Part IV
Dr. H. H. Holmes.
“Property of H. H. Holmes”
DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels or the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison.
The suspect was a physician whose given name was Mudgett but was known more commonly by the alias H. H. Holmes. He once had lived in Chicago where he and an associate, Benjamin Pitezel, had run a hotel during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They had moved next to Fort Worth, Texas, then to St. Louis, and on to Philadelphia, committing frauds along the way. In Philadelphia Holmes had swindled the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of nearly $10,000 by apparently faking the death of a policyholder, Ben Pitezel. Holmes had bought the insurance in 1893 from Fidelity’s Chicago office, just before the close of the exposition. As evidence of fraud accumulated, Fidelity had hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—“The Eye That Never Sleeps”—to search for Holmes. The agency’s operatives picked up his trail in Burlington, Vermont, and followed him to Boston, where they arranged to have him arrested by police. Holmes confessed to the fraud and agreed to be extradited to Philadelphia for trial. At that point the case appeared to be closed. But now in June 1895 it was becoming increasingly apparent that Holmes had not faked the death of Ben Pitezel, he had killed him and then arranged the scene to make the death seem accidental. Now three of Pitezel’s five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—were missing, last seen in Holmes’s company.
Geyer’s assignment was to find the children. He was invited to join the case by Philadelphia district attorney George S. Graham, who over the years had come to rely on Geyer for the city’s most sensitive investigations. Graham had thought twice this time, however, for he knew that just a few months earlier Geyer had lost his wife, Martha, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Esther, in a house fire.
Geyer interviewed Holmes in his cell but learned nothing new. Holmes insisted that when he had last seen the Pitezel children, they were alive and traveling with a woman named Minnie Williams, en route to the place where their father was hiding out.
Geyer found Holmes to be smooth and glib, a social chameleon. “Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation,” Geyer wrote, “and all of his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of his statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.”
Holmes claimed to have secured a cadaver that resembled Ben Pitezel and to have placed it on the second floor of a house rented especially for the fraud. By coincidence or out of some malignant expression of humor, the house was located right behind the city morgue, a few blocks north of City Hall. Holmes admitted arranging the cadaver to suggest that Pitezel had died in an accidental explosion. He poured a solvent on the cadaver’s upper body and set it on fire, then positioned the body on the floor in direct sunlight. By the time the body was discovered, its features had been distorted well beyond recognition. Holmes volunteered to assist the coroner in making an identification. At the morgue he not only helped locate a distinctive wart on the dead man’s neck, he pulled out his own lancet and removed the wart himself, then matter-of-factly handed it to the coroner.
The coroner had wanted a member of the Pitezel family also to be present at the identification. Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, was ill and could not come. Instead she sent her second-eldest daughter, Alice, fifteen years old. The coroner’s men draped the body so as to allow Alice to see only Pitezel’s teeth. She seemed confident that the corpse was her father. Fidelity paid the death benefit. Next Holmes traveled to St. Louis, where the Pitezel family now lived. Still in possession of Alice, he persuaded Carrie to let him pick up two more of her children, explaining that their father, in hiding, was desperate to see them. He took Nellie, eleven, and Howard, eight, and embarked with all three children on a strange and sad journey.
Geyer knew from Alice’s letters that initially she found the trip to be something of an adventure. In a letter to her mother, dated September 20, 1894, Alice wrote, “I wish you could see what I have seen.” In the same letter she expressed her distaste for Holmes’s treacly manner. “I don’t like him to call me babe and child and dear and all such trash.” The next day she wrote again, “Mamma have you ever seen or tasted a red banana? I have had three. They are so big that I can just reach around it and have my thumb and next finger just tutch.” Since leaving St. Louis, Alice had heard nothing from home and feared her mother’s illness might have gotten much worse. “Have you gotten 4 letters from me besides this?” Alice wrote. “Are you sick in bed yet or are you up? I wish that I could hear from you.”
One of the few things that Detective Geyer knew with certainty was that neither of these letters ever reached Carrie Pitezel. Alice and Nellie had written to their mother repeatedly while in Holmes’s custody and had given the letters to Holmes with the expectation that he would mail them. He never did. Shortly after his arrest police discovered a tin box, marked “Property of H. H. Holmes,” containing various documents and a dozen letters from the girls. He had stored them in the box as if they were seashells collected from a beach.
Now Mrs. Pitezel was nearly crushed with anxiety and grief, despite Holmes’s latest assurances that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were in London, England, under the able care of Minnie Williams. A search by Scotland Yard had found no trace of any of them. Geyer had little hope that his own search would fare any better. With more than half a year having elapsed since anyone had heard from the children, Geyer wrote, “it did not look like a very encouraging task to undertake, and it was the general belief of all interested, that the children would never be found. The District Attorney believed, however, that another final effort to find the children should be made, for the sake of the stricken mother, if for nothing else. I was not placed under any restrictions, but was told to go and exercise my own judgment in the matter, and to follow wherever the clues led me.”
Geyer set out on his search on the evening of June 26, 1895, a hot night in a hot summer. Earlier in June a zone of high pressure, the “permanent high,” had settled over the middle Atlantic states and driven temperatures in Philadelphia well into the nineties. A humid stillness held the countryside. Even at night the air inside Geyer’s train was stagnant and moist. Leftover cigar smoke drifted from men’s suits, and at each stop the roar of frogs and crickets filled the car. Geyer slept in jagged stretches.
The next day, as the train sped west through the heat-steamed hollows of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Geyer reread his copies of the children’s letters to look for anything he might have missed that could help direct his search. The letters not only provided irrefutable proof that the children had been with Holmes but contained geographic references that allowed Geyer to plot the broad contours of the route Holmes and the children had followed. Their first stop appeared to have been Cincinnati.
Detective Geyer reached Cincinnati at seven-thirty P.M. on Thursday, June 27. He checked into the Palace Hotel. The next morning he went to police headquarters to brief the city’s police superintendent on his mission. The superintendent assigned a detective to assist him, Detective John Schnooks, an old friend of Geyer’s.
Geyer hoped to reconstruct the children’s travels from Cincinnati onward. There was no easy way to achieve his goal. He had few tools other than his wits, his notebook, a handful of photographs, and the children’s letters. He and Detective Schnooks made a list of all the hotels in Cincinnati located near railroad stations, then set out on foot to visit each one and check its registrations for some sign of the children and Holmes. That Holmes would use an alias seemed beyond doubt, so Geyer brought along his photographs, even a depiction of the children’s distinctive “flat-top” trunk. Many months had passed since the children had written their letters, however. Geyer had little hope that anyone would remember one man and three children.
On that point, as it happens, he was wrong.
The detectives trudged from one hotel to the next. The day got hotter and hotter. The detectives were courteous and never showed impatience, despite having to make the same introductions and tell the same story over and over again.
On Central Avenue they came to a small inexpensive hotel, the Atlantic House. As they had done at all the other hotels, they asked the clerk if they could see his registration book. They turned first to Friday, September 28, 1894, the day that Holmes, while already in possession of Alice, had picked up Nellie and Howard from their St. Louis home. Geyer guessed Holmes and the children had reached Cincinnati later that same day. Geyer ran his finger down the page and stopped at an entry for “Alex E. Cook,” a guest who according to the register was traveling with three children.
The entry jogged Geyer’s memory. Holmes had used the name before, to rent a house in Burlington, Vermont. Also, Geyer by now had seen a lot of Holmes’s handwriting. The writing in the ledger looked familiar.
The “Cook” party stayed only one night, the register showed. But Geyer knew from the girls’ letters that they had remained in Cincinnati an additional night. It seemed odd that Holmes would go to the trouble of moving to a second hotel, but Geyer knew from experience that making assumptions about the behavior of criminals was always a dangerous thing. He and Schnooks thanked the clerk for his kind attention, then set out to canvass more hotels.
The sun was high, the streets steamed. Cicadas scratched off messages from every tree. At Sixth and Vine the detectives came to a hotel called the Bristol and discovered that on Saturday, September 29, 1894, a party identified as “A. E. Cook” had checked in, with three children. When the clerk saw Geyer’s photographs, he confirmed that the guests were Holmes, Alice, Nellie, and Howard. They checked out the next morning, Sunday, September 30. The date fit the likely chronology of events: Geyer knew from the children’s letters that on that Sunday morning they had left Cincinnati and by evening had arrived in Indianapolis.
Geyer was not yet ready to leave Cincinnati, however. Now he played a hunch. The Pinkertons had found that Holmes sometimes rented houses in the cities through which he traveled, as he had done in Burlington. Geyer and Schnooks turned their attention to Cincinnati’s real estate agents.
Their search eventually took them to the realty office of J. C. Thomas, on East Third Street.
Something about Holmes must have caused people to take notice, because both Thomas and his clerk remembered him. Holmes had rented a house at 305 Poplar Street, under the name “A. C. Hayes,” and had made a substantial advance payment.
The date of the agreement, Thomas said, was September 28, 1894, the Friday when Holmes and the children had arrived in Cincinnati. Holmes held the house only two days.
Thomas could offer no further details but referred the detectives to a woman named Henrietta Hill, who lived next door to the house.
Geyer and Schnooks immediately set out for Miss Hill’s residence and found her to be an acute observer and a willing gossip. “There is really very little to tell,” she said—then told them a lot.
She first had noticed the new tenant on Saturday, September 29, when a furniture wagon stopped in front of the rental house. A man and a boy descended. What most caught Miss Hill’s attention was the fact that the furniture wagon was empty save for an iron stove that seemed much too large for a private residence.
Miss Hill found the stove sufficiently strange that she mentioned it to her neighbors. The next morning Holmes came to her front door and told her he was not going to stay in the house after all. If she wanted the stove, he said, she could have it.
Detective Geyer theorized that Holmes must have sensed an excess of neighborly scrutiny and changed his plans. But what were those plans? At the time, Geyer wrote, “I was not able to appreciate the intense significance of the renting of the Poplar Street house and the delivery of a stove of such immense size.” He was certain, however, that he had “taken firm hold of the end of the string” that would lead to the children.
Based on the girls’ letters, Geyer’s next stop was obvious. He thanked Detective Schnooks for his companionship and caught a train to Indianapolis.
It was even hotter in Indianapolis. Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.
Early Sunday morning Geyer went to the police station and picked up a new local partner, Detective David Richards.
One part of the trail was easy to find. In Nellie Pitezel’s letter from Indianapolis, she had written “we are at the English H.” Detective Richards knew the place: The Hotel English.
In the hotel’s register Geyer found an entry on September 30 for “three Canning children.” Canning, he knew, was Carrie Pitezel’s maiden name.
Nothing was simple, however. According to the register, the Canning children had checked out the next day, Monday, October 1. Yet Geyer knew, again from their letters, that the children had remained in Indianapolis for at least another week. Holmes seemed to be repeating the pattern he had established in Cincinnati.
Geyer began the same methodical canvass he had conducted in Cincinnati. He and Detective Richards checked hotel after hotel but found no further reference to the children.
They did, however, find something else.
At a hotel called the Circle Park they discovered an entry for a “Mrs. Georgia Howard.” Howard was one of Holmes’s more common aliases, Geyer now knew. He believed this woman could be Holmes’s latest wife, Georgiana Yoke. The register showed that “Mrs. Howard” had checked in on Sunday, September 30, 1894, and stayed four nights.
Geyer showed his photographs to the hotel’s proprietor, a Mrs. Rodius, who recognized Holmes and Yoke but not the children. Mrs. Rodius explained that she and Yoke had become friends. In one conversation Yoke had told her that her husband was “a very wealthy man, and that he owned real estate and cattle ranches in Texas; also had considerable real estate in Berlin, Germany, where they intended to go as soon as her husband could get his business affairs into shape to leave.”
The timing of all these hotel stays was perplexing. As best Geyer could tell, on that one Sunday, September 30, Holmes somehow had managed to maneuver the three children and his own wife into different hotels in the same city, without revealing their existence to one another.
But where had the children gone next?
Geyer and Richards examined the registers of every hotel and boardinghouse in Indianapolis but found no further trace of the children.
The Indianapolis leg of Geyer’s search seemed to have reached a dead end, when Richards remembered that a hotel called the Circle House had been open during the fall of 1894 but had since closed. He and Geyer checked with other hotels to find out who had run the Circle House, and learned from its former clerk that the registration records were in the possession of a downtown attorney.
The records had been poorly kept, but among the guests who had arrived on Monday, October 1, Geyer found a familiar entry: “Three Canning children.” The register showed the children were from Galva, Illinois—the town where Mrs. Pitezel had grown up. Geyer now felt a pressing need to talk to the hotel’s past manager and found him running a saloon in West Indianapolis. His name was Herman Ackelow.
Geyer explained his mission and immediately showed Ackelow his photographs of Holmes and the Pitezel children. Ackelow was silent a moment. Yes, he said, he was sure of it: The man in the photograph had come to his hotel.
It was the children, however, that he remembered most clearly, and now he told the detectives why.
Until this point all Geyer knew about the children’s stay in Indianapolis was what he had read in the letters from the tin box. Between October 6 and 8 Alice and Nellie had written at least three letters that Holmes had intercepted. The letters were brief and poorly written, but they offered small bright glimpses into the daily lives of the children and the state of near-captivity in which Holmes held them. “We are all well here,” Nellie wrote on Saturday, October 6. “It is a little warmer to-day. There is so many buggies go by that you can’t hear yourself think. I first wrote you a letter with a crystal pen… It is all glass so I hafto be careful or else it will break, it was only five cents.”
Alice wrote a letter the same day. She had been away from her mother the longest, and for her the trip had become wearisome and sad. It was Saturday, raining hard. She had a cold and was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin so much that her eyes had begun to hurt. “And I expect this Sunday will pass away slower than I don’t know what… Why don’t you write to me. I have not got a letter from you since I have been away and it will be three weeks day after tomorrow.”
On Monday Holmes allowed a letter from Mrs. Pitezel to reach the children, which prompted Alice to write an immediate reply, observing, “It seems as though you are awful homesick.” In this letter, which Holmes never mailed, Alice reported that little Howard was being difficult. “One morning Mr. H. told me to tell him to stay in the next morning that he wanted him and he would come and get him and take him out.” But Howard had not obeyed, and when Holmes came for him, the boy was nowhere to be found. Holmes had gotten angry.
Despite her sorrow and boredom, Alice found a few cheery moments worth celebrating. “Yesterday we had mashed potatoes, grapes, chicken glass of milk each ice cream each a big sauce dish full awful good too lemon pie cake don’t you think that is pretty good.”
The fact that the children were so well fed might have comforted Mrs. Pitezel, had she ever received the letter. Not so, however, the story the former hotel manager now told Geyer.
Each day Ackelow would send his eldest son up to the children’s room to call them for their meals. Often the boy reported back that the children were crying, “evidently heartbroken and homesick to see their mother, or hear from her,” Geyer wrote. A German chambermaid named Caroline Klausmann had tended the children’s room and observed the same wrenching scenes. She had moved to Chicago, Ackelow said. Geyer wrote her name in his notebook.
“Holmes said that Howard was a very bad boy,” Ackelow recalled, “and that he was trying to place him in some institution, or bind him out to some farmer, as he wanted to get rid of the responsibility of looking after him.”
Geyer still nurtured a small hope that the children really were alive, as Holmes insisted. Despite his twenty years on the police force, Geyer found it difficult to believe that anyone could kill three children for absolutely no reason. Why had Holmes gone to the trouble and expense of moving the children from city to city, hotel to hotel, if only to kill them? Why had he bought each of them a crystal pen and taken them to the zoo in Cincinnati and made sure they received lemon pie and ice cream?
Geyer set out for Chicago but felt deep reluctance about leaving Indianapolis—“something seemed to tell me that Howard had never left there alive.” In Chicago he found, to his surprise, that the city’s police department knew nothing about Holmes. He tracked down Caroline Klausmann, who was now working at the Swiss Hotel on Clark Street. When he showed her his photographs of the children, tears welled in her eyes.
Geyer caught a train to Detroit, the city where Alice had written the last of the letters in the tin box.
Geyer was getting a feel for his quarry. There was nothing rational about Holmes, but his behavior seemed to follow a pattern. Geyer knew what to look for in Detroit and, with the assistance of another police detective, once again began a patient canvass of hotels and boardinghouses. Though he told his story and showed his photographs a hundred times, he never tired and was always patient and polite. These were his strengths. His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.
Once again he picked up the children’s trail and the parallel registrations of Holmes and Yoke, but now he discovered something even stranger—that during this same period Carrie Pitezel and her two other children, Dessie and baby Wharton, had also checked into a Detroit hotel, this one called Geis’s Hotel. Geyer realized to his astonishment that Holmes now was moving three different parties of travelers from place to place, shoving them across the landscape as if they were toys.
And he discovered something else.
In walking from lodging to lodging, he saw that Holmes had not only kept Carrie away from Alice, Nellie, and Howard: He had placed them in establishments only three blocks apart. Suddenly the true implication of what Holmes had done became clear to him.
He reread Alice’s final letter. She had written it to her grandparents on Sunday, October 14, the same day her mother, along with Dessie and the baby, had checked into Geis’s Hotel. This was the saddest letter of them all. Alice and Nellie both had colds, and the weather had turned wintry. “Tell Mama that I have to have a coat,” Alice wrote. “I nearly freeze in that thin jacket.” The children’s lack of warm clothing forced them to stay in their room day after day. “All that Nell and I can do is to draw and I get so tired sitting that I could get up and fly almost. I wish I could see you all. I am getting so homesick that I don’t know what to do. I suppose Wharton walks by this time don’t he I would like to have him here he would pass away the time a goodeal.”
Geyer was appalled. “So when this poor child Alice was writing to her grandparents in Galva, Illinois, complaining of the cold, sending a message to her mother, asking for heavier and more comfortable clothing, wishing for little Wharton, the baby who would help them pass away the time—while this wearied, lonely, homesick child was writing this letter, her mother and her sister and the much wished for Wharton, were within ten minutes walk of her, and continued there for the next five days.”
It was a game for Holmes, Geyer realized. He possessed them all and reveled in his possession.
One additional phrase of Alice’s letter kept running through Geyer’s brain.
“Howard,” she had written, “is not with us now.”
Moyamensing Prison
HOLMES SAT IN HIS CELL at Moyamensing Prison, a large turreted and crenellated building at Tenth and Reed streets, in south Philadelphia. He did not seem terribly troubled by his incarceration, although he complained of its injustice. “The great humiliation of feeling that I am a prisoner is killing me far more than any other discomforts I have to endure,” he wrote—though in fact he felt no humiliation whatsoever. If he felt anything, it was a smug satisfaction that so far no one had been able to produce any concrete evidence that he had killed Ben Pitezel or the missing children.
He occupied a cell that measured nine by fourteen feet, with a narrow barred window high in its outer wall and a single electric lamp, which guards extinguished at nine o’clock each night. The walls were whitewashed. The stone construction of the prison helped blunt the extreme heat that had settled on the city and much of the country, but nothing could keep out the humidity for which Philadelphia was notorious. It clung to Holmes and his fellow prisoners like a cloak of moist wool, yet this too he seemed not to mind. Holmes became a model prisoner—became in fact the model of a model prisoner. He made a game of using his charm to gain concessions from his keepers. He was allowed to wear his own clothes “and to keep my watch and other small belongings.” He discovered also that he could pay to have food, newspapers, and magazines brought in from outside. He read of his increasing national notoriety. He read too that Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective who had interviewed him in June, was now in the Midwest searching for Pitezel’s children. The search delighted Holmes. It satisfied his profound need for attention and gave him a sense of power over the detective. He knew that Geyer’s search would be in vain.
Holmes’s cell was furnished with a bed, a stool, and a writing table, upon which he composed his memoir. He had begun it, he said, the preceding winter—to be exact, on December 3, 1894.
He opened the memoir as if it were a fable: “Come with me, if you will, to a tiny quiet New England village, nestling among the picturesquely rugged hills of New Hampshire… Here, in the year 1861, I, Herman W. Mudgett, the author of these pages, was born. That the first years of my life were different from those of any other ordinary country-bred boy, I have no reason to think.” The dates and places were correct; his description of his boyhood as a typical country idyll was most certainly a fabrication. It is one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths that as children they lied at will, exhibited unusual cruelty to animals and other children, and often engaged in acts of vandalism, with arson an especially favored act.
Holmes inserted into his memoir a “prison diary” that he claimed to have kept since the day he arrived at Moyamensing. It is more likely that he invented the diary expressly for the memoir, intending it as a vehicle for reinforcing his claims of innocence by fostering the impression that he was a man of warmth and piety. He claimed in the diary to have established a daily schedule aimed at personal betterment. He would wake at six-thirty each day and take his “usual sponge bath,” then clean his cell. He would breakfast at seven. “I shall eat no more meat of any kind while I am so closely confined.” He planned to exercise and read the morning newspapers until ten o’clock. “From 10 to 12 and 2 to 4 six days in the week, I shall confine myself to my old medical works and other college studies including stenography, French and German.” The rest of the day he would devote to reading various periodicals and library books.
At one point in his diary he notes that he was reading Trilby, the 1894 best seller by George Du Maurier about a young singer, Trilby O’Farrell, and her possession by the mesmerist Svengali. Holmes wrote that he “was much pleased with parts of it.”
Elsewhere in the diary Holmes went for the heart.
One entry, for May 16, 1895: “My birthday. Am 34 years old. I wonder if, as in former years, mother will write me…”
In another entry he described a visit from his latest wife, Georgiana Yoke. “She has suffered, and though she tried heroically to keep me from seeing it, it was of no avail: and in a few minutes to again bid her good-bye and know she was going out into the world with so heavy a load to bear, caused me more suffering than any death struggles can ever do. Each day until I know she is safe from harm and annoyance will be a living death to me.”
From his cell Holmes also wrote a long letter to Carrie Pitezel, which he composed in a manner that shows he was aware the police were reading his mail. He insisted that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were with “Miss W.” in London, and that if the police would only check his story in detail, the mystery of the children would be solved. “I was as careful of the children as if they were my own, and you know me well enough to judge me better than strangers here can do. Ben would not have done anything against me, or I against him, any quicker than brothers. We never quarrelled. Again, he was worth too much to me for me to have killed him, if I had no other reason not to. As to the children, I never will believe, until you tell me so yourself, that you think they are dead or that I did anything to put them out of the way. Knowing me as you do, can you imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any motive?”
He explained the lack of mail from the children. “They have no doubt written letters which Miss W., for her own safety, has withheld.”
Holmes read the daily papers closely. Clearly the detective’s search had borne little fruit. Holmes had no doubt that Geyer soon would be forced to end his hunt and return to Philadelphia.
The prospect of this was pleasing in the extreme.
The Tenant
ON SUNDAY, JULY 7, 1895, Detective Geyer took his search to Toronto, where the city’s police department assigned Detective Alf Cuddy to assist him. Together Geyer and Cuddy scoured the hotels and boardinghouses of Toronto and after days of searching found that here, too, Holmes had been moving three parties of travelers simultaneously.
Holmes and Yoke had stayed at the Walker House: “G. Howe and wife, Columbus.”
Mrs. Pitezel at the Union House: “Mrs. C. A. Adams and daughter, Columbus.”
The girls at the Albion: “Alice and Nellie Canning, Detroit.”
No one remembered seeing Howard.
Now Geyer and Cuddy began searching the records of real estate agencies and contacting the owners of rental homes, but Toronto was far larger than any other city Geyer had searched. The task seemed impossible. On Monday morning, July 15, he awoke facing the prospect of yet another day of mind-numbing routine, but when he arrived at headquarters, he found Detective Cuddy in an unusually good mood. A tip had come in that Cuddy found promising. A resident named Thomas Ryves had read a description of Holmes in one of the city’s newspapers and thought it sounded like a man who in October 1894 had rented the house next door to his, at 16 St. Vincent Street.
Geyer was leery. The intensive press coverage of his mission and his arrival in Toronto had generated thousands of tips, all useless.
Cuddy agreed that the latest tip was probably another wild goose chase, but at least it offered a change of pace.
By now Geyer was a national fascination, America’s Sherlock Holmes. Reports of his travels appeared in newspapers throughout the country. In that day the possibility that a man had killed three young children was still considered a horror well beyond the norm. There was something about Detective Geyer’s lone search through the sweltering heat of that summer that captured everyone’s imagination. He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds. Millions of people woke each morning hoping to read in their newspapers that this staunch detective at last had found the missing children.
Geyer paid little attention to his new celebrity. Nearly a month had passed since the start of his search, but what had he accomplished? Each new phase seemed only to raise new questions: Why had Holmes taken the children? Why had he engineered that contorted journey from city to city? What power did Holmes possess that gave him such control?
There was something about Holmes that Geyer just did not understand. Every crime had a motive. But the force that propelled Holmes seemed to exist outside the world of Geyer’s experience.
He kept coming back to the same conclusion: Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for the money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.
What irked Geyer most was that the central question was still unanswered: Where were the children now?
The detectives found Thomas Ryves to be a charming Scotsman of considerable age, who welcomed them with enthusiasm. Ryves explained why the renter next door had caught his attention. For one thing, he had arrived with little furniture—a mattress, an old bed, and an unusually large trunk. One afternoon the tenant came to Ryves’s house to borrow a shovel, explaining that he wanted to dig a hole in the cellar for the storage of potatoes. He returned the shovel the next morning and the following day removed the trunk from the house. Ryves never saw him again.
Detective Geyer, now galvanized, told Ryves to meet him in front of the neighboring house in exactly one hour; then he and Cuddy sped to the home of the realtor who had arranged the rental. With little preamble Geyer showed her a photograph of Holmes. She recognized him instantly. He had been very handsome, with amazing blue eyes.
“This seemed too good to be true,” Geyer wrote. He and Cuddy offered quick thanks and rushed back to St. Vincent Street. Ryves was waiting outside.
Now Geyer asked to borrow a shovel, and Ryves returned with the same one he had lent the tenant.
The house was charming, with a steeply pitched central gable and scalloped trim like the gingerbread house in a fairy tale, except this house sat not alone in a deep wood, but in the heart of Toronto on a fine street closely lined with elegant homes and yards fenced with fleur-de-lis pickets. Clematis in full bloom climbed one post of the veranda.
The current tenant, a Mrs. J. Armbrust, answered the door. Ryves introduced the detectives. Mrs. Armbrust led them inside. They entered a central hall that divided the house into halves of three rooms each. A stairwell led to the second floor. Geyer asked to see the cellar.
Mrs. Armbrust led the detectives into the kitchen, where she lifted a sheet of oilcloth from the floor. A square trap door lay underneath. As the detectives opened it, the scent of moist earth drifted upward into the kitchen. The cellar was shallow but very dark. Mrs. Armbrust brought lamps.
Geyer and Cuddy descended a steep set of steps, more ladder than stairway, into a small chamber about ten feet long by ten feet wide and only four feet high. The lamps shed a shifting orange light that exaggerated the detectives’ shadows. Hunched over, wary of the overhead beams, Geyer and Cuddy tested the ground with the spade. In the southwest corner Geyer found a soft spot. The spade entered with disconcerting ease.
“Only a slight hole had been made,” Geyer said, “when the gases burst forth and the stench was frightful.”
At three feet they uncovered human bone.
They summoned an undertaker named B. D. Humphrey to help recover the remains. Geyer and Cuddy gingerly climbed back down into the cellar. Humphrey leaped down.
The stench now suffused the entire house. Mrs. Armbrust looked stricken.
Then the coffins arrived.
The undertaker’s men put them in the kitchen.
The children had been buried nude. Alice lay on her side, her head at the west end of the grave. Nellie lay face-down, partially covering Alice. Her rich black hair, nicely plaited, lay along her back as neatly as if she had just combed it. The men spread a sheet on the cellar floor.
They began with Nellie.
“We lifted her as gently as possible,” Geyer said, “but owing to the decomposed state of the body, the weight of her plaited hair hanging down her back pulled the scalp from her head.”
They discovered something else: Nellie’s feet had been amputated. During the search of the residence that followed, police found no trace of them. At first this seemed a mystery, until Geyer recalled that Nellie was clubfooted. Holmes had disposed of her feet to remove this distinctive clue to her identity.
Mrs. Pitezel learned of the discovery of her girls by reading a morning newspaper. She had been visiting friends back in Chicago and thus Geyer had been unable to telegraph the news to her directly. She caught a train to Toronto. Geyer met her at the station and took her to his hotel, the Rossin House. She was exhausted and sad and seemed perpetually near fainting. Geyer roused her with smelling salts.
Geyer and Cuddy came for her the next afternoon to bring her to the morgue. They carried brandy and smelling salts. Geyer wrote, “I told her that it would be absolutely impossible for her to see anything but Alice’s teeth and hair, and only the hair belonging to Nellie. This had a paralyzing effect upon her and she almost fainted.”
The coroner’s men did what they could to make the viewing as endurable as possible. They cleaned the flesh from Alice’s skull and carefully polished her teeth, then covered her body with canvas. They laid paper over her face, and cut a hole in the paper to expose only her teeth, just as the Philadelphia coroner had done for her father.
They washed Nellie’s hair and laid it carefully on the canvas that covered Alice’s body.
Cuddy and Geyer took positions on opposite sides of Mrs. Pitezel and led her into the dead house. She recognized Alice’s teeth immediately. She turned to Geyer and asked, “Where is Nellie?” Only then did she notice Nellie’s long black hair.
The coroner, unable to find any marks of violence, theorized that Holmes had locked the girls in the big trunk, then filled it with gas from a lamp valve. Indeed, when police found the trunk they discovered a hole drilled through one side, covered with a makeshift patch.
“Nothing could be more surprising,” Geyer wrote, “than the apparent ease with which Holmes murdered the two little girls in the very center of the city of Toronto, without arousing the least suspicion of a single person there.” If not for Graham’s decision to send him on his search, he believed, “these murders would never have been discovered, and Mrs. Pitezel would have gone to her grave without knowing whether her children were alive or dead.”
For Geyer, finding the girls was “one of the most satisfactory events of my life,” but his satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Howard remained missing. Mrs. Pitezel refused to believe Howard was dead; she “clung fondly to the hope that he would ultimately be found alive.”
Even Geyer found himself hoping that in this one case Holmes had not lied and had done exactly what he had told the clerk in Indianapolis. “Had [Howard] been placed in some institution, as Holmes had intimated his intention of doing, or was he hidden in some obscure place beyond reach or discovery? Was he alive or dead? I was puzzled, non-plussed, and groping in the dark.”
A Lively Corpse
IN PHILADELPHIA, ON THE MORNING of Tuesday, July 16, 1895—the day Geyer’s Toronto discoveries were reported in the nation’s newspapers—the district attorney’s office telephoned an urgent message to the warden at Moyamensing Prison, instructing him to keep all the morning’s newspapers away from Holmes. The order came from Assistant District Attorney Thomas W. Barlow. He wanted to surprise Holmes with the news, hoping it would rattle him so thoroughly that he would confess.
Barlow’s order came too late. The guard sent to intercept the morning papers found Holmes sitting at his table reading the news as calmly as if reading about the weather.
In his memoir Holmes contended that the news did shock him. His newspaper came that morning at eight-thirty as it always did, he wrote, “and I had hardly opened it before I saw in large headlines the announcement of the finding of the children in Toronto. For the moment it seemed so impossible, that I was inclined to think it one of the frequent newspaper excitements that had attended the earlier part of the case…” But suddenly, he wrote, he realized what must have happened. Minnie Williams had killed them or had ordered them killed. Holmes knew she had an unsavory associate named “Hatch.” He guessed that Williams had suggested the killings and Hatch had carried them out. It was all too horrible to comprehend: “I gave up trying to read the article, and saw instead the two little faces as they had looked when I hurriedly left them—felt the innocent child’s kiss so timidly given and heard again their earnest words of farewell, and I realized that I had received another burden to carry to my grave… I think at this time I should have lost my senses utterly had I not been hurriedly called to prepare to be taken to the District Attorney’s office.”
The morning was hot. Holmes was driven north on Broad Street to City Hall through air as sticky as taffy. In the DA’s office he was questioned by Barlow. The Philadelphia Public Ledger reported that Holmes’s “genius for explanation had deserted him. For two hours he sat under a shower of questions and refused to talk. He was not cowed by any means, but he would give absolutely no satisfaction.”
Holmes wrote, “I was in no condition to bear his accusations, nor disposed to answer many of his questions.” He told Barlow that Miss Williams and Hatch apparently had killed Howard as well.
Holmes was driven back to Moyamensing. He began earnestly trying to find a publisher for his memoir, hoping to get it quickly into print to help turn public opinion to his favor. If he could not exert his great powers of persuasion directly, he could at least attempt to do so indirectly. He struck a deal with a journalist named John King to arrange publication and market the book.
He wrote to King, “My ideas are that you should get from the New York Herald and the Philadelphia Press all the cuts they have and turn those we want over to the printer, to have them electroplated at his expense.” In particular he wanted a Herald picture of himself in a full beard. He also wanted to have “the autographs of my two names (Holmes and Mudgett) engraved and electroplated at the same time to go under the picture.” He wanted this done quickly so that as soon as the manuscript was set in type, all components of the book would be in hand, ready for the presses.
He offered King some marketing advice: “As soon as the book is published, get it onto the Philadelphia and New York newsstands. Then get reliable canvassers who will work afternoons here in Philadelphia. Take one good street at a time, leave the book, then return about a half hour later for the money. No use to do this in the forenoon when people are busy. I canvassed when a student in this way and found the method successful.
“Then, if you have any liking for the road, go over the ground covered by the book, spending a few days in Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. Give copies to the newspapers in these cities to comment upon, it will assist the sale…”
Aware that this letter, too, would be read by the authorities, Holmes used it to reinforce, obliquely, his claims of innocence. He urged King that when his sales effort took him to Chicago, he should to go a particular hotel and look for evidence in the register, and collect affidavits from clerks, proving that Minnie Williams had stayed there with Holmes long after she was supposed to have been murdered.
“If she was a corpse then,” Holmes wrote to King, “she was a very lively corpse indeed.”
“All the Weary Days”
IT WAS A STRANGE MOMENT for Geyer. He had examined every lead, checked every hotel, visited every boardinghouse and real estate agent, and yet now he had to begin his search anew. Where? What path was left? The weather remained stifling, as if taunting him.
His instincts kept telling him that Holmes had killed Howard in Indianapolis. He returned there on July 24 and again received the assistance of Detective David Richards, but now Geyer also called in the press. The next day every newspaper in the city reported his arrival. Dozens of people visited him at his hotel to make suggestions about where he ought to look for Howard. “The number of mysterious persons who had rented houses in and about Indianapolis multiplied from day to day,” Geyer wrote. He and Richards trudged through the heat from office to office, house to house, and found nothing. “Days came and passed, but I continued to be as much in the dark as ever, and it began to look as though the bold but clever criminal had outwitted the detectives… and that the disappearance of Howard Pitezel would pass into history as an unsolved mystery.”
Meanwhile the mystery of Holmes himself grew deeper and darker.
Geyer’s discovery of the girls prompted Chicago police to enter Holmes’s building in Englewood. Each day they delved more deeply into the secrets of the “castle,” and each day turned up additional evidence that Holmes was something far worse than even Geyer’s macabre discoveries indicated. There was speculation that during the world’s fair he might have killed dozens of people, most of them young women. One estimate, certainly an exaggeration, put the toll at two hundred. To most people, it seemed impossible that Holmes could have done so much killing without detection. Geyer would have agreed, except that his own search had revealed again and again Holmes’s talent for deflecting scrutiny.
Chicago detectives began their exploration of the castle on the night of Friday, July 19. First they made a broad survey of the building. The third floor contained small hotel rooms. The second floor had thirty-five rooms that were harder to classify. Some were ordinary bedrooms; others had no windows and were fitted with doors that made the rooms airtight. One room contained a walk-in vault, with iron walls. Police found a gas jet with no apparent function other than to admit gas into the vault. Its cut-off valve was located in Holmes’s personal apartment. In Holmes’s office they found a bank book belonging to a woman named Lucy Burbank. It listed a balance of $23,000. The woman could not be located.
The eeriest phase of the investigation began when the police, holding their flickering lanterns high, entered the hotel basement, a cavern of brick and timber measuring 50 by 165 feet. The discoveries came quickly: a vat of acid with eight ribs and part of a skull settled at the bottom; mounds of quicklime; a large kiln; a dissection table stained with what seemed to be blood. They found surgical tools and charred high-heeled shoes.
And more bones:
Eighteen ribs from the torso of a child.
Several vertebrae.
A bone from a foot.
One shoulder blade.
One hip socket.
Articles of clothing emerged from walls and from pits of ash and quicklime, including a girl’s dress and bloodstained overalls. Human hair clotted a stovepipe. The searchers unearthed two buried vaults full of quicklime and human remains. They theorized the remains might be the last traces of two Texas women, Minnie and Anna Williams, whom Chicago police had only recently learned were missing. In the ash of a large stove they found a length of chain that the jeweler in Holmes’s pharmacy recognized as part of a watch chain Holmes had given Minnie as a gift. They also found a letter Holmes had written to the pharmacist in his drugstore. “Do you ever see anything of the ghost of the Williams sisters,” Holmes wrote, “and do they trouble you much now?”
The next day the police discovered another hidden chamber, this one at the cellar’s southwest corner. They were led to it by a man named Charles Chappell, alleged to have helped Holmes reduce corpses to bone. He was very cooperative, and soon the police recovered three fully articulated skeletons from their owners. A fourth was expected from Chicago’s Hahneman Medical College.
One of the most striking discoveries came on the second floor, in the walk-in vault. The inside of the door showed the unmistakable imprint of a woman’s bare foot. Police theorized the print had been made by a woman suffocating within. Her name, they believed, was Emeline Cigrand.
Chicago police telegraphed District Attorney Graham that their search of the Holmes building had uncovered the skeleton of a child. Graham ordered Geyer to Chicago to see if the remains might be those of Howard Pitezel.
Geyer found the city transfixed by the revelations emerging from the castle. Press coverage had been exhaustive, taking up most of the front page of the daily newspapers. One Tribune headline had cried VICTIMS OF A FIEND, and reported that the remains of Howard Pitezel had been found in the building. The story took up six of the seven columns of the front page.
Geyer met with the lead police inspector and learned that a physician who had just examined the child’s skeleton had ruled it to be that of a little girl. The inspector thought he knew the girl’s identity and mentioned a name, Pearl Conner. The name meant nothing to Geyer.
Geyer telegraphed his disappointment to Graham, who ordered him back to Philadelphia for consultation and rest.
On Wednesday evening, August 7, with temperatures in the nineties and traincars like ovens, Geyer set out again, this time accompanied by Fidelity Mutual’s top insurance investigator, Inspector W. E. Gary. Geyer was glad for the company.
They went to Chicago, then to Indiana, where they stopped in Logansport and Peru, then to Montpelier Junction, Ohio, and Adrian, Michigan. They spent days searching the records of every hotel, boardinghouse, and real estate office they could find, “all,” Geyer said, “to no purpose.”
Although Geyer’s brief rest in Philadelphia had recharged his hopes, he now found them “fast dwindling away.” He still believed his original instinct was correct, that Howard was in Indianapolis or somewhere nearby. He went there next, his third visit of the summer.
“I must confess I returned to Indianapolis in no cheerful frame of mind,” Geyer wrote. He and Inspector Gary checked into Geyer’s old hotel, the Spencer House. The failure to find Howard after so much effort was frustrating and puzzling. “The mystery,” Geyer wrote, “seemed to be impenetrable.”
On Thursday, August 19, Geyer learned that during the preceding night Holmes’s castle in Englewood, his own dark dreamland, had burned to the ground. Front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune shouted, “Holmes’ Den Burned; Fire Demolishes the Place of Murder and Mystery.” The fire department suspected arson; police theorized that whoever set the fire had wanted to destroy the secrets still embedded within. They arrested no one.
Together Detective Geyer and Inspector Gary investigated nine hundred leads. They expanded their search to include small towns outside Indianapolis. “By Monday,” Geyer wrote in a report to headquarters, “we will have searched every outlying town, except Irvington, and another day will conclude that. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we shall go.”
They went to Irvington on Tuesday morning, August 27, 1895, aboard an electric trolley, a new kind of streetcar that drew its power through a wheeled conducting apparatus on the roof called a troller. Just before the trolley reached its final stop, Geyer spotted a sign for a real estate office. He and Gary resolved to begin their search there.
The proprietor was a Mr. Brown. He offered the detectives each a chair, but they remained standing. They did not think the visit would last long, and there were many other offices to touch before nightfall. Geyer opened his now-soiled parcel of photographs.
Brown adjusted his glasses and examined the picture of Holmes. After a long pause he said, “I did not have the renting of the house, but I had the keys, and one day last fall, this man came into my office and in a very abrupt way said I want the keys for that house.” Geyer and Gary stood very still. Brown continued: “I remember the man very well, because I did not like his manner, and I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.”
The detectives looked at each other. Both sat down at the same time. “All the toil,” Geyer said, “all the weary days and weeks of travel—toil and travel in the hottest months of the year, alternating between faith and hope, and discouragement and despair, all were recompensed in that one moment, when I saw the veil about to lift.”
At the inquest that followed a young man named Elvet Moorman testified he had helped Holmes set up a large woodstove in the house. He recalled asking Holmes why he didn’t install a gas stove instead. Holmes answered “that he did not think gas was healthy for children.”
The owner of an Indianapolis repair shop testified that Holmes had come into his shop on October 3, 1894, with two cases of surgical instruments and asked to have them sharpened. Holmes picked them up three days later.
Detective Geyer testified how during his search of the house he had opened the base of a chimney flue that extended from roof to cellar. While sifting the accumulated ash through a fly screen, he found human teeth and a fragment of jaw. He also retrieved “a large charred mass, which upon being cut, disclosed a portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard.” The organs had been packed too tightly into the chimney and thus never had burned.
And of course Mrs. Pitezel was summoned. She identified Howard’s overcoat and his scarf pin, and a crochet needle that belonged to Alice.
Finally the coroner showed her a toy that Geyer himself had found in the house. It consisted of a tin man mounted on a spinning top. She recognized it. How could she not? It was Howard’s most important possession. Mrs. Pitezel herself had put it in the children’s trunk just before she sent them off with Holmes. His father had bought it for him at the Chicago world’s fair.
Malice Aforethought
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1895, a Philadelphia grand jury voted to indict Holmes for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. Only two witnesses presented evidence, L. G. Fouse, president of Fidelity Mutual Life, and Detective Frank Geyer. Holmes stuck to his claim that Minnie Williams and the mysterious Hatch had killed the children. Grand juries in Indianapolis and Toronto found this unconvincing. Indianapolis indicted Holmes for the murder of Howard Pitezel, Toronto for the murders of Alice and Nellie. If Philadelphia failed to convict him, there would be two more chances; if the city succeeded, the other indictments would be moot, for given the nature of the Pitezel murder, a conviction in Philadelphia would bring a death sentence.
Holmes’s memoir reached newsstands. In its final pages he stated, “In conclusion, I wish to say that I am but a very ordinary man, even below average in physical strength and mental ability, and to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrong-doing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power…”
He asked the public to suspend judgment while he worked to disprove the charges against him, “a task which I feel able to satisfactorily and expeditiously accomplish. And here I cannot say finis—it is not the end—for besides doing this there is also the work of bringing to justice those for whose wrong-doings I am to-day suffering, and this not to prolong or save my own life, for since the day I heard of the Toronto horror I have not cared to live; but that to those who have looked up to and honored me in the past it shall not in the future be said that I suffered the ignominious death of a murderer.”
The thing editors could not understand was how Holmes had been able to escape serious investigation by the Chicago police. The Chicago Inter Ocean said, “It is humiliating to think that had it not been for the exertions of the insurance companies which Holmes swindled, or attempted to swindle, he might yet be at large, preying upon society, so well did he cover up the traces of his crime.” Chicago’s “feeling of humiliation” was not surprising, the New York Times said; anyone familiar with the saga “must be amazed at the failure of the municipal police department and the local prosecuting officers not only to prevent those awful crimes, but even to procure any knowledge of them.”
One of the most surprising and perhaps dismaying revelations was that Chicago’s chief of police, in his prior legal career, had represented Holmes in a dozen routine commercial lawsuits.
The Chicago Times-Herald took the broad view and said of Holmes: “He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.”