Dennis Nilsen

Dennis Nilsen
Confirmed victims: 15
Possible Victims: 16
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Dennis Nilsen was born on November 23rd, 1945. Like some of his fellow serial killers he also had an alcoholic father. His parents divorced when he was only four years old. He spent some years with his grandparents after his mother married again, but he eventually returned to live with his mother and stepfather, both of which were strict catholics.

After leaving school Nilsen would join the British army as a cook. He stayed in that profession for about eleven years. After leaving the army he would become a civil servant.

Nilsen's victims were usually homeless men or students that he would pick up at local bars and other similar establishments, including gay bars, and take home. During the nights with them he would kill them and claim to not have remembered doing so. He killed them by either strangulation or drowning. For example he strangled them sometimes with his neck tie.

Because of his cooking skills, Nilsen tried to get rid of the evidence by dismembering the bodies. Sometimes the bodies were not dismembered immediately and instead were kept in various parts of his home. And sometimes he would simply burn the bodies in a bonfire.

After moving to an attic flat in 1981, without having access to a backyard or garden type area, he found it quite difficult to hide the evidence of his murders. This eventually leads to the discovery of his crimes as he is forced to hide body parts all over his flat and attempt to flush remains down the toilet. That's quite a lot of flush down a toilet. He at least tried cutting it up to make it easier to flush, but alas, to no avail. His hiding places included his wardrobe were he would keep bags of organs, cupboards (for the heads) , and chests. This obviously caused kept the smell which also alerted the neighbours that something was going on.

When he tried to flush the entrails down the toilet it caused a blockage to all the flats and so the plumbers were called in to fix the drains. There they found a fleshy substance which they at first thought was chicken. Upon further investigation it turned out to be human flesh. He was then arrested and confused to killing 15 or 16 victims. He didn't know himself the exact number that he had taken to the grave.

Nilsen is currently serving a life sentence in a maximum security prison.

H.H Holmes

H.H Holmes
Confirmed Victims: 27
Possible Victims-27-230

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H.H Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett on May 16th, 1860 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Holmes had a rough childhood. He was bullied when he was a child by the other children in his area. Adding to his woes was an alcoholic father.

Holmes went to medical school at the University of Michigan. While studying at the University, Holmes would steal corpses, take out life insurance policies on them , disfigure them and then claim they had died in horrible accidents so that he could claim the insurance money. Often Holmes crimes involved taking out insurance policies on his victims (which included lovers, employees, friends, etc ) and then cashing them after murdering them. This was back when we had really lax insurance laws. Many serial killers over the years have placed life insurance on their would-be victims.

After University, Holmes would marry. In fact he married twice. One wife he married in 1878 and the second he would marry in 1887. He did try to file for divorce from his first wife but he never really got around to it...

Holmes moved to Chicago and there he met Dr.Holton and his wife. They owned a drugstore and Holmes got a job working there while Dr.Holton was dieing of cancer. He would then buy the store, while letting the Holton's live in the upstairs apartment. But when the Doctor died he murdered the doctors wife and told people she had moved to California.

Holmes then opened a hotel across from the drugstore. It was three storeys, a block long and nick named the castle by local residents. Holmes would use this 'castle' to torture and kill his victims in. He made sure the floor plan was very complicated thus making it difficult for his victims to escape and making it nearly impossible for anyone to discover his crimes. Some bedrooms were soundproof. Some were fitted with gas lines to he could gas his victims to death whenever he felt like it. He also had a vault built near his office so he could hear his victims cries as the slowly died from suffocation.

Holmes loved to torture his victims. He would give kidnapped women forced abortions, of which they usually died from. He would stretch out his victims on a stretching rack. He also used poisons and acid on his victims.

After they had died , Holmes would send their bodies down to the basement via a chute. There he would strip them of their flesh, dissect them and then sell their skeletons and organs to medical schools and research laboratories.
When the economy started to turn Holmes tried to relocate to Fort Worth, Texas but he didn't like the laws in Texas. He would be too hard for him to get away with it . He then preceded to move about Canada and the United States.

Holmes then concocted an elaborate insurance scam with business associate Benjamin Pitezel. Pitezel was to fake his own death and get 10,000$ in insurance money, half of which would go to his wife and the other half to Holmes whose role was to find a suitable cadaver that would be believable as Pitezel. Some say Holmes killed Pitezel, but no one really knows. Pitezel is said to have been depressed and could have just taken his own life, either way, the scam went through and Holmes told Pitezel wife that Pitezel was hiding out in South America. He would later on kill all three of Pitezel children.

His downfall came when Holmes was tracked down in Boston for horse theft. Upon talking to the custodian of the Castle in Chicago, police investigated the building, finding what remained of Holmes many victims. Police said they were never sure just how many people there were in the basement of the Castle because of the state the bodies were in after being dissected and dismembered. Holmes was convicted of murdering his partner Pitezel along with his other victims. He was hanged and buried in cement. A request he made in the fear that others would dissect him just like he had done to his victims.