Prolific serial killer spent time at U-M getting medical degree

Prolific serial killer spent time at U-M getting medical degree

By Pamela J. Appea

Sept. 02, 1999

   Herman Webster Mudgett must be at the top of a short list of University of Michigan graduates who didn't use their U-M degree to their best advantage.

   Mudgett, an 1984 graduate of the U-M medical school, is probably the first- and perhaps only U-M graduate hanged for murder.

   The Mudgett story is complex with many unanswered questions, but a review of two historical accounts provides the basic story.

   After some time at other universities, Mudgett came to Michigan to finish his medical degree.  Mudgett, who used several aliases throughout his life, was a chronic liar, always looking for profitable schemes. 

   While still a student, Mudgett allegedly began a fraudulent insurance scam he dug up bodies from the local cemetery, claiming money for them under false names, according to Robert Nash, author of "Bloodletters and Badmen".

   Little else is known about Mudgett's time as a student, but he was reportedly supported by his first wife, who lived in New Hampshire.

  After graduation, Mudgett moved to Chicago's south side, where he worked as a druggist. After several years, he bought land on 63rd Street and constructed a castle-like home with trap doors, false walls, an elevator with no shaft, and a chute that led to the basement, according to an end account by crime biographer Harold Schecter.

   Police believed that he killed dozens of women in the "Death Castle" by smothering them with chloroform. After Mudgett reportedly promised marriage, he convinced the women to sign over their banks accounts to him. Instead of marrying the women, Mudgett would murder the women at the house. 

   Mudgett would dump his victims down the "castle's" chute and then dissect the bodies in the basement, Nash wrote. 

   Nash reports that Mudgett was finally tripped up by the authorities when he murdered several members of the Pietzel family. In a botched fraudulent insurance partnership plan with father and husband, Ben Pietzel, Mudgett was tracked down by the police.  Mudgett then confessed to at least 27 other murders in Philadelphia.

   Like Pietzel, may have had a pattern of murdering his male business partners.  But the majority of Mudgett's victims were women. Several biographers and news reports allege that in less than 20 years Mudgett killed up to 150 women in the "Death Castle".

   "I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer," Mudgett said shortly before he was hanged on June 7, 1896.