The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  It was the children, however, that he remembered most clearly, and now he told the detectives why.

  Until this point all Geyer knew about the children’s stay in Indianapolis was what he had read in the letters from the tin box. Between October 6 and 8 Alice and Nellie had written at least three letters that Holmes had intercepted. The letters were brief and poorly written, but they offered small bright glimpses into the daily lives of the children and the state of near-captivity in which Holmes held them. “We are all well here,” Nellie wrote on Saturday, October 6. “It is a little warmer to-day. There is so many buggies go by that you can’t hear yourself think. I first wrote you a letter with a crystal pen. . . . It is all glass so I hafto be careful or else it will break, it was only five cents.”

  Alice wrote a letter the same day. She had been away from her mother the longest, and for her the trip had become wearisome and sad. It was Saturday, raining hard. She had a cold and was reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin so much that her eyes had begun to hurt. “And I expect this Sunday will pass away slower than I don’t know what. . . . Why don’t you write to me. I have not got a letter from you since I have been away and it will be three weeks day after tomorrow.”

  On Monday Holmes allowed a letter from Mrs. Pitezel to reach the children, which prompted Alice to write an immediate reply, observing, “It seems as though you are awful homesick.” In this letter, which Holmes never mailed, Alice reported that little Howard was being difficult. “One morning Mr. H. told me to tell him to stay in the next morning that he wanted him and he would come and get him and take him out.” But Howard had not obeyed, and when Holmes came for him, the boy was nowhere to be found. Holmes had gotten angry.

  Despite her sorrow and boredom, Alice found a few cheery moments worth celebrating. “Yesterday we had mashed potatoes, grapes, chicken glass of milk each ice cream each a big sauce dish full awful good too lemon pie cake don’t you think that is pretty good.”

  The fact that the children were so well fed might have comforted Mrs. Pitezel, had she ever received the letter. Not so, however, the story the former hotel manager now told Geyer.

  Each day Ackelow would send his eldest son up to the children’s room to call them for their meals. Often the boy reported back that the children were crying, “evidently heartbroken and homesick to see their mother, or hear from her,” Geyer wrote. A German chambermaid named Caroline Klausmann had tended the children’s room and observed the same wrenching scenes. She had moved to Chicago, Ackelow said. Geyer wrote her name in his notebook.

  “Holmes said that Howard was a very bad boy,” Ackelow recalled, “and that he was trying to place him in some institution, or bind him out to some farmer, as he wanted to get rid of the responsibility of looking after him.”

  Geyer still nurtured a small hope that the children really were alive, as Holmes insisted. Despite his twenty years on the police force, Geyer found it difficult to believe that anyone could kill three children for absolutely no reason. Why had Holmes gone to the trouble and expense of moving the children from city to city, hotel to hotel, if only to kill them? Why had he bought each of them a crystal pen and taken them to the zoo in Cincinnati and made sure they received lemon pie and ice cream?

  Geyer set out for Chicago but felt deep reluctance about leaving Indianapolis—“something seemed to tell me that Howard had never left there alive.” In Chicago he found, to his surprise, that the city’s police department knew nothing about Holmes. He tracked down Caroline Klausmann, who was now working at the Swiss Hotel on Clark Street. When he showed her his photographs of the children, tears welled in her eyes.

  Geyer caught a train to Detroit, the city where Alice had written the last of the letters in the tin box.

  Geyer was getting a feel for his quarry. There was nothing rational about Holmes, but his behavior seemed to follow a pattern. Geyer knew what to look for in Detroit and, with the assistance of another police detective, once again began a patient canvass of hotels and boardinghouses. Though he told his story and showed his photographs a hundred times, he never tired and was always patient and polite. These were his strengths. His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.

  Once again he picked up the children’s trail and the parallel registrations of Holmes and Yoke, but now he discovered something even stranger—that during this same period Carrie Pitezel and her two other children, Dessie and baby Wharton, had also checked into a Detroit hotel, this one called Geis’s Hotel. Geyer realized to his astonishment that Holmes now was moving three different parties of travelers from place to place, shoving them across the landscape as if they were toys.

  And he discovered something else.

  In walking from lodging to lodging, he saw that Holmes had not only kept Carrie away from Alice, Nellie, and Howard: He had placed them in establishments only three blocks apart. Suddenly the true implication of what Holmes had done became clear to him.

  He reread Alice’s final letter. She had written it to her grandparents on Sunday, October 14, the same day her mother, along with Dessie and the baby, had checked into Geis’s Hotel. This was the saddest letter of them all. Alice and Nellie both had colds, and the weather had turned wintry. “Tell Mama that I have to have a coat,” Alice wrote. “I nearly freeze in that thin jacket.” The children’s lack of warm clothing forced them to stay in their room day after day. “All that Nell and I can do is to draw and I get so tired sitting that I could get up and fly almost. I wish I could see you all. I am getting so homesick that I don’t know what to do. I suppose Wharton walks by this time don’t he I would like to have him here he would pass away the time a goodeal.”

  Geyer was appalled. “So when this poor child Alice was writing to her grandparents in Galva, Illinois, complaining of the cold, sending a message to her mother, asking for heavier and more comfortable clothing, wishing for little Wharton, the baby who would help them pass away the time—while this wearied, lonely, homesick child was writing this letter, her mother and her sister and the much wished for Wharton, were within ten minutes walk of her, and continued there for the next five days.”

  It was a game for Holmes, Geyer realized. He possessed them all and reveled in his possession.

  One additional phrase of Alice’s letter kept running through Geyer’s brain.

  “Howard,” she had written, “is not with us now.”

  Moyamensing Prison

  HOLMES SAT IN HIS CELL at Moyamensing Prison, a large turreted and crenellated building at Tenth and Reed streets, in south Philadelphia. He did not seem terribly troubled by his incarceration, although he complained of its injustice. “The great humiliation of feeling that I am a prisoner is killing me far more than any other discomforts I have to endure,” he wrote—though in fact he felt no humiliation whatsoever. If he felt anything, it was a smug satisfaction that so far no one had been able to produce any concrete evidence that he had killed Ben Pitezel or the missing children.

  He occupied a cell that measured nine by fourteen feet, with a narrow barred window high in its outer wall and a single electric lamp, which guards extinguished at nine o’clock each night. The walls were whitewashed. The stone construction of the prison helped blunt the extreme heat that had settled on the city and much of the country, but nothing could keep out the humidity for which Philadelphia was notorious. It clung to Holmes and his fellow prisoners like a cloak of moist wool, yet this too he seemed not to mind. Holmes became a model prisoner—became in fact the model of a model prisoner. He made a game of using his charm to gain concessions from his keepers. He was allowed to wear his own clothes “and to keep my watch and other small belongings.” He discovered also that he could pay to have food, newspapers, and magazines brought in from outside. He read of his increasing national notoriety. He read too that Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective who had interviewed him in June, was now in the Midwest searching for Pitezel’s children. The search delighted Holmes. It satisfied his profound need for attention and gave him a sense of
power over the detective. He knew that Geyer’s search would be in vain.

  Holmes’s cell was furnished with a bed, a stool, and a writing table, upon which he composed his memoir. He had begun it, he said, the preceding winter—to be exact, on December 3, 1894.

  He opened the memoir as if it were a fable: “Come with me, if you will, to a tiny quiet New England village, nestling among the picturesquely rugged hills of New Hampshire. . . . Here, in the year 1861, I, Herman W. Mudgett, the author of these pages, was born. That the first years of my life were different from those of any other ordinary country-bred boy, I have no reason to think.” The dates and places were correct; his description of his boyhood as a typical country idyll was most certainly a fabrication. It is one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths that as children they lied at will, exhibited unusual cruelty to animals and other children, and often engaged in acts of vandalism, with arson an especially favored act.

  Holmes inserted into his memoir a “prison diary” that he claimed to have kept since the day he arrived at Moyamensing. It is more likely that he invented the diary expressly for the memoir, intending it as a vehicle for reinforcing his claims of innocence by fostering the impression that he was a man of warmth and piety. He claimed in the diary to have established a daily schedule aimed at personal betterment. He would wake at six-thirty each day and take his “usual sponge bath,” then clean his cell. He would breakfast at seven. “I shall eat no more meat of any kind while I am so closely confined.” He planned to exercise and read the morning newspapers until ten o’clock. “From 10 to 12 and 2 to 4 six days in the week, I shall confine myself to my old medical works and other college studies including stenography, French and German.” The rest of the day he would devote to reading various periodicals and library books.

  At one point in his diary he notes that he was reading Trilby, the 1894 best seller by George Du Maurier about a young singer, Trilby O’Farrell, and her possession by the mesmerist Svengali. Holmes wrote that he “was much pleased with parts of it.”

  Elsewhere in the diary Holmes went for the heart.

  One entry, for May 16, 1895: “My birthday. Am 34 years old. I wonder if, as in former years, mother will write me. . . .”

  In another entry he described a visit from his latest wife, Georgiana Yoke. “She has suffered, and though she tried heroically to keep me from seeing it, it was of no avail: and in a few minutes to again bid her good-bye and know she was going out into the world with so heavy a load to bear, caused me more suffering than any death struggles can ever do. Each day until I know she is safe from harm and annoyance will be a living death to me.”

  From his cell Holmes also wrote a long letter to Carrie Pitezel, which he composed in a manner that shows he was aware the police were reading his mail. He insisted that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were with “Miss W.” in London, and that if the police would only check his story in detail, the mystery of the children would be solved. “I was as careful of the children as if they were my own, and you know me well enough to judge me better than strangers here can do. Ben would not have done anything against me, or I against him, any quicker than brothers. We never quarrelled. Again, he was worth too much to me for me to have killed him, if I had no other reason not to. As to the children, I never will believe, until you tell me so yourself, that you think they are dead or that I did anything to put them out of the way. Knowing me as you do, can you imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any motive?”

  He explained the lack of mail from the children. “They have no doubt written letters which Miss W., for her own safety, has withheld.”

  Holmes read the daily papers closely. Clearly the detective’s search had borne little fruit. Holmes had no doubt that Geyer soon would be forced to end his hunt and return to Philadelphia.

  The prospect of this was pleasing in the extreme.

  The Tenant

  ON SUNDAY, JULY 7, 1895, Detective Geyer took his search to Toronto, where the city’s police department assigned Detective Alf Cuddy to assist him. Together Geyer and Cuddy scoured the hotels and boardinghouses of Toronto and after days of searching found that here, too, Holmes had been moving three parties of travelers simultaneously.

  Holmes and Yoke had stayed at the Walker House: “G. Howe and wife, Columbus.”

  Mrs. Pitezel at the Union House: “Mrs. C. A. Adams and daughter, Columbus.”

  The girls at the Albion: “Alice and Nellie Canning, Detroit.”

  No one remembered seeing Howard.

  Now Geyer and Cuddy began searching the records of real estate agencies and contacting the owners of rental homes, but Toronto was far larger than any other city Geyer had searched. The task seemed impossible. On Monday morning, July 15, he awoke facing the prospect of yet another day of mind-numbing routine, but when he arrived at headquarters, he found Detective Cuddy in an unusually good mood. A tip had come in that Cuddy found promising. A resident named Thomas Ryves had read a description of Holmes in one of the city’s newspapers and thought it sounded like a man who in October 1894 had rented the house next door to his, at 16 St. Vincent Street.

  Geyer was leery. The intensive press coverage of his mission and his arrival in Toronto had generated thousands of tips, all useless.

  Cuddy agreed that the latest tip was probably another wild goose chase, but at least it offered a change of pace.

  By now Geyer was a national fascination, America’s Sherlock Holmes. Reports of his travels appeared in newspapers throughout the country. In that day the possibility that a man had killed three young children was still considered a horror well beyond the norm. There was something about Detective Geyer’s lone search through the sweltering heat of that summer that captured everyone’s imagination. He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds. Millions of people woke each morning hoping to read in their newspapers that this staunch detective at last had found the missing children.

  Geyer paid little attention to his new celebrity. Nearly a month had passed since the start of his search, but what had he accomplished? Each new phase seemed only to raise new questions: Why had Holmes taken the children? Why had he engineered that contorted journey from city to city? What power did Holmes possess that gave him such control?

  There was something about Holmes that Geyer just did not understand. Every crime had a motive. But the force that propelled Holmes seemed to exist outside the world of Geyer’s experience.

  He kept coming back to the same conclusion: Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for the money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.

  What irked Geyer most was that the central question was still unanswered: Where were the children now?

  The detectives found Thomas Ryves to be a charming Scotsman of considerable age, who welcomed them with enthusiasm. Ryves explained why the renter next door had caught his attention. For one thing, he had arrived with little furniture—a mattress, an old bed, and an unusually large trunk. One afternoon the tenant came to Ryves’s house to borrow a shovel, explaining that he wanted to dig a hole in the cellar for the storage of potatoes. He returned the shovel the next morning and the following day removed the trunk from the house. Ryves never saw him again.

  Detective Geyer, now galvanized, told Ryves to meet him in front of the neighboring house in exactly one hour; then he and Cuddy sped to the home of the realtor who had arranged the rental. With little preamble Geyer showed her a photograph of Holmes. She recognized him instantly. He had been very handsome, with amazing blue eyes.

  “This seemed too good to be true,” Geyer wrote. He and Cuddy offered quick thanks and rushed back to St. Vincent Street. Ryves was waiting outside.

  Now Geyer asked to borrow a shovel, and Ryves returned with the same one he had lent the tenant.

  The house was charming, with a steeply pitched central
gable and scalloped trim like the gingerbread house in a fairy tale, except this house sat not alone in a deep wood, but in the heart of Toronto on a fine street closely lined with elegant homes and yards fenced with fleur-de-lis pickets. Clematis in full bloom climbed one post of the veranda.

  The current tenant, a Mrs. J. Armbrust, answered the door. Ryves introduced the detectives. Mrs. Armbrust led them inside. They entered a central hall that divided the house into halves of three rooms each. A stairwell led to the second floor. Geyer asked to see the cellar.

  Mrs. Armbrust led the detectives into the kitchen, where she lifted a sheet of oilcloth from the floor. A square trap door lay underneath. As the detectives opened it, the scent of moist earth drifted upward into the kitchen. The cellar was shallow but very dark. Mrs. Armbrust brought lamps.

  Geyer and Cuddy descended a steep set of steps, more ladder than stairway, into a small chamber about ten feet long by ten feet wide and only four feet high. The lamps shed a shifting orange light that exaggerated the detectives’ shadows. Hunched over, wary of the overhead beams, Geyer and Cuddy tested the ground with the spade. In the southwest corner Geyer found a soft spot. The spade entered with disconcerting ease.

  “Only a slight hole had been made,” Geyer said, “when the gases burst forth and the stench was frightful.”

  At three feet they uncovered human bone.

  They summoned an undertaker named B. D. Humphrey to help recover the remains. Geyer and Cuddy gingerly climbed back down into the cellar. Humphrey leaped down.

  The stench now suffused the entire house. Mrs. Armbrust looked stricken.

  Then the coffins arrived.

  The undertaker’s men put them in the kitchen.

  The children had been buried nude. Alice lay on her side, her head at the west end of the grave. Nellie lay face-down, partially covering Alice. Her rich black hair, nicely plaited, lay along her back as neatly as if she had just combed it. The men spread a sheet on the cellar floor.