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There has been a lot of nonsense recently featured on History Channel’s American Ripper, suggesting that H.H. Holmes was not only the “first American serial killer” but also Jack the Ripper who committed a series of infamous unsolved murders in the Whitechapel district of London in the summer and autumn of 1888.

In my forthcoming book Sons of Cain, I ‘rip’ into the bullshit claims made in American Ripper.

Who is considered the “first” American serial killer depends on the ‘flavor of the month’ in literature, film and other popular media. At this writing, Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes or simply H. H. Holmes is often called America’s “first modern serial killer.”

Recently film director Martin Scorsese announced he is making a film, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Holmes, based on the Erik Larson bestseller, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America. Hollywood’s publicity machine went into action to tout Holmes as “America’s first serial killer” as a prelude to the upcoming movie.

If you accept the FBI’s new 2005 definition of a serial killer as somebody who has murdered two or more victims in separate incidents for any reason (supplanting the old three or more victims threshold) then I can reference five serial killers who murdered two or more victims before or contemporary to H.H. Holmes:

◦Jesse Pomeroy “The Boy Fiend”—Boston, 1874 who abducted and tortured a series of children, and is known to have murdered two of them.

◦Joseph Lapage “The French Monster”—Vermont/New Hampshire, 1875 who is known to have murdered at least two women.

◦Thomas W. Piper “The Bat” and “Boston Belfry Murderer”—Boston, 1875 who murdered three victims, 2 women and a girl.

◦The Servant Girl Annihilator—Austin, Texas, 1885 who murdered seven women.

◦Theodor ‘Theo’ Durrant “The Demon of the Belfry”—San Francisco, 1895, a necrophile serial killer with two confirmed victims, arrested the same year that H.H. Holmes was arrested.

And that’s without naming notorious American frontier serial killers like the Harpe Brothers in Tennessee in the 1790s or the Bloody Benders and their “murder inn” in Kansas, 1869-1872.

All these cases I describe in detail in Sons of Cain and all of them fall into the current FBI definition of what constitutes a serial killer.

In fact, H.H. Holmes officially was convicted of only one murder: of his employee and insurance fraud co-conspirator, Benjamin F. Pitezel; but the evidence is persuasive that Holmes took custody of three of Pitezel’s children and later murdered them as well, for a total of four victims. That does indeed make him a serial killer, but not necessarily the first in America.

After his conviction, H.H. Holmes in a series of paid newspaper articles claimed to have murdered twenty-seven people. But “only” nine of the twenty-seven murders that Holmes confessed to were actually found to have occurred, and none were ever conclusively linked to Holmes.

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At the center of the H.H. Holmes myth is his elaborate “Murder Castle”, a hotel with alleged secret rooms, gas connections and chutes in which he was said to have murdered guests during the Chicago World’s Fair in 1883. There is no evidence that anybody had been murdered at his premises or that they even served as a hotel during the World’s Fair. As Adam Selzer points out in his deeply researched and definitive H. H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil, “Many of the stories of him and his “Castle” are pure fiction. The castle never for one day truly functioned as a hotel, and the actual number of World’s Fair tourists he’s suspected of killing there has remained the same since 1895—a single woman, Nannie Williams. The hidden rooms were almost certainly used more for hiding stolen furniture than for destroying bodies.”

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As for H.H. Holmes being Jack the Ripper, there is not a shred of evidence that H.H. Holmes visited Britain at any time. For one thing, he spent that year in Chicago supervising the complex construction of the Castle with its hidden passageways and secret rooms (apparently firing workers and contractors every few weeks so that nobody could get a full picture of the architecture and its sinister purpose). Secondly, there are absolutely no profiling ‘signature’ similarities between the highly pathological murders of prostitutes by Jack the Ripper and the known murders committed by H.H. Holmes of Benjamin F. Pitezel and his three children.

The rest, is entertaining “conspiracy theory” television. Fun but nothing to do with the truth about the history of serial murder in the USA.