Step inside the legend of Chicago’s “Murder Castle” with Castle of Lies: A Compact History of H. H. Holmes. The popular story promises trapdoors, gas chambers and two hundred World’s Fair victims.

The record tells something colder: an insurance swindler and con man who killed his partner, Benjamin Pitezel, then three of Pitezel’s children, and lied about all of it.

JP Wilder follows Detective Frank Geyer’s search from city to city, into the Philadelphia courtroom and to the scaffold in May 1896, then weighs every famous claim against the evidence.

For true crime readers who want the record behind the myth.

With 13 public-domain images (14 portraits/pictures) from the 1890s record, notes for every fact, and a companion to Forty Whacks and The Ripper’s Mark.

Killer Shorts No. 5.