Listener discretion is advised, this episode features discussions of violence and murder that may be upsetting. We advise extreme caution for listeners under 13.

The medical field is considered to be among the most noble callings, we imagine doctors and health care workers as deeply empathetic carers, their life's work, lessening their patients pain. But there are also those who aren't driven by helping their patients. To some, medicine is purely a selfish path to respect and wealth. Others twists their life saving knowledge into a tool for murder. Evil like this is rare, but it does exist for doctors like H.H. Holmes, the bodies he left in his wake weren't just unfortunate casualties.

They were his life's work. This is Medical Murders, a podcast original. Every year, thousands of medical students take the Hippocratic Oath.

It boils down to do no harm. But a closer look reveals a phrase much more interesting. I must not play it God. However, some doctors break that oath. They choose to play God with their patients, deciding who lives and who dies each week on medical murders.

We'll investigate these doctors, nurses and medical professionals. We'll explore the specifics of how medical killers operate not just on their patients but within their own minds, examining the psychology and neurology behind heartless medical killers. I'm Alastair Madden and I'm joined by Dr. David Kipa, M.D.. Hi, everyone.

It's a pleasure to be here to assist Allaster by providing some medical information and insight into the killer's modus operandi. I've been in private practice for over three decades specializing in internal and addiction medicine, and I'm really thrilled to be part of this program because I'm a huge fan of crime stories. And for me, as a doctor, solving a murder is very much like solving a difficult diagnosis.

You can find episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts to stream medical murders for free on Spotify, just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. This is our second episode on Dr. H.H. Holmes, often cited as America's first serial killer. Though only nine of his murders have been confirmed, many suspect him of slaughtering dozens, if not hundreds of victims between 1886 and 1894. Last time we examined Holmes first murders and how he used his medical expertise to embark on a life of crime, this episode we'll discuss the sadistic rampage that made Holmes America's most infamous killer doctor.

All this and more coming up. Stay with us.

On Christmas Eve, 1891, Dr. H.H. Holmes killed his mistress Julia and her six year old daughter puzzle. Over the next few months, the 31 year old lay low, taking a break from crime until he was sure no one suspected him of the murders. By May of 1892, Holmes felt secure enough to go back to doing what he loved scamming the unsuspecting citizens of Chicago. His next project was to take advantage of addicts. He planned to rip off a popular and ineffective treatment for alcoholism.

At the time, it was a popular clinic for alcoholics not far from homes in the small town of Dwights, Illinois. Patients there were administered the so-called gold cure, a patent medicine derived from a gold bromide. While his medicine was not the cure, he hoped it to be the physician in charge of the clinic. Dr. Keeley did have a groundbreaking understanding of alcoholism. He treated the condition as an actual chemical addiction.

Actually, Dr. Healy was one of many people that was investigating the roots of alcoholism. Perhaps the most interesting figure in our evolution of understanding addiction is Bill Wilson, a co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Bill is a soldier who became an alcoholic after drinking at an officers party because he was so nervous at this gathering, he drank a beer. And this single drink was the catalyst for his ensuing alcoholism and the birth of one of the world's most successful treatments for addiction.

After a while, he understood that just talk therapy was not enough.

So he started to look deeper into this problem and he actually started using medications that were supplements like niacin, but realized at the end that even with these supplements and talk therapy, there was something missing, primarily because we didn't understand alcoholism as a disease. And for many years we thought of this as a behavioral malady.

And it was about in the early 2000s that we found the missing link in these chemical receptors in the brain. Now that we've been able to isolate a specific neurotransmitters that relate to alcoholism, dopamine and serotonin, we can use targeted medications to attack an alcoholics chemical imbalance at its source.

I personally think a combination of medication and therapy is the most effective treatment, and maybe more people would seek help if the social stigma of being an alcoholic was further deconstructed. In order for this to happen, physicians need to remain. Progressive up to date and compassionate with those afflicted. Of course, Dr. Holmes was far from compassionate. He wasn't interested in treating alcoholism. He was only interested in cashing in on the popularity of the gold cure. It had long been his goal to create a successful patent medicine, but Holmes was never particularly creative when it came time to name his new business.

He called it the Silver Ash Institute. Instead of using a bromide derived from gold, Holmes intended to use silver, literally creating a cheap knockoff of an already useless medicine.

Gold bromide refers to the result of the chemical elements gold and bromine bonding together. Gold itself actually does have a footing in medicine, and it's been used for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis and other more destructive forms of inflammation in the joints, gold axes and antiinflammatory. It would certainly have no impact on alcoholism, but it might help somebody that had stiff or painful joints. It does, however, make sense that gold could have been couched as some kind of miracle cure back in the hundreds, as many strange things were.

Though the plan seems simple enough, the Silver Ash Institute never took off like so many of homes get rich quick schemes. The enterprise was soon shuttered. However, there was a silver lining. Homes had hired a typist for the business, 24 year old Emelin Sergant, and soon found himself smitten. He brazenly pursued Amylin at work, though he had a wife, Merta, and a three year old child, Lucy. Back at home, many found homes behavior improper.

Emelin landlady forbade him from coming by the boarding house, but Emelin couldn't help but be swept off her feet. She was won over by homes, glib charm, expensive gifts and his promises that he would leave his wife for her. Emiliane was Holmes mistress for about a year until December of 1892, when she went missing.

In the months after her disappearance, there were rumors that Emelin had gotten pregnant and skipped town if she was pregnant.

It's possible Holmes tricked her into undergoing an abortion and murdered her on the operating table, just as he'd allegedly done to Julia O'Connor. This time, Holmes was confident he could get away with the murder. As soon as he'd killed Emelin, he launched another bold new scam with the World's Fair set to begin in May of 1893. Holmes decided to open a hotel while it looked like he wanted to take advantage of the impending tourism boom. He wasn't exactly out to make money off of the visiting fairgoers.

Instead, Homes was more interested in defrauding the multitude of amateur investors, clamoring to take advantage of the new opportunity. Many were all too eager to shell out cash without doing their due diligence. Holmes began approaching rich men all over town, telling them that he was opening a hotel in preparation for the fair. He used their letters of credit to construct a third story on top of his existing retail and apartment complex.

By the early months of 1893, many lenders had caught on that 32 year old homes, wasn't ever going to pay them what they were owed. Angry business owners swarmed the partially completed building to repossess their property. However, most were disappointed homes had already sold off many of the furnishings and had carefully hidden the rest. The items were so well concealed that it took weeks and multiple walk Theroux's for creditors to find what they were looking for. If they found them at all, not for the first time.

Homes outfoxed his marks through sheer absurdity. While the third floor was being constructed, he'd ordered countless secret doors and hidden compartments installed, which he used to keep his ill gotten gains out of sight. False walls and passageways hidden behind closets were packed to the brim with hardware, lumber and other equipment. But if the repo men didn't think to knock down walls or look for trapdoors, they would never find the stolen goods. It was these secret passageways, along with later sensational claims by Holmes himself that gave rise to legends about his so-called murder castle.

Pulp writers in the early 20th century seized on the strangest aspects of Holmes story and played them up. While it's possible that Holmes lured unsuspecting guests into his hotel and killed them, there's no hard evidence to support those claims. Most of the rooms in Holmes Hotel weren't even properly furnished, and there's no record. He operated the business legitimately. It was primarily a shell used to fool investors. On the other hand, hundreds of visitors to the World's Fair did disappear or fall victim to violent crimes.

While in Chicago, local police were known to be corrupt and had a reputation for ignoring as many cases as they pursued. So unfortunately, we'll never know for sure how many victims homes might have claimed in his castle. Even if he wasn't actually accepting guests running a phony hotel while simultaneously managing a legitimate drug store would have been enough for most men, but not for homes. By March of 1893, he was working hard to seduce his newest employee, a typist named Minnie Williams.

Minnie was a bit older than Emmeline at age 28 and a lot more worldly. She was charmed by Holmes attention and his persona as an ambitious doctor and business mogul. But she wasn't willing to take his word for it that he would leave his wife for her. She needed commitment.

So in June of 1893, Holmes moved into an apartment with many they posed as husband and wife in front of the other tenants using the names. Mr. and Mrs. Gordon Holmes, now 32, spent a few days a week with many and the rest of his time at home with his real wife, Marta. It's possible Holmes held a phony ceremony and convinced many they were actually married. It certainly seems as though many believed Holmes was committed a few weeks later.

The couple were joined in their apartment by Minnie's oldest sister, Nanny. Nanny had come to Chicago from Texas to see the World's Fair and decided to move in with her sister and her new husband for a while.

This meant Holmes was now juggling not just two wives, but two entirely separate families.

At the same time, he was still under pressure from a slew of infuriated creditors chasing him across the city. All the stress eventually became too much. After only a month of living together, Holmes hatched a plan to get rid of many and nanny. Neither sister was seen alive again after July 5th, 1893. Like many of his murders, it's not known exactly how Holmes killed the women or where he hid their remains. His story changed vastly in later years.

He initially confessed to stuffing Nanny's body in a trunk and sinking it in Lake Michigan, but later recanted his confession. Another possibility is that Holmes murdered the women in his hotel and incinerated the evidence in August, a month after Minnie and Nancy disappeared. Holmes set fire to his three story complex, including his World's Fair hotel. The building represented years of intricate lies, absurd trickery and half baked cons. When it burned, any hard evidence of Holmes murders went along with it.

But Holmes wasn't just out to cover his tracks. He also hoped to collect a hefty insurance payout. Unfortunately for him, defrauding the insurance companies was more difficult than forging letters of credit. Holmes to take it out multiple policies on the building using aliases and had failed to cover his tracks in a matter of weeks. He not only had angry creditors hounding him, but police as well now in danger of being arrested for fraud. Holmes decided that he would have to leave Chicago.

He didn't plan on taking his wife Merta, or his four year old daughter with him, but didn't intend to leave as a single man either as he made preparations to leave town. Holmes also began wooing yet another mistress, 24 year old Georgiana Yog, a clerk at a department store, had recently fallen victim to his charms, and she was all too eager to run away with the doctor. Holmes found her to be gullible and romantic, the perfect target.

When he told her that his uncle had left him some property in Texas, she excitedly left her job to join him on his trip to Georgiana. It was love at first sight, but for Holmes, Georgiana was just another tool, an accessory to his rabid killing spree.

Coming up, H.H. Holmes leaves Illinois killing freely as he crisscrosses the United States. Before we get back to the show, I have a quick podcast recommendation I think you'll really enjoy. It's an all new Spotify original from podcast and it's called Incredible Feats. Every weekday, comedian Dan Cummins, who you might recognize from the hit podcast Time Suck, explores a true account of physical strength, mental focus or bizarre behavior. He goes behind the scenes into the achievements of world record holders like Ashrita Furman, who's broken records on every continent, and athletes like Wim Hof, whose training methods allow him to withstand extreme temperatures for hours at a time.

And even people like Juliana Koepka, who was forced to survive alone in a rainforest when she was just 17 years old. Incredible feats is offbeat entertainment that sometimes weird, sometimes wonderful and always surprising. New episodes air Monday through Friday. Such incredible feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the story. In November of 1893, 32 year old Dr. Kahneman and murderer H.H. Holmes fled Chicago for good. He left his wife, Merta, and their four year old daughter behind without any explanation.

He and his latest mistress, Georgiana Yog, made for Texas, where Holmes told Georgiana he stood to inherit some property from his uncle. In actuality, the property homes had in mind belonged to his previous mistress, Minnie Wiliams. Holmes had killed many a few months earlier and now hoped to steal her inheritance and start anew in Fort Worth. Homes recruited a petty criminal he had worked with in Chicago, Benjamin Pizzle, to help him forge the deed to Minnies property.

Together, they managed to get the documents notarized and moved in for about six months. Homes Pizzle and Georgiana lived in Texas, but they were unable to stay out of trouble. Holmes quickly established himself as untrustworthy and accumulated a mountain of debt by July of 1894. He was forced to flee Texas in August. He, Georgiana and Pizzle made it to Philadelphia, where they lived undercover. But once again, Holmes needed money. For years, he had been dreaming of pulling off insurance fraud.

This time he was determined to make the companies pay for all the trouble they'd caused him in the past.

He convinced PYT sold that he had a solid plan and together they agreed to fake a death.

Using copious medical jargon, Holmes convinced Piso that the scam would be a piece of cake or they had to do was to procure a cadaver that roughly resembled pizzle.

Then they would burn and disfigured the face to hide its true identity and make it look as if the death was caused by an accidental explosion. Then they cash in on Feisal's insurance policy, a hefty sum given he had several children four years.

Hitsville had been assisting homes with his pie in the sky schemes. In the past, he'd helped Holmes hide his stolen goods from repo men and posed as a lawyer to intimidate people.

Homes had ripped off. In general, he had served as Holmes right hand man, someone who was willing to discreetly do anything to make a quick buck. Pisin wasn't foolish enough to completely trust his partner, but he didn't believe Holmes was dangerous, so he agreed to the plan that perhaps was Holmes greatest asset.

Nobody in his life ever suspected him of violence. No one ever saw the killing blow coming until it was already too late.

Holmes wasn't planning to procure a cadaver that resembled Benjamin Piso. He was planning to procure the cadaver of NEITZEL himself. On the morning of September 2nd, 1894, Holmes left Georgiana and walked down to Mitsos apartments in Philadelphia. The first order of business was for Holmes to get his friend too drunk to fight back. Pizzle was a known alcoholic, so it's possible he was already tipsy when Holmes showed up at his apartment if he was sober. It apparently wasn't too difficult to convince him to start drinking.

In the span of an hour or two, Heisel became completely delirious, so drunk that he could hardly see straight. Holmes, on the other hand, was stone cold sober. Once he was sure Pizzle was incapacitated, he reached into his pockets and pulled out a vial of chloroform, a common anesthetic and feigned tool for Hollywood spies.

Chloroform as a powerful sedative. But it's actually not as easy to use as the murder mystery movies make it seem. While it has been a tool in many crimes and murders over the years, rendering someone unconscious with a chloroform soaked rag would be pretty difficult. When chloroform is inhaled as a gas, it goes directly into the bloodstream and acts as a sedative in the brain. It would take a good five to 10 minutes to actually see someone black out from this.

And even then you'd have to keep administering more to keep someone in that unconscious state. This is why there's usually another substance involved when chloroform is used in a crime like alcohol or benzo drugs. And this is exactly what we saw with Holmes and Pizzle.

Because Peiser was already drunk, it would have been much easier for a trained doctor like Holmes to effectively put him to sleep. Which is exactly what he did. Holmes forced his friend to inhale the chloroform, gradually increasing the dose until BrightSource Pulse stopped. Afterward, he poured a few ounces of the chemical downpipes sore throat and pumped his chest so that it would enter his stomach. This was home's insurance policy, if an autopsy was performed and the coroner suspected that Paintsville had not died by accident.

Holmes wanted his death to look like suicide by chloroform. It was an unusual way to die, but one that would explain the overwhelming stench of chloroform at the scene. Home's primary plan, however, was to make it look like pizzle had died as a result of a chemical explosion. He carefully arranged his friend's body on the floor to look as if he had been knocked backward by a blast. Then he puts a shattered bottle of flammable benzene next to the body, along with a spent match and a pipe.

To the casual observer, it appeared the Pikesville had lit his pipe too close to the benzene homes burned pineapple's face and hair with a lighter to complete the effect. It was an audacious effort, but as usual, Holmes overestimated his own genius. It didn't take long to poke holes in the unlikely scenario.

The cover up that Holmes attempted on title's death was absurd. He claimed this was an explosion, but the only things burned on people's body were his hair and his face. In retrospect, the cover up of this murder was terrible. The lethal oral dose of chloroform is around three tenths of an ounce, and Holmes gave pizzle three full ounces or ten times the lethal dose. This dose would have resulted in a very rapid death, and it's hard to imagine Pikesville doing anything immediately after, especially striking a match.

Any competent medical examiner in this situation would have recognized that something was fishy.

Indeed, physicians in Philadelphia were not fooled in the slightest pizzas body was found a day after Holmes killed him on September 3rd. By that time, Holmes had skipped town with Georgiana, though he'd been hoping for a bigger head start. Though Pisolite body had begun to decay, it was still mostly intact. The doctors believe Pisolite body had been posed and that he hadn't died of an explosion at all, but the next day they were overruled by a coroner's jury, which determined that the cause of his death had been an explosion.

It's not known why the jury, likely composed of townsfolk without any medical training, opted to go against the doctor's recommendations, they may have found it hard to believe that someone would go to so much trouble to fake pineapple's death in such an absurd manner. They had unknowingly played right into Holmes hands, he and Georgianna were already headed to St. Louis to fetch those family homes, needed them to identify Pisolite body for the insurance company so he could get the payout when Holmes arrived in St.

Louis.

He found that the family had already heard the news about peso's death. He faced a dilemma. If he confirms that Benjamin had mysteriously died, they might suspect his involvement and he wouldn't be entitled to any of the insurance payout. But if he could convince Mrs. Pizzle that it was all part of a grand scam, he could still go through with his plan. It took some doing, but Holmes cruelly managed to give his wife false hope.

He told her he had worked with Weitzel to fake his death. He needed her to come back to Philadelphia to identify a phony corpse. Then they could all split the insurance money because Mrs. Pizzle was sick at the time, she decided to send her 15 year old daughter Alice, to identify the body instead. To keep the scheme a secret, Mrs. Pintor had agreed not to tell her children that she believed Paintsville was still alive. Holmes claimed he wanted to get a genuine reaction out of Alice when she saw the body so that the insurance agents wouldn't suspect foul play.

In reality, he may have just wanted to watch Alice suffer when she saw her father's corpse. Either way, Alice and Holmes traveled back to Philadelphia together on September 22nd, 1894. Alice positively identified the body in the morgue as her father, and Holmes collected the insurance money out of the 7200 dollar payout.

He only sent 500 dollars to Mrs. Piso.

But even after all of that, Holmes wasn't done torturing the pint cells, Mrs. Piso believed her husband would eventually come out of hiding and rejoin them. Homes needed to keep the illusion going. Otherwise, she might realize that he had a hand in peso's death. With that in mind, Holmes generously offered to handle the travel arrangements for the entire family. He told Mrs. Pizzle that her husband would meet them in Indianapolis to start their new life together. Mrs. Piso was happy to leave everything to Holmes.

She knew her husband was involved in unsavory activities, but tried not to get involved herself. She hoped this would be the last of his criminal schemes and that they would be able to start fresh in Indiana. But Holmes had other plans. Up next, H.H. Holmes sinks his claws into the piso children. Now back to the story.

In September of 1894, 33 year old H.H. Holmes successfully collected a life insurance payout after murdering his business partner, Benjamin Pizzle. He then convinced Pineapple's wife, as well as her five children, to travel with him across the United States. Mrs. Points or believe that Holmes had only faked her husband's death and was now taking them to a safe house where they could reunite. But that was just the latest in Holmes endless string of lies. In reality, he considered every member of the piezo family to be a loose end who could implicate him in insurance fraud and murder.

He needed to get rid of them to make things easier. Holmes split the family into small groups and had each of the groups travel on different trains and stay in separate hotels. Holmes himself traveled with Howard Weitzel, a young boy who hadn't yet left elementary school. The pair of them reached Indianapolis on October 10th. Homes arranged for himself and Howard to stay in a house he'd rented outside the city there. A neighbor helped him set up a stove. When nightfall came, he had Howard go out and fetch dinner while the boy was running errands.

Homes, heated the stove and prepared the poison. He would lay into Howard's last meal. Reports differ on whether Holmes killed Howard using cyanide, wolfsbane or a cocaine mixture. All of these drugs were later found in the barn outside the rented home. All three of these drugs are poisonous on their own, so combining them together would actually make it a much more efficient way to kill somebody.

Of the three poisons that we discuss, cyanide is perhaps the most lethal, with cocaine taking a very close second.

Cyanide is a fast acting chemical found in nature, in plants and some foods. If enough is ingested, it kills you by cutting off your cells ability to use oxygen. Cocaine is a highly addictive substance harvested from the South American coca plant and can be ingested in a variety of ways in terms of causing death. Cocaine stimulant effect heightens one's risk for a sudden and lethal heart attack. Wolfsbane is a flower that contains a deadly toxin known as a contain, and even touching it in the wild can lead to mild toxicity, resulting in headache, nausea and heart palpitations.

All these poisons have similar killing potentials and that they can easily be administered without detection, especially to an unsuspecting child. Also, with no medical examiner poking around, it would have been very difficult to detect any of these poisons after the fact, especially since Holmes plan to obliterate all traces of Howard pizzle.

After the boy was dead, homes burned, bits of his body in the stove and buried the rest in a nearby barn. He then convinced the souls that they would need to leave town again. He told Mrs. Piso that her husband could no longer meet them in Indianapolis. Instead, they would have to travel across the border to meet him in Toronto to prevent her from asking questions about her son. Holmes told her he was leaving Howard in Indianapolis with his cousin Minnie Williams.

Home's had enough on his plates trying to pick off the souls one by one, but his problems were about to get worse. Back in Philadelphia, an insurance investigator reviewed the coroner's report for Benjamen Michael's death and became suspicious. He didn't believe the false explosion story and hired the famous Pinkerton Detective Agency to pursue Holmes to investigate the matter further. Meanwhile, in Canada, Holmes separated Mrs. Paintsville from her daughter's 15 year old Alice and 16 year old Nelly. He took both of the girls to a rented house in Toronto on the night of October 25th.

Once again, it's unclear exactly how Holmes killed the girls, he later claims that he somehow lured them into a large trunk or suitcase, then attached a hose to the gas main in the house and suffocated them.

I doubt this was the real story. First, I'm not really sure how anyone could be lured into a large trunk or suitcase without prior intoxication, let alone two people. It also seems like a very inefficient method of killing. And it would be odd. It's Holmes concocted an elaborate setup, an apparatus for this purpose. Why would he go through all that hassle? It kind of seems to me like this was something Holmes made up for the sake of shock value to be more interesting.

It's much more likely that Holmes used poison once again, as there's some evidence to suggest that the home in question did not even have a gas main. Regardless of how he committed the murders, Holmes buried the bodies in a shallow grave in the cellar and burned their clothing in the furnace. By now, he had killed at least nine people. Five of them belonged to the Paintsville family. Only Mrs. Weitzel and her infant son remained for homes to eliminate. However, he couldn't act right away at the time Mrs.

Pizzle was hiding in New York at his instructions, he needed to figure out how to reunite with her alone without arousing her suspicions. Home's next moves are somewhat of a mystery.

He traveled around Canada and the northern United States for the next few weeks, always closely followed by detectives on November 13th. He resurfaced in Boston. He was likely planning to lure Mrs. Pizzle there with a new round of lies and false hope so he could tie up the final loose end.

Though he didn't know for sure that the Pinkertons were chasing him, Holmes always suspected he was being tailed. Up until that point, he had been careful about covering his tracks. But it's possible that with all his focus on the source, he was too distracted to keep up his disappearing act forever. With the help of the Pinkerton detectives, Boston police found and arrested Holmes on November 17th, 1894.

It didn't take long for authorities to realize that Holmes may have been guilty of more than insurance fraud. People close to him had been disappearing for years in custody. Holmes told a number of conflicting stories. He lied repeatedly about where his mistresses had gone, whether Benjamin Pizzle and his children were still alive and about his activities in Chicago. It was obvious Holmes wasn't being truthful, but it was difficult to separate fact from fiction. Police struggled to find hard evidence connecting Holmes to murder until July 1895.

That month, Nellie and Alice Mitsos bodies were finally found in the Toronto cellar when he learned the bodies had been discovered, Holmes responded, Well, I guess they'll hang me for this. He was right. In October, 34 year old Holmes was put on trial for murdering Benjamin Pizzle and was sentenced to be hanged. Afterward, police decided not to pursue charges for the deaths of Alice and Nelly, but Holmes made the most of his final months in the spotlight now with nothing to lose.

He gave a new confession to a Hearst newspaper, this time claiming to have murdered 27 people throughout his life. The newspaper paid him 7500 dollars for the tell all confession, but it was later found to be largely fabricated until the very end, Holmes said. Whatever he could to become rich and infamous. He even claimed he was possessed by Satan. Sensational reports began to circulate that he'd killed hundreds of people in his so-called murder castle in Chicago.

The reality was much sadder, though, his reputation would later paint him as one of history's greatest monsters. There was nothing special about H.H. Holmes. Throughout his life, he was primarily a second rate con man. He was a failed doctor who callously murdered at least nine people, mostly to cover up for his repeated catastrophic mistakes after looking at homes and his story.

It's clear he was a subpar physician. He was, however, an excellent murderer at the time of his killings. He used what was available to him very efficiently and very insidiously. It's rare that doctors enter training without the genuine intentions to help people and ethically practice their trade. It's a long haul to become a doctor, so one would have to be really committed to their unique motivation. This is a terrifying reality because it represents how determined Holmes was to line his pockets at the expense of a vulnerable population and even more sinister thought, maybe status and financial gain were secondary to Holmes underlying need to kill.

It may even be that Holmes thought becoming a doctor would give him some advantage in his underhanded get rich quick business ventures as he could masquerade as a moral man. Homes always seemed more interested in business dealings rather than medicine, but despite spending years trying to strike it rich and some unbelievable strokes of luck, he rarely had much money and certainly never had a genuine relationship. In the end, all he ended up with was the persona, the crumpled under the slightest scrutiny.

On May 7th, 1896, Holmes was hanged in Philadelphia. Few people mourned the loss while he was undeniably evil at his core, H.H. Holmes was nothing but a fraud. Thanks for listening to medical murders and thanks again to Dr. Kipa for joining me today. Alastair, thank you so much for having me.

And I'm really looking forward to next week's episode.

For more information on homes, among the many sources we used, we found the book H.H. Holmes The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer. Extremely helpful to our research.

You can find all episodes of medical murders and all other podcast originals for free on Spotify.

Not only does Spotify already have all of your favorite music, but now Spotify is making it easy for you to enjoy all of your favorite podcast originals like medical murders for free from your phone, desktop or smart speaker to stream medical matters on Spotify. Just open the app and type medical murders in the search bar. We'll see you next time. Medical Murders was created by Max Cutler and as a podcast studio's original. It is executive produced by Max Cutler. Sound Design by Ron Shapiro with production assistance by Carly Madden, Kristen Acevedo, Jonathan Cohen, Jonathan Rateliff and Erin Larson.

This episode of Medical Murders was written by Terrell Wells with writing assistants by Maggie Admire and stars David Kipa and Alistair Murden.

Listeners, you don't want to miss incredible feats, the all news Spotify original from podcast host Dan Cumins freefall straight into the weirdest, wildest achievements of all time. New episodes every weekday search incredible feats and follow free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.