Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  “Holmes would do anything,” Carrie replied bitterly. “He is a smooth-tongued scoundrel. He has lied to me and cheated me and I would not put it past him to make away with the children if it would do him any good.”

  Next, the newspaperman asked about her husband. Did Mrs. Pitezel harbor any hope that he was still alive?

  “I believe the body was that of my husband, for if Mr. Pitezel was alive, he would certainly come back here and make Holmes take back some of the things he said.”

  And the children …? the reporter asked softly.

  “What has become of them I don’t know,” she said with anguish. “I feel like tramping all over the world to see if I can find any trace of them.” Her lower lip shook, and tears spilled down her furrowed cheeks. A full minute passed before she was able to speak again.

  “Even knowing they were dead,” she said, “would be a relief.”

  Finding Alice, Nellie, and Howard had become a matter of paramount importance for the district attorney, too. His motives were partly humanitarian. His heart went out to Mrs. Pitezel, who—until the fate of her little ones became known—was condemned to a life of torturous uncertainty.

  But he was determined to locate the children for another, perhaps even more pressing reason. Graham knew perfectly well that, in capturing Holmes, the police had hooked something much bigger than an insurance swindler. And he had no intention of letting his catch wriggle free.

  By the time Carrie was released from prison, Graham, along with his assistant, Thomas Barlow, and Police Superintendent Linden, had decided to launch one final, painstaking search for the missing children. Many of Linden’s subordinates viewed this undertaking as hopeless—a waste of the department’s time and money. William Gary and his fellow insurance detectives, they pointed out, had been hunting futilely for the children since the preceding November.

  The consensus among police officials was that Holmes had killed his little captives. It did not seem possible, as one of them put it, “that such an astute and wily criminal [would leave] a trace behind him.” Most probably, Holmes had sunk the bodies in a lake or a river, as he claimed to have done with the corpse of Nannie Williams.

  Graham, Barlow, and Linden, however, were undeterred by these arguments. That the insurance men had been unable to locate the children simply meant that their investigation, in Graham’s words, “had been unskillfully made.” The district attorney was not persuaded that the children were dead. But if they were, he believed that a “careful and patient search” would inevitably uncover “the blunder which a criminal always makes between the inception and consummation of his crime.” It was simply impossible, Graham insisted, that “in this day and age, a man could kill three children and escape discovery.”

  True, it was a daunting task that would require the skills of an extraordinarily resourceful detective.

  Fortunately, the district attorney had the very man near at hand.

  38

  “If he shall be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

  —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

  In a policeman’s uniform, Frank Geyer looked like a character in a Mack Sennett comedy—beefy frame, balding dome, bushy mustache, and black, slanted eyebrows, so thick and dark that they might have been smeared on with grease-paint. Twenty years after the Holmes affair, Sennett would have all of America roaring with his silent two-reelers. Watch one of them now and you will see a dozen dead ringers for Geyer, clinging by their fingernails to a runaway trolley or crashing their paddy wagon through the nearest brick wall.

  But Geyer was no Keystone Kop. Quite the contrary. He was a formidable individual—a twenty-year veteran of the Philadelphia Bureau of Police with a well-earned reputation as the city’s top detective.

  But along with his great professional acclaim, Frank Geyer had experienced enormous personal tragedy. In March 1895—just three months before District Attorney Graham decided to mount an all-out search for the missing Pitezel children—a fire had consumed Geyer’s home, killing his beloved wife, Martha, and their only child, a blossoming twelve-year-old girl named Esther.

  Detective Geyer, who thrived on such challenges, would have been eager to undertake Graham’s mission in any event. But the loss of his loved ones infused him with even greater zeal for the search. Partly, this was simply a matter of distracting himself from his grief—he hoped to lose himself in his hunt for Alice and her siblings. But something else was at work, too.

  Life had taught Geyer a terrible lesson—that no horror compares to the death of one’s child. That one human being would deliberately inflict this horror on another seemed inconceivably wicked to him—nothing short of demonic. And Geyer would not rest until he saw the malefactor pay.

  And so, on Wednesday, June 26, 1895, Detective Frank Geyer carried his gripsack to the railway depot and set out on his quest.

  Geyer didn’t have much to go on, but he wasn’t traveling entirely in the dark. The dozen or so letters written by Alice and Nellie—which Holmes had preserved for his own devious purposes—had been found in a tin box among his possessions at the time of his arrest. For all their crude spelling and grammar, the letters were scrupulously correct in one regard: following the conventional format, each was headed with both the date and place of origin.

  As a result—though the insurance detectives had been stymied in their efforts to turn up the missing children—they had managed to map out the route Holmes had followed the previous fall, from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, Detroit, Toronto, and finally Burlington.

  Geyer knew that the answers he was seeking lay somewhere along this circuitous trail. To find them, he would have to start from the beginning.

  Armed with mug shots of Holmes and photographs of the children—taken in 1893 when they were pupils at the D. S. Wentworth School in Chicago—Geyer arrived in Cincinnati on the evening of June 27. He checked into the Palace Hotel, downed a quick dinner, and then proceeded to police headquarters, where he ran into an old friend, Detective John Schnooks. The two men reminisced for a while before Geyer explained the reason for his visit Schnooks advised Geyer to return the next day and confer with his chief, Superintendent Philip Dietsch.

  A firm believer in the benefits of a hearty breakfast, Geyer took the time to fortify himself with a platter of flannel cakes, bacon, and eggs before setting off for City Hall the following morning. Dietsch greeted him cordially and—after hearing the facts of the case—buzzed in Schnooks and directed him to “render Detective Geyer all the assistance in your power.”

  With that, the two men headed out into the city. The Great Search (as Geyer later came to think of it) had commenced in earnest.

  Geyer and his colleague began by checking the hostelries around the train depots. By morning’s end, they had located the two hotels—the Atlantic House and the Bristol—where Holmes had taken rooms for himself and the children under the name Cook—the same alias (as Geyer knew) that he had made Carrie Pitezel use in Burlington. W. L. Bain, clerk at the Bristol, positively identified Holmes and the children from Geyer’s photographs.

  Knowing that his nemesis had habitually rented houses in the cities he had passed through, Geyer decided to switch tactics and concentrate on real estate agencies instead of hotels. He and Schnooks traipsed throughout the city, fruitlessly questioning scores of agents, before finally coming upon the office of J. C. Thomas, whose clerk, George Rumsey, had no trouble recognizing the photographs of Holmes and Howard, whom he had taken for father and son. Rumsey recalled being struck by the disparity between the older man’s slick, well-to-do appearance and the ragtag apparel of the boy.

  Unfortunately, Rumsey could offer no further information about the house Holmes had rented since the records were locked up in the office of Mr. Thomas, who had gone home for the day. The clerk did not know his boss’s home address, only that Thomas had recently moved out to Cumminsville, a suburban town about five miles from Cincinnati.

&nbs
p; Believing that time was of the essence, Geyer and Schnooks immediately headed out to Cumminsville but were unable to locate Thomas, whose name was not yet listed in the local directory. Disappointed, the two detectives decided to call it a day.

  They were back at the real estate office first thing the following morning. The owner arrived a few minutes later and, like his clerk, instantly recognized the photographs of Holmes and Howard.

  Thomas had no need to consult his records for the information the detectives were seeking. He clearly remembered the handsomely dressed gentleman who had paid a $15 advance for a vacant house at 305 Poplar Street and then disappeared abruptly only two days after renting it. What had become of the fellow, Thomas could not say. He suggested the Geyer and Schnooks call on Miss Henrietta Hill, who lived directly next door to the rental property and might have additional facts to offer.

  Miss Hill did indeed have a vivid recollection of the mysterious tenant who had abandoned the neighboring house within days of moving in. What had puzzled her most, she explained, was the enormous cylindrical stove he had brought with him. Not only was the stove far too large for such a modest-sized house, but—even more baffling—it was the only item in the moving wagon.

  Thanking Miss Hill for her assistance, Geyer and Schnooks departed, well pleased. Having tracked down the places Holmes had stayed during his brief sojourn in Cincinnati and discovered the two aliases he had gone under—Cook and Hayes—Geyer felt confident that he “had taken firm hold of the end of the string that would lead me ultimately to the consummation of my mission.” At that point, Miss Hill’s information about the immense iron stove seemed like an intriguing but not especially relevant detail.

  Weeks would pass before Geyer discovered its terrible significance.

  39

  Detective Geyer called on me, and, in a long conversation

  with him, I made a most honest endeavor to

  place him in possession of all the facts that would be

  instrumental in facilitating the proposed search.

  —From the prison diary of H. H. Holmes

  Knowing from their letters that the children had been taken from Cincinnati to Indianapolis, Geyer left immediately for the Indiana capital, arriving around seven-thirty P.M. on Saturday evening, June 29. After registering and supping at the Spencer house, he repaired to police headquarters, where he introduced himself to Captain Splann, head of the detective corps.

  Before Geyer had a chance to explain his situation, the captain was called away to investigate a reported murder in the northern part of the city. It wasn’t until much later that night that Geyer had an opportunity to talk to Splann’s superior, Police Superintendent Powell. Like his counterpart in Cincinnati, Powell offered his full cooperation, assigning a detective named David Richards to assist Geyer in his search.

  During the next few days, Geyer followed the same routine that had served him so well in Cincinnati. Beginning with the hostelries around Union Depot and moving on to the neighborhood known as the Circle, the two detectives quickly turned up an entry for the children in the registry of the Hotel English. From Geyer’s photographs, the clerk identified Holmes as the man who had rented a room for the children on the evening of September 30 and then checked them out the following morning.

  At that point, Geyer and Richards ran into a dead end. They were unable to turn up any trace of the children after October 1. Undeterred, the two detectives proceeded to make a methodical search of every hotel and lodging house in the city—without success. Only then did Richards remember a small hotel called the Circle House, which had been operating on Meridian Street in September 1894 but had since gone out of business.

  By Monday morning, Geyer and Richards had managed to track down the former proprietor of the Circle House, Herman Ackelow, who was currently running a beer saloon in West Indianapolis.

  Ackelow—who had no trouble remembering Alice and her siblings—painted a grim picture of the three forlorn children, shut up in their room for days on end. He talked of the times that his teenaged son had brought the children their meals and found them weeping miserably, overwhelmed by the loneliness and unrelieved tedium.

  Particularly disturbing was Ackelow’s recollection of little Howard’s hysterical outburst after returning from a rare, midday outing with Holmes. The saloonkeeper described his subsequent conversation with the smooth-talking gentleman who had represented himself as the boy’s uncle.

  “He told me the boy was a bad one from the day he was born,” Ackelow recalled. “Said he didn’t know how his poor widowed sister could handle him no more, and he was thinking of maybe binding him out to a farmer or putting him in an institution. Just wanted to be shed of him, that’s all.”

  Ackelow’s words chilled Geyer. The detective came away from the interview feeling sure that Howard had not left Indianapolis alive. This belief, however, was contradicted by the findings of Fidelity Mutual’s own investigators, who had turned up “positive information that Holmes and the boy were seen in Detroit.”

  Back in his hotel room that night, Geyer carefully considered his options. He knew that Detroit had been the next stop on Holmes’s diabolical journey. But there was a loose end Geyer hoped to tie up.

  Before embarking on his search, he had visited Carrie Pitezel, who had supplied him with a detailed description of the children’s trunk—the one she had sent off with Nellie and Howard when they had departed from St. Louis with Holmes. The trunk had since disappeared. Geyer had also interviewed Holmes, who maintained that he had left the trunk in Chicago—in a hotel situated on West Madison Street, close to the corner of Ashland Avenue. Geyer was eager to find the trunk, believing that it might offer an important clue to the whereabouts of the missing children.

  And so, shortly before noon on Monday, July 1, Geyer left Indianapolis on a train headed north to Chicago.

  Beginning early Tuesday—the morning after his arrival in Chicago—Geyer spent two days in a fruitless effort to locate the trunk. Indeed, he never managed to find the hotel Holmes had supposedly left it in—for the very good reason that no such hotel existed. The information Holmes had volunteered, Geyer quickly realized, was simply another flagrant attempt to throw the detective off the trail.

  The trip to Chicago was not a total waste, however. Accompanied by Detective Sergeant John C. McGlinn, who had been detailed to help him, Geyer made a painstaking search of West Madison Street About fifty feet from the corner of Ashland Avenue, they happened upon a boardinghouse run by a woman named Jennie Irons. While Miss Irons didn’t recognize the photographs of the Pitezel children, she immediately identified Holmes as the gentleman she had known as Harry Gordon. According to the landlady, Gordon had occupied rooms in her lodging house for several months in 1892 with a pretty young woman he had introduced as his new bride.

  Only later did Geyer learn that the lovely “Mrs. Gordon” was actually a former mistress of Holmes’s—Emeline Cigrand—who had mysteriously disappeared from Chicago in late 1892, never to be seen again.

  Geyer also learned from Herman Ackelow that a German immigrant named Caroline Klausmann was the chambermaid of the Circle House during the time that Holmes and the children stayed there. Ackelow was not sure how helpful she would be since she didn’t speak English very well, but he knew she was now living in Chicago. Geyer found her working at the Swiss Hotel on Wells Street.

  Miss Klausmann’s English was no better than it had been a year earlier, but Geyer knew enough German to communicate the reason for his visit. The moment he showed her the photographs of Alice, Nellie, and Howard, the good woman’s eyes filled with tears. It still grieved her to remember the three heartsick children and her inability to offer them comforting words.

  Geyer was no nearer to finding the children. But each day was bringing dismaying new evidence of the misery they had endured under the heartless custodianship of Holmes.

  Before leaving Chicago, Geyer was eager to talk to one other person. And so, immediately after breakf
ast on Wednesday, July 3, he and McGlinn boarded a cable car for Englewood.

  They were on their way to Sixty-third and Wallace to interview Pat Quinlan—the janitor of Holmes’s Castle.

  The morning sunlight did nothing to dispel the dismal, vaguely derelict air that hung about the massive building, with its decaying facade and blank upper windows. Climbing a dark, winding staircase to the second floor, the detectives found Quinlan’s apartment. Geyer rapped on the door. “Detectives Geyer and McGlinn,” he called out, his words resounding in the utter silence of the Castle. Through the wood, a muffled voice requested them to enter.

  Inside, the detectives found themselves facing a pale, slim man of medium height with light, curly hair and a sandy mustache. Geyer judged his age to be about thirty-eight. Geyer presented his card. Quinlan perused it, then invited the two lawmen to take seats.

  Geyer got right to the point, grilling Quinlan hard about Holmes and the children. Though he stopped short of accusing the janitor of collusion, the detective made it clear that he believed Quinlan could tell him all about the missing children. But Quinlan remained staunch in his denials. He admitted that he knew the Pitezel family “very well” but insisted that he had not laid eyes on any of them for almost a year. He was more than willing to help in any way he could. But as to the whereabouts of Alice, Nellie, and Howard, he just didn’t have a clue.

  Geyer was inclined to believe Quinlan, partly because the janitor was a father himself and therefore unlikely—in the detective’s view—to have schemed against innocent children. Even more to the point, it was clear from Quinlan’s comments that he harbored little affection for Holmes.

  His employer was a “dirty lying scoundrel,” Quinlan snarled. He had been following all the newspaper stories about Holmes’s crimes, and nothing he had read surprised him in the least. The man was capable of anything.