11. His body count was greatly exaggerated.
Holmes is often referred to as America’s first serial killer – he wasn’t – and the number of murders attributed to him have been wildly exaggerated over the decades. He started the exaggerations himself, at a time when lurid stories of the Murder Castle appeared in the yellow journalism of the day, with each newspaper trying to out sensationalize their competition. Hearst paid Holmes for his “confession” during his trial and Holmes obliged with tales admitting to 27 murders, some of them of people who were still alive. The fiction that he killed the Horton’s emerged in his “confession”. A neighbor of the Castle told a Chicago newspaper that he had long suspected Holmes as the murderer of a woman who died sometime later of heart failure, as attested by her physician who issued a death certificate.
During the 1940s the number of murders attributed to Holmes was frequently recorded as being upwards of 200, without references or sources being identified. The high number was attested to by the ever more graphic descriptions of the Murder Castle, which was so efficient in the disposing of bodies that it was implied that the number was likely even higher than that. By the twenty-first century Holmes was accused of being not only America’s first serial killer, but the Whitechapel murderer known to history as Jack the Ripper as well, though the Ripper killings took place in 1888, a time when Holmes was in Chicago, frequently in court as a result of lawsuits over construction of the Castle and his non-payment of loans. Nine murders have been confirmed with Holmes being the likely killer, including that of Benjamin Pitezel, for which he was convicted. At his hanging Holmes denied killing anyone, other than accidentally during performance of abortions.