In Jeff Mudgett’s family, his grandmother’s chicken and dumplings was legendary, and he always looked forward to dinner at her house. But one night, she had more than mouthwatering comfort food on the menu, and it was about to give Mudgett a bad case of indigestion.
“My grandmother was into Ancestry.com,” Mudgett said. “She had these thoughts about us and Robert E. Lee and names like that. And the family used to go there for her chicken and dumplings, and we used to all roll our eyes. Well, that night she said that the pros had come back to her and told her that, you know, 'you need to take up another hobby. This subject matter is not so good.'"
"My brother jumped in. He had been helping my grandmother and he explained how, 'Yeah, it was H.H. Holmes, the American serial killer of the 1890s, and how that thing was in our background.”
H.H. Holmes is widely regarded as America’s first documented serial killer. Known as “The Beast of Chicago,” Holmes is believed to have killed as many as 200 people in Chicagoland alone.
“I guess you can imagine a couple of worse things. Maybe finding out you’re a descendant of Hitler or something like that, but we’re talking about the man that had the murder castle that Chicago law enforcement agrees that many of the young ladies who came to visit the Fair that needed places to stay went missing, and were last seen associating with this monster.”
“Murder Castle” was the harrowing name subsequently given to the 3-story residence that Holmes built in Chicago in preparation for the 1893 World’s Fair. The second floor had dozens of rooms for rent. It turned out, though, that not only were they soundproofed, they had false walls, bricked exits, trap doors and chutes that emptied into a basement complete with acid vats, quicklime pits and a crematorium.
Like The Eagles’ Hotel California, guests could check out of their room at any time, but could never leave … because if they tried, an alarm system built into the floors would alert Holmes, who would introduce his unnerved guests to their gruesome end.
Most people might, understandably, keep such an earthshattering discovery a tightly-guarded family secret. That’s certainly what Mudgett’s grandfather did.
“So this was her husband’s grandfather, who hadn’t told his wife, my grandmother, his ancestry for obvious reasons back then,” Mudgett notes.
But Mudgett didn’t keep silent. An attorney by education, training and practice, he very publicly began researching the life and times of his great-great-grandfather. As he did, fellow investigators contacted him with their own anecdotes about H.H. Holmes. Several suggested that five years before he built the Murder Castle and began eviscerating Chicago tourists, Holmes had cut his teeth in London under the pseudonym of Jack the Ripper.
“And, of course, I rolled my eyes at all those standard things,” Mudgett concedes. “But then they began feeding me with evidence that I, having practiced law in California, realized that a lot of this stuff would have been admissible at trial. It was good stuff.”
One key piece of evidence was a letter London’s Central News Office received following the murder Annie Chapman. Addressed “Dear Boss” and supposedly written in red ink because Chapman’s blood had congealed, it taunted the press and police and promised to clip off the ears of his next victim and send them to the police. To that point, the Whitechapel killer had been referred to in the newspapers alternately as the Red Fiend and Leather Apron. But the author signed the Dear Boss letter by a different name – and he’s been known by that moniker ever since.
“When you bring up Jack the Ripper, that’s a phrase known to billions around the world. It’s perhaps the most chilling phrase in the English language, and that Dear Boss Letter was where the phrase Jack the Ripper was invented,” said Mudgett.
Among the artifacts and family heirlooms that have been handed down to Mudgett is correspondence written by his great-great-grandfather, along with two memoirs he wrote in prison while awaiting execution for murders he committed in 1896. When Mudgett compared these handwriting samples to the infamous Dear Boss letter, he was astonished to find that the hand that wrote them was one and the same.
“When you [lay them] side by side … the layperson can obviously see that the handwriting is the same.”
But Mudgett went one step farther. He contacted the scientists who created the FBI’s handwriting analysis computer program and had them do a comparison. Jeff will reveal the results on Friday and Saturday nights, when he presents his Gold Theatricals multi-media show "American Monster" at Fort Myers Theatre.
“I’m going to show the results that the scientists brought back to me. I’m going to let the audience see with their own eyes what they can see is obviously the same hand.”
There will be other tantalizing revelations as well – such as the very real possibility that Holmes escaped the hangman’s noose, bribed prison guards to inter someone else’s body in his grave and escaped to South America never to be seen or heard from again.
“I consider that part of the story, the H.H. Holmes story, much bigger than Jack the Ripper,” Jeff proclaims. “It’s probably the most incredible escape from the American criminal justice system in our history, and I’d like to be able to present my case someday and with all evidence as if I was in trial and let all of us decide who they think was really in that grave or not.
American Monster is on stage for two shows only on March 3rd and 4th at Fort Myers Theatre.
FAST FACTS:
- American Monster is a 90-minute interactive multi-media show during which Jeff Mudgett will argue to the audience, sitting as judge and jury, that before his great-great-grandfather, H.H. Holmes, became the “Beast of Chicago, he killed under the pseudonym of Jack the Ripper.
- Holmes activities in the U.S. are well-documented except for a short span of time between July of 1888 and the beginning of 1889, during which he seems to have virtually disappeared. Coincidentally – or not – Jack the Ripper went on his murder spree from August to November of 1888.
- Not long after Jack the Ripper eviscerated his final victim, Mary Kelly, a ship’s log in England revealed that a passenger named H. Holmes booked passage for America.
- Historians have long maintained that Jack the Ripper was either a doctor or, at the very least, had medical training. H.H. Holmes received an MD from the University of Michigan Medical School, where he earned his doctorate. There, he gained such extensive medical training in dissection and organ removal that he could take out a kidney or uterus in a mere matter of seconds. At least three of Jack the Ripper’s victims had one or more of their organs removed.
- Scotland Yard’s profile of the Whitechapel Murderer postulated that the killer was 5 feet 7 inches, between 140 and 160 pounds and 25-35 years old. H.H. Holmes was 5 feet 7 inches, 147 pounds and 27 years old. Artists’ rendering included in the London newspapers bear an uncanny resemblance to photos of H.H. Holmes that were published in the Chicago Tribune a few years later.
- Holmes was convicted for the 1896 killings of his business partner and three of his children.
- Prior to his hanging for these murders, Holmes ordered his casket to be encased in 3,000 pounds of concrete ostensibly to prevent anyone exhuming and desecrating his body. Holmes’ great-great-grandson maintains that this was actually a measure designed to cover up the fact that someone else had been interred in his grave.
- Mudgett claims that like Ted Bundy and many other modern-day serial killers, his great-great-grandfather was able to con and kill so many victims because he was attractive, disarming, “charming, debonair and elegant.”
- The Dear Boss letter referenced above reads:
“Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal.
How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I can’t use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight.
My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.
Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
- Don’t mind me giving the trade name. Wasn’t good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha”
- And in fact, the next victim, Catherine Eddowes’ earlobes were mutilated.
- Many researchers and historians contend that the Dear Boss letter and subsequent Saucy Jacky postcard were written by a journalist to sell newspapers. “London was the biggest, largest city in the world at the time,” Mudgett acknowledges. “There were 6 million people that lived there and … there were 1 million newspapers with updates about Jack the Ripper being sold every day. It was a fortune for the news accounts, and they took advantage of it.”
- The unsolved mystery of Jack the Ripper was the subject of a 2015 TEDxVancouver Talk and a History Channel series entitled American Ripper that aired from July 11, 2017 (“Devil in the Details”) through August 29, 2017 (“The Grave).
- Jeff Mudgett has also recounted the story of his great-great-grandfather in a book which he titled Bloodstains.