Original subtitles

previously on american ripper

do we have letters from ripper

and holmes here and we're interested in your professional

analysis my conclusions

generally will steer an investigation in a certain way

his intentions for this building

were for murder and disposing of human remains

so where did these bodies go

these people disappeared

it sounds like a wood burning furnace was in the basement

this was not

efficient or successful way of getting rid of a body

that lawn where the murder castle used to stand is the only

repository of holmes's victims well i wouldn't say old

everywhere that he owned real estate

you can be sure he was killing people

i have a theory that holmes was encasing bodies in cement

and dumping them in the chicago river

oh wow wow wow wow there we go

oh see these

this is an indication that things have been dumped to

you hold it right in there now that's big yeah that's big

it's a lot here holy cow

there there they're all over the place yeah xcia

operative amorous fox and jeff mudge

great great grandson of h h homes

are on the chicago river

hunting for evidence that could break open

a one hundred and thirty year old mystery

surrounding the identity of jack the ripper

so we've got several impact areas which is an indication

that says okay something has been thrown in

at the site of a cement warehouse that home

zoned in eighteen ninety one

they've discovered a field of deep depressions

scattered across a river bed

signs that the proof they're looking for

could be hiding just beneath the surface

in an undiscovered

burial ground

well you have to be so close because of the visibility right

she just brushed the bottom there yeah

we've gotten a little close and it smokes things up

this is the issue

you know we're fighting with visibility hmm

records indicate that holmes's cement warehouse

purchased the raw materials to make concrete

but never actually sold any

this is a man

who may have killed hundreds of people and concocted

elaborate schemes to cover his tracks

it's not a stretch

to imagine that this was a front to dispose of bodies

and if that's true we may just be feet away

from the evidence we need to connect homes and the ripper

is it possible that just the weather or some other cause

created those craters no

these impacts look older oh

so that proves there's something under here

now we need to figure out a way to get at it exactly

it would have taken something of

fairly considerable weight

to make that depression yeah i mean

this is a really large debris field

right next to the physical property owned by homes

the potential of actually uncovering

body parts or physical evidence of his crimes that would be

a huge breakthrough in a hundred

twenty five year old crime which is really really rare

if we can recover the remains of a holmes

victim and conduct forensic analysis

we'll be able to compare it to the

coroner's reports from the ripper

victims and see if their killing styles are a match

i think we're the first that's ever

considered the bottom of the chicago river connecting h h

homes and jack the ripper

yeah if holmes wasn't casing his victims in concrete

we could have the opportunity to

uncover physical evidence

and compare these two killers so far

our investigation has

uncovered some key pieces of evidence that suggest a link

between holmes and ripper

first we found

that like holmes the ripper might have been a skilled doctor

we've also discovered a similar killing method that both men

asphyxiated their victims before dissecting them

it's interesting that scotland

yard identified an american

doctor as one of the top suspects in the ripper case

and on top of that they believe the ripper

might have been responsible for a new york city murder

committed only a couple of years after the london attacks

and so i want to know what we can expect to find

when we crack the concrete open

right let's something we'll have to figure out

to determine what kind of evidence

might have survived beneath the riverbed

jeff and amiralis consult with one of chicago's top

concrete manufacturers

we hear that you're the man to see about encasing a body

in concrete well first let me say

at ozinga concrete we don't condone

burying bodies in our concrete

noted all right

i was a federal prosecutor for twenty years

an assistant united states attorney

and now i'm president of ozinga chicago

so i am familiar with some unfortunate times

where people were murdered and encased in concrete

and you know the old stereotype in chicago right

semen overshoes

uh chicago overcoat and that's how al capone would

dispose of his enemies right now

we are in al capone's garage

stop it right nineteen thirty two

at this very location

elliott ness and his untouchables crashed through the door

with battering rams

and seized a hundred and forty barrels of bootleg beer

in this very building right the fbi yeah

knowing how entrepreneurial

holmes was when it came to his criminal cons and schemes

it wouldn't surprise me in the least to find out that

he essentially

pioneered the technique

that the most notorious mobsters in history

adopted as their calling cards fifty years later

in eighteen nineties this is the exact technology they used

alright and let's shovel it right in there

okay so we're gonna make a nice

lining along the bottom here

jeff and amarilis are here to field test

the preservative power of concrete let's take

porky pig over there and let's uh bury him in concrete

alright porky

you're gonna sleep with the fishes

using pig parts to approximate human remains

jeff why don't you really smash that big piece down there

they'll submerge the block in water

then return in two weeks to observe the effects that has

a strange texture at the bottom of a shovel i gotta tell you

i'm hoping this test

will demonstrate whether or not the concrete

provides enough of an airtight seal

to protect it from oxygen and bacteria

which would preserve

whatever organic matter is buried inside

in this case potentially one or more of holmes's victims

emeril did you learn to do this at the cia

this is outside of my realm of experience

to pick up holmes's trail

jeff and amarilis meet with historian adam seltzer

i want to go back to building

holmes's timeline

now because it's been so critical in generating new leads

the last known victim of holmes we discussed was emily and

segrand in december of eighteen ninety two we now

really want to see whether

there are any killings in eighteen ninety three

by ninety three

the world's fair was about to start up in chicago and

there were a lot of people flooding into

chicago at the time

it's my understanding

that was the biggest event in world history until the time

right it's one of the bigger ones

the 1893 world's columbian exposition

commonly known as the world's fair

is a showcase of technological achievement

from across the globe that put chicago on the map

just two years before

a new iron marvel the eiffel tower

greeted visitors at the paris exhibition and became name

an international sensation

but the grand size

scope and breadth of achievements on display in chicago

sets a new global standard

with one in every four americans

traveling to the windy city to witness the marvel

you know millions of people were coming to town

it was a huge opportunity for everybody

uh so now h h holmes hired benjamin peitzel

peitzel's a novelty dealer

he bought and sold

patents now and then

he did a lot of odd jobs around the castle and they

found that they had

a kind of a shared interest in dishonest business practices

really

interesting he was adding a third story onto his building

and they had been buying all of this material

ostensibly for the castle hotel rooms on credit

but then never actually paying for it furniture

furniture crockery flooring bedding mattresses

everything you might need to furnish a hotel holmes

had already constructed his building on 63rd and

wallace by the time the world's fair came to chicago

but it's then that the building

truly became the murder castle that we know

construction of the third floor

meant more hotel rooms for guests more money coming in

and potentially more victims

sounds like holmes was expecting

a lot of business from the world's fair

yeah i think it's just awfully convenient

it was like the big game

that he'd been preparing for yeah i mean

that sounds like

something we need to investigate further

i'd really like to get a better understanding

of how the world's fair impacted these dozens

maybe hundreds of alleged crimes that holmes committed

there's no doubt in my mind that the holmes story

evolves around the fair

and he wouldn't have built the murder castle

have the fair not been coming to chicago

how long did the fair run in total

well the fair opened on may first eighteen ninety three

and closed at the end of october

so that would be about four years

after the last ripper murder

investigating the theory that 19th century serial murderer

h h holmes was jack the ripper

jeff mudgett and amorous

fox have come to chicago's newberry library

to unlock the secrets of the 1893 world's fair

how many people came from

around the country

to actually visit the fair once it was up and running

we know that the fair sold

twenty seven point three million tickets holy smokes

that must have been extraordinary for the time

i mean that would be an extraordinary event today

the expo is a grand historical moment for chicago

and for the expert predator holmes

who completes the conversion of his building

into the murder castle

in anticipation of the fair's official opening in may

eighteen ninety three

people have made

parallels to the olympics and other sort of giant

international spectacles like that

it was just a vast scale you had

seven hundred acres filled with exhibits

the business leaders felt that if chicago was gonna

continue you to grow and thrive

it needed to offer more than just

grain elevators and

railroad yards it needed to have more culture

the world's fair of eighteen ninety three

celebrates america's transformation

from a nation of agriculture

into a nation of industry

the sprawling 600 acre

fairgrounds contains an entire city within a city

complete with palatial exhibition halls working canals

and stunning life

size replicas of christopher columbus's three famed ships

in honor of the 400th anniversary of his journey to america

groundbreaking technologies including the ferris wheel

washing machine

and moving sidewalk each make their debut

but for millions of visitors to chicago the premier

attraction of the fair

is the opportunity to witness for the first time

the newest marvel of the industrial age

the electric light

rival inventors thomas edison and nikola tesla

famously vie for the rights to light the fair

tesla wins out over his rifle

the one hundred thousand

light bulbs that eventually illuminate the majestic

fairgrounds help earn the chicago world's fair its nickname

the white city

the headline speaker was the president

president cleveland yeah so you see grover cleveland

on his little table

which was draped with the american flag he pressed a button

and then all the lights on the fairgrounds turned on

and that must have had an electrifying effect on the

crowd itself that was a really sort of big moment

well it's just such a metaphor for the industrial age

beginning yeah

and you see this crush of humanity i mean this is like

times square on new year's eve

and you just get the sense that

the city is kind of bursting at the seams

if this was a time that you wanted to

undertake the nefarious activity in the city

the focus of law enforcement was elsewhere exactly

where there were more opportunities for people to kind of

slip between the cracks

could you show us on the maps how far

holmes's murder castle was from the fair itself

sure so you see here picked out in red

are the fairgrounds

and that little strip

the midway where the ferris wheel was so that if you went

straight west

would have come to the corner where

holmes's enterprise was based

you could see that ferris

wheel from the murder castle so yeah it was a perfect

location yeah

it's chilling to imagine

holmes against the backdrop for this shining moment

in america his

cons and killing methods from new hampshire

to michigan to chicago to london

were now fully developed

and this fair just two miles from the murder castle

would have brought his victim straight to his doorstep

how many people came to chicago

to be employed by the fair there must have been

thousands of them and it's parallel to this

period of the late nineteenth century

when there was a big expansion in women's education

so women were going off to college and traveling alone

it's something that was becoming more common

in a lot of fronts

that paints for me a picture of women

coming from their small towns

thinking that they're gonna arrive

in the boomtown there's gonna be lots of opportunity

in the big city and that's exactly the kind of moment

that holmes enters your life

what could have been a more perfect place on earth

for a killer of his nature than something like this

two miles from his hotel

this factory of death

this torture corporation

from the sheer number

of people who are coming through chicago

right past the murder castle

you can easily speculate

holmes's body count was just growing and growing

during this period

and it would have been

impossible to dispose of that many bodies

in the castle itself

tiggly striking that diane said

was the number of women who were arriving in chicago

alone for the first time

to come and visit the fair or potentially to work here

unaccompanied by a family member

and not having any place to go

it makes me think of that lion on the savannah

over watching the herds

deciding which one he wanted tonight

yeah it's the ideal playground for him as white

chapel would have been yeah

all of ripper's victims were women

all of them were prostitutes

and all of them were stalked at night

then strangled and dissected with increasing brutality

i want to know more about what life

was like for the women that

holmes might have targeted

what that experience was

as a young woman arriving in each each

holmes's chicago

one weekend my great great aunt took a trip to chicago

and was never heard from again

so i was always intrigued and haunted by this bit of family

lore and especially more

so when i saw how prevalent

it was um in chicago at the time

thousands of women

arrived in the city in eighteen ninety three amarilis

consult with an expert on nineteenth century women's history

to learn more about their lives

and dance

we've just been hearing about the world's fair and how

many women were descending on chicago at this moment

well about a thousand trains a day came and left chicago

many of them bringing

girls from all over the country

who would be met at dearborn street station

and they're like the unscrupulous madams

or men offering employment

and these women were desperate

they needed to make money they needed to find a living

and a lot of these girls ended up in the brothels

with millions of visitors in town for the fair

chicago's brothel business is booming

as many as five thousand prostitutes

work in more than thirty

establishments across the city's red light district

just five miles from the fairgrounds a woman

working as a prostitute

at the end of the nineteenth century

could bring in more than thirty five dollars a week

nine hundred dollars in today's money

far more than any other job available to women at the time

it's so striking how this area of chicago was the american

equivalent of white

chapel in its conditions for prostitution and poverty

yeah absolutely

um i pulled some things aside

that would give you a bigger picture of the red

light district in chicago at the time

all of the red lines here indicate brothels

oh it's incredible one of holmes's chicago properties was

the abc copying company which was

right in the vicinity of this long line of red brothels

i mean if

holmes was operating as the ripper in this environment

it would be very easy for him

to take his victims a block back to this private office

and go about his crimes there

so were there reports of women

going missing in chicago at the time absolutely in fact

chicago

newspapers started running columns about missing girls

and the police

just did not have the resources

to track down every report of a missing girl

then so these girls just sort of vanished

up until this point in the investigation

all of holmes's victims have been people he knew

whereas the ripper targeted prostitutes

who we assume he chose at random

i'd like to investigate these missing women

to see if there are any patterns in their disappearance

that link them to holmes and to ripper

police officers at the time

said there was probably up to about eight hundred women

that disappeared where they never found out

whatever happened to them

eight hundred young women missing a year that number

astounds me

to dig deeper into the details of chicago's lost women

jeff meets with ray

johnson who's

combed through newspaper reports from the period

to identify any clues that connect them to h h holmes

were you able to tie

any of those eight hundred missing young women

to homes killings

you know there was a number of things i've found

about women with their throats cut

and the police

for some reason

coming to the conclusion that it was a suicide

thing is is that it's

exceedingly difficult to kill yourself

by cutting your own throat

there was a number of things i've found

about women with their throats cut

and the police

for some reason

coming to the conclusion that it was a suicide

investigating the unsolved

disappearances

of hundreds of women during the chicago world's fair

the thing is is that it's

exceedingly difficult to kill yourself

by cutting your own throat

former detective ray johnson shares a critical revelation

that could link some of the deaths to h h homes this woman

checked into a hotel

with a gentleman just before

the world's fair opened

in the late april of eighteen ninety three

now they signed in as mr and mrs alexander

which is interesting because

i know there was an alias for homes

which was an alexander never know

the headline mentions her throat was cut

and of course they called that a suicide as well

now i know that with the world's fair

chicago didn't want any bad publicity

they were really concerned that

that would affect the overall outcome of the fair

and then there's another woman josephine dealman

and she had her throat cut from ear to ear

and again this one they also said was a suicide

every time i was looking into

a case where a woman had cut her throat

and there wasn't a named suspect or there wasn't someone

standing over the body with a knife

that they were very easily

uh dissuaded to call it a suicide

now this is the one that really stood out to me

jack the ripper talk was excited

here today by finding a woman's mutilated corpse wow

nearly nude on the lake shore railroad word

been washed by the waves

besides what said to resemble

the characteristic ripper cut from the breast down

the legs had also been severed below the knees

so it looks like we have

evidence of ripper style killings in chicago right

because of the disemboweled

victim in

sliced throat that's what caught my eye catches my eye too

i can't trust that there wouldn't be more of these

but i do believe they were trying to keep things

under wraps so it's not to

generate any bad publicity for the city prior to the fair

finding reports of ripper like murders in chicago

during the exact years that holmes was active here

is huge for this investigation

and although we don't have police reports

if there were other crimes

similar to this the coroner's records would be our best bet

and those records do exist then let's go find them

northeastern university

houses the city's official corner reports dating back

to eighteen sixty five amarillo

joins jeff and ray

to search for evidence that could connect

homes to the unsolved

eighteen ninety three murders

if a body was found

regardless of what condition or where it was

the coroner would decide

what the cause of death was

i wonder how many unknown women

were found with ripoffesque type of murders in chicago

that's interesting

there's two of them right next to each other

what do you mean

unknown woman unknown woman

throat cut from ear to ear

could have been a suicide both on the same day

similar circumstances

yeah they said that they couldn't determine whether

she came to death

accidentally or otherwise so these are two women these

are two women who were found the same day who both turn up

the same day unidentified that's troubling

it would be really helpful if we knew

when these suspicious deaths started

i think we need to go through record by record

beginning right before

holmes arrives in chicago in eighteen eighty six

earlier in our investigation we uncovered the eighteen

ninety one murder of carrie brown in new york

scotland yard and nypd seriously speculated

that jack the ripper had escaped london and continued

his work in the states

finding evidence of more ripper

like killings

here in chicago during the time of the fair

feels like more than a coincidence

now we just have to connect the timing of these murders to h

h holmes no

suicidal in ten

so nothing in eighty four nothing in eighty four

and eighty five

nothing so far

you know factory accident

record by record of eighty five nothing eighty five alright

we know that holmes

arrived in chicago in eighteen eighty six

and was active there until late eighteen ninety three

after the world's fair had ended

eighty six so this is the time when holmes would have

first become active on chicago

oh wait hold on there's one unidentified woman cut throat

is one forty six

red light district

shores of lake michigan

unidentified woman cut from the breast down

unidentified woman

disemboweled so that's the second in eighteen ninety

two in eighteen ninety

print then another

unidentified woman

fourth for eighteen ninety two

three for eighteen ninety three

eighteen ninety four negative

get a load of this

eighteen ninety one one but then

you have the big spike in ninety two

right he acquired the warehouse in ninety one

four unidentified women in eighteen ninety two

then three more in eighteen ninety three and then zapo again

there's a definite

spike in ripper like murders when holmes is in chicago

especially around the time of the world's fair

we can't simply conclude that these women were victims of h

h holmes

but the coincidence of his presence in the city

and the gruesome

but familiar way these women died

does add up suspiciously for both ripper and holmes

if these are in fact victims of holmes

the fact that

at least one of them was disemboweled from

the sternum on down

in the style of jack the ripper

is really striking yeah

there's a striking connection between

the jack the ripper murders and these

these new murders regarding

unidentified women well i mean the numbers here don't lie

and all of these were just

chalked up to accident at the time

yeah we're discovering now with this research that

there were many different ways

that holmes

could have murdered and disposed of the bodies

yeah and many different locations and

most people think of all of these

killings having taken place in the murder castle we're now

seeing more and more evidence

that that just wasn't the case

and this is the first time that i've seen

the same style of killing

with the same kind of frequency

as jack the ripper's victims were killed in london

happening in chicago

and tied to the years that holmes lived in the city

what struck me was how

over and over again when the police couldn't determine

how these women

were murdered

they called them suicides now what does that mean

whether it was an organized conspiracy

or not by labeling them as suicide is a pretty simple

and neat trick to prevent

the kind of widespread fear that

jack the ripper was inspiring in the public at the time

they became

unwitting accomplices to holmes as he was operating here

there's a pretty serious debate among

holmes experts as to how many people

actually fell victim to his knife

some say it's as few as nine

others think it's closer to thirty

some say it's hundreds

if all of these

ripper style chicago killings were committed by one person

then we're looking at the work of a mass murderer

and a master at

inventing and evolving

new ways to get rid of evidence and outsmart the law

it seems to me that the

cement warehouse is going to be our biggest lead

there may actually be viable

physical evidence inside those blocks of concrete

we need to get that trunk out of there and see what this big

looks like it's been two weeks since jeff and

amaryllis set

out to test the preservation power of concrete

we put it in concrete

it's hardened we had it soaking in water

now they'll discover

if the submersion has had any effect on living tissue

buried inside the solid block

alright mark you're doing a heck of a job

alright should we crack this baby open okay

there we go alright

pig flesh is often used as a stand

in for humans in forensic research

because the tissues and bone density are very similar

if this test shows any preserving effect on the pig

it should give us an idea of what we can expect to find

in those concrete blocks

homes may have dropped in the river

oh there we go wow there we go

so what does it look like

it looks like we just put it in there

certainly nothing like if you had just left pig out

on the counter right this

fascinates me the contour of the concrete with the flesh

i'm imagining what we're going to find

that same thing after a hundred years correct correct

think about what causes a body to decompose bacteria maggots

insects when you

encase a body in concrete

there's no maggots that get in there

there's no insects that get in there

there's no other animals

so how can you best preserve a body for a hundred years

in case it in concrete

you break open that concrete you would see

striations cut marks on the bones

well so we're talking about a forensic time capsule oh yeah

the prospect of being able to examine a victim of

holmes a hundred

twenty five years later

and determine

if they were killed in the same way

as several of jack the ripper's victims

were killed in london

seemed unthinkable

but looking at

how pristine this tissue is

now it seems like we might have our chance

biggest problem

is not what forensic scientists could learn today

the biggest problem is

you're looking for a needle in a haystack

even more important

that we actually do

determine what's at the bottom of the river in that silt

obviously two weeks is not a hundred twenty five years

but those pig parts that we pulled out of the water

and the concrete i mean they weren't perfect

but they were nowhere near the

decomposition that you would expect to see after two weeks

and that is exciting

because it suggests

that if there is concrete at the bottom of the river

and that concrete does have homes as victims in it

this physical evidence could shed light

on how holmes was killing his victims

what his murder weapon of choice was

how he was disposing of their bodies

and all of those are incredibly important in understanding

who holmes was as a killer and whether it's possible

that he and ripper were one and the same

i know from personal experience

we can't just hire a dive team

based off video of the river floor

we're going to need detailed

coordinates and dimensions of the objects in order

to get permission to dive the site and recover any remains

i'm gonna reach out to the recovery team

and see whether we can get back out on the river

in the next couple days yeah agreed

whoa whoa i got a text from dennis the

forensic analyst he says the his

results from the handwriting analysis is ready to go

great let's head back

dennis hi you're back can't wait to hear what you found

we've done quite a bit of work yeah on your case

handwriting specialist dennis ryan and his forensics team

have conducted a detailed analysis of handwriting samples

uncovered in the investigation

his results will reveal whether the writings of h h holmes

match the known writings of jack the ripper

pictures worth a thousand words

we have some results that

are interesting

we've done quite a bit of work

to prove a link between aj choles and jack the ripper

jeff and omarilis submitted several handwriting

samples from both killers for analysis

a picture's worth a thousand words

the dear boss and saucy jack letters

believed to have been written by jack the ripper

in eighteen eighty eight

and several samples written by h h

holmes at various points over a twenty year period

including a letter and a receipt

the first thing

we did was compare the variation in one's writing

like a fingerprint

an individual's handwriting is completely unique

a highly trained specialist known as a forensic

document examiner analyzes

up to 40 different elements of a person's handwriting

including the size

spacing and slant of a letter

to determine the origin and authenticity of a document

and whether two pieces of writing were

penned by the same hand

i'm not an expert

but i do have some analytical training and i can see that

holmes's writing style had variation over the years

i can see definite differences in the way he forms

specific letters

that make me wonder whether he was intentionally

disguising his writing

okay now the sixty four thousand dollar question

is it possible

the same person

wrote both the jack the ripper letters and the home samples

that's a very good question

i'll show you some results

in this particular case these home samples

came in a letter called the attorney green letter

and this particular slide

we had sit three samples from the attorney green

and these are not consistent with

the samples from

the diavlos or saucy jack lettuce

the close portion of the h

and the d of b is open

and the e formation is flat and closed almost like a bump

and that's inconsistent with what's found

in the letters from jack the ripper

and in this last sample

from the attorney graham

the y formation comes back and loops

in the attorney graham it's just one stroke down

and that finishes the letter

so we're finding inconsistencies

and the style and the skill of the writer is different

damn this was another sample that was submitted

the h h homes receipt but this

we were unable to determine

if this was consistent with the divorce or saucy

jack lettuce

why because the style of the writing is different

and the formation of some of the letters

he has the word payment

e in the payment and the other one had an open bottom to it

but then the me

was one of the letter combinations that we found to be

similar

so when there are characteristics that are consistent

and characteristics that are not consistent

how you would be inconclusive

inconclusive correct interesting

the receipt that we picked up in our investigation

in new hampshire

is the earliest known document with holmes's writing

he was seventeen years old

he would have been twenty seven when the ripper

letters were written

and thirty three when he wrote the attorney graham letter

and i have to wonder why his writing

changed so drastically over the years

so you cannot form a conclusive judgment about whether

this receipt written by h h holmes

and the dear boss letter were penned by the same hand

that's correct but you can't rule it out

can't rule it out can't say yes or can't say no

well i can tell you this your your inconclusive conclusion

means that holmes could have been jack the ripper

we've got to get to the bottom of that river

as you know jeff and i are on the holmes trail

we have a bit of a treasure hunt for you

the next step in the river investigation is to pinpoint

specific coordinates for a dive jeff and

amaryllis meet with an underwater recovery specialist

to strategize

we have already taken a first look

at the bottom of the chicago river

and we brought some video here to show you what we found

and it's what has led us to you

now the chicago river

it gets pretty murky as you can see from this video

you can see there are these really unusual

creators and divots and we're hoping

that with your assistance

we might be able to pinpoint

the exact locations and dimensions

of whatever is down there so we can share it with the dive

team well yeah

we handle problems like this

so looking for debris that can be

buried or you know at the surface

is something that we

typically do and

those same applications can be applied to this

and i see from the video

the water is a little bit

murky at times so

the one of the approaches we do is we do what we call

side scan sonar

it's using sonar rather than the visual wavelength

tied in with the gps

and we can make actually a mosaic of the bottom

i have an example of the one from a bridge

we just recently did

you can see how

the images of logs and pieces of concrete debris

are scattered there

and sometimes you can even

get the detail even the gory details

now this is somebody who

fell overboard and that's two weeks in the water

so it's very high resolution

you really can get a sense of the shape and

volume of what you're looking at yes exactly

and we know that it's a long shot

but the truth is that after a hundred years plus

for me as a cold case investigator the chance

to actually examine physical evidence

to link the two killers we're investigating

is really the brass ring

for this investigation

i think we should get down there and see what we can find

we're about seven minutes

from the spot how long will it take you to deploy the

side scanner probably take about less than five minutes

to deploy that and start okay

jeff and amiralis are on the cusp of discovering

whether concrete blocks at the bottom of the chicago river

could contain a brick in the case

possible victims of h h holmes

it's pretty amazing to think that right there

was holmes's cement storage facility

he had a pure fear you can imagine him standing

looking out at all of the boats

coming up and down the river and

not expecting that

a hundred years later we'd be out here with all of this

forensic technology taking a look at what he left for us

on the bottom of the river let's

cross our fingers

that he had to use some big blocks

once in a while we might be able to detect them far easier

yeah

if we can get exact gps

coordinates and a sense of how large the blocks are

then we'll be able to send in a dive team

to retrieve the evidence

yeah this is our sonar fish

doesn't matter how murky the water is

it's going through sound

just like a bat this is sending out a sound

signal it's getting it back

like a fish finder it's gonna show us any shapes anything

correct this is gonna be looking at

anything that's on the bottom or sticking out of the bottom

we're gonna be able to see

alright alright alright let's get her in the water

check we've been waiting months for this right now

let's go let's go

security security security toledo us 25743

gonna be doing some bottom soundings

working between columbus and lakeshore drive

so we'll take the ship in a kind of grid pattern

correct we'll run it along parallel to the shore

make several passes i see

tell us what we're looking at

basically what we have is the the center

line right here would be representing of

the fish the path of the fish as it's going in the water

and we're pegging out on either side

this bright return is our wall oh wow

that's you can see it's nice and bright because it's steel

and basically what it is it's picture

you're shining a flashlight over the bottom here

where we're seeing real bright spots

it's hitting a nice solid object

bouncing back and then there's a shadow behind it

where your light wouldn't shine

and that's how we can kind of see that an object

is sticking up above the bottom

just because it's the lack of data

so as soon as we get over there

we'll be able to start taking a look

and seeing what the fish finds

without any physical proof connecting homes in the river

my theory will always be questioned

i'm hoping we'll finally get some answers

we're approaching your area of interest

i'll start my pass

okay i'm really juiced

let's see if we can find some concrete

next time on american ripper

we've got a crime scene full of evidence he's

got all these creditors

about to stage an intervention and arrest him essentially

yeah so he thought

by getting out of town he could let a lot of the heat off

this is

holmes's escape plan from chicago right the second castle

amazing strangely enough

that's the actual beginning of the end for h h holmes

the only safe thing for him to do

was to get rid of the whole family

these bones for howard peitzel have not yet been found

we're going to dig down looking for human remains

see if we can find what's left of howard what's that

possibly something in this area

whoa this is a crime scene