2. The insurance fraud scheme at the University of Michigan
It was while he was a student at the University of Michigan that Mudgett came to the conclusion that cadavers could serve a purpose beyond that of understanding human anatomy. With his acquired knowledge and access to the cadavers in the university’s laboratory, Holmes established one of his early insurance scams. He stole cadavers from the lab, maimed them either surgically or by burning, and then placed them in carefully contrived accident scenes, after having acquired an insurance policy on the “victim”. Holmes continued the scam until he graduated from Michigan, or so he later told reporters for Hearst Newspapers. As with many of his claims while confessing, the scam could not be verified by authorities or insurance companies, and the University of Michigan could not, or would not, confirm the discrepancies in the laboratory’s inventory.
After graduating, which was itself nearly derailed due to a scandal involving a woman he had promised to marry despite being already married, Holmes eventually surfaced in Philadelphia, where he worked for a time in a pharmacy. When a customer died after taking medications prepared by Holmes he relocated, turning up in Chicago in 1885. Though his medical degree read Mudgett, he continued to work under the name Holmes; Chicago in the 1880s was not a town noted for strict law enforcement or legal niceties. Holmes was employed in Chicago at a drugstore located on the corner of Wallace Avenue and West 63rd, by a man who was a fellow graduate of the University of Michigan, who owned the store with his wife, Elizabeth Holton. Part of Holmes’ mythology is that he poisoned the druggist and murdered his widow, neither of which is true. Both were still alive when Holmes was executed in Philadelphia.