“Sometimes you and the district attorney settle matters without troubling me,” interjected Judge Arnold, sounding slightly weary of the constant sniping between the two men. “If you ask me to exclude all the witnesses, the request will be denied. But witnesses pertaining to this part of the case—what took place at number 1316 Callowhill Street and at the exhumation of the body at the potter’s field—will be directed to retire.”
At a gesture from Graham, Assistant DA Thomas Barlow picked up a sheet of paper and read off the names of the relevant witnesses, who filed from the courtroom.
Holmes, however, was still unsatisfied and insisted on seeing the roster: “Not having a list of the witnesses, I am at a loss to know whether all have retired.”
“I wish I could get the prisoner to understand that everybody is acting honestly in this case,” Graham said impatiently.
Holmes ignored the remark. “Is Jeptha Howe here?” he demanded.
“Mr. Howe is in St. Louis,” Graham replied, “but he may be here later.”
“And in regard to my wife?”
“Which one?” blurted Graham.
Holmes’s face flushed with anger. “The one whom you designate as Miss Yoke, thereby casting a slur upon her as well as myself.”
“That is how she wants to be designated herself,” Graham retorted. “The man who laid the foundation of the slur is the man who married her with two other wives living.”
“I shall challenge you to prove that,” said Holmes, his voice rising.
“That we shall do,” Graham said with a thin smile.
Holmes took a moment to collect himself. When he spoke again, his voice had returned to its normal volume, though it trembled slightly. “I ask if my wife is to be a witness and ask her to be excluded.”
“If you are speaking of Miss Yoke—and that is the name she gave me, for she has the right to say what name she prefers,” Graham answered, “if you mean Miss Yoke, I decline to inform you whether she will be examined as a witness or not. But she is not in the courtroom, if that is a matter of any satisfaction to you.”
Expressing an ironic word of gratitude to Graham, Holmes reseated himself, and the examination of Dr. Scott proceeded.
Guided by Graham, the druggist described the condition both of the victim’s body and the second-floor bedroom in which it lay. It was clear the lawyer wanted Dr. Scott’s testimony to show that Pitezel’s death could not have been caused by either chemical explosion or suicide.
Though he had gone to the house “expecting to find a man blown to death,” Scott declared that the evidence was not consistent with such an accident. A shattered chemical bottle was near the body, but its fragments, instead of being “scattered all over the room,” were lying inside the unbroken base. “It looked for all the world,” Scott explained, “as though the bottle had been taken with force and crushed on the floor and the pieces fell inside of it.” Similarly, the victim’s corncob pipe was resting neatly beside the dead man’s face, as though it had deliberately “been placed there.”
The cadaver itself, though in a state of dreadful putrefaction, looked surprisingly serene. “The body laid very peaceful, quiet,” Scott stated, “as though he had fallen into a sleep and life had passed away from him without a struggle.”
Scott, who had attended the postmortem, went on to describe the findings, all of which—the drained heart, empty bladder, paralyzed sphincter, and congested, chloroform-odored lungs—pointed to one conclusion: “sudden death through chloroform poisoning.” The examiners had also found a quantity of the chemical in the victim’s stomach, though they decided that it had been “introduced there after death” since the organ showed no “inflammation or congestion, which would have been the result if chloroform had been taken in life.”
“Could a person taking chloroform,” Graham inquired, “have arranged his body as this body was found.”
Scott’s answer was an emphatic “No, sir.”
“That could not be?”
“Impossible,” Scott insisted.
“Why?”
“If taken by mouth, it would produce spasms—it would not cause death from shock immediately. If taken by inhalation, he would lose consciousness and not be able to govern his own willpower.”
According to Holmes’s statement of December 26, 1894, Pitezel had committed suicide on the third floor of the Callowhill Street house. Holmes claimed that he had dragged the corpse to the second-floor bedroom, where he had staged the phony accident. Seeking to refute this claim, Graham questioned Scott closely about the bodily contents involuntarily discharged by the victim at the moment of death.
The druggist testified that the dead man’s bowels and bladder had been been emptied in the second-floor bedroom. In addition, a stream of noisome red fluid had “issued from his mouth and run onto the floor, filling the grain of the board.” By contrast, the third floor contained no trace of any discharge.
Though this talk of excreta was so graphic that it made several jurors visibly uncomfortable, it appeared to have a very different effect on Holmes. Announcing that he had “not eaten anything today,” he respectfully requested a lunch recess. Judge Arnold granted the motion, adjourning the court for an hour.
When the trial resumed at two-thirty, Holmes launched into a brisk cross-examination of Scott. He handled himself so professionally that even Judge Arnold nodded in approval at several points. Nevertheless, Holmes failed to elicit a single response that (as the Chicago Tribune’s writer put it) “was in the slightest degree in his favor.”
By the time the next witness was called—the coroner’s physician Dr. William K. Mattern—the pressure on Holmes was beginning to tell. Pleading exhaustion, he begged for a day’s continuance; he did “not feel up to the strain” of cross-examining another major witness. But Graham would not agree to this motion and proceeded with his questioning of Mattern, whose testimony in regard to the autopsy findings confirmed Dr. Scott’s.
When Holmes took over, it quickly became clear that—for all his shrewdness and skill—he had reached the limits of his legal abilities. He hammered away at Mattern in a desperate effort to find some vulnerable point in the physician’s testimony. But everyone in the room could see that Holmes was flailing.
Nearly two hours into the cross-examination, Holmes began dwelling on such a small, insignificant detail—the precise size of the lancet he had used to excise Pitezel’s neck mole during the postmortem at potter’s field—that Graham could no longer contain his impatience. Rising, he angrily protested that Holmes was wasting time on irrelevancies. Judge Arnold concurred, and Holmes, looking chagrined, brought the cross-examination to a hasty end.
By the time Graham finished examining the next witness—Dr. Henry Leffman, professor of toxicology at the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and one of the country’s leading analytic chemists—Holmes seemed like a defeated man. Leffman acknowledged that people had been known to kill themselves with chloroform. But he insisted that it would be impossible “for a man to administer chloroform to himself and then compose himself” in the peaceful attitude in which Pitezel’s corpse had been found.
“Why?” asked Graham.
“No one is aware of the time when consciousness ceases,” Leffman explained. “Judging from my own experience, I have been four times under the influence of anesthetics. There is a condition of confusion before true insensibility comes on, and it would be, I think, impossible for anyone to arrange his body in a perfectly composed condition like that entirely by his own act.”
In cross-examining the witness, Holmes limited himself to a few dispirited questions. To the onlookers, he seemed like a different man from the one he had been in the morning, when he had argued and fought—according to one correspondent—with “the desperation of a cornered hyena.” Now, wrote this reporter, “the hyena was almost a lamb.”
When Judge Arnold announced his intention to continue the proceedings following a one-hour dinner recess, Holmes begged him to
reconsider. “It is utterly impossible for me to attend three sessions without breaking down and becoming sick,” he said plaintively. “I am subject to sick headaches, and I have been suffering with it all day. I think two sessions a day, at least for the next few days, will be sufficient.”
“Well, we will hold a session tonight,” answered the judge. “We’ll look after the matter tomorrow.”
The cavernous room was much emptier when the court reconvened at seven-thirty. Most of the audience had gone home for the night—unaware that the trial, already so full of dramatic turns, was about to take another one.
The evening session started slowly. Graham and his assistant ran late and kept the court waiting. After apologizing for his tardiness, the district attorney called for the next witness, but the crier misunderstood the name, and it took a few moments to straighten the matter out.
During this lull, Holmes suddenly arose and made a sensational announcement:
“Your Honor, partly on account of my physical condition, partly because I have been annoyed unnecessarily by reason of not being expeditious enough in examining witnesses, and partly because of my counsel’s being criticized for allegedly deserting me, I have asked them to come here and consult with me. If they are willing to go on, I would like to know if the Court is willing that they should reenter the case.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Holmes,” Graham scoffed. “Be frank for once. You know whether they are willing to come or not. You have been in consultation with them during the recess.”
Holmes seemed flustered. “Well, yes,” he stammered. “I have asked them to come here.”
At that point—like actors responding to their cues—Rotan and Shoemaker strolled into the courtroom while the remaining audience members broke into an excited buzz. Walking directly to the bench, Rotan—his voice loud enough to be heard over the din—began addressing a long, involved explanation to Judge Arnold, who cut him short with a wave of a hand.
“No apology necessary,” said the judge. “Go on.”
And with that (wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer), “Holmes, the criminal lawyer,” metamorphosed back into “Holmes, the accused criminal.”
The evening provided one final bit of drama during Graham’s examination of Adella Alcorn, the proprietress of the boardinghouse where Holmes and Alice Pitezel had passed the night of September 22, 1894, following the girl’s identification of her father’s corpse. The landlady testified that—after the pair had departed early the next morning—she had gone upstairs to clean their rooms.
“How many beds had been occupied?” Graham asked.
“Two.”
“What did you find, if anything, in these rooms belonging to the prisoner?”
Mrs. Alcorn spoke up clearly. “A nightshirt.”
“And what did you find besides that?”
By this point, it was obvious to everyone in the courtroom that Graham was trying to prove the charge he had made during his opening address: that Holmes had violated the purity of the fifteen-year-old girl. When Rotan raised a vehement objection, Graham rephrased his question:
“Did you find anything else there, without stating what it was?”
Mrs. Alcorn nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“Belonging to the prisoner?”
Mrs. Alcorn shifted in her seat. “It was not there before he came, and I could not tell you who it belonged to, because it was not mine, and no one else had been in the room.”
When Rotan objected again, Graham admitted that there was “some question in my own mind as to whether this is competent, and I do not want to state it in the presence of the jury. If counsel will come around at the side bar, I will tell Your Honor what I propose to prove, and then you can either admit it or reject it.”
As the lawyers approached the bench, the audience—its prurient interest piqued—puzzled over the mystery. Clearly, Mrs. Alcorn had discovered something suspicious, even shocking, in Holmes’s bedroom. In light of her comment that “it was not mine,” some observers speculated that the incriminating item was a female undergarment—one of the “unmentionables” of that Victorian time.
But the world would never learn what she had found. After a brief consultation with the attorneys, Judge Arnold rejected Graham’s offer of proof. A few moments later, Mrs. Alcorn stepped down from the stand, leaving the audience—and the jurors—free to imagine the worst.
48
Never before, it is safe to say, has there been witnessed in any courtroom within this Commonwealth such a scene as was enacted yesterday in the trial of H. H. Holmes. Mrs. Carrie Pitezel was brought face to face with the man who, his accusers say, killed her husband, her two daughters, and her little son in cold blood. The meeting was more than the poor woman could stand. At the sight of several childish letters in the handwriting of her little ones, she broke down completely, and her piteous moans struck to the heart of everyone in the courtroom. Every heart except one.
—Philadelphia Public Ledger, October 31, 1895
The return of Rotan and Shoemaker meant that the trial had lost one of its most entertaining features—Holmes’s spellbinding performance as his own defense attorney. Even so, day three turned out to be the dramatic high point of the proceedings, containing what everyone agreed was the single “most sensational scene yet enacted—a scene that moved many to tears, stirred the emotions of the jurors, and made even the judge and prosecutors wipe their eyes.”
Until that scene took place, however, the day offered few diversions. A succession of witnesses was called to the stand, including O. LaForrest Perry and William E. Gary of the Fidelity Mutual Life Assurance Company. But their businesslike testimony, though important to the Commonwealth’s case, had the spectators stifling yawns.
The audience stirred briefly to life when Orinton M. Hanscom, deputy superintendent of the Boston police, approached the stand. Hanscom was something of a celebrity, having played a key role in the Lizzie Borden case as a detective for the defense. But while he cut a dashing figure, his testimony was as dry as the insurance officials’.
In the meantime, Holmes sat in his waist-high wire enclosure, assiduously taking notes, while a professional phrenologist, John L. Capen, M.D., studied him from a short distance away. Dr. Capen was there as a representative of The New York World, and his analysis of Holmes’s features appeared in the next day’s edition. The wildly sensationalistic tone of this portrait was typical of the treatment Holmes continued to receive in the popular press.
Holmes, according to this specialist, was
a man with a keen but intensely repulsive face: a face shaped like a hatchet, like one of those old-fashioned hatchets…. The shape of the head is unusual, abnormal. The top of the head is flat, except for one sharp bump rising suddenly and sharply. It would be said to mean reverence by the usual phrenologist. But not reverence for human life—at all events, not in this case.
The eyes are very big and wide open. They are blue. Great murderers, like great men in other walks of activity, have blue eyes. There are deep lines under the eyes that come from sleepless nights of troubled thought and helpless rage.
Of the murderer’s mouth not much can be seen, for the hair is as thick as the thickest fur. But one can see that the lips are very thin and the expression so cruel and cold as to be not human.
At first glance, the striking thing about the man is the skull, so abnormally shaped at the back; but it is not so abnormal as the murderer’s ear. That ear—as small as a little girl’s and twisted out of shape, so that the inner part sticks out beyond the outer rim—would stamp the man as a criminal in the opinion of every student of criminology. It is a marvelously small ear, and at the top it is shaped and carved after the fashion in which old sculptors indicated deviltry and vice in their statues of satyrs.
He is made on a very delicate mold. To be a great murderer he needed all his cunning and trickery, for nature gave him neither the physical strength nor the animal brutality needed for violent killing. He has killed his friends, k
illed, cut up, and burned little children, and murdered women whom he pretended to love. But he probably never looked one of them in the face to murder him openly.
At the end of Hanscom’s testimony, Assistant District Attorney Barlow was asked to read the transcript of the statement Holmes had made to the authorities following his arrest in Boston. A trained elocutionist, Barlow got to his feet and began to declaim the confession in a deep, dramatic voice.
He was halfway through the document when the door beside the crier’s desk opened and a trio of dark-clad figures stepped into the courtroom. One was Dessie Pitezel, dressed in the same outfit she had worn the day before on the witness stand. The other was a stout, matronly woman, whose manner quickly made it clear that she was a professional nurse. In between these two stood a frail, deathly pale figure, garbed in funereal black.
Excited whispers ran through the audience. Carrie Pitezel was in the room.
The spectators in the rear craned their necks for a better look, but their view was obstructed by the district attorney, who walked over to have a brief, whispered conversation with the “much-talked-of widow” (as the newspapers called her). A few minutes later, Barlow reached the end of the document, and Graham called Mrs. Carrie Alice Pitezel to the stand.
On that day—Wednesday, October 30, 1895—Carrie was just three months shy of thirty-seven. But tragedy had drained every trace of youth from her face. Indeed, she might have accomplished her purpose without speaking a word, her very appearance seemed such damning proof of Holmes’s villainy.
She was, wrote the correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, “the very picture of human misery. Despair was written in every lineament of her colorless face. Big dark circles marked her eyes, and heavy lines furrowed her cheeks—the indelible evidence of ceaseless sorrow and worry.”
As she settled into her place, Carrie cast a look of the most bitter hatred in the direction of the prisoner’s dock. At that instant, Holmes looked up from his legal pad. The courtroom was as silent as death. In attempting to convey the tension of that moment, the Inquirer reached a new, melodramatic pitch:
Depraved Page 33
