HOLLOWAY, WANDA: True Crime Recaps 2022 -
There’s no shortage of overbearing parents but some take things way to far … These mothers will stop at nothing to ensure their daughters are the star of the show. True Crime Recaps: Ruthless Pom Pom Moms, Youtube 26.32, 2022
Verna [Heath] and Wanda [Holloway] had known each other for years … The trouble started in 1989 with the seventh grade cheerleader tryouts …Wanda didn’t take it well … She put her plan in motion … murder for hire. ibid.
Wanda Holloway: Her sentence is commuted to nine and a half years of probation, six months time served, and a thousand hours of community service. ibid.
HOLMES, HARRY HOWARD aka HERMAN WEBSTER MUDGETT: H H Homes & the Murder Castle TV - Carpe Noctem online - American Ripper in London TV -
He turned murder into a full time job. Dr H H Holmes was an entrepreneur who lusted after blood and wealth. The 1893 Chicago World’s Fair offered him the perfect opportunity to indulge in both: deeds so horrific they created a new category of criminal ... America’s first serial killer. H H Holmes & the Murder Castle
19th July 1895 that the police stormed a building known simply as the Castle. ibid.
The modern serial killer ... the public was transfixed by curiosity. ibid.
The beatings left a uniquely sinister mark. ibid.
The female guests didn’t notice the spy-holes. ibid.
Hundreds who had disappeared in the lead up to the World’s Fair – over the previous three years H H Holmes had murdered so many visitors to his World’s Fair hotel he had a backlog of bodies. ibid.
Holmes walked to the scaffold on 7th May 1896 still in the grip of his dissection room fantasy. ibid.
Herman Webster Mudgett (May 16, 1861 – May 7, 1896), better known under the alias of Dr Henry Howard Holmes, was one of the first documented American serial killers in the modern sense of the term. Holmes opened a hotel in Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair, which he built himself and which was the location of many of his murders. While he confessed to 27 murders, of which nine were confirmed, his actual body count could be as high as 250, because he took an unknown number of his victims from the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair which was less than 10 miles away from his ‘World’s Fair’ hotel. The case was notorious in its time and received wide publicity through a series of articles in William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers. Interest in Holmes’s crimes was revived in 2003 by Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, a best-selling non-fiction book that juxtaposed an account of the planning and staging of the World’s Fair with Holmes’s story. Carpe Noctem online article
A serial killer who haunted Chicago in the 1893 World’s Fair. Now modern science tries to determine if he pulled off the greatest con in history. Ripper in London: Devil in the Detail, History 2017
‘I am the descendant of the devil – my great-great-grandfather, H H Holmes – was America’s first serial killer. A conman and an evil genius he engineered a death factory in the late 1800s that claimed an uncountable number of lives. At the very same time another killer was slaughtering victims on the streets of London.’ ibid. Juff Mudgett
H H Holmes outsmarted the law for over ten years. He lured victim after victim into his murder castle in Chicago. He conned them out of their money and their property, and ultimately their lives. ibid.
While he confesses to killing twenty-seven people, five of the twenty-seven he named were later found alive, leading us to question what’s true and what’s invented. ibid.
Exposed to corpses at an early age: this fostered his passion for dissection. ibid.
‘That gap – that’s the exact period that Jack the Ripper was committing his murders in London.’ ibid. Jeff Mudgett
‘In 1888 Britain’s first serial killer – Jack the Ripper – went on a killing spree in London. He was never caught. But I know who the Ripper is – his real name is H H Holmes. He was America’s first serial killer. And he’s my great-great-grandfather.’ American Ripper in London II: The Butcher’s Blade, Jeff
‘We have a number of significant statements Holmes made regarding London.’ ibid.
‘H Holmes, 36, American’ … ‘He’s coming back from Liverpool to New York May ’89’. ibid. historian
‘Travelling the North Atlantic in winter is a rotten journey; if you’re travelling in December you clearly have to travel.’ American Ripper in London III: Whitechapel Runs Red, historian
‘The final Ripper killing was committed indoors which may have inspired Holmes to consider how do I replicate these killings back home.’ ibid.
‘The phrases in the letters were American.’ ibid. forensic linguist
‘The lodger was a medical man. An American’ … One of the leading suspects. ibid.
‘If you took this composite to a judge he’d issue a warrant.’ ibid. Jeff
‘Staring back at me is a very familiar face.’ American Ripper in London IV: Home Sweet Hell, Jeff
In Chicago in the Spring of 1889 H H Holmes hired a construction team to convert his property on 63 and Wallace into what we now know as the Murder Castle. His sinister intent was to build a place to kill and dissect his victims in private. ibid.
‘Carrie Brown was a quintessential Ripper victim: she was a prostitute, she was strangled and disembowelled. ibid. Fox
At the site of a cement warehouse that Holmes owned in 1891 they’ve discovered a field of depressions scattered across the river bed, signs that the proof they’re looking for could be hiding just beneath the surface in an undiscovered burial ground. American Ripper in London V
1893: The World’s Fair … One in every four Americans travelled to the Windy City to witness the marvel. ibid.
As many as 5,000 prostitutes worked in over 30 establishments over the city’s red light district. ibid.
Holmes may have used the cement warehouse as a front for disposing of bodies in order to pull off a large scale killing operation. American Ripper in London VI
He drew up plans to franchise the murder castle. ibid.
Holmes had a set of surgical knives. American Ripper in London VII
Holmes had at least two accomplices at the murder castle. ibid.