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This society, a place where residents knew nothing about one another, killers were going undetected.

This was the case of H.H. Holmes. Holmes appeared to be anything but the devil with his dashing goods looks and gentleman’s attire. He was also a shrewd  business man, a con artist, and the most organized of all serial killers known throughout history.

Like many troubled youth, being tormented by other children was a way of life. The bullies surrounding him once took him to the doctors office and fondled him with a skeleton; however, the situation was gratifying and exhilarating to Holmes. He continued through childhood experimenting  on kittens, dogs, cats, and rats, maximizing the suffering by using his own hands and instruments of torture.

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Generally, this type of act is meant to make the killer feel superior. That first initial taste of death, lacking of empathy, is what characterizes the beginning of a true sociopath. These killers lack the “Super Ego”, coined by Sigmund Freud as a conscience, and in the case of H.H. Holmes, he was more crafty than he was crazy.

To gain access to what he desired the most, Holmes attended the University of Michigan Medical School where his obsession with human body parts grew into a devious scam.

Initially, Holmes would steal cadavers from the medical college and take out insurance policies on fictitious family members, burying them where they would be found. When the bodies were discovered, Holmes would collect a hefty sum, sometimes collecting over $12,000 each.

Suddenly Holmes disappeared, resurfacing in Chicago in 1885 posing as an inventor. In 1887, he worked as a clerk at a local drug  store in Chicago for the owner E.S. Holton. Shortly thereafter, Holton went missing and Holmes announced he had purchased the store and Holton had moved out west.

H.H. Holmes was wealthy beyond his dreams and he decided to capitalize his worth by purchasing an enormous block building across the street from the drugstore, which was later coined the “Castle of Horrors” or “The Murder House”.

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The three story building looked normal from the outside, with shops and his personal drug store occupying the ground floor. The upper two floors were a maze of killing and torture rooms, lacking of windows and locking from the outside. Holmes put in gas lines in some of the windowless rooms where he would lock victims in and listen to them die as poison was pumped in.

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The basement was the most horrific site of all, fashioned with a furnace for torching bodies and dissection tables used to peel away the flesh from human bodies using strong acids. Of course, the skeletons left over were cleaned and specially prepared for shipment all over the United States to medical schools.

By 1892, the horror house was  ready for full capacity. Holmes took the initiative to add hotel rooms and a front desk, louring tourists off the streets-a way for him to fund is ghoulish tendencies perhaps. H.H. Holmes also placed ads in newspapers for job listings, tempting young women to the hotel and then killing and robbing them when they arrived.

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It wasn’t until 1893 that Holmes did the majority of his killing. During this time, the Chicago World’s Fair was in town, bringing hundreds of strangers to Chicago. The fair introduced Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix, Quaker Oats, and Cream of Wheat-convenience foods.

Over a six month span thousands of fair-goers went missing. It was later said that Holmes would take many of those travelers and put them all into on room and suck it dry of oxygen.

After the fair ended, Holmes grew bored and decided to leave Chicago, teaming up with Benjamin Pitezel and Marion Hedgepeth for one last scam in Philadelphia. All three men agreed to fake the death of Pitezel  and share the insurance policy they took out previously on him-sum being $10,000.

Holmes decided to murder Pitezel, kidnap 3 of his children, and run away with all of the money. Hedgepeth was angered and went to the police to rat out Holmes. By the time the police reached Holmes, all three children had been murdered. The authorities were directed to seize the hotel in Chicago where they found the most gruesome and detestable scene-leftover body parts, bones, cadavers, and human hair were scattered all over the hallways and the basement.

When Holmes was in custody he explained to the police that “I was born with the devil inside me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer any more than a poet can stop the inspiration to sing.”

Around the 1895, the hotel burned to the ground. “On May 7, 1896, Holmes was hanged at Moyamensing Prison, also known as the Philadelphia County Prison. Until the moment of his death, Holmes remained calm and amiable, showing very few signs of fear, anxiety or depression. Holmes’ neck did not snap immediately; he instead died slowly, twitching over ten minutes before being pronounced dead 15 minutes after the trap was sprung. He requested that he be buried in concrete so that no one could ever dig him up and dissect his body, as he had dissected so many others. This request was granted.”

No serial killer in history could ever be compared to a man that constructed a castle for the sole purpose of killing human beings, except perhaps Adolf Hitler who could share in this hellish accomplishments.

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I doubt that you’ve heard of it, since the device was never really marketed under that catchy title. Forty-four years later, Whitcomb Judson, a successful inventor with a dozen patents to his name, marketed a slightly different version, with the equally the riveting designation, the “Clasp Locker Device.” Judson and his business partner, attached the invention to their boots and took it to the Chicago Worlds Fair in 1893, where they sold twenty pairs, about one pair per million visitors. Their Universal Fastener Company was never to be much of a success.

However, fifteen years later, the Swedish engineer, Gideon Sundback made the invention smaller, lighter, and more reliable. In a brilliant marketing ploy, he re-christened the “Automatic Continuous Clothing Closure/Clasp Locking Device” with the trendy appellation “The Hookless Fastener”. The product may have been brilliant, but it dragged its name around like a ball and chain.

Nevertheless, despite a less than inspired marketing campaign, the new and improved fastener began to sell. It was attached to purses and other items, and was sold to the Army, and applied to the clothing and gear of the United States soldiers in World War I. Strange as it seems now, the new invention came with instructions

The story goes that Mr. B. F. Goodrich, of the B. F. Goodrich Company, marketing the fasteners on his galoshes, coined the term “zipper,” for the sound made when the fastener slid its way along the parallel metal tracks. After that, the invention was a sure-fire winner. It was not the brilliant, inarticulate engineers, but the smooth-talking salesman and hard-headed businessman who introduced the onomatopoeic term “zip” to the English language.