16. Holmes’ confession to the New York Journal
On Sunday, April 12, 1896 a facsimile of a handwritten note appeared on the front page of the New York Journal. The note read, “To the New York Journal: I positively and emphatically deny the assertions that any confession has been made by me except one and which is the only one that will be made(.) The original confession is the one given to the New York Journal. It alone is genuine all others are untrue. Signed H H Holmes April 11 1896.” His confession, in which he claimed to have murdered 27 people, appeared in the same edition of the newspaper. As has been noted earlier, some of the people he claimed to have killed were later established to still be alive, despite his claims of the confession being “genuine”.
Throughout the confession Holmes wrote of the defects of character which he had developed, and that they were easily discernible in his countenance, having caused physical changes to his face. He wrote of killing for “pecuniary gain” and that as his murders piled up he developed “the light regard I had for the lives of my fellow beings”. Holmes wrote of killing one of his male victims by starving him almost to death before needing the room in which he was held, “for another purpose and because his pleadings had become almost unbearable, I ended his life”. Holmes also described victims selected for the purpose of extorting their money, starving and gassing them over a period of time before they signed over securities and accounts to him, after which he finished them off and sold their bodies to medical schools. The chilling nature of his narrative sold well, and despite it being self-described as true, he later renounced the entire tale.