This theory was given a boost on Monday afternoon, when L. G. Fouse received a wire from William E. Gary, informing him that Pitezel had been known in Forth Worth as Benton T. Lyman and might still be at large under that alias.
Of course all this was pure speculation. Only one person knew the truth of what had happened at 1316 Callowhill Street on the morning of September 2. And he wasn’t telling it.
Detective Thomas Crawford of the Philadelphia Bureau of Police arrived in Boston early Monday morning, bearing warrants for the arrest of both Holmes and Mrs. Pitezel, who agreed to forgo formal extradition proceedings. At seven-thirty that evening, the prisoners boarded a train for Philadelphia in the company of Crawford, O. LaForrest Perry, and a pair of Pinkerton detectives. Also included in the party were Dessie Pitezel, who hugged her infant brother to her chest, and Georgiana Yoke Howard, who continued to keep up an appearance of wifely loyalty, though her taut face and anguished eyes spoke plainly of her mortification.
After ten months of marriage, Georgiana was finally confronting the bitter truth—that her life with Holmes had been a complete lie from the beginning. The police, who did not regard her as a suspect, understood this. From the start, they perceived that the pretty young woman was not Holmes’s accomplice but rather another of his many victims.
In contrast to his wife’s grim demeanor, Holmes—even with one hand cuffed to Crawford’s wrist—seemed the very picture of relaxed unconcern. Impeccably dressed in a handsome wool cutaway, matching vest, black four-in-hand tie, and stylish gray trousers, he spent the better part of the trip regaling Crawford with the ostensible history of his criminal career.
He had been born, raised, and educated in Burlington, Vermont, Holmes claimed. After graduating from the University of Vermont, he taught school for a while in Burlington, then went off to study medicine at the University of Michigan, where he first made the acquaintance of the individual—then a fellow med student, now a prominent New York physician—who had supplied him with the substitute corpse used in the recent swindle. Fidelity Mutual, however, was not the first insurance company Holmes had defrauded. Far from it. He and his physician friend—whose identity he still refused to divulge—had first worked the scheme twelve years before. Short of funds, they had taken out a $12,500 policy on the friend’s life, obtained a “bogus body” in Chicago, transported it east, and successfully “palmed it off” on the insurance company.
Since that time, Holmes claimed, he had repeated the fraud on a number of occasions. One of these he related to Crawford in detail.
After insuring his life for $20,000, Holmes illegally procured a cadaver from a medical college in Chicago, then traveled to Rhode Island, where he took a room in a seaside hotel. At the time, he was sporting a full, bushy beard, which he had been cultivating for the preceding six months.
Toward sunset, Holmes left the hotel, announcing to the desk clerk that he was going for an evening swim. Once out of sight, he hurried to an isolated spot several miles from the resort, where, in the underbrush fringing the beach, he had stashed the cadaver. Dragging the body down to the shore, he cut off its head and arranged the mutilated corpse so that, in his words, it “looked as though it had been washed up by the waves.”
The following afternoon, after shaving off his beard, Holmes returned to the hotel in disguise and registered under a different name, inquiring of the desk clerk if he knew of a gentleman named Holmes. Yes, said the clerk. Mr. Holmes had checked in the day before but hadn’t been seen since the previous evening, when he had gone out for a swim. When Holmes failed to return by nightfall, a search was made and the mutilated body—presumably that of the unfortunate Mr. Holmes, who had evidently drowned and been feasted on by sharks—was located on the beach.
Unfortunately, Holmes sighed, bringing his account to a close, “this particular scheme fell through” and he was unable to collect on the policy.
All this was extremely interesting to Crawford and his colleagues, though they already knew enough about Holmes to view virtually everything he said with intense skepticism. The story, in any event, seemed wildly improbable—though no more so than the next part of Holmes’s recitation. Clearly anticipating that he would soon be suspected of even greater crimes, Holmes had an extraordinary tale to relate.
While living in Chicago with his second wife, he had fallen in love with a pretty young woman in his employ—a “typewriter girl.” Before long, the two had become intimate and were sharing a furnished apartment on the outskirts of town.
A few weeks later, the elder sister of Holmes’s mistress arrived for a visit. Insanely jealous, his mistress soon began accusing her sibling of flirting with Holmes. One day while Holmes was away, the two women had a violent argument in his office. In the heat of the quarrel, his mistress grabbed a wooden stool, brought it down on her sister’s skull, and killed her.
“When I came back,” Holmes continued, “I found the dead body in the room. I took the corpse, put it in a trunk, weighed it down with rocks, and sank it in Lake Michigan in the dead of night. This was a year and a half ago. The younger sister, in danger of arrest for murder, was anxious to escape. She owned some property in Fort Worth, amounting to forty thousand dollars. Pitezel and I took this property off her hands and gave her the money to fly the country.
“We then bought horses, getting credit on the strength of the Fort Worth property. But the deeds were not straight, and we needed money to keep things going. So the two of us agreed to work the insurance scheme, and that’s how this trouble began.”
Crawford chewed over this information for a moment, then asked if Holmes had been involved in any other crimes.
The prisoner suddenly turned coy. “Oh,” he replied with a casual wave of his free hand, “I have done enough things in my life to be hung a dozen times.”
The little party rode in silence for a while. As the train passed through Providence, Holmes leaned toward his custodian.
“See here, Crawford,” he whispered. “I think my wife can raise five hundred dollars. I’m a hypnotizer—learned how to do it from a fellow doctor. I can hypnotize people very easily. If you let me hypnotize you so that I can escape, I’ll give you the five hundred dollars.”
“Sorry,” replied the detective. “Hypnotism always spoils my appetite. I’m afraid five hundred dollars is no inducement when weighed against possible dyspepsia.”
This episode, widely reported in the press, was taken as still another sign of Holmes’s colossal brazenness, and his claim to mesmeric power dismissed as sheer nonsense. At this point, he was not yet the demon he would later become in the popular imagination—a creature of almost supernatural evil, possessed of a Dracula-like ability to hypnotize his victims at a glance.
The train pulled into Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station at precisely six-ten P.M. on Tuesday, November 20. Still handcuffed to Crawford, Holmes—whose handsome attire, as one reporter noted, “bespoke the prosperous man of business, [though] his face seemed to set forth the fact that he was cool and calculating, a man to be feared”—was led directly to the City Hall police station. Carrie’s nervous condition was such that she was unable to walk without the support of one of the Pinkertons.
Inside the station, Holmes was led directly to a darkened cell on the second tier. After being grilled for several hours by Superintendent Linden, President Fouse, and O. LaForrest Perry, he was brought down to the identification department, where he was photographed and measured according to the system pioneered by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon.
Carrie, meanwhile, was locked in the upper cell of the first tier. Dessie and the baby remained outside in the corridor under the sympathetic gaze of a police matron named Kalboch.
The sight of the two children playing just beyond the bars of her cell offered little comfort to their wretched mother, who wept continuously from the moment the iron door clanged shut behind her. The pitiable situation of Mrs. Pitezel was becoming a matter of increasing concern both to the autho
rities and the public at large. Even the officials of Fidelity Mutual, who regarded her, at the very least, as an accessory after the fact, were moved by Carrie’s plight. Naïve and (as the newspapers put it) of “no more than ordinary intelligence,” she had clearly been an easy subject for the ruthless manipulations of Holmes, who had—so Coroner Ashbridge and many others continued to believe—widowed her into the bargain.
Even more worrisome was the unresolved mystery of her three missing children. For the first time, a dreadful possibility was being not only entertained but openly discussed by the police—that Holmes had done away with Alice, Nellie, and Howard.
As The Philadelphia Public Ledger revealed in a front-page story on Wednesday, November 21, “the question of the disposition of Pietzel’s three children, who were taken by Holmes to be placed in the care of their father, is agitating the authorities. An effort is being made to find them, but as yet it has resulted unsuccessfully. The police think that if the charge of Pietzel’s murder can be substantiated against Holmes, there will be little doubt that he has added the killing of the children to his long list of crimes, for which he himself admits he should be hanged.”
34
I like that fellow, even if he is a rascal.
—Prison guard, quoted in The Chicago Tribune, November 25, 1895
While Holmes sat brooding in his dark Philadelphia cell, his crimes were rapidly coming to light in Chicago. Less than twenty-four hours after his arrest, nearly fifty victims of his various frauds showed up at the Englewood police station to put in claims against his property.
Every day brought a fresh spate of revelations about his seemingly endless swindles, from his worthless elixir to his phony gas-generating machine to his sharp dealings with building contractors and furniture suppliers. Dozens of former acquaintances, associates, and employees stepped forward to recount tales of his deceits—often with a kind of appreciative chuckle for the sheer daring and ingenuity of the man. As one newspaper put it, Holmes “swindled with a dash and vim that won the admiration even of those he tricked.”
Typical of such gossip was an interview given by a gentleman named C. E. Davis, owner of a jewelry shop on the ground floor of Holmes’s Castle. “I’ll give you a sample of the man,” Davis told a reporter for The Chicago Times-Herald. “Nearly every particle of material in this building and its fixtures was got on credit and very little of it was ever paid for…. Holmes used to tell me he had a lawyer paid to keep him out of trouble, but it always seemed to me it was the courteous, audacious rascality of the man that pulled him through. One day he bought some furniture for his restaurant and moved it in, and that very evening the dealer came around to collect the bill or remove the goods. Holmes set up the drinks, took him to supper, bought him a cigar, and sent the man off laughing at a joke, with a promise to call the next week for his money. In thirty minutes after the man took his car, Holmes had wagons in front loading up that furniture, and the dealer never got a cent. He was the only man in the United States that could do what he did. I believe he was an English crook who had found the old country too hot for him.”
Davis’s remarks show how quickly Holmes’s notoriety grew. Within days of his arrest, the legend was already taking shape: Holmes “the archconspirator,” “boss crook of the century,” “swindler of men and betrayer of women, who has left behind him a wake of ruin and tears that not all the courts of America can wash away.”
Noting his proficiency “at half-a-dozen lines of crooked work,” The Chicago Tribune proclaimed him “about the smoothest and best all-around swindler that ever struck this town.” It was Holmes’s “astonishing versatility” that raised him “above the run of ordinary criminals”—that and his remarkable power over women. According to the paper, Holmes had ruined at least two hundred “pretty young girls” and had six wives and twenty-five children scattered around the country.
But there were growing indications of an even darker side to his career—of crimes far worse than swindling and seduction, or even the murderous betrayal of a faithful confederate. By Wednesday, November 21, two names had been connected to Holmes’s bizarre tale of rivalry and bloodshed between a jealous mistress and her older sister—the names of Minnie and Nannie Williams.
Assisted by their counterparts in Fort Worth, the Chicago police had already uncovered a great deal of information about Minnie Williams—her background, upbringing, relationship to Holmes, and—not incidentally—considerable inheritance. “Those people in Englewood who knew Holmes and the Williams girl can tell enough stories to fill a book,” averred The Chicago Tribune. Among those with especially intriguing stories to tell was the former caretaker of the Castle, Pat Quinlan, who would soon fall under official scrutiny himself, suspected of assisting in Holmes’s foulest crimes. Interviewed by detectives on the evening of Tuesday, November 20, Quinlan offered vivid recollections of Minnie Williams and confirmed certain details that seemed to support Holmes’s version of events—including the fact that Holmes kept a small wooden stool in his office, of the kind Minnie had presumably used to bash in the skull of her sister.
Most people, however, continued to dismiss Holmes’s account as a complete fabrication. Some maintained that, from the first, Minnie had been an active accomplice, who had “stuck by Holmes through all his peculiar career.” But others—including the girls’ uncle, the Reverend C. W. Black of Jackson, Mississippi, who had not heard from either of his nieces since July 1893—remained firmly convinced that Holmes, perhaps assisted by Pitezel, had done away with both sisters in order to get his hands on the Forth Worth property.
The Williams sisters were not the only young women widely believed to have been murdered by Holmes. In a front-page story on November 21, The New York Times revealed that “H. H. Holmes, the life-insurance swindler now under arrest in Philadelphia, is charged with being the cause of the mysterious disappearance of a third woman during his operations in Chicago. That person is Miss Kate Durkee, and she is said to have had considerable property.”
One year before, the article went on to say, “creditors of Holmes had made a desperate effort to find out who and where Miss Durkee was. It was supposed that she was an accomplice of Holmes’s and that property illegally obtained was being transferred to her name. Suddenly, Miss Durkee dropped from sight and, like the Williams sisters, has left no trace behind.”
George B. Chamberlain, proprietor of a Chicago mercantile agency and one of Holmes’s many creditors, harbored no doubts about the poor woman’s fate. Interviewed by reporters on November 22, he stated his absolute belief that “Miss Durkee was murdered.”
With evidence of Holmes’s villainy mounting daily, reporters began digging into every aspect of his life, from his New Hampshire boyhood to his medical-school career in Ann Arbor to the frenzied entrepreneurialism of his Englewood years. Accounts of his illicit activities began pouring in from every part of the country, from Kankakee to Omaha, Terre Haute to New Orleans.
One of the most striking reports came from Providence, Rhode Island. According to authorities there, a corpse had been removed from the graveyard of the State Mental Institution several years earlier—at precisely the time of Holmes’s professed insurance scam at the seaside resort. The decapitated body of the dead man—an inmate named Caleb R. Browne—had subsequently been recovered, though the head was never found. This report lent considerable credence to the story Holmes had told to Detective Crawford. And it added another outrage to the growing list of Holmes’s crimes. In addition to swindling, bigamy, and murder, Holmes now stood accused of grave-robbing.
Given the zeal of the press to probe every corner of Holmes’s shadowy life, what happened next was inevitable. On November 25, a small but significant passage appeared on page one of The Chicago Tribune—the first printed description of Holmes’s property at Wallace and Sixty-third streets in Englewood.
“In America’s whole domains,” declared the writer, who had evidently snuck into the building and made a hurried tour, “there i
s not a house like unto that one, and there probably never will be. Its chimneys stick out where chimneys never stuck out before, its staircases do not end anywhere in particular, it has winding passages that bring the rash intruder back to where he started with a jerk and altogether it is a very mysterious sort of a building.”
For the first time, the newspapers, the public—and the police—were beginning to take note of the bizarre and mysterious building that would soon be known throughout the country as Dr. Holmes’s Horror Castle.
* * *
Though Holmes possessed a real flair for self-pity, he put up a stoic front during his early days of captivity, assuming the guise of the repentant sinner: a man who knew he had done wrong and was prepared to swallow his medicine—two years of jail time, the maximum sentence for conspiracy in Philadelphia. Carrie Pitezel, on the other hand, continued to be overwhelmed with horror and shame. During her first long night in the Philadelphia cell, she gave herself over to such uncontrolled grief that Police Surgeon Andrews had to be summoned first thing in the morning. He managed to soothe her with the aid of a sedative, and she remained prostrate on her cot for most of the day. Once or twice, she got unsteadily to her feet, shuffled to the cell door, and peered through the iron grate at her infant boy, who toddled up and down the corridor, clasping a tin cup provided by Matron Kalboch.
The third member of the conspiracy, Jeptha D. Howe, was due in Philadelphia on the evening of Wednesday, November 21, but failed to appear. Instead, his employer, Marshal McDonald—the former district attorney of St. Louis and law partner of Howe’s older brother, Alphonso—slipped quietly into the city. After checking into the Lafayette Hotel, McDonald sought out his old friend Police Superintendent Linden. The two men conferred for several hours, then met with the reporters.
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