Fort Worth's Connection To America's First Serial Killer

If I remember right, I think I've mentioned before that one of my favorite genres is the true crime book, with Ann Rule being my favorite author.

Yesterday I started reading a new true crime book, that being Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America's First Serial Killer, by Harold Schechter.

It truly is shocking. I'm only 100 pages in and it's truly shocking. And little did I know, when I started reading this book, that the story would come to Fort Worth.

Even though I'm from the Northwest, the land that breeds serial killers, I've never actually met one, that I know of. I did go to a company picnic with Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway. I went to the same college as Spokane serial killer, Robert Lee Yates. Ted Bundy took one of his victims from the university I attended my last 2 years of college.

So, I've come close to serial killers, may even have laid my eyes on one, for all I know. But, for personal true crime contact, my only actual personal contact has been getting someone out of the D/FW jail a few weeks ago and my long ago acquaintance with a Northwest criminal who had done time for crime.

So, in this Depraved book, this guy named Herman Webster Mudgett, who goes by a lot of aliases, the main one being Dr. H. H. Holmes, was a very prolific serial killer in the 1880-90s. It is believed he killed between 20-230.

Where this story goes totally macabre is the means by which this guy did his deeds. He was a highly evolved con man, committing all sorts of frauds. In Chicago he managed to build a huge building that the locals dubbed "The Castle." The Castle was 3 stories tall. He lived on the top floor. The second floor was a confusing labyrinth of rooms that he would rent out. The top floor had a coffin sized safe, sound proof rooms and a chute that went to the basement. In the basement he had a kiln, acid baths, an operating table and assorted other tools to help him do his bad deeds.

Mudgett/Holmes did his crimes during the same time as Jack the Ripper in London. He likely would have been more infamous with his crimes existing in the popular imagination, had Jack the Ripper not garnered so much attention worldwide.

If Mudgett/Holmes had not been a serial killer, his serial bigamy would likely have made him famous. He was married many times, never got a divorce. His preferred means of separation was murder. The first of his wives that he killed in The Castle, he turned into a skeleton and sold to a local teaching university. Same with the next wife. Who was pregnant. Mudgett/Holmes had quite a sideline of selling skeletons.

On it went. The hugely popular 1883 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition brought people from all over America and the world to Chicago. It is estimated about 45 people came to Chicago and never returned home. Likely temporary dwellers of the Mudgett/Holmes Castle.

Eventually things in Chicago got dicey. So, Mudgett/Holmes loaded up his latest bride and his confederate (later victim) Benjamin Pitezel and headed to Fort Worth, where earlier Mudgett/Holmes had conned a former mistress, Minnie Williams, out of valuable land she had inherited from her uncle. He'd already used up the cash Minnie had inherited.

The property consisted of a large, vacant lot on the corner of Second and Russell Streets, close to the Tarrant County Courthouse. Mudgett/Holmes proceeded to scam locals out of money and services, sort of a precursor of a century later when entities, like Cabelas, would succeed at similar fleecings in Fort Worth.

But, in Fort Worth, it all caught up with Mudgett/Holmes faster than it had in Chicago. Just when his situation in Fort Worth was getting dicey, Mudgett/Holmes somehow magaged to steal a boxcar full of horses, which he shipped off to Chicago. The theft was discovered and he was charged with horse theft. In Texas, horse theft is taken quite seriously.

With the law nipping at his heels, Mudgett/Holmes and Benjamin and wife, Georgiana, fled Fort Worth in the middle of the night. From then on he was on the lam, city to city, running his cons and keeping one step ahead of the law. Til he was caught, tried. And hanged.

I'm going to west Fort Worth today. Maybe I'll pop into downtown Fort Worth and see what stands nowadays at the corner of Second and Russell Streets. A historical monument? I doubt it.