TV series on serial killer buried in Delco starts tonight
H.H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer whose Holy Cross Cemetery grave in Yeadon was exhumed for DNA analysis during the spring, is the subject of a new History channel eight-part limited series. In “American Ripper,” the greatgreat-grandson of Holmes, Jeff Mudgett, is determined to prove an astonishing, controversial theory: That H.H. Holmes and Britain’s notorious serial killer, Jack the Ripper, were the same man.
Herman Mudgett, alias H.H. Holmes, was America’s first serial killer rumored to have claimed as many as 200 lives in the late 19th century.
Holmes was tried and executed in Philadelphia in 1896 for killing business partner Benjamin Pitezal in the city while on the lam from a Chicago investigation. He had been accused of a series of con artist scams, and later murders, in Chicago coinciding with the 1893 World’s Fair. Of the many crimes tied to his name, he was only tried and convicted for the Pitezal murder and sentenced to hang at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. Holmes’ final wish was for an oversized, cement-layered grave for the coffin holding his cement-encased body as a deterrent to grave robbers.
Simultaneously, an unidentified murderer known as Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the streets of London. Mudgett leads an investigation that secured permission to exhume the presumed body of H.H. Holmes for DNA testing to determine whether he pulled off the ultimate con, escaping his own execution to lead a second secret life. “American Ripper” premieres on Tuesday, July 11, at 10 p.m.
From the moment 20 years ago when Mudgett’s world was shaken at the revelation that he was the descendant of H.H. Holmes, he became obsessed with acquiring information about his ancestor. Through extensive research, he began to believe the bold theory that Holmes was also the Ripper. Now, the retired attorney has partnered with former CIA criminologist, Amaryllis Fox, who has spent her career identifying terrorists across the globe, to launch a deeper investigation.
Forensic science was at its infancy in the 1800s, leaving countless unanswered questions throughout the timeline of these killing sprees. “American Ripper” hunts down evidence to prove a link between these two monstrous men including: Holmes’ personal copy of his published memoir, housed at the Library of Congress; clues about his earliest victims in Holmes’ hometown and childhood home in Gilmanton, N.H.; crime scene evidence from the Jack the Ripper murders including photos, eyewitness accounts and coroners’ reports; new interviews with numerous historians and detectives; and new leads in the search for long-lost remains of Holmes’ many victims.