The Beast of Chicago

The Beast of Chicago by Rick Geary  80 pp.

I am well and truly hooked on this "Victorian Murder" graphic novel series. This one is about the serial killer Herman Mudgett, aka H.H. Holmes, who is called "America's First Serial Killer". In truth, he is the first one to be caught and convicted. Holmes story was featured in the book The Devil in the White City which I read a few years ago. He had a large building constructed in Chicago which housed businesses on the first floor and rooms to rent in the upper floors. The building also had secret rooms and staircases, gas jets to air tight rooms that he could control from his personal residence, an oversized furnace for disposing of bodies, and an "autopsy" room where he dismemberd bodies. During the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 he had a brisk business in boarders and many of them never left alive. In addition to the murders he committed in Chicago, Mudgett/Holmes was also a bigamist with wives and children scattered around the country, committed life insurance fraud, and murders in other parts of the country. It's a creepy story about a creepy, evil man.