Step 1. Steal a cadaver (Check!)
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I live in Fort Worth. For a time, so did serial murderer Henry Howard Holmes.
Henry, as a young medical student in 1861, was a future serial killer.
Did he know his destiny? Hard to say.
Here is what is known and true. 
Henry was a medical student with a wild imagination. There were all these dead bodies lying about and nobody to exploit them for profit. If only somebody could concoct a scam and collect money from insurance companies using those corpses...hmmm?
Henry to the rescue!
Step 1. Steal a cadaver (Check!)
Step 2. Steal the identity of the deceased. (Check!)
Step 3. Take out a life insurance policy. (Check!)
Step 4. Name yourself beneficiary in case of death. (Check!)
Let’s cut to the chase...you’re getting ahead of the story. Obviously, Henry was able to collect plenty of money. After all, he could provide proof of death, right?
The fun part was setting up an accident and positioning the body. Sound like fun? Well, for a future serial killer it sure would be!
This sort of fraud was more exciting than some of Henry’s earlier schemes, profitable as they were, such as Mail Order cures for alcoholism. (Synopsis: stop drinking.)
Then there was the wonderful contraption Henry invented which extracted “illuminating gas” from the water. (Do I have to tell you our boy had piped in natural gas from the city pipes?)
Investors were impressed.
The money rolled in. Henry rolled out.
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As Henry grew more sophisticated in his thinking, he turned to marrying rich widows!
These women’s assets found their way into our ‘hero’s’ bank account shortly before the honeymooners went off on a trip around the world. Henry always came back. The spouse never did turn up!
Divorce was unnecessary.
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30 years passed from the corpse theft days. All sorts of criminality found its way into Henry H. Holmes’ biography. Cattle theft was the least exciting, while hotel building proved to be one of the grandest and most grisly schemes this man’s twisted mind embarked upon for murderous purposes.
As I told you at the start, I live in Fort Worth. For a time, so did serial murderer H.H. Holmes. In fact, Henry built a fabulous hotel in my fair city.
The year is 1885 and the location was at the corner of today's Commerce St. and 2nd St.
H.H.Holmes had married a railroad heiress in Cowtown and took possession and control of his wife and sister’s inheritance, their property, (before he murdered them).
You can read the story here on the front page of the Fort Worth Gazette.
https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth110022/m1/1/
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Upon prime downtown real estate Henry constructed a hotel which would house his own version of a chamber of horrors.
Let’s call this building what newspapers later called it, TEXAS MURDER CASTLE.
Another newspaper called it THE RUSK STREET FIRETRAP. Even that long ago, media couldn’t get its stories straight. (Commerce St. was the wrong street name, Rusk was the right name.)
We can gather facts about his macabre building by comparing it with a later hotel he also constructed during the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893.
To wit:
“The street-level floor was for shops and his pharmacy, while the upper two stories were hotel rooms (or boarding house rooms) and his office. However, the upper two stories were laid out like a maze, with doors that opened into walls, stairways that went nowhere, and gas pipes which he apparently controlled to suffocate people. There were also chutes and a dumbwaiter, purportedly intended to deliver the bodies of his victims to the basement where he might bury them, burn them in his own crematory ovens, or dissect and render them (in acid) in order to convert them to skeletons to sell to medical schools. He apparently lured quite a number of women into these torture chambers / charnel house, as well as a few men, before he was eventually found out.”
The problem with being a serial killer, fraudster, thief, and Con man is having way too many loose ends to tie up before somebody gets wise and comes after you.
H.H.Holmes was going by the name of O.C. Pratt in Fort Worth and one of his illicit enterprises involved a far more serious crime than serial murder:
Horse thievery!
It would not be an exaggeration to say, it was the horror at his making off with a railroad car filled with fine horses which got him run out of Fort Worth and eventually arrested in Chicago where his serial killing via Hotel Horror chambers brought him into the crosshairs of police.
His life’s work of death was thus interrupted before he could chalk up new outlines on the floors of his Ft.Worth Hotel.
Now, this is the story as it is commonly told locally. It isn’t quite correct.
According to historian and author Adam Selzer:
Throughout winter and spring, 1894, Holmes supervised construction of the new building in Fort Worth, which was, in fact, actually completed, though never occupied or used. Though about twice the square footage, being on a wider lot, it was almost exactly the same design as the Chicago castle on the outside.
Galveston Daily News reported “The grim, half-completed building nearby, (and) the dark alley give the place an uninviting appearance. The weeds grow above the spot and the smell of the surroundings is suggestive enough.”
The same article further noted that in the middle ages, the place would have been called “The Castle of Many Doors.” Rumors suggested there was a chute leading right to a sewer, which would have been a great way to dispose of a body.
Worth noting:
67 people who checked into the Chicago Hotel during the Word’s Fair never checked out or were seen or heard from again.
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For greater details about H.H.Holmes try this new book:
H. H. Holmes The True History of the White City Devil by Adam Selzer
https://www.amazon.com/H-Holmes-History-White-Devil/dp/1510713433/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494094821&sr=8-1&keywords=H.+H.+Holmes+The+True+History+of+the+White+City+Devil+Adam+Selzer