“Face to face with the woman whose husband he is accused of murdering, whose children he is known to have separated from their mother, whether or not he was guilty of ending their lives; face to face with the woman who—if the theory of the prosecution is correct—will someday stand before him in the dread presence of a Higher Tribunal and join her innocent little ones in the awful denunciation, ‘Thou art the man!’ the prisoner Holmes sat calm and indifferent.”
After glancing at Carrie for a moment, Holmes nonchalantly resumed his writing, while Graham approached the stand.
Carrie’s testimony lasted several hours. Throughout that time, her voice was so choked and feeble that the court crier had to stand beside the box and repeat her answers. At various points she grew so faint that she had to be revived with smelling salts, administered by her hovering nurse. Several times during the afternoon, her physician, Dr. Thomas J. Morton, stopped by the courtroom to see how she was bearing up.
Meanwhile, Holmes was “the picture of busy contentment. He took notes of the proceedings. He occasionally read out of a book. At times, he chatted gaily with his attorneys.” He seemed entirely indifferent to the heartrending spectacle taking place a few yards in front of him—even when virtually every other eye in the courtroom was moist with pitying tears.
Guided by the district attorney, the shattered woman told of her husband’s move to Philadelphia to carry out the insurance fraud; of the newspaper notice of “B. F. Perry’s” death; of Holmes’s sudden appearance in St. Louis; of Alice’s trip to identify the corpse; and of the settlement of the policy, whose proceeds immediately disappeared into the pockets of Holmes and Jeptha Howe.
Then in a broken, barely audible voice, punctuated by anguished sobs, she described how Holmes had taken away Alice, Nellie, and Howard, then kept her moving from city to city until—half-crazed with confusion and worry—she had found herself in the hands of the Boston police.
It was a familiar tale, whose details had been repeated endlessly in the press. But it gained renewed—and unbearably tragic—force coming directly from the lips of the tormented wife and mother.
Graham—who clearly regarded Mrs. Pitezel as his trump card—handled the examination so skillfully that the evening headlines described the session as a “field day for the Commonwealth.” At one point, he stepped over to the prosecutor’s table, picked up something in each hand, then returned to the witness box and held out the evidence for Carrie’s inspection—two small, slightly faded pieces of cloth.
At a glance, they appeared to be unremarkable—as nondescript as dust rags. But there was nothing ordinary about them.
Many people, knowing where those scraps had come from, would have refused to lay a finger on them. Few could have held them in their hands, as Graham was doing, without feeling a tremor of unease—even dread.
They were swatches of Benjamin Pitezel’s grave clothes, removed from his moldering body during a second exhumation conducted in early September.
“Mrs. Pitezel,” Graham said somberly. “I show you portions of two garments taken from a corpse buried in potter’s field, this city, but since laundered. Do you recognize the material?”
Carrie’s bottom lip shook violently and she began to weep into her handkerchief. It took a few moments before she regained enough control to speak again.
“That blue,” she rasped. “It’s the same color as my husband’s trousers when I last saw him—when he left St. Louis.” She pointed her quivering finger at Graham’s other hand. “And that checked goods. I made him a shut out of goods just like that.”
It was a powerfully affecting moment, which produced its desired effect: several of the jury members seemed to be fighting back tears, and one or two cast openly baleful looks at the prisoner.
A few minutes later, Graham “struck to the heart” of every spectator in the room when he held up some of the letters that her homesick children had written but Holmes had never mailed.
“Mrs. Pitezel,” Graham said, “I wish to show you these letters at this time solely for the purpose of identifying the handwriting. Look at them and hand them back to me.” Graham passed her one of the letters, then asked, “Whose handwriting is that?”
Carrie’s hands trembled as she examined the sheet. “Oh, my God, Mr. Graham. That’s—” She could not finish the sentence. Overwhelmed with grief, she broke into racking sobs. It was not until her nurse hastened to her side and administered several spoonfuls of nerve medicine that Carrie was able to identify the handwriting as Alice’s.
But the most harrowing moment was yet to come. Standing near the witness box, Graham asked Carrie if she had seen her husband since he had left St. Louis for Philadelphia in the summer of 1894.
“I have never seen my husband since the twenty-ninth of July,” she answered softly.
“Have you seen or heard from Alice, Nellie, or Howard since this man got possession of them and took them away from you?”
Carrie dabbed at her eyes before replying. “No, sir. I have not heard from them.”
“And have you not seen them since?”
At that moment, Rotan raised a strenuous objection to this line of questioning, insisting that it was incompetent, irrelevant, and would hopelessly prejudice the jurors against his client.
Judge Arnold, however, ruled the testimony admissible, and Graham repeated his question.
“Have you seen your children since?”
“I saw them in Toronto,” Carrie answered in a broken voice. “In the morgue. Side by side.”
The audience, straining to hear every word, had remained utterly silent during her reply. All at once, cries broke out throughout the courtroom, jury members wept openly, and Judge Arnold himself dug under his robe for his pocket handkerchief and began to pat his eyes.
Rotan objected again, though even he seemed shaken: “I cannot see what motive there is to bringing in these children.” But his voice was uncharacteristically weak.
Graham’s voice, by contrast, rang with indignation. “Was there not a motive for him to take Alice and put her out of the way—the girl that he sent to identify the father, and who knew that it was her father who was buried in the potter’s field? Was there not a motive for him to kill that child? How can we tell but what those children together had talked over what had taken place? Was there not a motive for him to have destroyed the lives of all three of them?”
Swiveling, Graham pointed an accusing finger toward the prisoner’s dock, where Holmes—his face registering nothing but blithe indifference—continued to scribble notes on his pad. Observing him through their tears, more than one of the spectators shook their heads in bewilderment and wondered yet again what manner of being he was.
One man, at least, believed he had an answer. That evening, during dinner recess, the correspondent for The New York World managed to secure an exclusive interview with the world-famous criminal.
Passing down a flight of stone steps to the basement of the courthouse, then through a long, dim tunnel lined with steel-barred cells, the reporter reached the apartment where Holmes took his meals and conferred with his lawyers during recesses.
The newsman found Holmes relaxed on a comfortable leather lounge with his feet propped on a table. He was entertaining a visitor, a gentleman named McGarge—“a distinguished citizen of Philadelphia”—who was there purely out of curiosity. When the newsman entered, McGarge had just asked Holmes about the rigors of prison life.
Holmes conceded that the authorities had treated him with every consideration. Still, he lamented, he found his existence terribly “dull and wearying,” particularly because of its unrelenting solitude. “If only I had company,” he sighed. “Any living thing—even a bird or a mouse. Or a spider!”
Suddenly, Holmes addressed the guards posted outside his cell. “I fooled you boys once,” he said with a low chuckle. “I had a live chicken in my cell, and I had it to keep me company for a whole month.”
As the guards made incredulous noises, Holmes
turned back to his visitors and proceeded to tell a remarkable tale. “You see, I was allowed to have food brought into the prison if I could pay for it, and I had some eggs that were not cooked. I saved one, and I hatched it.”
Mr. McGarge offered a gentle expression of skepticism.
“It’s true,” Holmes insisted. “I wrapped the egg up in a coat and placed it beside the radiator, and it was born, all right. You cannot imagine the joy and satisfaction of bringing a life safely into the world to keep me company in that cell. That little chicken loved me, and I took care of it. I hid it away when the guards came around, and I had it a whole month. Then”—his voice suddenly grew husky with emotion—“then it died, as all the things we love die in the world.”
As the two visitors returned to the courtroom a short while later, the newsman rendered his opinion that Holmes was a remarkable example of a “double personality.” “It is most interesting as a study in human nature,” he remarked, “to see the man who butchered and broiled little children hatching out a chicken and grieving over its death with undoubted sincerity.”
Mr. McGarge, however, took a somewhat more cynical view of the matter, observing wryly that, sometime after hatching the egg, “Holmes doubtless had the chicken’s life insured.”
49
“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:
“I deeply sympathize.”
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size.
Holding his pocket handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
—Lewis Carroll, “The Walrus and the Carpenter”
Public interest in the Holmes case continued to run high—particularly in Philadelphia, where the newspapers treated the trial as the greatest spectacle the city had witnessed since the Centennial of ’76. On Thursday morning, October 31, the biggest crowd yet showed up at City Hall, pressing for admission. In spite of the police guards posted outside the courtroom, a surprising number of unauthorized individuals managed to wangle their way in—most of them (so the Inquirer’s correspondent noted) pretty young women whose only credentials were their “fetching smiles” and “fresh blue eyes.”
The crowd was hoping for a show, and Holmes gave it to them. By the end of the day, however, the spectators were split over what they had seen. Some were convinced that it had been Holmes’s most remarkable performance.
Others felt sure that, for once, he hadn’t been acting at all.
Georgiana Yoke’s long-awaited appearance was the occasion for Holmes’s dramatic display. Before she could testify, however, Graham had to resolve the issue of her marital status. To that end, he first recalled William E. Gary, who had paid a visit to Holmes’s residence in Wilmette as part of the insurance investigation.
“Whom did you see there?” asked Graham.
“Mrs. H. H. Holmes,” answered Gary.
Graham handed him a photograph and asked him to identify it. It was a picture of Myrta Holmes.
Gary studied it for a moment before declaring, “That is Mrs. H. H. Holmes.”
Gary went on to explain that, shortly after seeing Myrta, he had interviewed Holmes in Moyamensing. “I said to Mr. Holmes that I had called at Wilmette and had met his wife and found her a very bright and intelligent woman. He stated that she was a very intelligent woman. As I concluded my interview, Mr. Holmes requested me to wait a moment, stating that he wanted to write a letter to his wife if I could wait. I assented, and he retired to a stool and wrote a communication which he asked me to mail to Mrs. H. H. Holmes in Wilmette.”
As it happened, Gary had taken the precaution of copying the letter before sending it off. After asking Gary to identify his copy, Graham offered it in evidence.
The letter read as follows:
Moyamensing Prison
Dear Mamma:
It is Thanksgiving Day. It finds me in my cell with the feeling strong upon me that I have nothing to be thankful for, not even my life. I took my chances and failed, and my principal regrets are the suffering and disgrace upon you and all others. I do not think I have to ask you to disbelieve the murder charges…. I expect a two years’ sentence, but if I were free to-day I should never live again as in the past, either with you or anyone else, as I will never run the chances of degrading any woman further…. In a little time I will write you about the property; only one-half page letters are allowed. Direct care of the superintendent if you wish to write.
H.
Graham then proceeded to read two more letters—the ones Holmes had written in September 1894 to Edwin Cass, head of Fidelity’s Chicago office. In them, Holmes had repeatedly alluded to Myrta as “my wife.”
Graham was still reading these letters aloud when the door behind the jury box opened and a young woman slipped into the room. Every head in the spectator section seemed to swivel at once in the direction of the captivating figure dressed in a stylish black gown, a black, broad-brimmed hat, trimmed with velvet, and harmonizing gloves.
Holmes looked over at her, too, and a peculiar, stricken expression passed over his face.
Just then, Graham finished reading the letters. Over Lawyer Rotan’s objections, Judge Arnold announced his intention to allow Georgiana’s testimony.
“I do not know of any stronger evidence that could be brought into court,” said the judge, “than this testimony of the man against himself. He has, in his own declaration, made a statement of his marriage and of his wife in Wilmette. It is for the jury to say whether or not he was married to the lady at Wilmette, in which case the second marriage is absolutely void and null and does not require a divorce to make it so. There being testimony of a former marriage at the time he married this lady, she is entitled to testify against him.”
With that, Georgiana Yoke stepped onto the stand, while the spectators sat transfixed by her charms. “Hers,” wrote the Inquirer’s man, “was a face and form well calculated to win sympathy. Slender, delicate, refined, she looked the picture of tender innocence. Her cheeks were flushed, but the rosy tint was becoming—it well set off the head of flaxen hair. Her dainty lips twitched nervously. Her dreamy eyes were downcast. Not once were they turned toward the prisoner. Not for a glance were they Lifted that way.”
Suddenly, however, the crowd was distracted from its contemplation of this entrancing figure. Something extraordinary was going on in the prisoner’s dock.
H. H. Holmes—“Holmes the brilliant, Holmes the fearless, the man who had sat without a tremor while Mrs. Pitezel was telling her horrible story, this being so apparently devoid of emotion”—was weeping uncontrollably.
The remarkable scene was described in the next morning’s paper:
For the first time since the trial began, Holmes’s nerve seemed to have deserted him. The moment Miss Yoke ascended to the stand, his eyes filled with tears, and then he dropped his head upon his arm, which lay on the railing of the dock, and gave way to sobs. Two or three very audible moans escaped his lips, and it was several minutes before he could regain his composure.
The sight of this man, who had stood the scorching arraignment of the district attorney and the pitifully tearful tales of the widow whose husband and children he is accused of murdering, in such an open and unreserved demonstration of grief was indeed a surprise to all who saw it. Tears were coursing down the prisoner’s cheeks and his handkerchief was at his face.
What horror and pathos had failed to do, a woman’s face had done.
Afterward, some held to the opinion that the whole spectacle was a sham—that Holmes had been acting on the advice of his attorneys, who had urged him to display a bit of human emotion after his shockingly indifferent response to Mrs. Pitezel.
Others, however, contended that the outburst could not possibly have been faked. “The emotion,” insisted one reporter, “could scarcely be assumed. The heaving chest, the panting lips, were too real for that. What memories the young woman’s appearance called up to him, none could tell. Was it love—or was it fear—that moved the
man?”
Whatever the case, Holmes’s reaction brought murmurs of amazement from many in the audience. Judge Arnold banged for order, and Graham began his questioning, while Holmes dried up his tears, swallowed his sobs, and looked on glumly.
During Graham’s examination, Georgiana recounted her experiences with Holmes. She gave particular attention to his odd behavior on the afternoon of September 2, 1894—the day of Pitezel’s death—when he had returned, flushed and breathless, from his early-morning outing and insisted that they leave Philadelphia at once.
By that point in Georgiana’s testimony, Holmes had regained enough self-composure to hold an urgent, whispered conference with his attorneys.
As soon as Graham had completed his questioning, Lawyer Rotan stood up and informed the judge that the defendant insisted on cross-examining the witness himself. Meeting with no objection, Holmes got slowly to his feet and leaned his hands on the dock rail.
For a moment, he seemed in danger of giving way to his tears again. He gulped hard and raised his handkerchief to his eyes. It was an affecting sight—though its authenticity was somewhat undermined by a remark he had let slip to his attorneys. As Holmes was rising from his seat, a newspaperman sitting close to the dock overheard him mutter, “I will now let loose the fount of emotion.”
Though Holmes did his best to touch Georgiana’s heart—appealing to her memories of their shared days of travel—the young woman remained utterly aloof. She refused to meet his gaze and replied to his queries in a tone of cool formality. The cross-examination turned out to be a brief and undramatic affair, notable only for the theatrical quavering of Holmes’s voice, as though he were struggling at every moment to keep his emotions at bay.
Georgiana was succeeded on the stand by Detective Frank Geyer. The audience buzzed with excitement, expecting a dramatic, firsthand recitation of his celebrated hunt for the Pitezel children. They were in for a disappointment.
Depraved Page 34
