The remains of notorious Chicago serial killer H.H. Holmes are set to be exhumed to try to solve a 120-year-old mystery: Did the “Devil in the White City” fake his own execution?
History tells us that Holmes — whose macabre murder spree during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago was detailed in Erik Larson’s 2003 best-seller “The Devil in the White City” — was hanged in Philadelphia in 1896 and buried at nearby Holy Cross Cemetery.
But Holmes, whose birth name was Herman Mudgett, was long rumored to have applied his infamous skills of deceit to his own fate, and one legend has it that he paid off jail guards to hang a cadaver in his place so he could escape to South America.
Following a request by a descendant of Mudgett, a court in Pennsylvania has issued an order allowing the remains to be unearthed… Read more.
See, I’m with Adam Selzer on this, and the reason is the phrase “following a request by a descendant of Mudgett”. Because one of his descendants has basically made a career out of being the great-grandson of the Devil of the White City; I’m willing to bet this “descendant” mentioned is the same guy who thinks HH Holmes was Jack The Ripper. And he’s not denying the clear evidence that Holmes was in the US while Jack The Ripper was active, oh no – he says Holmes hired someone to commit the Ripper killings for him.
HH Holmes was crazy good at manipulating people to do shit for him but I’m gonna go ahead and say he probably did not pay a stooge to commit the Ripper murders thousands of miles away, and he equally likely did not bribe his prison guards to fake his execution.
Mooncustafer 