“I believe Mr. McDonald to be a perfectly honorable man,” Captain Linden declared, “and entirely innocent of any illegal connection with the Pitezel conspiracy. He tells me that Jeptha D. Howe is only a beginner with the firm and says he was unwittingly led astray by the scoundrel Holmes.”
Elaborating on the police chief’s statement, McDonald asserted that “whatever indiscretions Howe may have committed were due to the influence exerted on him by Holmes. Howe is only twenty-two years of age. He is a graduate of the law school of Washington University and is married to a most estimable young lady of a very good family in St. Louis. This was his first case, and he went into it with all the ardor of a beginner. At the time Holmes approached Mr. Howe, both myself and my partner, Alphonso Howe—the young man’s elder brother—were in Colorado. If we had been at home at the time, he never would have become mixed up in the case.”
When asked about Howe’s present whereabouts, McDonald explained that the young man had stopped off in Washington, D.C., to seek the advice of Senator Cockrell of Missouri, an old family friend. Howe was expected in Philadelphia the following morning and would immediately turn himself over to authorities.
In spite of the assurances of his old friend, Captain Linden detailed two of his men to search for Howe, suspecting that the young lawyer might have been smuggled into the city and stashed in a hotel, so that he could surrender himself in the morning when bail could be arranged, thus avoiding a night in jail. The two men assigned this task were Thomas Crawford and a second detective who would soon play a celebrated role in the Holmes-Pitezel affair, Frank P. Geyer.
McDonald, however, was telling the truth. The following morning at around ten, Howe arrived at the train station, where he was met by McDonald, who immediately escorted him to City Hall. Before entering Superindendent Linden’s office, the young lawyer agreed to meet the press. Taken to the reporters’ room on the eighth floor of the building, Howe—invariably described as “boyish” and “innocent looking,” with “a face as smooth as a baby’s”—proceeded to provide such a detailed account of his dealings with Mrs. Pitezel that McDonald felt compelled to cut him off. Howe wrapped up his statement quickly, declining to say anything about his connection with Holmes or his involvement with Marion Hedgepeth.
At that point, he was brought into the superintendent’s office, where he formally surrendered himself and spent some time answering questions. Halfway through his interrogation, L. G. Fouse showed up.
“Well, Mr. Fouse,” Howe said cordially, rising to shake hands with the insurance executive. “You treated me with such kindness and courtesy I am sorry that you think I am a criminal.”
“So am I,” Fouse answered coldly. “But it will take a good deal to convince me of your innocence.”
Howe protested that Fouse was only prejudiced against him because of the false accusations leveled by Holmes.
Fouse replied with a snort. “You knew Holmes, and, in fact, you met him on your way to this city. In the office of our company, you both met as strangers. You exclaimed, when told that he was in this city, ‘Who is this man? What does he mean? What is he here for?’ And when you were introduced, you acted in a way that led us to believe that you had seen him for the first time. When you can explain to me why you did this, I will believe you innocent.”
Howe was taken to the sixth-floor office of District Attorney George S. Graham, who set bail at $2,500: the money was put up later that afternoon by a saloonkeeper named William McGonegal, a friend of McDonald’s. After his release, Howe told reporters that he would remain in Philadelphia for a day or so to consult with his attorney, A. S. L. Shields, before returning to St. Louis to await his trial.
That night, Howe and McDonald attended the South Broad Street Theatre, where they watched a performance by the St. Louis actress Della Fox. Afterward, Howe appeared perfectly relaxed and carefree, chatting and laughing with McDonald as they strolled up Broad Street toward the Lafayette Hotel, shadowed by a pair of reporters.
While Jeptha Howe was doing the town, Holmes and Carrie Pitezel continued to languish in jail. By Friday, November 23, arrangements were being made to transfer them to the county prison, commonly known as Moyamensing.
Early that morning, Detectives Crawford and Geyer escorted the prisoners from their City Hall cells to the Court of Quarter Sessions. There, Assistant District Attorney Kinsey, Police Surgeon Andrews, and Mr. Benjamin Crew, secretary of the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, consulted over the advisability of allowing Dessie and the baby to remain with their mother. Crew urged that the children be placed in the care of his organization. Overhearing his proposal, Carrie broke into hysterics. “You will not take my baby from me, will you?” she wailed.
Immediately, Police Surgeon Andrews placed his arm around the overwrought woman, assuring her that she would not be separated from the infant. “Send the girl, too,” he said to Kinsey. “The woman is in no condition to take care of the baby by herself.”
The matter settled, Carrie and her children were helped into a closed carriage for their trip to the county prison. Holmes, meanwhile, was unceremoniously loaded into a van full of drunks (“a crowded conveyance filled with a filthy lot of humanity” as he later described it) and driven to Moyamensing, where he was locked in a nine-by-fourteen-foot whitewashed cell.
Meanwhile, speculation about Pitezel’s fate continued to rage. Rumors circulated at such a dizzying pace that, as a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer put it, they were enough to “exhaust anyone attempting to keep up with them.” Certain people close to the case, including Coroner Ashbridge and Jeptha Howe, held firm to their conviction that Pitezel was dead. Others, however, were beginning to revise their opinion, including L. G. Fouse, who had received tips from his investigators that Pitezel had been spotted in Chicago as recently as early November, in Detroit a few weeks before that, and was currently rumored to be in New York City.
To further confuse matters, a man named E. A. Curtis—who owned a furniture warehouse in Englewood where Pitezel had apparently stored some of his belongings before clearing out of Chicago the previous —yearclaimed that he knew the latter’s precise whereabouts and could locate him within thirty-six hours, for a suitable reward.
From his cell in Moyamensing, Holmes did his best to muddy the waters even more by making a most remarkable retraction. Through a lawyer named Harry Hawkins—who had agreed to defend him in the conspiracy case—Holmes let it be known that his melodramatic account of the two Williams sisters and their murderous rivalry had been nothing but a hoax.
Speaking to reporters on Saturday, November 24, Hawkins described a conversation he had held with his client earlier in the day. “Holmes told me with tears in his eyes that he was absolutely innocent of the murder of Pitezel and that the man was alive and well. Holmes told me that the story he told Detective Crawford about one of the Williams sisters having murdered the other, and he having thrown the body in the lake, was a fake, pure and simple. He declared that both of the girls are alive. He said that Pitezel met Nannie Williams in New York and gave her a thousand dollars after the insurance money was collected. This money was to take her and her sister south.”
What had motivated Holmes to concoct such an elaborate lie in the first place? the newspapermen demanded.
“Holmes said that Crawford was such a gullible-looking fellow,” Hawkins replied, “that he thought he would have some fun with him.”
It had already occurred to the authorities that there was one sure way to determine whether Pitezel was alive or not, and that was by disinterring the Callowhill corpse a second time and having Carrie Pitezel view the remains. This measure had been discussed as early as November 21, when O. LaForrest Perry declared that “it was not improbable that the body will be re-exhumed.” As the police and insurance officials were debating the desirability of such an act, Holmes settled into his new accommodations at Moyamensing.
In the memoirs he would publish during his imprisonment, Holmes descri
bed his cell as “virtually a place of solitary confinement,” lighted only by a narrow, grated window and secured by double doors—an inner one of latticed iron and a second one of solid wood, “which, when closed, excludes nearly all sound.” Even so, he was by no means cut off from the world, since he was allowed to read the newspapers every day. As a result, he knew all about the proposal to reinspect Pitezel’s body.
On Friday, December 7, he also learned something else—that Carrie Pitezel had broken down and revealed everything she knew about the insurance scheme. By that point, Dessie and Wharton had been removed from Carrie’s cell and placed in the care of the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty.
Holmes understood that if the police went ahead and dug up the corpse, he would stand revealed as a barefaced liar, since he had continued to maintain that Pitezel was in hiding down South. Even worse, he would undoubtedly be charged with murder. And so he resorted to a typically brazen ploy. Summoning R. J. Linden to his cell, he made a great show of remorse and announced that he had decided to come clean.
He had been lying all along, he confessed. The dead man interred in potter’s field really was Pitezel. But Holmes hadn’t killed him.
The truth, Holmes solemnly declared, was that Benjamin Pitezel had committed suicide.
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I have commenced to write a careful and truthful account of all matters pertaining to my case, including the fact that Pitezel is dead and that the children are with Miss Williams.
—From the prison diary of H. H. Holmes
Linden summoned a stenographer to the cell, and Holmes began dictating his formal statement. The date was December 26,1894. The timing was no coincidence, Holmes having deliberately waited until the day after Christmas to confess, as though the holiness of the season had moved him to unburden his soul.
According to Holmes, he had visited the house on Callowhill Street perhaps four or five times after Pitezel set up his phony patent dealer’s business. Sometime around the “last of August,” Holmes dropped by and found Pitezel in a deeply despondent mood. He had clearly been hitting the bottle. When Holmes “took him to task for it,” Pitezel replied “that he guessed he had better drink enough to kill him[self] and have done with it.” After loaning Pitezel $15, Holmes left, having “stayed five or six hours.”
The following Saturday, September 1, “quite late [in the] evening,” Pitezel turned up at Adella Alcorn’s boardinghouse on North Eleventh Street “and said he had received a telegram that his baby was sick and he had to go home…. I raised no objection to his going. When we got the arrangements all made, he said, ‘You will have to let me have some money to go with.’ ”
Holmes asked what had happened to the $15 Pitezel had borrowed only a day or two before. “Well, I haven’t got it,” Pitezel replied. Holmes refused to fork over any more money, and Pitezel retreated into the night.
“The next morning about ten-thirty,” Holmes continued, “I went to his house. I had been provided with a key to go in with. I found no one there either on the first or the second floor, where his sleeping apartment was. He had a cot up there which I do not think he ever made up.”
Holmes repaired to the Mercantile Library and whiled away an hour, then strolled over to Broad Street “where I had a private mailbox.” After checking for letters, he bought a morning paper and returned to 1316 Callowhill Street. Finding the place still empty, Holmes “went upstairs and laid down on the cot and read the paper.” This was around noon.
A half hour later, Holmes went downstairs, intending “to write some letters” at Pitezel’s desk. As he crossed the vacant office, he spotted something lying on the desktop: “a scrap of paper with a… cipher on it that we used.” Holmes quickly decoded the cipher. The message read, “Get letter out of bottle in cupboard.”
Puzzled, Holmes fetched the letter from the cupboard and was shocked to find that it was a suicide note. “It told me that he was going to get out of it, and that I should find him upstairs, if he could manage to kill himself.”
Dashing up to the third story, Holmes flung open the door “and saw him lying on the floor apparently dead. I felt his pulse and laid my hand on his and found it was cold.” Pitezel was stretched on his back with a towel muffling his face. On a chair beside the body sat a gallon bottle of chloroform, rigged up with a four-foot length of rubber tubing that fed the deadly fluid directly into his mouth.
The fumes were so overpowering that Holmes was forced to flee the room. “I went and opened the windows in the other room and came back and started to go in again, but had to give it up, and went to the second floor again. As soon as I could, I did go in again.” Looking more closely at Pitezel, Holmes saw that he was lying “with his left hand folded over his abdomen and his right hand lying at his side.”
At this point, Linden interrupted and asked what had become of the suicide note.
“I did not keep the letter which was in the bottle,” Holmes replied, “but destroyed it with the other papers the next day on the train going from Philadelphia to St. Louis.”
Linden told Holmes to continue.
Gazing down at his lifeless partner, Holmes quickly realized that—regrettable though it was—Pitezel’s suicide provided him with a golden opportunity, obviating the need for a substitute corpse. Within minutes he had swung into action. “I removed the furniture from the third-story room and took it to the second story, leaving the body until the last. Then I brought the body down into the second story and arranged it in the way it was found. This was about three o’clock.”
The next step was to stage the phony accident. “I had arranged with Pitezel that when he placed the substitute body, a bottle should be broken and… the fragments scattered around the room. I held the bottle up and broke it with a blow of the hammer upon the side. That bottle contained benzine, chloroform, and ammonia, which was to be used for burning the floor to indicate that an explosion had occurred. I took some of this fluid and put it on his right hand and side and on the right side of his face and set fire to it… I gathered together the rubber tube, towel, and the bottle of chloroform and left the house as soon as I could, about a quarter of four.”
Holmes concluded his statement by describing his hasty departure from Philadelphia that evening and his trip to St. Louis late the following Wednesday. Arriving on Thursday morning, he had purchased a newspaper and saw “a report that the body had been found…. I went to Mrs. Pitezel’s and found that they had also seen the report. The children were greatly worried, but Mrs. Pitezel was not, as she believed the scheme had been carried out. We talked the matter over a couple of hours, and I came back that night and saw Howe and explained what had been done, not telling him that it was Pitezel but leaving him to believe that the plan of placing a substitute had been carried out, and retained him on behalf of Mrs. Pitezel to procure the money from the company.”
When Holmes reached the end of his confession, Linden looked at him sternly. Perhaps the story was true, he said. Or perhaps Holmes had found Pitezel in a drunken state and then forced him to swallow the chloroform.
Holmes indignantly denied this accusation, insisting that his partner was already dead by his own hand when Holmes had discovered him.
“If Pitezel is dead,” Linden demanded, “then where are the three children?”
Holmes replied without hesitation, “In safe hands.” He had brought them to Detroit and turned them over to his former mistress.
Alice, Nellie, and Howard were hi the care of Minnie Williams.
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Philadelphia Public Ledger, November 24, 1894
There is not the slightest doubt that Holmes, in his many stories, has not confined himself strictly to the truth.
Holmes’s revised statement—“Confession No. 2,” as the authorities labeled it—inspired even greater skepticism than his first. The police scoffed at the claim that Pitezel had committed suicide—particularly by the outlandish method Holmes described. The notion that anyone would lie flat on the floor wi
th a towel over his face, like a man in a barber’s chair, and suck chloroform through a long rubber tube seemed completely preposterous. The whole story seemed like a flagrant fabrication, concocted to explain away the incontrovertible evidence—a dead man on a bedroom floor with a stomachful of chloroform.
The identity of that dead man, however, remained a matter of debate. Dismissing Holmes’s latest story, Inspector Gary and his colleagues continued to press their search for Pitezel and the missing children in various parts of the country. Coroner Ashbridge, on the other hand, would not be swayed from his conviction that Pitezel had been murdered. Anyone hunting for Holmes’s partner need look no further than potter’s field, he maintained, and re-exhuming the body would corroborate this. But as the winter came on, authorities continued to dither over the issue.
In the meantime, Holmes kept busy in his cell, monitoring the daily news reports on his case, scheming with his lawyers, and doing his manipulative best to impede the investigation. Georgiana, who continued to stick by her husband, paid him periodic visits. Perceiving that his highly presentable wife was a boon to his public image, Holmes did everything he could to remain in her good graces, professing his undying love and tearfully repenting the pain he had caused her.
Locked in his solitary cell, he resolved on a strict, daily regimen. In the prison diary he would append to his published memoirs, he described his self-improving schedule in terms that would have done Benjamin Franklin proud:
January 1, 1895—The New Year. I have been busy nearly all day in prison formulating a methodical plan for my daily life while in prison, to which I shall hereafter rigidly adhere, for the terrible solitude of these dark winter days will otherwise soon break me down. I shall rise at 6:30, and after taking my usual sponge bath shall clean my room and arrange it for the day. My meal hours shall be 7:30 A.M., 12, and 5 and 9 P.M. I shall eat no more meat of any kind while I am so closely confined. Until 10 A.M. all the time not otherwise disposed of shall be devoted to exercise and reading the morning papers. 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 balance of my day shall be taken up with reading the periodicals and library books with which—keeps me well supplied. I shall retire at 9 P.M. and shall as soon as possible force myself into the habit of sleeping throughout the entire night.
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