly satisfactory. To begin with, since Holmes was tried in Philadelphia, no really thoroughgoing investigation ever was made of the crimes for which he is remembered… 

Which pretty much confirms everything I’ve been saying. Nothing about the investigation and prosecution of the Holmes case makes a lick of sense. 

The focal point of the Holmes lore was his “Murder Castle.” This was a block-long hotel he had built in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago and named “The World’s Fair Hotel” to attract the incoming crowds of visitors to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a.k.a. the Chicago World’s Fair. This Murder Castle was where Holmes allegedly tortured and vivisected his hundreds of female victims, yet one of the first things we read on Wikipedia is that “evidence suggests that the hotel portion was never truly open for business.” Explain to me, then, why Larson tells us this: 

The first guests began arriving at Holmes’s World’s Fair Hotel…. When male visitors asked about accommodations Holmes told them with a look of sincere regret that he had no vacancies and kindly referred them to other hotels nearby. His guest rooms began to fll with women, most quite young and apparently unused to living alone. Holmes found them intoxicating. (242) 

I’m not sure how Holmes was intoxicated by hotel guests that never existed, since the hotel was never open. In any event, we see that basic facts about the location of Holmes’ killings are cast into serious doubt, since historians can’t even agree that it was actually a hotel, much less that any murders happened there. 

It also casts serious doubt on the rigorousness of Larson’s research for The Devil in the White City. Larson is an award-winning journalist and “nonfiction” author. You’d expect him to value historical accuracy and primary source material. He himself has stated he does all his own research and has “rejected the idea of trying to imagine or take factual liberties with scenes and conversations from the past, stating that in his work, ‘anything that appears in quote is something that came from a historical document.’” Strange, then, that Larson’s version of the Holmes story borrows heavily from Herbert Asbury’s account in Gem of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld, which itself was based on the tabloids of Holmes’ day and later pulp magazines. Wikipedia admits this: 

Asbury’s account drew heavily on 1890s tabloids and included several claims – such as the “200 victims” figure, Holmes killing Dr. Holton and torture equipment found in the castle – that, according to Adam Selzer, were the products of his own imagination.However, Asbury’s account was a major foundation for later retellings of Holmes, including Larson’s, which quoted several portions of Asbury’s account verbatim. 

Apparently, another author’s fanciful retelling of the Holmes case constitutes a “historical document” to Larson. This means we can pretty much write off the entire narrative framework of Larson’s account, since it’s built on an older version of the Holmes story that was itself based on, well, nothing. 

But who is Adam Selzer? In 2017, he wrote his own version of the Holmes story in his comprehensive biography, H.H. Holmes: The True Story of the White City Devil. Selzer basically denies that Holmes was a serial killer in the popular sense of the term – that is, he didn’t kill for abnormal psychological gratification, but merely out of the practical necessity of protecting his fraudulent business interests. But even Selzer is misdirecting here, since he never questions whether Holmes killed anyone in the first place. Selzer was planted to get you closer to the truth, while reinforcing the essential lie. It’s curious to look at Selzer’s biography, since he has never written anything else like the Holmes biography. He started out writing young adult fiction. In 2010 he published a “paranormal romance” titled I Kissed a Zombie and I Liked It. It’s hard to take this guy seriously, and that’s part of the ruse. The “serious” journalist Larson writes a totally mythical account of Holmes and gets shortlisted for the National Book Award, while the most historically accurate account gets penned by a paranormal teen romance author and part-time ghost tour guide. 

Above is an illustration printed sometime after Holmes’ alleged killings. This wasn’t published in some shady tabloid or pulp magazine, but in the Chicago Tribune. It depicts Holmes’ Murder Castle in elaborate detail, complete with labyrinthine chambers, secret torture rooms, and a dungeon-like crematory fed by chutes where he disposed of the bodies. Larson tells us that open gas lines were installed in many of the rooms so Holmes could incapacitate or kill his victims at the turn of a valve. But back at Wikipedia we read: 

Following the discovery of [Pitezel children] Alice and Nellie’s bodies, in July 1895, Chicago police and reporters began investigating Holmes’ building…. Though many sensational claims were made, no evidence was found which could have convicted Holmes in Chicago. According to Selzer, stories of torture equipment found in the building are 20th-century fiction. 

If the building were really as described in Larson’s book and the above illustration – and given that Holmes was personally linked with at least a dozen missing persons – don’t you think the building would have become a key part of the investigation? Instead, we find reporters given free access to the building and police finding “no evidence,” and all the while nobody thought to photograph anything. Within a month, the building was “mysteriously gutted by fire”, conveniently destroying the non-evidence. In Larson’s account, we read that Holmes at one point took his wife Myrta Belknap’s great-uncle Jonathan Belknap to tour his Murder Castle. His intention was to assure Belknap of his successful business endeavors, since he had asked Belknap for a loan. If the building really resembled the illustration above, do you think Belknap would’ve considered it a successful venture? This was supposed to be a hotel; would you ever build a hotel with hallways leading nowhere and windowless rooms? And why would Holmes risk exposing his demented plans by giving tours of this labyrinthine monstrosity? Clearly it did not look like the newspaper renderings of it, which would surely have tipped off Belknap. 

The truth is that the illustration of Murder Castle is as much fiction as everything else in the Holmes story, and it should raise all sorts of alarms in your head that a respected, “fact-based”, mainstream newspaper like the Chicago Tribune was pushing all these myths about Holmes and his murder-free castle. If you don’t think newspapers still publish fake stories with fake pictures to this day, you need to – as Miles would say -- “check your fluoride dosage.” 

Its location in the quite wealthy Englewood neighborhood is another red flag about the Murder Castle. According to Larson, Englewood residents… …

acquired big houses on streets named Harvard and Yale that were lined with elm, ash, sycamore, and linden and posted with signs barring all but essential wagon traffic. They sent their children to school and went to church and attended meetings of the Masons and forty-five other secret societies having lodges, kingdoms, and hives in the village. (46) 

Englewood was the center of spookiness in Chicago, being home to an incredible 46 secret societies and having streets named after the country’s chief spook schools. This is why they staged the Murder Castle here – it was a project being managed by the chief spooks of Chicago at the time. They were running the project in their backyard. 

Since the Holmes story has come completely unraveled at this point, I’ll just mention in passing a few more absurdities from Larson’s book: 

• Larson says Holmes was well-off by the time he moved to New York as a young man: “He was lying about needing money. The owner of the house in Mooers Forks where he boarded, D.S. Hays, noticed Mudgett often displayed large sums of cash” (44). Yet a few pages later, Larson writes: “Mudgett needed money. Teaching had paid a poverty wage; his medical practice yielded an income only slightly larger. ‘In the fall of 1885,’ he wrote, ‘starvation was staring me in the face.’” Which was it? Was Holmes wealthy or poor? 

• On page 43, we read about one of Mudgett’s early insurance-fraud exploits. His scheme was to procure some cadavers and use them to “prove” the death of an accomplice who had taken out a life insurance policy on himself, naming Mudgett as the beneficiary. We read: 

Mudgett claimed to have gone to Chicago in November 1885 and there to have acquired his “portion” of the bodies. Unable to find a job, he placed his portion in storage and left for Minneapolis, where he found work in a drugstore. He remained in Minneapolis until may 1886, when he left for New York City, planning to take “a part of the material there,” and to leave the rest in Chicago. “This,” he said, “necessitated repacking the same.” 

He claimed to have deposited one package of dismembered cadaver in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse in Chicago. The other accompanied him to New York, where he lodged it “in a safe place.” 

We’re supposed to believe he toted bodies across multiple cities? How did he keep them from decaying and stinking? Why carry out this ridiculous scheme across multiple cities? Why was he “unable to find a job” but elsewhere he’s painted as a charming and successful druggist and businessman? 

• Larson (and Wikipedia) tells us Holmes bought large amounts of chloroform from another druggist to incapacitate his victims: 

A druggist named Erickson recalled how Holmes used to come into his store to buy chloroform…. “I sometimes sold him the drug nine or ten times a week and each time it was in large quantities. I asked him what he used it for on several occasions, but he gave me very unsatisfactory answers. At last I refused to let him have any more unless he told me, as I pretended that I was afraid that he was not using it for any proper purpose.” 

Holmes told Erickson he was using the chloroform for scientific experiments. Later, when Holmes returned for more chloroform, Erickson asked him how his experiments were coming. Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments. (72-73) 

But Holmes was a druggist himself, so it makes no sense that he went to another druggist. He could have bought the chloroform himself at a wholesale rate through his supplier, and it would have avoided raising suspicion by buying large quantities from someone else. And why would Holmes need to buy large quantities of chloroform “nine or ten times a week”? If he only killed 9 to 12 people at most, he surely wouldn’t be blowing through that much chloroform, especially since he allegedly incapacitated most of his victims with gas. Also, Holmes is supposed to be a criminal mastermind who got away with all manner of fraud for years, yet he can’t even keep a simple story straight with his druggist? Give me a break.

Given all this, we can assume Holmes was never really executed. I assumed this even before I read the following on his Wikipedia page: 

In 2017, amid allegations that Holmes had in fact escaped execution, Holmes’ body was exhumed for testing. Due to his coffin being contained in cement, his body was found not to have decomposed normally. His clothes were almost perfectly preserved and his mustache was found to be intact. The body was positively identified as being that of Holmes with his teeth. Holmes was then reburied. 

I wonder if his bowler hat was also perfectly preserved in that slab of cement. The first thing to notice is that it never says who was making these allegations, or on what grounds. Secondly, he allegedly requested his coffin be buried in cement so that looters wouldn’t dig up his body and sell it to medical schools, which is what Holmes himself supposedly did on numerous occasions. But why would Holmes care what happened to his body after he died? And why would the state agree to this request? It would just cost more money and take more time, and he was supposed to be an evil guy anyway, so why honor his request? 

Here’s one idea: they wanted to discourage any skeptics from digging into it (literally). Many people who read about his exploits and followed his trial probably saw right through the absurdity of it, and some may have been bold enough to dig up his gravesite to see if he really died. But what’s all this about exhuming his body in 2017? From the Tribune: 

A judge approved the exhumation of Dr. H.H. Holmes’ grave earlier this year. Descendants requested it for a series called “American Ripper” on the History Channel. Part of the show looked at whether Holmes escaped, and scientists’ findings were revealed in this week’s final episode. 

The show’s star is Holmes’ own great-great-grandson, Jeff Mudgett, who enlists the help of “former CIA operative” Amaryllis Fox to prove that his great-great-grandfather was the same person as Jack the Ripper. I’m not even joking. Jeff Mudgett has even done a  TED talk claiming his ancestor was also the Ripper. If you didn’t already believe TED talks were just another half baked Intel production, you will after watching Jeff Mudgett’s truly awful talk. But there’s a bigger problem here, which is that I’ve already shown there’s zero evidence Holmes was actually a serial killer, much less a psychopathic one. So Jeff is putting the cart way before the horse. He needs to prove Holmes is a serial killer before he can prove he’s Jack the Ripper. For someone who has spent so much time researching his great-great-grandfather, he must know that. (Then there’s the biggest problem of all, which is that Jack the Ripper never existed.) Jeff is probably just keeping up the family business, being a low-ranking member of the ruling Families who was assigned to push the serial killer farce and keep the masses in a constant state of low-grade anxiety and man-hatred. 

Why do that, you ask? Because it’s profitable. In the case of Holmes, it turned out to be profitable in a very specific way. Holmes was arrested in Boston on November 17, 1894, after being tracked there from Philadelphia by – who else? – the Pinkertons. As you know, the Pinkertons were a precursor to the CIA and the Secret Service; they were U.S. Intelligence before there was officially “U.S. Intelligence.” The man responsible for investigating Holmes was Pinkerton detective Frank Geyer. On his Wikipedia page we read:

In 1896, Detective Geyer became an author and inventor. He authored The Holmes-Pitezel Case: a history of the greatest crime of the century and of the search for the missing Pitezel children, which became an instant best seller. Shortly after its release, his “Shutter or Door Fastener” patent application was approved by the United States Patent Office on March 10, 1896.” 

Talk about drumming up your own business! In this book on Geyer, we learn that he was a Freemason. “Author Mark Twain, who lived and worked near Geyer, was also a Mason, as were numerous Philadelphia mayors and officials, like District Attorney George S. Graham, who prosecuted the H.H. Holmes case and later became a congressman.” That would be George Scott Graham, noted for his involvement in several gruesome and highly publicized cases of the day. Speaking of freemasons, the architect of the Chicago World’s Fair, Daniel Hudson Burnham, was also the architect of Chicago’s Masonic Temple Building, one of the first skyscrapers in America. I’ll let you draw the obvious conclusion about all these connections to freemasonry. 

Finally, let’s consider Holmes’ genealogy. Larson’s book blows past Holmes’ childhood in a matter of pages, giving us nothing more than a few “formative” experiences and absolutely no genealogy. This tells me there’s something to hide. And, of course, there is. I started by doing my own genealogical research on Holmes, starting with the obvious clue in his real name: Herman Webster Mudgett. Yes, Holmes was related to the famous Websters, including Daniel Webster. This is where Scorsese comes in, since Wikipedia admits that Scorsese’s wife, Helen Morris, is a direct descendant of Daniel Webster. Now you know why Scorsese was tapped to direct the upcoming Holmes film. It’s all in the family. 

The next clue is his alias, which was also the name of a prominent Boston Brahmin family that included Oliver Wendell Holmes. Doesn’t seem like a smart choice of alias if you’re trying to blend in, does it? Larson even tells us that Mudgett did this knowingly, “borrowing one of the most prominent family names of the time”. If you already suspect Mudgett was secretly related to these prominent Holmes, congratulations. Yes, Mudgett was related to Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through his grandmother, Oliver descended from Massachusetts Governor Simon Bradstreet and his wife, poet Anne Bradstreet, who was the daughter of Massachusetts Governor Thomas Dudley. If you go to famouskin.com, you find that Mudgett was also a direct descendent of Governor Dudley, making Oliver and H.H. 7th cousins once removed. My assumption is that they are more closely related, since many lines in Mudgett’s family tree are scrubbed. Despite that, famouskin.com has managed to find  dozens of genealogical connections between Mudgett and other famous people. The list is daunting, and I strongly encourage you to study it. It includes William the Conqueror (24th great-grandfather), King Edward I (18th great-grandfather), Sir George Downing (1st cousin 9 times removed), King Henry VIII (1st cousin 12 times removed), Megan Markle (4th cousin 4 times removed), Chester Arthur (5th cousin), Mark Twain (5th cousin once removed), John Sargent Pillsbury (5th cousin twice removed), Franklin Pierce (5th cousin twice removed), Gerald Ford (5th cousin thrice removed), First Lady Abigail Adams (5th cousin fve times removed), Barnes & Noble cofounder William Barnes (6th cousin), Apollo astronaut Alan Shepard (6th cousin once removed), George H.W. Bush (7th cousin twice removed), Dick Cheney (also 7th cousin twice removed), Superman actor Christopher Reeve (also 7th cousin twice removed), Kelsey Grammer (7th cousin thrice removed), First Lady Edith Roosevelt (8th cousin), Richard Nixon, Humphrey Bogart, Dick Clark, Mitt Romney, James Dean, James Taylor, Amy Poehler, Bill Gates, Prince William, Tom Selleck, Chevy Chase, and the list goes on and on. Best of all, Holmes is the 24th great-grandson of Andronikos Komnenos. Yes, that’s right folks, America’s First Serial Killer was a crypto-Jewish Komnene! 

I must take a minute to address the obvious question: why are the powers-that-be allowing famouskin.com to post all these family connections among the rich and powerful? Because famouskin.com is actually working in their favor. Most of the family connections are relatively distant, being fourth cousins at best. So you are led to believe these connections are incidental, the way any ordinary Joe might stumble upon the occasional prominent ancestor in his genealogy. But we should assume they are hiding much closer connections among all these people, including connections to all the British peers that keep coming up in Miles’ research. The lack of any relations to barons, earls, or lords in Holmes’ famouskin.com page is a glaring omission, since we know that Pierce, Adams, Cheney, Barnes, Nixon, Clark, Dean, Taylor, Bush, Gates, etc. are all surnames of European nobility, and many of them crypto-Jewish. 

We can assume Holmes was closely related to English nobility, since Larson gives us this little inside joke on page 165, when he tells us Holmes once confided to his alleged victim Emeline Cigrand that “he was even the son of an English lord, a fact he had confided in strictest secrecy.” We get another clue on page 200, when Larson describes Holmes’ first encounter with one of his wives, Minnie Williams: “When Holmes met Minnie, he was traveling on business under the alias Henry Gordon and found himself invited to a gathering at the home of one of Boston’s leading families.” Larson never cares to reveal which leading family this was, but we may assume it was one of the Brahmin families, all of whom were from the peerage. Larson also neglects to explain how Holmes found himself at this home, since he was supposed to be a nobody from a poor family. We do know that Holmes was related to these Boston Brahmins through several lines, including the Holmes, Adams, Appletons, Coffins, Downings, Dudleys, Websters, and Welds. So that’s how he “found himself invited” to this family gathering. He was a fellow family member.

As for being the son of an English lord, his father is given as Levi Horton Mudgett, a “farmer.” Those two photographs above are tagged as Levi on the internet. First, the photo on left, showing both Holmes’ parents, is an obvious fake. They look ridiculous, as if they’re playing dress-up or posing for one of those old-timey photos you get at the state fair. It’s clearly a fake. In the photo on the right, the man does not match the man in the other photo at all. The biggest clue is his left ear, which sticks way out, while in the other it looks oddly crimped. The man’s face, especially his jawline, is also much broader. Aside from a mustache and a sort of grim look, they’re nothing alike. Neither of these photos show Holmes’ real parents. 

Levi was supposed to be a farmer, though some sites give his occupation as a painter. Since his mother was a Prescott, from the same family as Prescott Bush, I highly doubt he was either of those things. In fact, he may have been in the peerage. We do fnd one Mudgett there, Mary Mudgett, born 1797. Levi’s grandmother was also Mary Mudgett, born 1776, maiden name Morrill. Her mother-in-law was Mary Smith Mudgett, daughter of Richard and Mary Smith. What’s curious is that Mary of the peerage married John Smith, and their daughter married Jacob Merrill – which looks a lot like Morrill. Her great-granddaughter, Doris May Rita Sanders, married Gordon Arnold Markle. This is how Holmes is related to the current Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle. But why would Meghan’s ancestors, all the way to her 4th great grandmother Mary Mudgett, be listed in the peerage? Unless she has always been in the peerage. (Hint: she has.) 

Holmes was born in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Gilmanton is in Belknap County. Here we have more evidence Mudgett was from a more prominent family than we’re led to believe, since his second wife was Myrta Belknap. Her genealogy is scrubbed, but we may assume she was from the prominent Belknap family that gave Belknap County its name. We’re told they first met in Minneapolis, but that seems to be a lie to cover up both her and Holmes’ ties to Belknap County’s wealthiest families. Gilmanton was named after the prominent Gilman family, related to the Dudleys, Leavitt's, and Coffins. We’ve already seen that Holmes is both a Dudley and a Coffin. He’s also related to the Gilmans through the Leavitts, who married with the Scribner's of Holmes’ ancestry. These are likely the same Scribner's of Scribner’s Sons publishing house. He’s also tied to the Gilmans through his step-grandmother, who was Judith Edgerly Gilman. We learn more of Holmes’ Gilman relatives through Winthrop Sargent Gilman, from the same family after whom Gilmanton was named. (Holmes was a Winthrop and Sargent too). Wikipedia tells us “his ancestors were among the most prominent early settlers” and his father Benjamin Ives Gilman “graduated in the first class of Phillips Exeter Academy.” Phillips Exeter is still one of the top spook schools in the U.S., where all the ruling Families send their next generation. A look at some of its earliest alumni confirms that Holmes was related to all the top families: John Taylor Gilman (Governor of New Hampshire), Dudley Leavitt (publisher and writer); David Morril (another Governor of New Hampshire); Daniel Webster; Benjamin Prescott (another Governor of New Hampshire); Thomas Coffin (Idaho congressman); and Winfield Scott Edgerly (U.S. Army Brigadier General). All names we’ve already seen. Other matches between the surnames in Holmes’ family tree to  Phillips Exeter alum include Adams, Bond, Dunbar, Flanders, Gordon, Marshall, Price, Sanborn, Smith, and Quincy. Another notable Phillips Exeter alum was Massachusetts Congressman Henry Bacon Lovering, son of John Gilman Lovering of New Hampshire. Holmes’ first wife was Clara Lovering. A few generations back, Henry Lovering’s ancestor is John Prescott Lovering. So Holmes and Clara were related. 

Holmes’ connection to President Arthur is noteworthy, since Arthur’s daughter Ellen married Charles Downing Pinkerton, whose wife Sarah was first cousins with President Harrison. We’ve already seen the Downings in Holmes’ ancestry, and now we find the Pinkertons too. So Holmes was “arrested” by his own relatives. 

For another fun twist, we find the name Prendergast in Holmes’ genealogy. The other major hoax event surrounding the Chicago World’s Fair was the assassination of Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison two days before the close of the fair. This resulted in the closing celebration of the fair being canceled and replaced by a large public memorial service for Harrison. The assassin? Patrick Eugene Prendergast. What a coincidence! By the way, Mayor Harrison’s mother was nee Russell. That name will come up again shortly. 

For yet another fun twist, we find that Holmes and the architect of the Chicago World’s Fair, Daniel Burnham, are related. Holmes’ 3rd great-grandmother was Margaret Low, married c.1723 in Ipswich, Massachusetts. From where do the Burnhams of Daniel’s ancestry hail? Ipswich, of course. If you follow them back, you find Daniel’s 3rd great-grandfather having a sister (a great aunt of Daniel’s) named Anne Burnham Low. She married John Low II of Ipswich, who had a sister named Margaret. My guess is this is the same Margaret Low in Holmes’ line. Low, by the way, is a common Jewish surname, based on the Hebrew word for lion. Variants include Loew and Loeb. Remember Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy Jewish college students who killed a 14- year-old boy in Chicago 30 years after the Holmes affair? Like Holmes, Loeb also graduated from the University of Michigan. Same school, same family. 

Since the majority of The Devil in the White City actually follows Burnham and the development of the World’s Fair rather than Holmes, I decided to do a bit more research on Burnham. His father-in-law was Vice President over the Chicago stock yards, which was basically the biggest industry in Chicago at the time and what it was primarily known for. The stock yards were owned by the Vanderbilts. Daniel’s father was named Edwin Burnham. There’s another, well known Edwin Burnham who fathered Frederick Russell Burnham, a British intelligence agent who started the scouting movement. That middle name should tip you off – his mother was a Russell, and his first cousin was Charles Russell, cofounder of the NAACP.

Charles was known as the “father of the muckrakers” for his journalistic attacks on capitalism. Lest you think he was a genuine critic of capitalism, his “solution” to the evils of capitalism was socialism, and he joined the Socialist Party in 1908. We know from Miles’ research that Marxism/socialism was a fake movement manufactured by the Industrialists and has been one of their most successful means of undermining criticism against themselves. This should also tell you what to think about the NAACP, if you didn’t already know. Now for the rub: one of Charles Russell’s most famous pieces was an expose on the corrupt practices and inhuman conditions at the Chicago stock yards, which later served as inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. See the problem with that? Russell was closely related to the Burnhams, and we can assume Daniel Burnham was also related to these Burnhams. Daniel’s father-in-law ran the Chicago stockyards. As we’ve seen over and over, the same families denouncing the evils of capitalism were the same ones perpetrating and profiting from them. It is called controlling the opposition: pretending to criticize yourself so that someone else won't do it better. 

Daniel Burnham’s mother-in-law was Ophelia Graham Sherman. Remember that name? The prosecutor for the Holmes murder trial was George Graham. Ophelia’s genealogy is completely scrubbed; we don’t even know who her parents were. We can assume they’re being hidden, since it’s unlikely the wife of one of the richest men in Chicago came from obscurity. By the way, Holmes is also related to Shermans, including U.S. Vice President James Sherman and General Sherman. 

Let me end with a few words on the archetype of the serial killer, and what the Holmes case means for this archetype. Holmes is presented as “America’s first serial killer,” in the sense in which we commonly understand it today – the soulless, psychopathic killer born with an inexplicable lack of empathy and a pathological need to kill. What is curious is how perfectly the timing of the Holmes case aligns with the rise of this archetype in the field of psychology. Larson discusses this in the book, noting that the “archetype of the psychopath was introduced in 1885 in Pall Mall Magazine” (87). 1885 is the exact year Holmes’ killings allegedly started, with the young boy who disappeared in Philadelphia. Larson goes on to write: 

Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Insanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly.... So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” (88) 

That language should strike you as odd. For example, the word prototypical. A prototype is defined as a “preliminary model of something, especially a machine, from which other forms are developed.” This suggests that serial killers didn’t arise organically out of human nature or society, but rather that the archetype was designed, as a machine is. Cleckley uses the word “constructed”, which is even more overt. Things don’t construct themselves, which begs the question of who is doing the constructing. Also curious is Cleckley’s assertion that a psychopath and a normal person are indistinguishable, even in a clinical setting. That begs the question, how does Cleckley know psychopaths exist? He admits himself that there are no clinical indications of psychopathy, and therefore no way of diagnosing this disorder. In fact, that is the telltale mark of a psychopath. So, its inability to be diagnosed is part of the disease? The crap they expect you to believe! But that is par for the course when it comes to clinical psychology, which has always been steeped in pseudoscience. 

To make this point abundantly clear, read the transcript of this interview with filmmaker Errol Morris, known for his movies like The Thin Blue Line and the Stephen Hawking documentary A Brief History of Time. In discussing Cleckley, Morris says: 

He created two of the enduring myths — I would call them — of the 20th century. He wrote The Three Faces of Eve, the book on multiple personality disorder…. The other book, of course, is The Mask of Sanity. These ideas don’t originate with Cleckley, but Cleckley popularized them, he built them up, he sold them — almost as a brand…. What always disturbed me about Cleckley’s notion was, well, how do we really know what goes on inside another person’s head? I suppose it’s one significant question. 

I suppose it is. And Morris should know a lot about myths, since he directed a documentary on Hawking. Just like Hawking was the master of unprovable theories, Cleckley mastered the unprovable theory of the psychopath, just in time to explain Holmes and the next hundred years of serial killers, whose actions don’t make any sense outside of Cleckley’s theory. How convenient.