By now, Geyer felt certain that he and Cuddy were on the right track. Telling Ryves that they would return within the hour, they quickly repaired to the Nudels’ home at 54 Henry Street.
Mrs. Nudel seemed in the mood to chat, but Geyer had no time for pleasantries. Pulling out his photographs, he asked if she had ever seen the man in the picture.
“Why, yes,” she replied after studying Holmes’s mug shots for a moment. “This is the man who rented the St. Vincent Street house last October and only occupied it for a few days.” He had given her a month’s rent in advance—$10—promising to pay the balance the next time he saw her. Then he had disappeared without a trace.
Leaving Mrs. Nudel with a hurried thanks, the two detectives rushed back to St. Vincent Street where Ryves was seated on his front porch, anxiously awaiting their return. Geyer asked for a shovel, and the old man disappeared around the rear of his house, returning a few moments later with the same implement he had loaned to Holmes nine months before.
Then the two detectives walked next door to number 16.
It was a quaint, two-story cottage with a single gabled window in front and a covered veranda festooned with flowered vines. Stepping onto the porch was like entering a garden bower. Geyer paused at the front door, taking in the scene and wondering if the two Pitezel girls had truly met their deaths in this place. It was hard to conceive of this peaceful cottage as the site of such an atrocity.
The current tenant, a Mrs. J. Armbrust, clucked her tongue with amazement when Geyer explained why he and Cuddy were there. Leading them into the kitchen, she lifted a large piece of oilcloth from the center of the floor, revealing a small trapdoor, about two feet square. Geyer raised the door and peered down into the blackness. Mrs. Armbrust bustled away, returning moments later with an oil lamp, which she handed to Cuddy.
Then, with Cuddy leading the way, the two men descended a steep, narrow staircase into the pitch-dark cellar.
Cuddy held the light while Geyer moved around the little cellar, poking the shovel blade into the ground, searching for signs of disturbance. Suddenly, he found what he was looking for—a soft spot in the southwest corner. Cuddy directed his light into the corner while Geyer commenced to dig. The loose-packed soil came up easily.
Geyer had gone about a foot down when the earth gave off a carrion stench.
Two feet more and he turned up a human armbone, black with rotting flesh.
Cuddy gagged. Geyer, breathing through his mouth, shoveled dirt back into the hole to keep down the stink. Then the two men climbed out of the reeking cellar and into the kitchen.
Cuddy, looking ashen, stood near an open window and inhaled great drafts of garden air.
“We must get to a telephone,” Geyer said, his voice tense with a mixture of triumph and horror.
They found one in a telegraph office on Yonge Street. Cuddy called Inspector Stark, who congratulated the men on their discovery, then recommended that they seek out B. D. Humphrey, an undertaker who resided nearby.
Minutes later, Geyer and Cuddy were at Humphrey’s establishment. The undertaker agreed to accompany the detectives back to St. Vincent Street to assist with the exhumation. Geyer described the condition of the bodies and suggested that Humphrey bring three pairs of rubber gloves.
Back at the house on St. Vincent Street, the men took a moment to steel themselves, then descended into the cellar. It took only a few moments for Geyer to uncover the bodies. Humphrey shouted up to Mrs. Armbrust, telling her to send her teenaged son back to his establishment and have his assistant dispatch two coffins to the house.
In the shallow, noisome pit, Alice lay on her side, with her head to the west. Nellie lay on her face, crossways to her sister, her legs resting on Alice’s body. Both girls were naked.
The three men bent down and gently grasped Nellie’s body. Her flesh was so putrefied that, as they lifted the little corpse from the makeshift grave, her scalp—pulled free by the weight of her plaited hair—slithered wetly from her skull.
By then, a wagon had arrived with the coffins. Laying Nellie’s body on a sheet, the three men carried it upstairs, laid it inside one of the coffins, then returned to the cellar and removed Alice’s corpse. The bodies were taken directly to Humphrey’s establishment and from there to the city morgue.
“By this time,” Geyer later recalled, “Toronto was wild with excitement. The news had spread to every part of the city. The St. Vincent Street house was besieged with newspaper men, sketch artists, and others. Everybody seemed to be pleased with our success, and congratulations, mingled with expressions of horror over the discovery, were heard everywhere.”
The fetor of death was still thick in Geyer’s nostrils that night, the images of corruption still sharp in his mind. The thought of the slaughtered children filled him with outrage and sorrow. But as he lay in the dark of his hotel room, a profound restfulness began to overtake him.
True, his job was not over—Howard Pitezel remained to be found. But in less than three weeks of searching, Geyer had managed to solve a major part of the mystery. And in doing so, he had not only accomplished a notable feat of detection. He had done something that gave him a far deeper sense of satisfaction.
He had sealed the fate of H. H. Holmes.
42
What greater pain could mortals have than this:
To see their children dead before their eyes?
—Euripides, The Suppliant Women
The newspapers were full of sensational stories during the third week of July 1895—tragic mishaps, extraordinary sightings, and terrible crimes. In Baltimore, a young carpenter named George List met a dreadful end when a stack of lumber standing directly behind him tottered and fell, knocking him headfirst into the spinning blade of a large circular saw. A twenty-four-year-old Philadelphia woman named Rose Gearhart, abandoned by her brutish husband, committed suicide by swallowing strychnine after administering a fatal dose to her four-year-old daughter, who died after three hours of agonized convulsions.
New Yorkers were startled by accounts of a horned, hundred-foot sea serpent spotted in Long Island Sound and a monstrous, reptilian creature with a thunderous voice inhabiting a pond on Staten Island. (The former turned out to be a dead, bloated python discarded from a steamer out of Singapore, while the pond monster proved to be an overgrown bullfrog.) In Manhattan, a middle-aged widow named Elizabeth Lachmann plunged to her death while attempting to retrieve her false teeth from the first-story ledge of her apartment building, where they had landed after slipping from her mouth as she leaned out of her bedroom window.
And from Ashland, Kentucky, came reports of an appallingly savage act: a pretty seventeen-year-old named Carrie Jordan was abducted by three male acquaintances, who carried her off to an abandoned cabin, brutally assaulted her, then nailed her by the hands to a wall and left her for dead.
But all of these horrors and prodigies were quickly over-shadowed by the news from Toronto: that the highly publicized quest of Philadelphia’s intrepid detective Frank P. Geyer had climaxed in the uncovering of Alice and Nellie Pitezel’s remains.
MURDERED THE CHILDREN! trumpeted The Philadelphia Inquirer. INFANTS’ BLOOD SHED! blared The Chicago Tribune. GIRLS BODIES FOUND! proclaimed The New York Herald. Throughout the country, Geyer’s grim discovery was front-page news.
In Philadelphia, District Attorney Graham had been the first to get the word, having received a telegram from Geyer on Monday evening, July 15, the date of the discovery. Graham planned to keep the news from Holmes, intending to spring it on him during a private conference the following day. The attorney general hoped that Holmes would be so rattled that he would break down and confess. Around eleven Tuesday morning, Graham telephoned the authorities at Moyamensing, instructing them to withhold all newspapers from the prisoner.
The call came too late. Earlier that morning, a crowd of reporters had appeared at the prison, clamoring for an interview with Holmes. Suspecting that a major break had occurred, Holmes sent ou
t for the papers. By the time court officers Gentner and Alexander arrived to transport him to City Hall, he had seen the headlines and was braced for a brutal grilling.
Taken in shackles to the district attorney’s office, he maintained a stubborn silence while Graham and Thomas Barlow bombarded him with questions for nearly two hours. Holmes later claimed that had been speechless with grief over the killings (which he would try to pin on Minnie Williams and a mysterious accomplice named “Hatch”).
Led back to his cell, however, he did mutter a comment to one of his guards: “I guess I’ll hang for this.”
* * *
Even as Holmes was uttering this prediction, Detective Geyer was doing everything possible to make sure it came true. Early Tuesday morning, he and Cuddy set out to find evidence that would confirm the identities of the two murdered girls, whose corpses were decomposed beyond recognition.
Before lunchtime, they had succeeded in locating the tenants who had moved into the St. Vincent Street house immediately after Holmes absconded from it—a family named McDonald, now residing at 17 Russell Street. Mrs. McDonald testified that, except for an old bedstead and mattress, the house had been completely vacant. Her sixteen-year-old son, however, produced a simple toy that he had found in a second-floor closet: a painted egg concealing a little snake that sprang out like a jack-in-the-box when the wooden shell was parted.
Geyer reached into his coat pocket and produced a folded sheet of paper. It was an inventory he had gotten from Mrs. Pitezel, detailing all the possessions her children had carried with them on their fateful journey with Holmes. Scanning the sheet now, Geyer let out a small exultant cry.
Included on the list was a toy egg containing a spring-loaded snake. It had been Howard Pitezel’s favorite plaything.
Though Geyer still believed that Howard had been slain in either Indianapolis or Detroit, he knew from Thomas Ryves that Holmes had moved an oversize trunk into 16 St. Vincent Street. Perhaps, Geyer speculated, Holmes had killed the boy in the States, stuffed him in the trunk, then transported the corpse to Canada for disposal.
Returning to 16 St. Vincent Street, Geyer—assisted by Cuddy and several other officers—spent the next several hours digging up the fetid basement and making a thorough examination of the barn and outbuildings. But all they found were some skeletal scraps that turned out to be chicken bones.
Geyer, however, did obtain some key corroboration from the current tenant, Mrs. Armbrust. Shortly after moving in, she had gone to use the fireplace in the north front room and discovered that the chimney was blocked. Reaching a hand up the flue, she had pulled out a mass of charred straw and singed rags.
The rags were unmistakably the remnants of female clothing—a scrap of blue dress, a piece of gray blouse, some reddish brown material from a girl’s woolen garment. Someone had apparently tried to incinerate the clothing but had packed it too tightly inside the chimney, choking off the burning straw.
In the woodbox by the hearth, Mrs. Armbrust had discovered something else, too—a pair of girl’s black button-boots.
None of this evidence existed anymore—Mrs. Armbrust had discarded it long ago. But her description was completely consistent with Carrie Pitezel’s inventory of Alice and Nellie’s belongings.
The children’s bodies, meanwhile, had been transferred from B. D. Humphrey’s undertaking establishment to the city morgue, where Coroner Johnston and a trio of doctors performed a postmortem early Tuesday morning. Though the extreme putrefaction of the corpses made it hard for the physicians to reach a definitive conclusion, they believed that the girls had died of suffocation before being interred in the basement—a finding that led to further speculation about the sinister function of Holmes’s large trunk.
At the time of Holmes’s arrest, the trunk had been recovered from his hotel room. The Boston police had subjected it to a thorough examination and had discovered a small hole neatly drilled below the lid. Geyer now surmised that Holmes had somehow lured the two girls into the trunk, closed and locked the lid, then inserted one end of a long rubber tube into the hole. The opposite end he attached to a gas jet. Then, opening the valve, he had calmly stood by while the children asphyxiated.
Though their findings were necessarily tentative, given the condition of the bodies, Johnston and his associates felt fairly confident about their conclusions. They were puzzled, however, by one anomaly: the feet of the smaller child were missing.
At first, they supposed that the feet had been accidentally severed by a shovel blade when the corpses were exhumed. But no trace of the feet had been found during the subsequent search of the cellar.
Geyer, however, provided the solution to this mystery. Having questioned Carrie closely about her daughter’s distinctive traits, he knew that little Nellie was slightly clubfooted.
The conclusion was inescapable: Holmes had sought to obscure the identity of the child’s corpse by amputating its misshapen feet.
At seven-thirty that night, the coroner’s jury convened at the morgue to examine the bodies as part of the preliminary inquest. Geyer was there, too, having been asked to attend by Coroner Johnston.
By that time, the citizens of Toronto were in such an uproar over the gruesome discovery that Geyer (as he later wrote) “felt sure they would have made short shrift of Holmes” had they “been furnished with the opportunity.” Indeed, the public had already begun clamoring for Holmes’s extradition. Meeting with reporters shortly before the opening of the inquest, Geyer assured them that Holmes would certainly stand trial in Canada for the killing of the Pitezel children should he somehow escape the noose in Philadelphia for the murder of their father.
Then, while Geyer remained in the waiting area, Coroner Johnston led the jury members—all of them respected city merchants—in to view the girls’ bodies. Moments later, the jurors came hurrying out again, overwhelmed by the ghastly sight—and unbearable stench—of the rotting remains.
The following evening, the inquest resumed at the Police Court in City Hall. Called as a witness, Thomas Ryves testified that the girls in Detective Geyer’s photographs were the same children who had briefly lived next door to him the previous fall. Then Geyer took the stand and spent nearly two and a half hours narrating the history of the Holmes-Pitezel affair, concluding with a detailed account of his own dogged search for the missing children.
At that point, the inquest was adjourned. Though no one doubted that the decomposed corpses lying in the morgue were those of Alice and Nellie Pitezel, there was no positive proof of their identities. Only one person could provide that proof.
The inquest would have to wait until Carrie Pitezel arrived in Toronto to view what was left of her two youngest daughters.
Like Holmes, Carrie had learned the devastating news from the papers. The previous week, she had traveled to Chicago from her parents’ home in Galva in order to pursue her own inquiries into the children’s whereabouts. She was staying with her old friends, the Haywards, when the newspaper arrived.
At the sight of the headline, she succumbed to such hysterical grief that her hosts sent their eldest child running for Dr. Hubbert, the family physician. With the help of “quieting mixtures,” Hubbert temporarily tranquilized the stricken woman, but had to return twice more during the day to administer additional opiates. Finally, the drugs lulled her into a troubled sleep.
When she awoke later that night, she found a telegram from District Attorney Graham, informing her that the coroner’s jury could not proceed without positive means of identifying the bodies.
Early Thursday morning, July 18, Carrie set off by herself for Toronto.
No one recognized her during the long train ride, though her black mourning clothes and ravaged look drew curious stares. In Toronto, however, a crowd of several hundred gawkers had gathered at the Union Depot. Fortunately, Geyer was there, too. The moment Carrie alighted from the train at around nine P.M., he took her by the arm and led her briskly through the jostling mob to a waiting carriage, wh
ich drove them to the Rossin House.
By the time Geyer got her to her room—directly across the hallway from his own—Carrie was on the verge of collapse. Heartsick and exhausted, she swooned as he led her toward her bedroom. Geyer, who had arranged to have smelling salts brought to the room, immediately applied the restoratives. Gradually, Carrie’s eyes fluttered open and focused on the detective.
“Oh, Mr. Geyer,” she moaned. “Is it true that you have found Alice and Nellie buried in a cellar?”
Geyer took her by the hand and, in the gentlest tones he could manage, told her that she must prepare herself for the worst.
Through her tears, Carrie replied that she would do her best.
With that, Geyer confirmed that her daughters were dead—though he stopped short of revealing the condition of their bodies or the precise circumstances of the discovery. After arranging for a chambermaid to look after her, Geyer returned to his room for the night.
Carrie seemed slightly better the next morning when Geyer stopped by to see her. He was on his way out, he explained, to make arrangements for her to view the children. Geyer picked up Cuddy at police headquarters, then the two men proceeded to the home of Coroner Johnston, who informed them that the bodies would be ready for inspection at four that afternoon.
Returning to the hotel, Geyer and his partner tried to steel Carrie for the coming ordeal. Geyer marshaled all the tact at his disposal but could no longer conceal the dreadful truth about the state of her children’s remains. When he told her “that it would be absolutely impossible for her to see anything but Alice’s teeth and hair, and only the hair belonging to Nellie,” Carrie came close to passing out.
The two men stayed by her side until the carriage arrived at four. Then—arming themselves with brandy and smelling salts—they escorted the trembling woman to the waiting cab.
As a small, morbid crowd milled outside the city morgue, Geyer and Cuddy hurried Carrie inside. Leaving her in the waiting area, they passed inside the deadhouse to make certain that everything was in readiness.
Depraved Page 26
