Moore, however, explained that there had been “several persons with children in the real estate office that day.” He thought one of the youngsters—a small, brown-haired boy—had been with Holmes. But now he “was not sure.”
Repairing again to the house at 241 East Forest Avenue, Geyer and Tuttle made another thorough search of the premises, including the cellar, barn, outhouses, and yard. They found nothing to suggest that Howard had been murdered there. The cellar did contain an enormous furnace—a convenient place to dispose of a child’s body, Geyer believed. But there was nothing “which indicated that a body had been consumed therein.”
The only truly sinister clue was the mysterious hole—four feet long, three feet wide, and three and a half feet deep—which the current tenant had discovered in the cellar shortly after moving in. But that, too, had been empty.
Back in his hotel room that night, Geyer reviewed all the facts. Now that Bonninghausen and Moore had revised their testimony, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence to prove that Holmes and Howard had been together in Detroit. Geyer knew, moreover, that—in her letter of October 14, 1894—Alice had written that “Howard is not with us now.”
He knew something else, too: that the cellar hole Holmes had dug in the Forest Avenue house was precisely the same size as the Pitezel girls’ makeshift grave in Toronto. Under the circumstances, it seemed plausible that the hole had been intended for Alice and Nellie, not Howard. When some unexpected turn forced Holmes to abandon the house, he had spirited the girls off to Canada and consummated his monstrous plan there.
Putting all these considerations together, Geyer was convinced that by the time Alice and Nellie checked into the New Western Hotel on October 12, they were alone; Howard had never reached Detroit.
The next morning, Geyer sent a wire to his superiors in Philadelphia, informing them of his decision to return to Indianapolis.
* * *
He arrived on the morning of July 24. Twenty minutes later he was at police headquarters, conferring with Superintendent Powell, who detailed Detective Richards to assist him again. Geyer knew exactly what he was searching for: a house that had been rented in early October 1894 by a man who claimed that he was taking it for his “widowed sister”—the same falsehood Holmes had used in Cincinnati, Detroit, and Toronto.
Procuring a city directory, Geyer and Richards compiled a list of every real estate agent in Indianapolis and set about visiting each one. In the meantime, the newspapers ran front-page stories on Geyer’s search, complete with pictures of Holmes and Howard Pitezel. As in Toronto, the headlines galvanized the public. “It seemed,” Geyer would later remark, “as if every man, woman, and child in Indiana was alert and watchful and aiding me in the work of finding the missing child”—though, in fact, the countless leads that began pouring in all proved to be worthless.
Day after day, in the swelter of one of the hottest Midwestern summers in memory, the two men tramped and trolleyed through the city—to no avail. By month’s end, even Geyer—for all his resolve—couldn’t keep from feeling disheartened. “It began to look,” he confessed, “as though the bold and clever criminal had outwitted the detectives, both professional and amateur, and that the disappearance of Howard Pitezel would pass into history as an unsolved mystery.”
Just when Geyer’s faith began to falter, his spirits were buoyed by a letter from Assistant District Attorney Thomas Barlow, who continued to feel certain that “skill and patience would yet win.” After analyzing the letters written by Alice and Nellie Pitezel, Barlow had concluded that the children could not possibly have checked out of the Circle House on October 6, as the proprietor, Herman Ackelow, had claimed.
Proceeding to the hotel, Geyer rechecked the registry and discovered that Barlow was right—the last payment on the Pitezel children’s board had been made on October 10. Since Geyer had already “ascertained to a certainty” that Alice and Nellie had arrived in Detroit on the evening of October 12, he now felt sure that he “was hot on the track, with only forty-eight hours to be accounted for,” not six days as he had previously believed.
Sometime during those forty-eight hours, Howard Pitezel had disappeared—“either in Indianapolis or between that city and Detroit.”
On Thursday evening, August 1, Geyer received a telegram from District Attorney Graham informing him that a child’s skeleton had been uncovered in the cellar of Holmes’s Castle. Geyer was in Chicago before breakfast the next morning, conferring with Chief Badenoch and Inspector Fitzpatrick. It quickly became clear to him, however, that the remains could not possibly be those of a little boy.
He was preparing to travel back to Indianapolis when another telegram arrived from Graham, requesting his immediate return to Philadelphia. Stepping off the train on the afternoon of August 3, he was mobbed by reporters, clamoring for an interview with the hometown hero. Geyer had become a celebrity.
Appreciating the value of publicity, which had proved to be such an important tool in his search, Geyer was always glad to oblige the press. But he was too travel-worn at the moment to offer more than a few weary words. Indeed, Geyer was so clearly exhausted by his efforts that his superiors insisted that he remain in Philadelphia for a few days until he had a chance to recover.
By Wednesday evening, August 7, he was ready to resume his quest. This time, however, he would be accompanied by another skilled detective—W. E. Gary, chief investigator for the Fidelity Mutual Life Assurance Company, who had been involved with the Holmes case even longer than Geyer.
The two men headed first to Chicago, where they interviewed Pat Quinlan and his wife, both of whom “stoutly maintained their ignorance of the children.” Geyer was inclined to believe that they were telling the truth.
Next, he and Gary traveled to Logansport, and from there to Peru, Indiana, Montpelier Junction, Ohio, and Adrian, Michigan. In each of these towns, they spent several days searching among hotels and boardinghouses and interviewing real estate agents—“all to no purpose.” The two detectives finally decided to return to Indianapolis and (in Geyer’s words) “settle there until District Attorney Graham told us to stop or until we had found the boy.”
By this time—his third trip to Indianapolis—Geyer was growing discouraged again. “The large stock of hope I had gathered up in the district attorney’s office in the Philadelphia City Hall was fast dwindling away,” he admitted. “The mystery seemed to be impenetrable.”
Once more the papers printed headline stories about the resumption of his search. Once more he was inundated with tips about “mysterious people who had rented houses for a short time and then disappeared.” Geyer and Gary ran down each of these leads. They also made a list of all the newspaper classifieds from October 1894 offering private houses for rent. Altogether, the two men checked out no less than nine hundred clues without coming any closer to a solution.
Having exhausted every possibility in Indianapolis itself, they turned their attention to the nearby towns. Two weeks Later, they had investigated virtually all of them without turning up any sign of the boy.
There was only one place left to look—the little town of Irvington, six miles outside the city.
On Friday, August 23, Geyer composed a letter to District Attorney Graham. “By Monday,” he wrote, “we will have searched every outlying town except Irvington, and another day will conclude that. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we shall go.”
Geyer and Gary took the trolley to Irvington early Tuesday morning, August 27. There were no hotels in town for the detectives to check, so they turned their attention instead to the real estate agents.
Not far from the trolley stop, Geyer spotted a sign for a real estate office run by a Mr. Brown. Inside, they discovered a pleasant-faced old man seated behind his desk. After making his introductions, Geyer asked Brown if he “knew of a house in this town which had been rented in October of 1894 by a man who said he wanted it for a widowed sister.” Removing a well-worn photograph of Holmes from the packa
ge he carried, Geyer handed it to Brown, who adjusted his spectacles and studied the face for a long moment.
Finally the old man looked up from the picture and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I remember a man who rented a house under such circumstances in October of 1894, and this picture looks like him very much. I did not have the renting of the house, but I had the keys, and one day last fall, this man came into my office and in a very abrupt way said, ‘I want the keys for that house.’ I remember the man very well because I did not like his manner. I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.”
For a few moments, Geyer and Gary simply stood there, frozen in place. Finally they turned, exchanged a look, and sank down into the two chairs facing Brown’s desk.
“All the toil,” Geyer later wrote, recalling the emotions of that moment, “all the weary days and weeks of travel—toil and travel in the hottest months of the year, alternating between faith and hope, and discouragement and despair—all were recompensed in that one instant, when I saw the veil about to lift and realized that we were soon to learn where the little boy had gone.”
The detectives were out of their seats in an instant. Seeing the urgency in their faces, Brown volunteered to escort them to Dr. Thompson’s home.
The physician, who lived only a short distance away, was seated in his office when the three men arrived. One look at Geyer’s photographs was all Thompson needed to identify Holmes as the man who had rented his house the previous fall. He also told Geyer that a boy in his employ—a youngster named Elvet Moorman—had seen and spoken to Holmes.
At Geyer’s request, Dr. Thompson sent his little daughter running for Moorman, who arrived a few minutes later. “Why, that is the man who lived in your house,” the teenager exclaimed after studying Holmes’s photograph. “The one who had the small boy with him.” When Geyer showed him Howard Pitezel’s picture, Moorman nodded emphatically. There was no doubt about it—that was the child he had seen at the house with the man.
By then, Geyer and Gary could scarcely contain their excitement. With Thompson leading the way, they hurried to the house, which stood a little distance from Union Avenue in the extreme eastern part of town.
The detectives made directly for the cellar, which was divided into two parts. In the rear compartment, which was evidently intended as a washroom, the floor was made of cement; in the front, hard clay. The detectives could see at a glance that both areas of the cellar floor were undisturbed. They decided to search the outside of the house.
A small wooden porch, its sides enclosed by latticework, extended from the right wing of the house. As Geyer peered through the latticework, something caught his eye.
Prying off the porch steps, he squeezed himself underneath and brought out the broken remnant of a wooden trunk.
For weeks, Geyer had been troubled by the mystery of the children’s missing trunk. Now he felt certain that he had solved it. Taking a moment to examine this critical piece of evidence, he noticed a strip of blue calico, about two inches wide and printed with the figure of a white flower, which had been pasted along an inside seam, evidently as a patch.
Sticking his head back under the porch, Geyer detected a place where the earth looked disturbed. Procuring a shovel, he crawled back under the porch and dug up the spot to see if a body was buried there. But he found nothing.
Geyer and Gary spent the next few hours searching the premises without turning up anything incriminating. By then, a crowd of several hundred people had gathered around the house, milling about the property and seriously impeding the investigation. Evening was coming on, too, and—as Geyer was eager to interview the real estate agent who had rented the property to Holmes—he and Gary decided to suspend their search until the following day.
Taking the trolley back to Indianapolis, they sought out the agent, J. S. Crouse, who readily identified Holmes from Geyer’s photograph. According to Crouse, Holmes had rented the house “for a widowed sister by the name of Mrs. A. E. Cook.” Crouse had received one month’s rent in advance and had never seen the man again.
If the detectives still had any doubt that they had finally located the house, Grouse’s testimony dispelled it. Geyer knew that Holmes had registered under the alias A. E. Cook during his trip to Cincinnati with the three Pitezel children.
The two men headed next to the Western Union office, where Geyer wired a message to Carrie Pitezel in Galva: “Did missing trunk have a strip of blue calico over seam, white figure on bottom?”
They were waiting for a reply when a telephone call came in from the Indianapolis Evening News, requesting that Geyer come immediately to the newspaper office. There, the city editor informed Geyer that an urgent message had just arrived from a physician named Barnhill—Dr. Thompson’s partner. Barnhill was on his way from Irvington with “something important to communicate” and wanted Geyer to meet him at the news office.
A short time later, Barnhill hurried in, carrying a little bundle, which he immediately unwrapped on the city editor’s desk.
Inside were several charred fragments of human bone—part of a femur and a chunk of skull, its sutures showing plainly. Barnhill was convinced that the remains were those of a child between the ages of eight and twelve.
In response to Geyer’s questions, Barnhill explained that—after the detectives had departed—he and Dr. Thompson had continued to search the premises. In the meantime, a pair of neighborhood boys named Walter Jenny and Oscar Kettenbach had decided to “play detective” in the cellar.
A chimney stood in the rear part of the cellar against the farthermost wall. Sticking his hand into the pipe hole, young Walter pulled out a big handful of ashes. Among the ashes was a burnt chunk of bone. Reaching in again, he brought out more bones and ashes. At that point, the boys had run to call the doctors.
In spite of the lateness of the hour, Geyer and his partner hurried back to Irvington, where they found the house overrun with neighborhood curiosity seekers. The marshal of police was there, too, attempting to maintain order, and the three men finally cleared everyone out of the place except Drs. Thompson and Barnhill and several members of the press.
Proceeding to the cellar, Geyer used a hammer and chisel to take down the lower part of the chimney. Using an old fly screen as a sieve, he began sifting the ashes and soot from the chimney.
Almost at once he found a complete set of teeth and part of a lower jaw.
A few minutes later, he pulled a large, charred mass from the bottom of the chimney. It was baked so hard that Dr. Thompson had some difficulty cutting it open.
Inside were the blackened remains of a stomach, liver, spleen, and intestines.
After two grueling months, Frank Geyer had found Howard Pitezel.
The discoveries of that day were the stuff of nightmare. Yet back in his hotel room, Geyer enjoyed a sweet and dreamless sleep.
He did not bask in self-satisfaction for long, however. The success of his quest had brought him personal fame. But as an agent of justice, he knew that his mission wasn’t completed. As Geyer put it, “all that had been unearthed would count but for little if Holmes were permitted to elude the firm grasp of the law or to avoid punishment.”
The most important task still remained: “The greatest of criminals had yet to be brought to answer for his deeds.”
The Devil
to Pay
45
I have commenced to write a careful and truthful account of all matters pertaining to my case.
—From the prison diary of H. H. Holmes
Two weeks after it was vacated by the Chicago police, H. H. Holmes’s “Horror Castle”—newly remodeled as a tourist attraction under the management of A. M. Clark—was almost ready to receive its first paying customers. But shortly after midnight on Monday, August 19, Clark’s get-rich-quick dreams went up, quite literally, in smoke.
No one ever found out how the fire started. Some saw it as an act of divine retribution—God’s furious purging of Holmes’s iniquitous
den. The police, on the other hand, took a more down-to-earth view, suspecting that one or more of Holmes’s confederates had started the blaze to conceal incriminating evidence that the investigators had overlooked.
Whatever its source, the fire made short shrift of the building, confirming Inspector Laughlin’s assessment of the Castle’s “combustibility.” At precisely 12:13 A.M., George J. Myler—a night watchman at the Western Indiana railroad crossing—spotted flames shooting from the Castle’s roof. Before he could turn in an alarm, a series of explosions rocked the building, blowing out the windows of Fred Barton’s ground-floor candy shop. By the time the first engines arrived, the fire was already out of control.
A half hour later the roof collapsed, taking down part of the building’s rear wall. Under the direction of Chief Kenyon, the firefighters managed to keep the conflagration from spreading to the flat frame houses in the rear. Nevertheless, by the time the blaze was extinguished, at around one-thirty A.M., much of the Castle had been consumed.
Though the ground-floor shops sustained only minimal damage, the two upper stories were completely gutted. Altogether the losses amounted to approximately $25,000. The “murder museum” was a blackened shell, and A. M. Clark—former cop and would-be impresario—was out of show business for good.
Others, however, had better luck in exploiting the public’s obsession with Holmes. In Philadelphia, for example, C. A. Bradenburgh—whose Dime Museum on Ninth and Arch streets specialized in such topflight attractions as “The Fat Ladies’ Wood-Sawing Contest,” “Professor Catulli’s Naiads of the Phosphorescent Fountain,” and “Count Ivan Orloff, The Living Transparent Man”—drew in large crowds during the summer months by converting his establishment into a “Holmes Museum.” Included in the exhibit were a scale-model replica of the Castle, phrenological charts illustrating the archfiend’s cranial abnormalities, and a human skull whose measurements were purportedly identical to those of Benjamin Pitezel.
Depraved Page 29
