Most Terrifying Things About America’s First Serial Killer

How Does One Fake An Execution?

But how could Holmes have gotten away with a fake hanging anyway? While there have most certainly been death faking throughout history, a hanging seems as though it would be particularly difficult to accomplish. However Adam Selzer, who wrote H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil wrote about it.

Adam wrote about the supposed execution, “They’d brought in a fake body and hidden it behind a partition below the scaffold. When Holmes was brought out to be hanged, the guards had formed a semicircle around him, momentarily blocking the view… while [the executioner] pretended to bind his arms and put the hood over his head. In those few crucial seconds, the hooded substitute body was raised behind the semicircle, and Holmes himself slipped away to be smuggled out in a casket.” Basically, the used a cadaver of another person. Another scam involving a dead body. Holmes had done so many similar scams in years past but was this first involving himself and possibly his most intricate scam of his life?