17. The Philadelphia Inquirer confession was contradicted
The confession which Holmes provided to the New York Journal, accompanied with the handwritten note which was reproduced on the front page, was not, as he claimed, the only confession he provided to the newspapers, if the newspapers of the day are to be believed. His first confession was to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the leading newspaper of the city where he was tried for the murder of his former partner, convicted, and sentenced to death. In it he claimed to have killed 27 people, and gave a mostly chronological (some were listed out of order, according to Holmes) listing of the victims and the circumstances of their deaths, including in some cases the money which he made from the killings. In some instances the victims were unnamed, with Holmes claiming that he simply couldn’t remember the name of the persons he had killed.
In some reproductions of the confessions, Holmes was quoted as saying, “I was born with the devil in me”, which did not appear in all newspapers which ran portions of the statements he gave. Whether Holmes uttered the words which explain his becoming a serial killer through the impetus of Satan has been debated ever since, as have so much of his life and his crimes. At the time of his execution, Holmes again recanted, denying his guilt in any killings. Holmes gave his final statement, according to his own words, because, “by not speaking I may be made to acquiesce in my execution”. After his execution, rumors began almost immediately that he had somehow managed to escape, and that the man buried outside Philadelphia had been another cadaver. The rumors led to his body being exhumed and tested for DNA evidence in 2017.