Holmes’s insistence that the dead man found at 1316 Callowhill Street really was Benjamin Pitezel created a legal complication, since the conspirators had been charged with using a substitute corpse to pull off the swindle. Shortly after Holmes offered his second confession, the officers of Fidelity Mutual retained a respected Philadelphia lawyer, Thomas Barlow, to represent the company in the case. By early May, a new indictment had been found, charging Holmes and Howe, as well as Marion Hedgepeth, “with having conspired to cheat the Fidelity Mutual Life Assurance Company by alleging that one B. F. Pitezel … had died as the result of an accident.” Designed to cover every possibility, this indictment was valid whether Pitezel was dead or alive—a suicide, murder victim, or fugitive.
On May 27, 1895, Holmes was brought to trial under this second indictment in Philadelphia’s Quarter Sessions Court, Judge Hare presiding.
Led to the dock shortly before eleven A.M., the prisoner exchanged a few words with his counsel—R. O. Moon and Samuel P. Rotan—then gazed around at the courtroom, casually twirling one waxed tip of his handlebar mustache. Observing Holmes closely from the packed spectator gallery was Detective Frank P. Geyer, who had come at the request of District Attorney Graham.
In spite of Holmes’s New Year’s resolution to exercise daily and watch his diet, he had gained weight during his months of imprisonment. Dressed in a handsome black suit, with a sack coat, black tie, and heavy gold watch-chain strung across his paunch, he looked more like a bank manager than America’s most infamous criminal.
The proceedings began with the empaneling of the jury. District Attorney Graham offered no objections to the first twelve men who were seated. But Defense Attorney Moon was less easily satisfied. Noting the extraordinary publicity attending the case, he asked leave of the Court “to question the jurors if they have formed or expressed any opinions as to the guilt or innocence of the prisoner.” In the end, several of the jurors were rejected on Moon’s challenges. Another, who suffered from heart disease, begged to be excused because he feared that a lengthy trial might endanger his health.
He needn’t have worried. As it turned out, the trial lasted only one day. Graham began by clarifying the nature of the conspiracy charge, recapping the facts of the case, and reviewing the contents of Holmes’s two confessions. “No matter which statement of the prisoner you choose to believe,” Graham told the jurors, “it makes no difference to the Commonwealth’s case, since both of them show the intent to cheat and defraud the insurance company.”
He pointed out that the dead man found at 1316 Callowhill Street could not possibly have been killed as the result of an accidental explosion. “Everybody knows,” he said, “that where a person is burned, the forces of nature respond and rush to repel the injury, and the result is the forming of a blister. Whereas, if a dead body is burned, the flesh simply sizzles and roasts like a steak. That was the case with this body. There were no blisters upon it, and there can be no other conclusion but that the burns had been made after death took place.”
Without ever raising the charge of homicide, Graham made it clear that, in his opinion, Pitezel had been murdered. He referred repeatedly to Carrie (who occupied a prominent seat in the courtroom) as “the widow” and stated explicitly that he “did not believe the suicide story.”
Graham ended his statement on an ominous note, referring to “Pitezel’s three little children,” who had been “under Holmes’s care.” “Whatever has become of them,” the district attorney intoned, “only God and the prisoner know.”
L. G. Fouse, the first witness called to the stand, offered a detailed account of his dealings with Holmes, dwelling at some length on the latter’s cool, if not cold-blooded, behavior during the postmortem inspection of the disinterred corpse. The jurors looked grim as Fouse described the perfect nonchalance with which Holmes had wielded his surgeon’s knife, breezily slicing the identifying marks from the putrified body of his former partner. Two more witnesses—Police Superintendent Linden and Col. O. C. Bobyshell, former president and current treasurer of Fidelity Mutual—testified briefly before Judge Hare adjourned for the day.
Conferring with Moon and Rotan at the end of the day, Holmes—perceiving that his position was hopeless—instructed the attorneys to cut a deal with the DA. In return for a reduced sentence, Holmes would change his plea—“thereby saving at least a week’s valuable time to the Court,” as he explained.
The following morning, in obedience to their client’s wishes, Holmes’s lawyers entered a plea of guilty, and the trial came to an abrupt end. Judge Hare announced that he would defer sentencing until after the trial of Jeptha D. Howe.
In the company of his lawyers, Holmes was removed to the “cell room” in City Hall to await the conveyance that would carry him back to Moyamensing. Holmes was in a celebratory mood. Assuming that Judge Hare sentenced him to only half the maximum term and allowed the six months he had already spent in prison, he would be a free man by October.
He had just leaned back in his chair, legs outstretched, fingers laced behind his neck—the very picture of a man without a worry in the world—when word arrived that District Attorney Graham wished to see him in his office immediately.
37
Knowing me as you do, can you imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any motive?
—H. H. Holmes, in a letter to Carrie Pitezel
A long conference table occupied the center of the DA’s private office. On one side sat Holmes and his attorneys. Facing them were Graham and Thomas Barlow, who had been named special assistant district attorney earlier that day.
Graham was about to speak when the door swung open and two more men stepped into the room—Detective Frank Geyer and Police Captain Miller. In the hallway just outside the office, a crowd of reporters clamored for news. As Miller slipped through the doorway, one of the reporters—a writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer—poked his head into the room and shouted, “What’s up?” Miller waved the man back—“I can’t say anything!”—then slammed the door shut and took a seat beside his fellow officials.
Turning back to Holmes, Graham wasted no time in getting to the point. He had decided to drop the case against Carrie Pitezel, he explained, and set her free without delay. The poor woman had “suffered quite enough. The uncertainty of the fate of Alice, Nellie, and Howard, coupled with the death of her husband, has almost dethroned her reason.” He fixed Holmes with a hard stare. “It is strongly suspected,” said Graham, “that you have not only murdered Pitezel but that you have killed the children.”
Holmes opened his mouth to protest, but the DA hushed him with an upraised hand.
“The best way to remove this suspicion is to produce the children at once,” Graham declared. “Now where are they? Where can I find them? Tell me and I will use every means in my power to secure their early recovery. It is due to Mrs. Pitezel—and to yourself—that the children should be found. When you were arrested in November, you said the children were in South America with their father. It is now May, and we have heard nothing from them. You subsequently said that you gave the children to Miss Williams.” Graham let out a sigh. “I am almost persuaded that your word cannot be trusted, Holmes.”
Holmes looked injured but chose not to reply.
Hands folded on the table, Graham leaned forward in his seat, his eyes locked on Holmes’s. “Even so, I am not averse to giving you an opportunity to assist me in clearing up the mystery which surrounds their disappearance and their present abode. I now ask you to answer frankly and truthfully—Where are the children?”
Meeting Graham’s stare without a blink, Holmes replied that he was “glad of the opportunity thus afforded me to assist in the restoration of the children to their mother.” Suddenly, his eyes seemed to moisten with tears. Speaking with a slight quaver in his voice, he vehemently denied that he had killed Pitezel or done harm to the little ones. “Why should I kill innocent children?” he cried.
“Then tell u
s what has become of them,” Graham said again.
Holmes took a moment to collect himself. Then, speaking “with every appearance of candor” (as one of the witnesses later reported), he launched into the story he had been privately rehearsing for the past several weeks.
“The last time I saw Howard,” he began, “was in Detroit, Michigan. There, I gave him to Miss Williams, who took him to Buffalo, New York, from which point she proceeded to Niagara Falls. After the departure of Howard in Miss Williams’s care, I took Alice and Nellie to Toronto, Canada, where they remained for several days. At Toronto, I purchased railroad tickets for them for Niagara Falls, put them on the train, and rode out of Toronto with them a few miles, so that they would be assured that they were on the right train. Before their departure, I prepared a telegram, which they should send me from the Falls if they failed to meet Miss Williams and Howard. I also carefully pinned inside Alice’s dress four hundred dollars in large bills, so Miss Williams would have funds to defray their expenses.
“They joined Miss Williams and Howard at Niagara Falls, from which point they went to New York City. At the latter place, Miss Williams dressed Nellie as a boy and took a steamer for Liverpool, whence they went to London. If you search among the steamship offices in New York, you must look for a woman and a girl and two boys and not a woman and two girls and a boy. This was all done to throw the detectives off the track, who were after me for the insurance fraud. Miss Williams opened a massage establishment at Number Eighty Veder or Vadar Street, London. I have no doubt the children are with her now, and very likely at that place.”
There was a momentary silence as Graham and his colleague absorbed this unlikely tale. Attorney Barlow—whose face clearly registered the depth of his skepticism—was the first to break it. “Can you give me the name of a single respectable person to whom I can go,” he demanded, “either in Detroit, Buffalo, Toronto, Niagara Falls, or New York, who will say that they saw Miss Williams and the three children together?”
Holmes looked stung. “Your question seems to imply a disbelief in my statement.”
“It certainly does,” answered Barlow. “Indeed, I believe your entire story to be a he from beginning to end.”
Holmes heatedly insisted that his story was true—and that he had a way to verify it. He and Miss Williams had worked out a means by which they could communicate in an emergency, he explained. This involved placing a coded advertisement in the personal column of The New York Herald. To prove his veracity, Holmes offered to furnish the code to Graham, who could then plant a decoy message that would flush Minnie Williams out of hiding.
Agreeing to give Holmes one final chance to vindicate himself, Graham told him to supply the cipher by the following afternoon. Shortly thereafter, the conference was ended and Holmes transported back to Moyamensing.
The next day—Wednesday, May 29—Graham received the following letter from Holmes:
Dear Sir:—
The adv. should appear in the New York Sunday Herald and if some comment upon the case can also be put in body of paper stating the absence of children and that adv. concerning appears in this paper, etc., it would be an advantage. Any words you may see fit to use in adv. will do … only one sentence need be in cipher as she will know by this that it must come from me as no one else, unless I told them, could have same….
The New York Herald is (or was a year ago) to be found at only a few places regularly in London.
Very respectfully,
H. H. Holmes
The code Holmes appended to the letter was a simple cipher based on the word republican. Spelled out in capitals, the word corresponded to the first ten letters of the alphabet; in lower-case, the word represented the next ten letters; and the final six letters of the alphabet remained uncoded. This was the cipher as Holmes wrote it out:
REPUBLICAN republican
a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z.
To show how the cipher worked, Holmes spelled out his own name in code:
C b e p B a
Holmes.
Following Holmes’s suggestion, Graham immediately contacted the Philadelphia correspondent for the New York Herald, who prepared an article about the case, which was published on Sunday, June 2, 1895. In the same edition, the following advertisement appeared in the newspaper’s personal column (the names Adele Covelle and Gereldine Wanda were, according to Holmes, pseudonyms occasionally employed by Minnie Williams):
MINNIE WILLIAMS, ADELE COVELLE, GERELDINE WANDA—
AplbcnRun nb CBRc EBLbcB 10th PREeB cBnucu PCAeUcBu
Rn buPB…. CbepBa. Address George S. Graham,
Philadelphia, Penn., U.S.A.
The coded part of this message translated as follows: “Important to hear before 10th Cable. Return children at once…. Holmes.”
In the meantime, Graham had contacted Scotland Yard, supplying them with a detailed summary of the case and requesting their assistance in tracking down Miss Minnie Williams, currently the proprietress of a massage establishment at 80 Veder or Vadar Street. Graham received a reply by return post.
The letter informed him that there was no street by either of those names in the city of London.
In spite of Holmes’s avowals that Minnie Williams would respond to the coded message “without delay,” two weeks passed without an answer—a fact that surprised no one in the district attorney’s office. On June 17, Holmes took pen in hand again, this time to compose a lengthy letter to Carrie Pitezel, in which he reiterated the lies he had told to Graham and the others. He began with a graphic account of Ben’s increasingly erratic and suicidal behavior during the months preceding his death.
“Facts you should know are as follows,” Holmes wrote. “Ben lived out West, and while drunk in Fort Worth, Texas, married a disreputable woman by the name of Mrs. Martin….
When he became sober and found what he had done, he threatened to kill himself and her, and I had him watched by one of the other men until he went home. When we straightened up the bank account, he had fooled away or been robbed by her of over $850 of the money we needed so much. Later, he wanted to carry out the insurance work in Mississippi, where he was acquainted, and I went there with him, and when I found out what kind of a place it was, would not go any further with it there and told him so, and he said if I did not, he would kill himself and get the money for you, etc. To get him out of the notion, I told him I would go to Mobile and if I could get what was wanted [i.e., a substitute corpse] would do so, if not, I would go to St. Louis and write for him to come…. When I reached St. Louis I wrote him, and in the letter he left me after he died, he said he tried to kill himself with laudanum there, and later I found out this was so.”
Pleading as an old family friend who had always had her best interests at heart, Holmes urged Carrie to trust in her own common sense, not the cruel accusations of strangers. “I was as careful of the children as if they were my own,” he wrote, “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 quarreled. Again, he was worth too much to me for me to have killed him, if for 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 continued to maintain that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were in the care of Minnie Williams. “So far as the children’s bodily health is concerned, I feel sure I can say to you that they are as well today as though with you, also that they will not be turned adrift among strangers, for two reasons. First, Miss W., though quick tempered, is too soft hearted to do so; second, if among others where their letters could not be looked over and detained, they would write to their grandparents.”
Insisting that his most immediate concern was to see her set free, Holmes concluded with the fervent ho
pe that “your suffering here is nearly ended.”
Carrie Pitezel’s suffering was far from ended; indeed, the coming weeks had unspeakable anguish in store. But her confinement, at any rate, was over. On the very day she received Holmes’s letter—Wednesday, June 19—Graham, making good on his promise, arranged for her immediate discharge from Moyamensing.
Bunking in the summer sunlight, Carrie was escorted down the steps by her two oldest friends, who had made the trip from Illinois to lend their support. After a brief stop at City Hall, where she climbed to the rooftop for a sweeping view of the city, she proceeded to the office of her lawyer, Thomas A. Fahy.
Dessie and the baby—who had spent the past six months as the wards of the Society to Protect Children from Cruelty—were waiting for her there. After an emotional reunion, Carrie and her children spent several tender hours sequestered in Fahy’s chambers.
Before setting off for the hotel room Fahy had reserved for her, Carrie agreed to speak to a reporter for The Inquirer. It was the first interview she had granted since her arrest.
Sitting across from her, the reporter was struck by how haggard she appeared. In spite of her black hair, she looked as wizened as a crone. He found it hard to believe that the infant cradled in her arms was her own child and not the baby of the blooming eighteen-year-old seated beside her.
The reporter began by asking her opinion of Holmes. Did Mrs. Pitezel think he was telling the truth about her missing children?
Depraved Page 23
