1. H.H. Holmes

H.H. Holmes was a terrifying individual. He graduated from University of Michigan’s Surgery and Medicine Department in 1884. At this time things started taking a peculiar turn for Holmes. Cadavers were being stolen from the school laboratory. Then, the bodies were becoming disfigured. Holmes was claiming people were injured in accidents and then collecting the insurance money for himself.

Holmes went off to work in Chicago. People around him started disappearing. It didn’t raise any suspicion–not yet, anyway. He opened up an enormous hotel that locals called ‘The Castle’. While Holmes was building the hotel, he hired and fired workers regularly so that they would never learn the hotel’s complex layout. Doors that opened to brick walls. Secret stairwells. Rooms that had gas lines running into them. Soundproof rooms. It was a hotel of torture. He lured guests to stay at the hotel and would kill them in a variety of ways. The bodies would be taken down into the basement where he would play around and dissect them. He then sold the skeletons to medical schools.

When he as inevitably caught, as the death tally was growing considerably, he was found guilty of nine murders but people believe he committed closer to around 200 murders in a span of a few years. He was hanged in 1896 at the age of 34. ‘The Castle’ was demolished in the 1930s. Variety reports that Leonardo DiCaprio will soon play the killer in a Scorsese film, The Devil In the White City, based the bestselling book.

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