There were the three missing members of the Gorky family: a middle-aged widow named Kate, who ran a restaurant on the first floor of Holmes’s Castle during the time of the Chicago World’s Fair; her comely sister, Liz; and her pretty teenaged daughter, Anna. There were also an indeterminate number of female clerical workers who had supposedly vanished after taking jobs at the Castle, including a beautiful Boston girl named Mabel Barrett, a sixteen-year-old stenographer named Miss Wild, and a bookkeeper named Kelly. (According to one report, Holmes had “employed more than one hundred young women during his years in Englewood.”)
In addition, Holmes was now suspected of having killed Mary Cron—a middle-aged woman brutally attacked in the bedroom of her Wilmette home in November 1893—and of masterminding the sensational 1892 abduction of little Annie Redmond, the daughter of a Chicago blacksmith.
On July 29, Detective Geyer publicly accused Holmes of having plotted to kill his wife, Georgiana, presumably to get his hands on her estate. Two days later, The New York Times leveled an equally sensational charge, claiming that, at the very start of his criminal career—while still going under his real name, Herman Mudgett—Holmes had done away with a little boy.
According to this story, Holmes had appeared one day in the small upstate town of Mooers, New York, and “created such a good impression that he was engaged to teach the village school. This occupation he found uncongenial. He left Mooers and went to Massachusetts, but returned in a short time, accompanied by a small boy, who disappeared shortly after arrival, Holmes saying he had gone home.
“It is now believed that the boy was the murderer’s first victim.”
Several witnesses swore that they had narrowly escaped death at Holmes’s hands. Jonathan Belknap—grand uncle of Holmes’s Wilmette wife, Myrta—sent a letter to the Chicago police, describing a nerve-racking night at the Castle. Belknap had traveled to Chicago in 1891 after discovering that Holmes had forged his signature on a $2,500 bank note.
“I knew Holmes was a scoundrel,” Belknap wrote. “On my going to his house with him, he showed me all through it and insisted that I should go up on the roof with him. But I was very suspicious of the man and refused to go with him. I did not want to remain in the house that night but he would not let me go. When I went to bed, I carefully locked the door.
“I was awakened sometime after midnight by stealthy steps along the hall. Presently, I heard my door tried and then a key was slipped into the lock. I asked who was there and heard the sound of feet shuffling down the hallway. Evidently two men had been there, for Pat Quirdan’s voice answered that he was there and that he wanted to get in and sleep with me—that there was no other place there. I refused to open the door. He insisted for a time and then went away.
“I am confident now that if I had gone on the roof of the house with Holmes that day, or if I had allowed Quinlan to come into the room that night, I would have been a dead man.”
Another person now convinced that the archfiend had been plotting her murder was a washerwoman named Strowers, who lived on Sixty-third and Morgan and often laundered Holmes’s clothing. According to Mrs. Strowers, Hohnes had approached her in 1891 and tried to persuade her to take out a $10,000 insurance policy on her life.
“You take out the policy,” Holmes had reportedly told her, “and I will give you six thousand dollars cash for it at once.”
Mrs. Strowers acknowledged that she had been tempted by the offer. But as she stood there mulling it over, Holmes had leaned toward her, fixed her with his hypnotic gaze, and whispered, “Don’t be afraid of me.” There was something so unsettling in his look that Mrs. Strowers refused to consider the proposition and never spoke to Holmes about it again.
Among the countless crimes ascribed to Holmes during the first, frenzied days of the search was the killing of Mrs. Pat Quinlan, wife of the building’s janitor. “Are more murders to be added to the list of Holmes’ atrocities?” began the front-page story in the July 25 edition of The Chicago Inter Ocean. “Is the wife of Pat Quinlan alive? Did Holmes the arch-fiend make away with her, and are her bones rotting in some cellar buried in quick lime?”
Less than twenty-four hours after these feverish questions were posed, however, Mrs. Quinlan showed up at Chicago police headquarters and was promptly taken into custody, along with her husband, a wiry little man with a walrus mustache and nervous eyes. Held on charges of complicity, both of the Quintans were subjected to relentless grillings. After countless hours “in the sweatbox,” Mrs. Quinlan finally broke down and confessed to her knowledge of Holmes’s fire insurance scam.
Her husband, however, refused to budge. “I am innocent,” he sobbed to reporters after yet another brutal interrogation. “I knew Holmes and worked for him. All these people you say were murdered I knew, and when they went away, as Holmes claimed, I thought it funny. You say I helped him to commit murder, but I did not. I am innocent and I cannot tell you what you claim I know. Let me alone. I am innocent!”
Chief Badenoch, however, scoffed at Quinlan’s disclaimer, stating flatly that the man “was a murderer.” At the time of his arrest, the janitor had been carrying a big iron ring containing more than three dozen keys to all the doors in the Castle.
No one with that sort of access to the innermost recesses of the building could have stayed ignorant of its grisly secrets: the acid vats and quicklime tanks. The death shafts and asphyxiation chambers. The stained wooden dissecting table and chests full of blood-caked surgical tools. The underground furnace, converted to a private crematorium. The heaps of human bones.
Informed in his prison cell that the police had turned up a skeleton pile in a corner of the basement, Holmes indignantly declared that these remains were nothing but “butcher-shop refuse.” Forensic analysis confirmed that some of the bones did indeed come from animals. But others were held to be human.
Apparently, Holmes had sought to conceal the evidence of his butchery by mixing human remains with old soup bones.
In spite of these finds—the “ghastly treasures” dug up daily from the damp earthen floor of the cellar—the police had yet to turn up any definitive proof linking Holmes to the disappearance of Minnie and Nannie Williams, Julia Conner, or Emeline Cigrand (who, according to Holmes’s latest story, had been so guilt-stricken over her illicit relations with him that she had run off and entered a convent).
And then, on Friday, July 26, Lt. William Thomas of the Cottage Grove station tracked down Holmes’s former employee and freelance anatomist, Charles M. Chappell. Within forty-eight hours, the police announced that they had recovered the articulated skeletons of two adult women—one from the home of a West Side physician, the other from the LaSalle Medical School—plus a Saratoga trunk containing an assortment of “human relics,” including an armbone, a hand, and a skull.
The newspaper headlines, already given to shrill allegations, reached a new pitch of hysterics: A CHAMBER OF HORRORS! screamed The New York World. CASTLE IS A TOMB! thundered The Chicago Tribune. SKELETONS TAKEN FROM HOLMES CHARNEL HOUSE! cried The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Unsurprisingly, the sensational press indulged in the wildest excesses, publishing the most extravagant rumors as unvarnished fact. Among the lurid stories that appeared in these papers were reports that Holmes’s tidy dwelling in Wilmette was a second “house of horrors,” complete with “secret chambers, hidden apartments, subterranean vaults, concealed doors, and false partitions.” The papers cited neighbors who swore that they had spied “mysterious beings” hauling suspicious objects out of the house “in the dead hours of night.” Other witnesses testified that they had seen Holmes digging a “private graveyard” behind his house.
On the afternoon of July 27, a newsman from The Chicago Inter Ocean trekked out to Wilmette to investigate these rumors. His report appeared the following day. “Here is a simple statement of the truth. That house does not contain a single mysterious feature. The articles which have been ‘secretly removed’ during the past two weeks were vegetab
les, a child’s hat, two boxes of glass, and an old stove. The ‘grave’ in the garden is a cess-pool, and the statement is authorized that anybody can explore it who wishes to.”
Admitted to the house by Myrta’s, the reporter was seated in the front parlor, while six-year-old Lucy—the Holmes’s “fair-haired, sweet-faced” daughter—was sent off to play with her “dollies.”
The reporter was moved by Myrta’s agonizing situation. A courteous and obviously well-bred person who attended daily services at the local Episcopal church, she had been—in his view—“more cruelly persecuted and misrepresented” than any other woman alive. “She has been hounded by would-be detectives, reporters, and vulgar curiosity-seekers. At all hours of the day and night, they have gone to her home. Because they were refused admittance, many of them hurled oaths at her and made all kinds of threats.”
The reporter was struck by her devotion to Holmes. Though she frankly confessed that he was capable of “dishonorable financial transactions,” she insisted that he could not possibly be guilty of murder. “In his home life,” she testified, “I do not think there was ever a better man than my husband. He never spoke an unkind word to me or our little girl. He was never vexed or irritable but was always happy and free from care. In times of financial trouble or when we were worried … his presence was like oil on troubled waters.”
The proof of his essential goodness could be seen in his feelings for children and animals. “It is said that babies are better judges of people than grown-up persons,” she declared. “And I never saw a baby that would not go to Mr. Holmes and stay with him contentedly. He was remarkably fond of children. Often when we were traveling and there happened to be a baby in the car he would say, ‘Go and see if they won’t lend you that baby a little while,’ and when I brought it to him, he would play with it, forgetting everything else, until its mother called for it or I could see she wanted it…. He was a lover of pets and always had a dog or cat and usually a horse, and he would play with them by the hour, teaching them little tricks or romping with them. Is such a man without a heart?”
As she spoke, tears rose in her eyes, though her tone made it clear that they sprang as much from frustration as sorrow. “Ambition has been the curse of my husband’s life,” she said. “He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth. He worked hard, but his efforts failed. He was involved. Temptation to get money dishonestly came and he yielded. He fell. He did defraud people, I fear—but he did not commit murder! He has been accused of crimes which happened on the same date in Chicago, Canada and Texas. Will not people see the absurdity of charging to him all crimes that cannot otherwise be accounted for?”
By then, her voice had risen to a desperate cry. “Mr. Holmes is a human being,” she exclaimed through her tears. “He is not supernatural!”
By then, in fact, some of the more responsible papers had begun to print certain retractions. The “charred human ribs” discovered in Holmes’s office stove, for example, had been found to be fragments of fireclay, while assorted “bloodstained” articles proved to be discolored with rust. The testimony of the self-confessed skeleton mounter, Charles Chappell, had been called into question, his own family dismissing it as the ranting of a hopeless drunk. And supposed victims such as Kate Durkee and her sister Mary turned out to be alive and well and very much astonished by reports of their murder.
On July 29, The Chicago Tribune printed a cartoon that acknowledged the truth of Myrta Holmes’s accusation—that the charges against her husband had reached the point of “absurdity.”
Two days earlier, newspapers throughout the country had published sensational accounts of a massacre in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Reportedly, a tribe of “hostile Bannocks” had butchered every white settler in the area.
The stories turned out be totally spurious. In fact, the tension in the area had been stirred up by local cattle ranchers who coveted the Bannocks’ land and were attempting to drive them from their reservation. Before the truth was uncovered, the Tribune ran its self-mocking cartoon.
In the drawing, Holmes is shown standing in his jail cell, holding up a newspaper whose front page reads, “BANNOCK INDIANS ON WARPATH—SETTLERS MASSACRED.”
Holmes looks profoundly dismayed—not because of the deaths but because he knows he’s about to be blamed for them. Staring straight at the reader, he cries out in protest, “I AM INNOCENT!”
Even so—and in spite of Myrta’s insistence that her husband was “not supernatural”—the papers continued to characterize Holmes in precisely those terms, describing him as a “human monster,” “bloodthirsty fiend,” “murder-demon,” “ghoul,” and “ogre.” On the very day that the Tribune ran its satiric cartoon, it printed a story captioned NO JEKYLL, ALL HYDE—a headline that summed up a common perception of the double-faced Dr. Holmes, who struck many observers as the flesh-and-blood incarnation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s fictional monster. The New York World, meanwhile, printed a floor plan of the Castle under the title BLUEBEARD’S CHAMBER OF HORROR.
And indeed, as the exploration of the building entered its second week, the police continued to uncover enough gruesome evidence to justify such lurid characterizations. Sections of a human skull. A hip socket, a shoulder blade, and several pieces of collarbone. Blood-clotted clothing in the chamber once occupied by Julia Conner.
The police made one of their most unsettling discoveries during their inspection of Holmes’s walk-in vault—a discovery that left little doubt that at least some of his victims had suffered the agonies of slow asphyxiation.
Locked inside the suffocating vault, one of these poor souls had clearly made a frantic effort to break free. The sign of her struggle was still visible on the inside of the massive iron door.
There—a few feet off the floor, as though she had braced her back against one wall, placed her foot against the door, and shoved with all her might—was the imprint of a woman’s naked sole.
Convinced that the Castle had divulged its darkest secrets, the police decided to halt their search on Monday, August 5. One question remained: What was to become of Holmes’s “nightmare house”?
Some voices called for its immediate demolition. The place, they argued, was a death trap—and not only because of the numberless victims who had already perished within its walls. On July 23, E. F. Laughlin, an inspector for the Chicago Department of Buildings, had made a tour of the Castle and been appalled by its shoddy construction. “The structural parts of the inside are all weak and dangerous,” he wrote in his report to Commissioner Joseph Downey. “Built of poorest and cheapest kind of material…. All dividing partitions between flats are combustible…. The sanitary condition of the building is horrible.”
His final recommendation: “The building should be condemned.”
To others, however, tearing down the Castle seemed a terrible waste. True, the place might not be fit for habitation. But there were other uses to which it might be put. On Sunday, July 28, nearly five thousand people had swarmed to Sixty-third and Wallace, hoping for a glimpse of the Castle’s ghastly interior—its “torture dungeon” and “suffocation vault” and “corpse chambers.” The following week, The New York Times published a story headlined KNOWS HOW IT FEELS TO SMOTHER, about a Chicago man named William Barnes who locked himself inside a jeweler’s vault because he wanted to “learn the sensations of some of Holmes’s victims.”
Clearly, the archfiend continued to exert a powerful grip on the public imagination. There was good money to be made from such morbid fascination, as an enterprising expoliceman named A. M. Clark was quick to perceive. Even before Detective Norton called a halt to the investigation, Clark had arranged to lease the building from its courtappointed receiver. On Sunday, August 11, he made his announcement to the press.
Beginning that week, the Castle would be turned into a tourist attraction—a “murder museum” with an admission charge of fifteen cents per person and guided tours conducted by Detective Norton himse
lf.
44
Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long.
—Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Along with their exhaustive coverage of the Castle investigation, the newspapers had been publishing regular updates on Detective Geyer’s progress. By the first week of August, the public knew that Geyer had headed back to Indianapolis after failing to turn up any trace of Howard Pitezel in Detroit.
What no one knew but Geyer himself was that—for the first time since he set out on his arduous quest—he was beginning to doubt whether the mystery of the missing boy would ever be solved.
Geyer had arrived in Detroit shortly before suppertime on July 21—too late to do anything more than drop in on his old friend Thomas Meyler, who insisted on springing for steaks at a local chophouse to celebrate Geyer’s success in Toronto.
The next morning—accompanied once again by Detective Tuttle—Geyer sought out the two witnesses who claimed to have seen Holmes in the company of Howard Pitezel. Questioned more closely this time, both men admitted that they might have been mistaken. Mr. Bonninghausen—the real estate agent who had rented Holmes the house on East Forest Avenue—declared that he had “no absolutely positive recollection of the matter,” though he was certain that his clerk, Mr. Moore, “had noticed a little boy with Holmes.”
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