Herman Webster Mudgett was born in New Hampshire on May 16, 1861 to Levi and Theodate Mudgett. Possessing extreme intelligence, Herman was working as a school teacher by the age of 16 and planned out his future as that of a doctor.

While only 17 years old, he married his sweetheart, Clara Lovering, in Alton, New Hampshire and, the following year, they relocated to Ann Arbor so that he could engage in the study of medicine at the University of Michigan. During his senior year, he and another student came up with a grisly plan which would bring them a windfall of money. It was decided that the other student would take out a $1,000 life insurance policy on himself and name Herman as the beneficiary. They would then steal a cadaver from the medical school, set up a believable death scene, and claim the body was Herman’s classmate.

The cadaver successfully stolen, the two boys staged it in a cheap rooming house. Before long, the easy money was in Herman’s pocket. The sense of power was enormous — the opportunities unlimited. The only thing holding Herman back from creating a life of wealth through the use of dead bodies was the responsibility of a wife. He soon informed Clara that he had to leave Michigan to go to California for a while on some personal business and that she needed to return to New Hampshire and wait for him there. Clara did as she was told.

Herman did not return to his wife. He moved to Philadelphia, changed his name to Henry Howard Holmes and, in 1882, opened a pharmacy. The following year, Dr. H.H. Holmes purchased a three-story building in Chicago which contained a variety of businesses as well as apartments. He completely renovated the building, keeping the entire third floor for himself. He hired a man named Patrick Quinlan to act as caretaker of the building and Quinlan asked no questions when Herman required his assistance building trap doors on the third floor and lining the walls of the rooms with noise-muffling asbestos.

In 1893, the still-married Herman exchanged vows with his secretary Minnie Williams. As an attractive, successful man, Herman discovered it was easy to lure in women and gain control of whatever money they had. The next year, he allegedly sent Minnie away and put together a lucrative plan with his friend, Benjamin Pitezel, a chemist. The plan was to follow the same outline as the college scam. A cadaver would serve as Benjamin’s body and his $10,000 life insurance would be collected. But Benjamin didn’t know the real plan. He was literally killed in his office during an alleged explosion.

Benjamin’s wife Carrie knew about his strategy with Herman to defraud the insurance company. She believed Benjamin was in hiding and had no idea that when she and Herman went to identify the body, that it was truly her husband’s charred remains. When she received the life insurance money, Herman informed her that Benjamin had an unpaid debt to him of $7,000 and owned another of their friends $2,800. Allowing her to keep $200 for traveling expenses, he ordered Carrie to relocate to Vermont and wait for him there as he would arrange a living situation for her and her children until Benjamin could resurface. The children, he explained, would remain with him to make the journey simpler for her and he would bring them along when he joined her in Vermont.

Herman did not go and meet Carrie in Vermont. He took the children to his third-floor residence at 701 63rd street in Chicago, which he referred to as his “castle.” Furious and terrified, Carrie contacted authorities in an effort to reclaim her children who she was now unable to locate. She was well aware of Herman’s past — he was a swindler who substituted medical cadavers and made a fortune on fraudulent death claims. But now she began to wonder if her husband was in hiding or actually dead.

Authorities hunted for Herman and the three children. When police arrived at the Chicago castle, they discovered the third floor contained a soundproofed chamber strewn with surgical tools and torture instruments. A massive stove stood 8 feet high and 3 feet in diameter and a dumbwaiter, big enough to carry a grown man, ran straight from third floor to basement from a trapdoor in the bathroom. In the furnace, beneath the floor, police found the bones and charred remnants of several people acquainted with Herman who had disappeared. Vats of quicklime were discovered in the basement and hair believed to be that of Minnie and her sister Anna was found caught in the flue of the stove. All three of Carrie’s children had been killed, Howard’s burned remains being found in the stove of a house Herman had rented in Indianapolis.

After Herman was arrested in Boston on July 14, 1895, he claimed he had killed an average of two people per year over the course of the last 14 years. Among his confessions was a body-snatching scam which took place in Rhode Island where a friend of his, known as “Hatch,” resided. Herman claimed that after his initial successful insurance fraud, he planned to stage his own death so took out a $20,000 policy and traveled to a Providence hotel with a fresh corpse in his baggage. He claimed that he removed the head and burned it in the hotel fireplace then left the body at a lonely spot not far from there. For reasons unknown, he didn’t conclude the plan.

Herman was hanged at Moyamensing Prison on May 7, 1896. Just before he died, he pronounced a curse on everyone who had brought his downfall. Over the course of the next year, the prison warden, coroner, undertaker, embalmer and jury foreman were dead. The year after that, the hangman died, a jury member committed suicide and the priest who heard Herman’s last confession was found dead in an alley with a fractured skull. The handyman who had helped construct the murder castle was tortured by hallucinations for years before killing himself. His suicide note read, “I could not sleep.”

Rhode Island authorities began to wonder if a long ago mystery might have been solved by Herman’s confession. In 1881, the one-day old grave of a former State Farm inmate was exhumed and the head stolen. Neither the thief nor the head were ever found, although it was obvious the head had been removed by someone familiar with medical surgery. Despite Herman’s version of the story, a headless body was never discovered on the outskirts of a Providence hotel and it seemed foolish that he would have carted a full body to Rhode Island when he could simply procure one here.

Numerous unsolved disappearances and murders are attributed to Herman Mudgett, a 19th-century serial killer who may very well have been an ill-intentioned guest here in the ocean state nearly a century and a half ago.

Kelly Sullivan is a Rhode Island columnist, lecturer and author.