Free The Killer Book of Cold Cases by Tom Philbin Page A

not technically airtight. (Among other problems, no unequivocal evidence showed that any of the murders had actually occurred in Koster’s jurisdiction.)
    As of now, Robinson is on Death Row in Kansas, and if a lot of people have their way, he will be the first person to die in that state via lethal injection.
Who Am I?
Like John Robinson, I was a con man and a killer, and when I moved to the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago in the late 1890s, pretty young women who came to the area started to go missing.
I was well aware that many of those pretty young women wanted to work at the Chicago World’s Fair, which was opening in the fall of 1892, and businesses related to it.
I had arrived in Chicago a few years earlier, and the first thing I did was to start working for a pharmacy in Englewood. The lady I worked for was very grateful because her husband, who had founded and operated the store, was dying of cancer, and when I started to work there, her dreams came true: I handled just about everything and did so well.
I attracted a lot of new customers to the store, particularly young, pretty women because I was attractive. I was a slim man, perhaps five-foot-eight, with a handsome face and big, liquid blue eyes that few women could look into without getting a strange sensation in their stomach.
I could cry at will. I had tears in my eyes when, after her husband died, I asked the lady to sell the pharmacy to me. She did, and I repaid her by never paying her for the store, making her life miserable, and murdering her, while telling everyone that she had left Illinois for California and would not be returning.
I was very good at bilking insurance companies, for example, by stealing a body from a medical lab and then convincing the company that it was someone I had bought insurance for.
If I couldn’t get the right body, I would murder someone and then alter their appearance by burning or cutting their features so they could pass as the deceased.
I also engaged in selling “articulated” bodies, skeletonized bodies, to medical laboratories. One person I murdered—who happened to be pregnant at the time with my baby—was a beautiful, six-foot-tall woman named Julia Connor. I got $225 (extra because she was unusually tall) for her body.
My home was my castle—and my slaughterhouse. It was a sixty-room hotel I designed, and no one else ever saw the plans. It debuted as a hotel for the World’s Columbian Exposition (also known as the Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893, with some of the building rented out for commerce. The hotel contained all kinds of special rooms where people were gassed, cremated while alive, asphyxiated, and stretched to the breaking point. I could drop the bodies down a chute that led to a room where the bodies were eventually sold to medical schools.
Police got on to me because of a fake life-insurance scheme involving a man named Benjamin Pitezel who was going to fake his own death, but I murdered him first.
I was arrested in 1894. Police investigated the castle, and eventually the whole story came out. The authorities pinned twenty-seven murders on me though most people thought that actual number came to more than one hundred.
Shortly before being hanged, I penned my account of those murders, for which I was paid $7,500. The story was published in the
Philadelphia Enquirer
on April 12, 1896. I was hanged on May 7, 1896. I was thirty-five years old.
    Answer: I am Dr. H.H. Holmes, America’s first modern serial killer.

    Dr. H.H. Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, was a serial killer who preyed on young women and killed more than 100 people.

Notable Quotable
“In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story. My life has been straightened out…Wait ’til you hear the story of what took place at this house. You’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.”
—Phillip Garrido, from his