What’s Juicy?
I first found out about H.H. Holmes while watching a TV show named Timeless a few years back. Since then, his name or alias has come up a few times. I was pretty surprised when I heard about his connection to Fort Worth.
Minnie Williams is the person who brought Mudgett to Fort Worth. She was born in Mississippi into poverty. Her parents died and she went to live with her uncle in Dallas. Nanny and her brother stayed behind. There is no evidence she had a speech impediment but she did attend the Conservatory of Elocution in Boston. She came back to Midlothian to teach but also went to the northeast to perform in theater. That is where she most likely met Mudgett.
There are several accounts of how Minnie and Hatch/Holmes/Mudgett met. I don’t really know which one is true, so I went with the most likely story.
Mudgett did have a history of disturbing the dead to commit insurance fraud. He would steal bodies, even dig them up, to stage them as people he bought life insurance policies for. He is also accused of turning stolen corpses into medical skeletons. They were sold to local universities. He is most famous for his Chicago Murder Castle that he expanded for the Chicago World’s Fair. It is believed that he murdered hundreds of fair attendees.
Nannie was asked to come to Chicago for Minnie’s wedding. If Minnie wrote the letter, she was definitely not alive when Nannie arrived. In his biography, he admitted to suffocating Minnie in an air tight vault.
He was tried and hanged for killing Pietzel. He turned himself in because he was afraid what they would do to him in Texas for stealing horses.
The fascinating part of this story is that there are so many discrepancies in the newspaper accounts that it is hard to tell what is true and what is embellished. It is definitely my kind of story.