While lying in this amnesiac state, he was visited by the patroness of the hospital—a “beautiful, wealthy woman, who brought flowers to the sick and read to us from books, and with her gentle voice sought to bring cheer into the dull hospital wards.” This good woman—whose name was Georgiana Yoke—had fallen in love with him, and he with her. Upon his convalescence, they were married.
Deeply moved by her new husband’s constant suffering as he “endeavored in vain to regain the threads of memory” of his past, Georgianna had finally secured the services of a “great surgeon,” who performed a “wonderful operation” on his brain. When he came out of the ether, he discovered that his “memory had like a flood come back upon me, and to my unspeakable horror I realized what a wrong I had committed in marrying this sweet woman who had administered to me as I lay helpless and sick in the hospital. For it was only then that I remembered that I was a married man, and that my real wife was you, dear Clara.”
It is yet another mark of Holmes’s extraordinary persuasiveness that Clara evidently swallowed this whopper whole, though her reaction could hardly have been of much relevance to Holmes, since he had no intention of ever seeing her—or any other member of his family—again.
In one respect, Holmes’s enormous lie to Clara contained a symbolic truth about his connection to the past. A grotesque caricature of American traits, he had become the frightening realization of the culture’s most pathological possibilities: Holmes had reinvented himself so many times that even he could no longer remember all of his identities. After a week at his family home, he was ready to leave his earliest life behind forever.
On November 15, he hired a carriage to convey him to Boston and bid a tearless farewell to the past.
His immediate past, however, was quickly catching up to him. Indeed, by the time he reached Boston, he knew he was being followed.
Taking a room at the Adams House, he immediately sat down and composed a letter to Carrie, instructing her to meet him in Lowell in a week. Before she left Burlington, however, there was a small task he wanted her to perform.
For reasons too complicated to explain in a letter, he had stashed a bottle of expensive chemicals behind the coal bin in her house. He had since decided that the bottle might get damaged in its present location. As soon as Carrie finished reading—and then destroying—this letter, she was to remove the bottle from the basement, bring it up to the attic, and conceal it in a safe place until Holmes could come and fetch it
As he was waiting for the ink on the letter to dry, Holmes remembered how nervous he had felt transporting the cloth-wrapped bottle to the house on Winooski Avenue and his relief at finally getting shed of it.
Then—regretting that he would not be present to witness the fireworks when Carrie climbed three flights of rickety stairs with the ten-ounce bottle of nitroglycerin—he hurried out to mail the letter and to begin making the rounds of steamship offices.
On Friday, November 16, John Cornish, head of the Pinkerton office in Boston, held an urgent meeting with Orinton M. Hanscom, deputy superintendent of police and himself a former Pinkerton man. Holmes was getting ready to leave the country. It was time for the law to move in.
At approximately three o’clock the following afternoon, Holmes—who had transferred to a room at 40 Hancock Street—found himself surrounded by four police officers as he stepped from the lodging house. He surrendered without a struggle
Though the apprehension of Holmes was a source of great satisfaction to the Pinkertons—another feather in the agency’s cap—they had no way of knowing what a coup his arrest really was. At the time, they regarded Holmes as the mastermind of a uniquely insidious plot. Only later would the full enormity of his crimes become apparent.
To their other accomplishments—the recovery of a stolen Gainsborough masterpiece after a relentless twenty-year hunt, the thwarting of an early assassination plot against Abraham Lincoln, the smashing of the Confederacy’s most active spy ring, and much more—the Pinkertons would add another celebrated feat: the capture of the man soon to gain nationwide infamy as “the most dastardly criminal of the age.”
31
It was ordained at the beginning of the world that certain signs should prefigure certain events.
—Cicero, De Divinatione
The telegraph wire strung above the roof of his house hadn’t bothered Linford Biles much. But when the telephone company added a second wire only a few inches away from the first, he began to get nervous. And with good reason. Whenever a stiff wind blew and caused the two wires to touch, sparks would go shooting onto the shingles.
Still, Biles was not the sort of man to cause a fuss. At sixty-four, he’d spent the better part of his life as a loyal, uncomplaining worker for the Atlantic Oil Refining Company of Philadelphia, where he held the position of paymaster. Though his two grown children—who lived with their widowed father in his modest house on Tasker Street—repeatedly urged him to notify the city, Biles wouldn’t hear of it Not even after the accident.
It happened on Saturday, November 17—the very day of H. H. Holmes’s arrest in Boston. As a half dozen laborers made their way home from the oil works at Point Breeze during that gusty afternoon, they spotted a tongue of flame licking up from one of the houses lining Tasker between Tenth and Eleventh streets. Hurrying in the direction of the fire, they saw that the two live wires running over the roof at number 1031 had become entangled, showering sparks onto the ivy vine that grew along the south side of the house. The sparks had ignited the vine. By the time the workers arrived, the fire was climbing rapidly toward the roof.
While one of the workmen ran for the nearest fire alarm, the others put up a shout. Within moments, the street was filled with people. The fire department responded with admirable speed. Before any real damage could be done to the house, the flames were extinguished and the sparking wires uncrossed. Linford Biles lost most of his ivy plant, but otherwise his property was unscathed.
Among the crowd watching the barely averted tragedy was an old woman named Crowell. As she gazed up at the wires “spitting about like devils” in the air, a strange conviction overtook her. To her eyes, the fire looked less like an accident than a portent—a “dark message,” an “evil warning.”
Something bad was on the way, Mrs. Crowell felt sure. And it was coming for Linford Biles.
Hyde
and Seek
32
Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.
—Georges Braque
Right from the start, the Holmes case was front-page news, not only in the cities where his major crimes took place—Philadelphia and Chicago—but throughout the country. To be sure, the initial coverage was skimpy compared to the media circus still to come. But in an age obsessed with get-rich-quick schemers, Holmes became an overnight sensation—“an adventurer” (as one newspaper described him only days after his arrest) “whose deeds make him a most formidable rival to the most villainous characters ever depicted in fiction.”
From New York City to San Francisco, the whole nation seemed gripped by a powerful fascination with the devious Dr. Holmes. And in the beginning—before horror and outrage overwhelmed it—this fascination was flavored with a grudging admiration for the sheer audacity of the man.
That boldness was on full display from the first day of his capture. Taken directly to Boston police headquarters, Holmes was led into the office of Deputy Superintendent Hanscom, who informed him that he had been picked up on a warrant from Fort Worth, Texas. The charge was horse theft. For a moment, Holmes had to struggle to maintain his sangfroid, since the prospect of doing time in a Texas prison filled him with dread. But he recovered his coolness a moment later, when O. LaForrest Perry strode into the room.
Even after calling in the Pinkertons, Fidelity’s main investigators, including Perry, had continued their own detective work. Assisted by Major James E. Stuart of the U.S. Postal Inspector’s Department, they had traced several of Holmes’s letters to Bu
rlington. Perry immediately caught a train for Vermont. Along the way, he received word that a man and woman resembling Holmes and Mrs. Pitezel had been spotted in New York City, where they had checked into a fashionable midtown hotel.
Making a quick change in his travel plans, Perry proceeded to Manhattan, arriving at the hotel around dusk. Informed by the clerk that the couple in question had gone out to the theater, Perry took a seat in the lobby. When the suspects returned a few hours later, however, he saw at once that he had been following a false lead.
Drained and disheartened, he had headed back to Philadelphia for some badly needed rest. No sooner had he arrived home than he received a dispatch from the Pinkertons’ Boston office, informing him that Holmes had been shadowed to that city. Instantly reinvigorated, Perry reboarded a train. He reached Boston not long after the police closed in on Holmes and hauled him down to headquarters.
As soon as Holmes saw Perry, he half-rose from his chair and, extending his right hand, greeted the insurance man cordially. “I guess I know what I’m really wanted for,” he said in a tone of almost palpable relief. Infinitely preferring the hospitality of the Pennsylvania prison system to a stint in a Texas penitentiary (“I dislike fearfully to go to Fort Worth to serve a term,” he confided to an acquaintance. “I had rather be here in Philadelphia five years than there one”), Holmes was not just ready but positively eager to admit to the insurance fraud. With Perry looking on and Hanscom and John Cornish asking the questions, he proceeded to offer his first complete—if largely fabricated—confession.
Under the stern gaze of his captors, Holmes assumed a guise of heartfelt sincerity and cooperation. Looking his interrogators straight in the eye, he replied in a bluff, manly fashion that gave the impression of absolute frankness. When the circumstances warranted it, he could also call up a ready tear of sorrow, pity, or remorse.
His style was nicely described by an individual who would have ample opportunity to watch Holmes in action over the coming months. “In talking,” this observer wrote, “he has the appearance of candor, becomes quite 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 readily admitted that he and Pitezel had connived to cheat Fidelity Mutual out of $10,000. He insisted, however, that the corpse found at 1316 Callowhill was not Pitezel’s but a body provided by a New York City physician—an old medical school chum who had conspired with Holmes on previous insurance scams.
Holmes had packed the cadaver in a trunk, arranged to have the trunk shipped to Callowhill Street, then hurried back to Philadelphia. After turning the claim ticket over to Pitezel, Holmes had immediately departed the city again, leaving his partner with explicit instructions on how to fake the accidental explosion as soon as the express company delivered the corpse.
Pitezel, hi short, was very much alive. Holmes had seen him on several occasions since that time—in Cincinnati and Detroit—though he was a little fuzzy on the dates.
Holmes’s interrogators were, of course, very eager to know the name of the physician who had supplied the body, but Holmes steadfastly refused to betray his accomplice, even at the risk of incurring their anger. “I don’t mean to antagonize you in the least,” he apologized. “But for the time being I’d rather not answer that.”
His motives, he let his captors understand, were largely selfless. His friend, after all, had an untarnished reputation, and such a scandal would be the end of his career. At the same time, Holmes admitted, “he is a man now well enough to do that if my wife becomes penniless, if I am shut up for a term of years, I think I can call upon him for help.”
Seeing that they were not going to discover the doctor’s identity—and suspecting the true reason for Holmes’s reluctance to reveal it (namely, that no such individual existed)—Hanscom and Cornish turned to another, even more pressing matter: the whereabouts of Alice, Nellie, and Howard Pitezel.
To account for the missing children, Holmes spun a tale every bit as convoluted as the route he had followed during the weeks when he had the little ones in his clutches. According to this story, Pitezel—after using the substitute corpse to fake his own death—had fled to Cincinnati and holed up in a room. Holmes, meanwhile, had traveled back to St. Louis, taken charge of Nellie and Howard from their mother, then picked up Alice in Indianapolis and brought all three children to Cincinnati, where he had installed them in a hotel. Carrie and her remaining children were to follow along a few days later. In the interim, Holmes was to rent a house where she and her husband could have a private reunion before Ben went into hiding for the winter down South.
Compliant as she was, Carrie had been adamant on one point. For the time being at least, the children—who truly believed that their father was dead—must remain in the dark. She was terrified that if they discovered the truth, they might let it slip out and give away the game. Carrie was emphatic about this: if the little ones found out that Ben was alive, the deal was off. She would pull out of the plot—“throw it over,” as Holmes put it.
Holmes respected Carrie’s position. After all, as he told Hanscom, “you could not depend on ten- or eleven-year-old children to keep the fact—keep them from speaking among themselves or before strangers.” But shortly after his arrival in Cincinnati, a most unfortunate incident occurred. The problem resulted from Ben Pitezel’s terrible loneliness, compounded by his predilection for drink.
As soon as Holmes finished checking Alice and her siblings into a hotel, he had paid a visit to Pitezel, who had obviously spent the preceding twenty-four hours in the warming company of a whiskey bottle. Under Ben’s persistent—if slightly fuddled—questioning, Holmes had foolishly revealed the whereabouts of the three little ones.
The very next day, while Holmes was visiting the children, the door had suddenly flown open. As the children gaped in wonder, their teary-eyed father—apparently resurrected from the grave (where, judging by his smell, he had been preserved in rotgut)—stumbled into the hotel room, blubbering about how much he missed them. And completely blowing the plan.
As soon as Pitezel sobered up, Holmes—as vexed with himself as with his dipsomaniac partner—spelled out their predicament. Carrie’s proviso—that the children remain ignorant of their papa’s existence—had been violated. The only solution, as far as the two men could see, was to keep Carrie apart from the children so that she could not find out what had happened.
That very day, Pitezel had set out for Detroit with little Howard in tow. Holmes followed shortly afterward with Alice and Nellie. To confound anyone who might be following them, he disguised the younger girl as a boy.
Not long after arriving in Detroit, Holmes received an alarming message from an associate in Chicago. A pair of police officers from Fort Worth had been nosing around town, asking questions about Holmes and Pitezel. Clearly, the law was hot on their trail and might trace them to Detroit any day. With no time to lose, Holmes turned the two girls over to their father, who immediately lit out for New York City, planning to hop a steamer to South America. If he couldn’t book passage right away, he intended to take the children by train to Key West.
“Then you believe that he and the children are alive and well?” asked Hanscom.
“Yes, sir,” Holmes replied.
“You have every reason to believe that?”
“Yes, sir.” Holmes could not say precisely where they were—either South America or Florida—but he knew for a fact that all four of them were, even at that moment, residing in some sunny clime.
Cornish and the others exchanged a look of open skepticism. After clarifying a few points about the extent of Carrie Pitezel’s complicity in the fraud—and making a final, futile effort to extract the name of the corpse dealer—Cornish made their doubts explicit. “I must tell you,” he warned, “that unless
Pitezel is produced alive, we must consider him dead.”
“I understand,” said Holmes, “and that is why I say that I don’t care how soon Pitezel is brought to the front now. I have almost got to do it to protect myself. It is not that I wish to go back on him by any means.”
“You expect in any event that there will be imprisonment to go with it?” asked Deputy Superintendent Hanscom.
“I certainly do. I told my wife—I begged her—to go away and drop it because I expected a term at the penitentiary.”
“Of course,” Hanscom said with a smirk, “it is desirable for you not to be held for the greater offense.”
“I certainly don’t want to be held for murder. While I am bad enough on smaller things, I am not guilty of that.”
Perhaps the most striking aspect of this confession is the reaction of Hanscom and Cornish. In spite of Holmes’s disarmingly forthright manner, his explanation for the children’s whereabouts clearly had the quality of desperate improvisation. Nevertheless, his questioners appeared less concerned with the ultimate fate of Alice, Nellie, and Howard than with that of Pitezel. Hanscom and his associates continued to believe that Holmes—for all his protestations of innocence—had done away with his partner. But the idea that terrible harm had befallen the little ones seems not to have crossed their minds, undoubtedly because the notion was simply too outrageous to conceive. After all, only a creature hopelessly lost to sanity or feeling would slaughter helpless children. And Holmes, though a self-confessed scoundrel, was clearly not a madman or a fiend.
Or so they thought at the time.
Holmes, of course, was not the only one the police wanted to question. Even as the interrogation was taking place, a Pinkerton man named Lane—masquerading as a messenger from Holmes—was in Burlington, delivering a decoy letter for Carrie Pitezel. The letter, penned by Holmes at Hanscom’s dictation, directed Carrie to bring Dessie and Wharton to Boston at once.
Depraved Page 19
