The First Serial Killer in America
Who has become the subject of American folklore
Herman Webster Mudgett, known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, was America’s first serial killer who confessed to 27 murders, and is suspected of killing over 200 people by folklore. He owned a building three miles west of the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago that was called the World’s Fair Hotel, even though there is no evidence that the hotel was ever open for business.
It would be called “The Murder Castle” decades after Holmes’s deeds, according to Adam Selzer in H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil. Selzer would say that Holmes, by the 21st century, had entered the territory of folklore:
“[He] was a man who built a hotel full of torture chambers to prey on visitors who came to the World’s Fair and may have killed hundreds of people, making him our first and most prolific serial killer. Holmes had already been known as the ‘king of criminals’ before he’d even been formally accused of murder, but now he was a veritable supervillain.”
His story involved a new police chief who convinced himself and newspapers of fiction — Frank Geyer. The police would give many theories about his killings that spouted nothing more than nonsense, and gossip newspapers and tabloids also took a large interest in Holmes.
