Mark McNease

Long before the term “serial killer” existed, Herman Webster Mudgett—better known as H.H. Holmes—was quietly perfecting the art of murder in plain sight. This week’s True Crime Tuesday episode takes listeners inside the infamous “Murder Castle,” the Chicago building Holmes constructed and outfitted with hidden rooms, trap doors, and a body chute, all disguised behind the bustle of the 1893 World’s Fair.

We trace Holmes’s path from small-time swindler to one of the most prolific killers in American history, examining how his charm and cunning allowed him to hide in plain sight for years. It’s a story of ambition, deception, and horror that laid the groundwork for how we think about serial killers today.

Tune in to this episode of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast to hear the full story.

In the lonely grasslands of southeast Kansas, a small roadside inn offered weary travelers a hot meal, a warm bed, and a canvas curtain separating the dining room from the family’s living quarters. What guests couldn’t see was the trapdoor beneath their feet, or the hammer waiting behind that canvas.

Between 1871 and 1873, the Bender family ran one of the most chillingly efficient killing operations in American frontier history. At least a dozen travelers vanished after stopping at their door, seated at the table of honor directly over a hidden pit, never to leave again. When suspicion finally caught up with them, the Benders disappeared into the night, leaving behind an inn full of buried secrets and a manhunt that has never definitively ended. This week on True Crime Tuesdays, we step into the Bender Inn, where hospitality meets murder.

This week’s case comes with an element of dark humor, although nothing’s funny about a stranger breaking into people’s homes. Nobody died in this story. Nobody was even hurt, not at first. What we’ve got instead is something stranger—a criminal whose weapon of choice was a pair of scissors, whose target wasn’t a wallet or a life, but his victim’s hair. And for one summer in 1942, an entire Mississippi town lived in terror of a man who broke into bedrooms in the dead of night for no reason anyone could explain. And there’s more: even after an arrest and a conviction, people still aren’t sure the right man ever paid for it.