Overview

Two hundred bodies. A gas chamber in the basement. Acid vats. A torture maze built to catch tourists at the 1893 World's Fair. You have read the stories. You have watched the documentaries. You have heard the body count climb on every new podcast. Almost none of it is true. The real Herman Webster Mudgett, the New Hampshire farm boy who took the name H. H. Holmes, killed perhaps nine people. The Murder Castle on Sixty Third Street was a swindler's headquarters with an oversized furnace, not a Bluebeard's slaughterhouse. The famous Hearst confession was paid fiction, written in a Philadelphia cell for seven and a half thousand dollars by a man six weeks from the rope. The smaller story is the worse one. In this unflinching psychological autopsy, Craig Beck strips away the mythology to find the cold, calculating, deeply hollow man underneath. Not a monster. Not a Devil. A charming young doctor who killed when it was cheaper than the alternative, and slept soundly the night before he was hanged. You will meet the wives he discarded. The children he murdered for an insurance payout. The detective who refused to come home until he had found the bodies. The calm, watchful man who sat through his own trial drawing portraits of the chemist describing how he was about to be killed. And you will learn to recognise his successors. They are in your office, your dating life, your social media feed. Most do not kill anybody. The few who do are simply tidying up. The legend has had its century. The man is waiting. CraigBeck.com

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