ENDING

In July 1984, Holmes was arrested for the first time.  Ironically though, it was not for murder.  It was for one of his schemes.  He was quickly bailed out by his wife at the time.  He then thought up of a huge scheme.  It was supposed to be a good scheme, but after mistrust and backstabbing from both sides, the thing started to fall apart.  Someone ended up turning in Holmes to the police.  Holmes was given the choice of picking between his crimes; killing Ben (who died soon after he turned Holmes in), horse thief, or insurance fraud.  He picked insurance fraud and was sent to Philadelphia. 

Through out his questioning, Holmes refused to answer what he did with someone’s kids.  The detective on his case went to every place that Holmes had visited and found them.  Two were buried in the backyard of one of the houses he was staying at and another was in a trunk.  He had said he wanted to play hide and seek, but ended up locking her in and asphyxiated her.  After finding these dead bodies, the detective had what he needed to go search the rest of Holmes places.  He knew he would find what he needed in the Castle.  What Geyer found there will forever be remembered. 

They found room where he cooked people alive.  There were also rooms that were air tight if the door was closed.  While the first and third floor was a clever disguise of a regular hotel, everything else was a horror house; especially the basement that was located seven feet under the Castle.  There they found horrors beyond their imaginations.    

“Here, they found Holmes’ blood-spattered dissecting table, his gleaming surgical instruments, his macabre "laboratory" of torture devices, various jars of poison and even a wooden box that contained a number of female skeletons. Built into one of the walls was a crematorium, with a heavy iron grate to hold the fire and another grate, fitted with rollers, by which a body could be slid into the flames. The

 crematoriums still contained ash and portions of bone that had not burned
 in the intense heat. A search of the ashes also revealed a watch that had belonged to Minnie Williams, some buttons from a dress and several charred tintype photographs. Under the staircase, Geyer also found a ball made from women’s hair that had been carefully wrapped in cloth.” [1]

That was just some of the things they found.  There were dozens of other things they found about how he killed his victims and what he did with their bodies.  After all the excavation, the “Murder Castle” was burned down on August 19. 

The trial of H. H. Holmes took place just before Halloween of 1895.  The trail only took six days, but it was a sensation.  Plus, Holmes himself made quite a scene.  In the trial, he did things such as burst out weeping.  He even fired his lawyers and proceeded to represent himself.  He was clever and shrewd just like any attorney.  None of it though, was to any avail.  It only took the jury two hours before they had the verdict.  In reality, they had said that it only took them one minute.  They only stayed longer “for the sake of appearances.”     On November 30, the judge sentenced him death.  Holmes was scheduled to die on May 7, 1896. 

He was sentenced to hang, but there were complications.  When the trap door left beneath his feet, it took him fifteen minutes to die.  Even though the fall broke his neck and the rope was so tight that it was imbedded into his neck, his heart was still beating for the next couple of minutes.  People had to look away as he died.  Finally, at 10:25 am, he was declared dead. 

“By now, the details of the case had been made public and people were angry, horrified and fascinated, especially in Chicago, where most of the evil had occurred. Holmes had provided a lurid confession of torture and murder that appeared in newspapers and magazines, providing a litany of depravity that compares with the most insane killers of all time. Even if his story was embellished, the actual evidence of Holmes’ crimes ranks him as one of the country’s most active murderers.” [1]