Leonardo DiCaprio to Play America’s Most Notorious Criminal Ever!

Hollywood screenwriters have long been fascinated with the theme of the booby-trapped house, typically a dreadful place of unimaginable tortures conceived by deranged minds, where almost every occupant meets their doom.

From Wes Craven’s “The People Under the Stairs” to the chilling Season 5 of “American Horror Story” set in a hotel designed by a sadistic mind, through the torture porn genre like “Hostel”, the “Saw” series, and the grim experiments in psychiatric hospitals, the variations on this theme are naturally plentiful in horror.

However, the true epitome in this domain is not a fictional character and has never been until now, except, of course, for documentaries dedicated to him. Known by multiple aliases (up to seven documented), a bigamist, dubbed “Doctor Torture” or “the Beast of Chicago”, H.H. Holmes is often considered the first American serial killer.

Arrested by Pinkerton detectives after a manhunt on November 17, 1894, in Boston, H.H. Holmes confessed to 27 murders and six attempted murders. However, experts believe he may have committed close to 200 murders in his Chicago hotel, which he opened during the 1893 World’s Fair.

It was there, in his veritable Hell Mansion with a hundred rooms, that he relished in torturing his victims in certain secret rooms of his building, of which he personally designed the diabolical floor plans. A building so vast, ultra-modern, and featuring the latest innovations, located not far from Chicago’s famous slaughterhouses, it was nicknamed “the castle” by neighbors…

The Beginnings of a Criminal Career

Herman Webster Mudgett, better known as H.H. Holmes, was born in May 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire, into a wealthy family. The youngest of four children, his parents, Levi Horton Mudgett and Theodate Page Price, were both descendants of the region’s early settlers.

Between a violent alcoholic father and a devout Methodist mother who regularly read Bible passages to Herman, he displayed signs of early intelligence. Yet, he was a fearful child, often bullied by classmates and harbored morbid thoughts, leading him to torture and kill animals.

His criminal life began early. After graduating as a pharmacy assistant, he later forged a medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1884 to practice as a doctor. While studying, Herman Webster Mudgett stole bodies from the lab with an accomplice, disfigured them, and then claimed these people had been killed accidentally, all to collect money from life insurance policies he had taken out on each deceased individual.

In 1885, he moved to Chicago and found work under the pseudonym Dr. Henry H. Holmes at a pharmacy owned by a certain Dr. E.S. Holton. When Dr. Holton fell ill with prostate cancer, his wife ran the business and praised Holmes as a model employee, eventually promoting him to manage the store, which continued to attract an increasing number of customers.

When Dr. E.S. Holton died in 1887, his widow sold her shares to Holmes. Soon after, she disappeared without a trace. When asked about her possible return, Holmes claimed she had moved to California without leaving an address…

Building the Castle of Horrors

In 1886, Holmes finally bought a plot of land he had long coveted, located across from the pharmacy, to build a structure. Although not an architect, he insisted on designing the plans himself and supervising its construction in great detail. Holmes changed contractors four times to ensure he was the only one who fully understood the layout of the house, thus reducing the chances of being reported to the police. 400 workers toiled for three years on this massive construction project.

“Lethal, practical, and comfortable, the Castle includes a hundred rooms, apartments, and shops,” wrote Alexandra Midal, a curator and professor of design theory, in an intriguing essay published in 2018 titled “The Manufacture of Murder: Life and Works of H.H. Holmes, America’s First Serial Killer.” This three-story building with 35 rooms on each floor is a “rational and mechanically cozy masterpiece of crime in slippers,” wrote A. Midal.

A crime craftsman of diabolical ingenuity, whose story seems perfectly intertwined with the story of industrialization in the latter half of the 19th century, boosted by technological advancements. In this “killing machine where every room, every corridor, and every trap was ingeniously designed to facilitate his crimes,” H.H. Holmes installed a network of domestic gas and electricity while most of his contemporaries still used candles.

Here is a picture of H.H. Holmes’s “castle” in Chicago from the 1890s…

It was a veritable labyrinth, with rooms that had no windows, doors that opened onto brick walls, staircases that led nowhere, peepholes hidden behind mirrors, and traps and chutes that allowed for bodies to be directly dropped to the basement…

Here, in this horror lab, Holmes suffocated his victims using gas pipes, watching them agonize in soundproof rooms. They were also burned alive, locked in trunks, rooms with no exits, or even a massive safe that actually served as a dungeon where victims suffocated…

When not dissolving bodies in acid baths, he dismembered his victims and did not hesitate to sell their skeletons and organs to various medical schools, as they were always in need for anatomy studies and dissections…

During the 1893 World’s Fair held in Chicago, Holmes opened his house as a hotel for visitors… Not only did some never leave, but Holmes’s victims were often women. Whether they were employees hired as secretaries or maids, forced to take out life insurance before being killed, girlfriends seduced and swindled, and so on…

The man stopped at nothing. After leaving Chicago shortly after the World’s Fair, Holmes set about eliminating his old accomplice Benjamin Pitezel, with whom he had orchestrated numerous insurance fraud schemes.

After telling Pitezel’s widow that her husband was still alive and in hiding, Holmes convinced her to entrust him with three of her children for a trip: Alice, 14; Nellie, 11; and Howard, 8. He killed Howard in Indianapolis, and the teenage girls in Toronto.

He even attempted to kill the widow and her youngest child from afar using nitroglycerin: “After sawing a staircase step in her home in Burlington, he sent her there after asking her to urgently move a sealed box containing papers of extreme importance. In reality, the box contained a vial of explosives… Fortunately for them, Mrs. Pitezel and her infant did not trip over the step and escaped death,” wrote Alexandra Midal.

“I was born with the devil in me”

Betrayed by an accomplice who was languishing in prison and had not received his share from a life insurance scam, Holmes was finally apprehended in November 1894 in Boston. During his imprisonment, he traded his chilling confessions for $7,500, detailing some of his murders, particularly to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

A notorious liar and fabricator, he nonchalantly provided contradictory accounts that further muddled the facts. From an initial confession of 14 murders, he ultimately claimed 27, although only nine could be confirmed after extensive investigations.

This is just a fraction: human remains found, sometimes in too advanced a state of decomposition, did not allow for more murders to be attributed to him. “I was born with the devil in me. I cannot deny that I am an assassin, no more than the poet can deny the inspiration that compels him to sing,” he told the sensationalist press, which naturally hung on his every word.

On May 7, 1896, at 10:12 AM, within the walls of Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia, H.H. Holmes was hanged. In a cruel irony and injustice, only the murder charges of his accomplice Pitezel and his three children were used for his death sentence.

In his last will, Holmes expressed the wish that his body be buried in concrete: he did not want his remains to be stolen or mutilated, where, however, for years, he had hardly had any qualms about doing so to satisfy his criminal enterprise.

Rumors abounded after his hanging. It was claimed that the body transported by the funeral directors was not actually his… It was not until 121 years after his death, in July 2017, that these rumors were put to rest, with the exhumation of his skeleton, requested by Jeff Mudgett, the serial killer’s great-great-grandson.

Given the industrial scale of his murders, his astonishing modus operandi, his perverse and devilish precision, and the context in which he operated, H.H. Holmes’s life certainly deserved an adaptation on the big or small screen, even though the subject has obviously been a source of inspiration for many filmmakers in the past.

An Old Project Back on Track

Yet it has not been so, at least until 2010, when Leonardo DiCaprio acquired the adaptation rights to the bestseller by Erik Larson, “The Devil in the White City,” which notably features Holmes and is set against the backdrop of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

In 2019, now in partnership with Martin Scorsese, the project shifted to a series under the Hulu banner. Who eventually dropped the idea. It has just been reactivated this January 2025, still under the stewardship of Scorsese/DiCaprio, but switching back to a film format. This was revealed by Deadline, reporting a meeting with executives from 20th Century Studio. Fingers crossed…