After rehearsing the technical details of the charge, Graham declared that, while it was within the jury’s power to find one of four verdicts—manslaughter, murder in the second degree, murder in the first degree, or acquittal—there was, in reality, only “one verdict you will be able to find. Either this man in the dock willfully, deliberately, and premeditatedly killed Benjamin F. Pitezel, or he did not. If he did not, then of course, he is to be acquitted. But if he did, under the circumstances of the case, the evidence that he has committed it cannot, in my judgment, fall below that of the highest grade known to the law—murder of the first degree.”
Graham then launched into a detailed account of the crime, beginning with the discovery of Pitezel’s burned and blackened body. He described the exhumation of the corpse, the payment of the insurance policy, the division of the spoils between Holmes and Jeptha Howe. But greed, he asserted, was not Holmes’s only motive for murdering his faithful accomplice. The alcoholic Pitezel, with his drink-loosened tongue and intimate knowledge of Holmes’s many crimes, had become an active danger to his longtime employer.
Next, Graham told of Holmes’s fateful encounter with Marion Hedgepeth, of the double cross that provoked the latter into betraying the insurance scheme to the police, and of Holmes’s devious movements through the Midwest and up into Canada with the helpless Pitezel family in his power and the Pinkertons at his heels.
“This man had a great job on his hands,” Graham said to the jury, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “He moved these people in three detachments. In one, he had himself and Georgiana Yoke, the beguiled woman he calls his wife. In another, he had Mrs. Pitezel, Dessie, and the baby. And in still another, he had Alice, Nellie, and Howard. He moved these three detachments separately, without any member of one encountering any member of the others. What a general! I am not surprised that this man undertakes to defend himself. I have no doubt that he will do it better than any lawyer that could be found. A man who could conduct three detachments and keep each one ignorant of the others is a general indeed.”
For the most part, this story was familiar to the jurors, all of whom had admitted under questioning that they had kept up with the case in the newspapers. But Graham elicited some shocked reactions—and brought blushes to the cheeks of the ladies in the house—when he insinuated that, during the night they had spent in Philadelphia at Adella Alcorn’s rooming house, Holmes had violated the innocence of Alice Pitezel.
“This man took Alice Pitezel, a fifteen-year-old girl, to 1905 North Eleventh Street,” Graham said harshly, aiming an accusatory finger at Holmes, “and represented her as his sister, and they were given adjoining rooms. His sister! His sister! I will show you that he occupied the same room with that little girl at 1905 North Eleventh Street!”
Holmes—whose expression up to this point had been as blank as the court stenographer’s—started at this charge and half-rose from his chair, as though he were about to raise an outraged objection. After a moment, however, he seemed to think better of it, settled back in his seat, and returned to taking notes.
Graham caused another sensation a bit later when he recounted Holmes’s failed attempt to obliterate the rest of the Pitezel family with a bottle of nitroglycerin—a part of the story that had never been made public before.
“Holmes asked Mrs. Pitezel to handle an explosive that was sufficient to blow up a whole row of houses,” Graham said, “in the hope that it might explode while she had it in her possession and kill her and the two children left to her. But no, she was not to die then and is living yet. Can it be that it was a providential preservation, in order that the links might be brought together and this man receive the punishment he deserves? Mrs. Pitezel, though a wreck of what she was, is still living and able to tell her story, as she will in a very short while tell you the whole pitiable story from beginning to end.”
Graham concluded as he had begun, by repeating that “there is only one grade of guilt applicable to this crime, and that is murder in the first degree—the punishment for which is death.”
It was almost four forty-five P.M. by the time the district attorney was finished. Approaching the bench, he held a brief consultation with Judge Arnold, who then adjourned court until ten the next morning. The bailiffs stepped to the dock to conduct the defendant from the room.
“With that,” wrote the correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, “Holmes arose from his chair, and the last sensation of a day replete with extraordinary incidents occurred.”
Speaking in a voice “vibrating with emotions,” Holmes addressed the judge. “May it please Your Honor,” he began, “I am forced to ask that certain privileges be accorded me in prison. They are not very extensive privileges.” His cell, he explained, lacked sufficient light for him to work at night. Therefore, he would require a lamp, as well as “paper and writing materials,” so “that I may be enabled to prepare my case.”
Then, looking defiantly at the district attorney, he demanded that he be permitted “to interview a certain party—my wife!”
“Which wife?” Graham retorted.
Holmes drew himself up to his full height. “You well know whom I mean, Mr. Graham,” he said indignantly.
“I don’t know. I know you have a wife in New Hampshire and another in Wilmette, Illinois, and then there is a Miss Yoke in this city.”
“That there shall be no mistake,” Holmes said bitterly, “I mean the woman you insultingly call Miss Yoke. Can I send word to her? I would like to see her.”
“She won’t see you. You had the opportunity of seeing her in my office, but she shunned you.”
“I never had! I say that I was legally married to this woman two years ago, and there has been no separation except that brought about by you.”
“It is only her own choice,” Graham said with a shrug. “It is a matter of indifference to me whether she sees you or not. But she has declined to see you.”
“At least allow me to write and ask her, so that she may answer and I can read in her own handwriting that she doesn’t want to see me.”
“She told you so to your face,” Graham said flatly. “In my presence.”
“I beg to differ from you, sir,” Holmes said, his face flushing with anger.
Here, Judge Arnold spoke up: “Mr. Holmes, you will be allowed to write a letter to her and one of the court officers will take it to her, and if there is an answer to it, he will bring it to you.”
“I do not want it to be taken by any officer who is in any way connected with the district attorney,” Holmes answered.
Now it was the judge’s turn to grow angry. “Well, you can’t get that. You can’t have everything. You can’t have the world. We have sworn officers of the court here. All you have to do is write her a letter and it will be taken to her by an officer.”
Holmes directed an incensed look at Graham. “Will you answer me a direct question? Have you or have you not intercepted letters from me to her since last July? Haven’t you done everything in your power to keep us apart? Answer yes or no.”
“I don’t know what right you have to address interrogations to me,” Graham said huffily. “But I will say that I never addressed half a dozen words to her in my life!”
“Mr. Holmes,” Judge Arnold interposed. “These are mere idle suspicions. You may write your letter. It will be taken by a court officer and no one but she shall see it.”
“And,” added the district attorney, “I will have her in court tomorrow morning, besides.”
“I will see,” concluded the judge, “that you get light and writing materials.”
“I thank you, sir, for the privilege,” said Holmes, bowing.
Judge Arnold brought down his gavel and adjourned court for the day.
Holmes’s impassioned insistence that he and Georgiana had legally been wed struck many observers as genuine—the outraged response of a man whose wife’s virtue had been called into question. But others, better versed in the law, saw a different—and far less galla
nt—motive for his indignant display.
Establishing the legitimacy of his marriage was a matter, not of honor, but of urgent self-interest to Holmes, who knew perfectly well that a wife cannot testify against her husband without his consent.
47
Holmes was on the aggressive. It hardly seemed that
he was a defendant… . He was an orator, a prince at
repartee, a lawyer, and a man fighting for his life
all combined.
—Philadelphia Inquirer, October 30, 1895
The spectator gallery—a big wooden balcony comprising about five hundred seats—was entirely vacant on Tuesday. The announcement that only duly authorized individuals would be permitted access to the trial had kept the curious throngs away.
But if the gallery was empty, the lower part of the courtroom was overflowing. No one could recall a case in which an accused murderer had defended his own life in a trial, and the unprecedented spectacle had attracted a large legal crowd, from law students toting their distinctive green bags to such eminent attorneys as A. S. L. Shields, Joseph H. Shakespeare, Col. Wendell P. Bowman, and Mrs. Carrie Kilgore, the only female member of the Philadelphia bar.
A few prominent citizens had also exerted their influence to secure admission, among them Sheriff Clement and Select Councilman Bringhurst. Before the day was over, State Senator Becker also put in an appearance, admitting that “for once, curiosity had dragged him from his usual business.”
Shortly before ten, the prisoner entered the courtroom through the entrance usually reserved for lawyers. Stepping briskly to the dock—which had been moved closer to the witness stand and directly in front of the jury box—he tossed his coat over the railing and took his seat.
Holmes had gotten only an hour of sleep. He had spent the rest of the night preparing his case and looked even more drawn than he had the day before. As soon as the proceedings began, however, he “took hold of his case with a vigor that was remarkable” (as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported). “In some points, the keenest lawyer could not have beaten him in his thrusts and parries. At times, Holmes would turn his volleys on the District Attorney and would assail him with darts that were covered in venom.”
The sniping between Holmes and Graham began even before the first witness was questioned. Rising in the dock and addressing Judge Arnold, Holmes humbly requested that he be permitted “certain privileges or favors, even in addition to those so kindly granted me last night.” The first was that he be provided with “drawings of the Callowhill Street house, showing all three floors and the stairway.”
“We have plans of the whole house,” said District Attorney Graham, “and you may have use of them at the proper time.”
“Very well,” Holmes continued. “I would also ask that a small quantity of this deadly liquid, which the district attorney has so boldly charged me with intending to use to exterminate the balance of the Pitezel family, be submitted to analysis, and if this is impossible, then a sample be turned over to someone whom I will furnish for that purpose. This is absolutely necessary, if Your Honor please, because the liquid in question is comparatively harmless. While it contains nitroglycerin, it is the commercial form of that preparation that is found in nearly every drugstore, and it could only do harm by being ignited, and even then to a limited extent.”
“May I ask what deadly drug you refer to?” Graham said, assuming a baffled look. “I am at a loss to understand the allusion.”
“In your address to the jury,” Holmes replied, his voice quivering with resentment, “you charged me with using this deadly drug and intimated that you had a small quantity in your possession.”
“Do you mean what I referred to as left in the house at Burlington, which you requested Mrs. Pitezel to carry from one part of the building to another?”
“That is what I mean.”
Graham gave a little shrug. “That has never come into my possession, and I am unable to have it analyzed or give you any portion of it.”
“Still, you were able to state it plainly,” Holmes shot back.
“I will prove what I said,” Graham replied coldly. “Your own statement said it was nitroglycerin.”
“I do not deny that at all.” Holmes glanced at the judge. “Then the only other thing I can ask here is that I be furnished with some recent work on toxicology and medico-jurisprudence.”
Judge Arnold gazed curiously at Holmes. “Are you a physician?”
For a moment, Holmes seemed slightly taken aback, as though startled that the judge would be ignorant of such a well-publicized fact. “Why, yes, sir. And at present I have no one to furnish me with those things which are of vital importance to me.”
“Perhaps Mr. Shoemaker or Mr. Rotan can get them for you, as we will give you the privilege of consulting these gentlemen,” the judge replied.
Holmes nodded graciously toward the bench. “Very well. That will answer my purposes.”
With these preliminaries disposed of, the examination of the first witness—the Pitezels’ eldest daughter, Dessie—got under way.
Self-possessed and strikingly pretty in a dark gray dress, the seventeen-year-old girl occupied the stand for only a few minutes. Her testimony was a perfunctory matter of identifying a photographic portrait of her father. Graham, however, electrified the courtroom when—after showing the picture to the girl—he whirled around and held it directly in front of Holmes’s eyes.
“Do you wish to look at it, sir?” he asked sternly.
As one eyewitness wrote, “it was a moment of drama—the accused murderer suddenly brought face-to-face with the counterpart presentment of his victim in the presence of his accusers.”
But if Graham had hoped to unsettle Holmes, he was disappointed. The prisoner cast a brief, unblinking glance at the photograph, then turned and put a few simple questions to Dessie, who answered curtly before stepping down.
It was not until a short time later, when Eugene Smith took the stand, that Holmes truly went on the offensive. Under Graham’s questioning, Smith—the carpenter and amateur inventor who had discovered Pitezel’s body—reviewed his part in the affair, beginning with the day he had brought his model saw-set to “B. F. Perry’s” patent shop on Callowhill Street and concluding with his trip to potter’s field to help identify the corpse.
For the most part, Smith appeared self-assured on the stand. He betrayed his essential timidity, however, when he confessed that he had recognized Holmes on the ride to the graveyard but had failed to alert the authorities because he was afraid “to say anything.” Though Holmes was under indictment only for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, the spirits of Alice, Nellie, and Howard were a hovering presence throughout the trial; more than one observer, hearing Smith’s testimony, was left with the rueful conclusion that the carpenter’s diffidence had contributed, however unwittingly, to the children’s deaths. Had Smith only possessed the confidence to speak up on that day, Holmes’s part in the fraud would have been exposed right away, and the subsequent tragedy averted.
Taking up his cross-examination, Holmes quickly scored a minor point by compelling Smith to retract one of his statements. The carpenter had testified that, on his second visit to the patent dealer’s, he had seen Holmes enter the office, then proceed upstairs after gesturing for “Perry” to follow. Standing in the dock, his pencil leveled accusingly at the witness, Holmes forced Smith to admit that, though he had seen the two men enter the stairwell, he had not actually observed them ascend to the second story.
However, since the floor plans made it clear that the stairway led nowhere else, this admission struck most of the audience as far less of a coup than Holmes’s self-satisfied smile suggested.
As for the rest of the testimony, Holmes did his best to shake up the witness, but Smith stuck to his original statements. At one point—clearly hoping to bolster his contention that Pitezel had committed suicide—Holmes tried to get Smith to say that the patent dealer had appeared despondent. Smith, however, woul
d have none of it: “It did not seem to me he had any care or trouble that I noticed.”
The cross-examination ended with a heated exchange between Holmes and the district attorney. Under direct examination, Smith had testified that, after Dr. Mattern had failed to find the identifying marks on Pitezel’s exhumed corpse, Holmes had “removed his coat, put on the doctor’s gloves, pulled out a lancet, and went to work on the body.” When Holmes began to harp on a seemingly insignificant detail—whether he had put on the rubber gloves before or after Mattern had gone off to wash his hands—Graham voiced an angry objection.
“That is not material,” he exclaimed. “The prisoner has been allowed every latitude, but I object to these questions unless he tells what he means to show.”
Holmes jabbed his pencil in Graham’s direction. “I want to protest against the bloodthirsty way in which the district attorney and this witness are inclined to make it appear that I rushed to mutilate the dead body of my friend.”
“Nobody has intimated that,” interposed the judge.
“There was no bloodthirstiness on your part,” said Graham, then added darkly, “Not at this time.”
“No,” Holmes retorted, “but you have been bloodthirsty at other times.”
Following Smith’s dismissal, Graham called the first of his medical witnesses, Dr. William Scott, the pharmacist who had been summoned to 1316 Callowhill Street to examine Pitezel’s corpse. Before the district attorney could pose his first question, however, Holmes stood up and motioned that all the other witnesses be excluded from the room during Scott’s testimony.
“I do not think it is just to my side of the case,” he declared, “that these other witnesses should sit here and receive the full benefit of all the questions that have been asked, giving them time to consider them and arrange their answers.”
“I will not agree to that,” Graham replied.
“I am at a loss to understand,” Holmes said with heavy sarcasm, “whether you make the rulings or whether the honorable judge does.”
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