Okay, so some backstory here. You see there once was a man named H.H. Holmes (born name was Herman Webster Mudgett, to a Methodist farmer family) and he is considered to be America's first serial killer (well he was the first one to be called a serial killer) and he was eventually caught and sent to prison outside of Philly. Now, he was sentenced to death but there are rumors that this guy eluded the law/cheated death and had a "stand-in" during his hanging. Not only that but he, in his will, wanted concrete to be poured onto his grave (which just makes the old story about him escaping the gallows even weirder). But he was more known as the guy who built and used the "murder castle", located in Chicago- was not only his home but where he did most of his murders, and he had traps, secret chutts, and doors, etc...
But Holmes’ licentious legend doesn’t truly begin until the construction of his “Murder Castle” in 1887 – a sprawling, three-story mixed use building with his pharmacy on the ground floor and a maze-like array of rooms above that featuring trap doors, sliding walls, airless vaults and dissecting tables. There was also a crematorium, a lynching parlor, stretching racks and the aforementioned greased slide.
Holmes main targets were believed to be young women whom he lured in with the promise of room and board or with jobs in his pharmacy. His murderous exploits during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition were detailed in Erik Larson’s 2003 best-selling, non-fiction “The Devil in the White City.”
"The atrocities of which he was convicted are almost unparalleled in the history of crime — shocking alike for their enormity and the cold-blooded, deliberate way in which they were committed," the Chicago Tribune reported in 1896. "He attributed his natural relish for crime to the fact, as he put it, 'he was born with the devil in him.'"
After the third floor of the castle caught fire in 1893, Holmes fled town amid accusations of arson. With insurance companies chasing him down, he went to Texas and Missouri before ending up in Philadelphia, where he set up a phony patent office with Pitezel.
Now they want to exhume his grave to see if he really died or evaded the law, like what some people think:
“Why are we still fascinated by him?” John Russick, vice president for interpretation and education at the Chicago History Museum, told Fox News. “Part of it is the morbid curiosity in his crimes, but part of it is the effort to confirm that he is dead and was not actually able to outwit the law. There is the desire to confirm that legend is not true.”
While the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Anthropology will conduct forensic testing on the remains, the team digging up Holmes’ coffin won’t have an easy time. The Chicago Tribune reported around the time of his death that Holmes requested to have his body encased in several barrels of cement, weighing around 3,000 pounds, in an effort to “ensure his body against the vandalism or scientific curiosity of ghouls.”
That's slightly ironic for a guy believed to have dismembered and skinned the bodies of his victims before tossing what was left down a greased chute that led down to a lime pit and selling the remaining bones.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/05/05/gr ... ution.html