The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  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 boarding-houses. 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 goodbye 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 par
ties 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.