The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  They began with Nellie.

  “We lifted her as gently as possible,” Geyer said, “but owing to the decomposed state of the body, the weight of her plaited hair hanging down her back pulled the scalp from her head.”

  They discovered something else: Nellie’s feet had been amputated. During the search of the residence that followed, police found no trace of them. At first this seemed a mystery, until Geyer recalled that Nellie was clubfooted. Holmes had disposed of her feet to remove this distinctive clue to her identity.

  Mrs. Pitezel learned of the discovery of her girls by reading a morning newspaper. She had been visiting friends back in Chicago and thus Geyer had been unable to telegraph the news to her directly. She caught a train to Toronto. Geyer met her at the station and took her to his hotel, the Rossin House. She was exhausted and sad and seemed perpetually near fainting. Geyer roused her with smelling salts.

  Geyer and Cuddy came for her the next afternoon to bring her to the morgue. They carried brandy and smelling salts. Geyer wrote, “I told her that it would be absolutely impossible for her to see anything but Alice’s teeth and hair, and only the hair belonging to Nellie. This had a paralyzing effect upon her and she almost fainted.”

  The coroner’s men did what they could to make the viewing as endurable as possible. They cleaned the flesh from Alice’s skull and carefully polished her teeth, then covered her body with canvas. They laid paper over her face, and cut a hole in the paper to expose only her teeth, just as the Philadelphia coroner had done for her father.

  They washed Nellie’s hair and laid it carefully on the canvas that covered Alice’s body.

  Cuddy and Geyer took positions on opposite sides of Mrs. Pitezel and led her into the dead house. She recognized Alice’s teeth immediately. She turned to Geyer and asked, “Where is Nellie?” Only then did she notice Nellie’s long black hair.

  The coroner, unable to find any marks of violence, theorized that Holmes had locked the girls in the big trunk, then filled it with gas from a lamp valve. Indeed, when police found the trunk they discovered a hole drilled through one side, covered with a makeshift patch.

  “Nothing could be more surprising,” Geyer wrote, “than the apparent ease with which Holmes murdered the two little girls in the very center of the city of Toronto, without arousing the least suspicion of a single person there.” If not for Graham’s decision to send him on his search, he believed, “these murders would never have been discovered, and Mrs. Pitezel would have gone to her grave without knowing whether her children were alive or dead.”

  For Geyer, finding the girls was “one of the most satisfactory events of my life,” but his satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Howard remained missing. Mrs. Pitezel refused to believe Howard was dead; she “clung fondly to the hope that he would ultimately be found alive.”

  Even Geyer found himself hoping that in this one case Holmes had not lied and had done exactly what he had told the clerk in Indianapolis. “Had [Howard] been placed in some institution, as Holmes had intimated his intention of doing, or was he hidden in some obscure place beyond reach or discovery? Was he alive or dead? I was puzzled, non-plussed, and groping in the dark.”

  A Lively Corpse

  IN PHILADELPHIA, ON THE MORNING of Tuesday, July 16, 1895—the day Geyer’s Toronto discoveries were reported in the nation’s newspapers—the district attorney’s office telephoned an urgent message to the warden at Moyamensing Prison, instructing him to keep all the morning’s newspapers away from Holmes. The order came from Assistant District Attorney Thomas W. Barlow. He wanted to surprise Holmes with the news, hoping it would rattle him so thoroughly that he would confess.

  Barlow’s order came too late. The guard sent to intercept the morning papers found Holmes sitting at his table reading the news as calmly as if reading about the weather.

  In his memoir Holmes contended that the news did shock him. His newspaper came that morning at eight-thirty as it always did, he wrote, “and I had hardly opened it before I saw in large headlines the announcement of the finding of the children in Toronto. For the moment it seemed so impossible, that I was inclined to think it one of the frequent newspaper excitements that had attended the earlier part of the case. . . .” But suddenly, he wrote, he realized what must have happened. Minnie Williams had killed them or had ordered them killed. Holmes knew she had an unsavory associate named “Hatch.” He guessed that Williams had suggested the killings and Hatch had carried them out. It was all too horrible to comprehend: “I gave up trying to read the article, and saw instead the two little faces as they had looked when I hurriedly left them—felt the innocent child’s kiss so timidly given and heard again their earnest words of farewell, and I realized that I had received another burden to carry to my grave. . . . I think at this time I should have lost my senses utterly had I not been hurriedly called to prepare to be taken to the District Attorney’s office.”

  The morning was hot. Holmes was driven north on Broad Street to City Hall through air as sticky as taffy. In the DA’s office he was questioned by Barlow. The Philadelphia Public Ledger reported that Holmes’s “genius for explanation had deserted him. For two hours he sat under a shower of questions and refused to talk. He was not cowed by any means, but he would give absolutely no satisfaction.”

  Holmes wrote, “I was in no condition to bear his accusations, nor disposed to answer many of his questions.” He told Barlow that Miss Williams and Hatch apparently had killed Howard as well.

  Holmes was driven back to Moyamensing. He began earnestly trying to find a publisher for his memoir, hoping to get it quickly into print to help turn public opinion to his favor. If he could not exert his great powers of persuasion directly, he could at least attempt to do so indirectly. He struck a deal with a journalist named John King to arrange publication and market the book.

  He wrote to King, “My ideas are that you should get from the New York Herald and the Philadelphia Press all the cuts they have and turn those we want over to the printer, to have them electroplated at his expense.” In particular he wanted a Herald picture of himself in a full beard. He also wanted to have “the autographs of my two names (Holmes and Mudgett) engraved and electroplated at the same time to go under the picture.” He wanted this done quickly so that as soon as the manuscript was set in type, all components of the book would be in hand, ready for the presses.

  He offered King some marketing advice: “As soon as the book is published, get it onto the Philadelphia and New York newsstands. Then get reliable canvassers who will work afternoons here in Philadelphia. Take one good street at a time, leave the book, then return about a half hour later for the money. No use to do this in the forenoon when people are busy. I canvassed when a student in this way and found the method successful.

  “Then, if you have any liking for the road, go over the ground covered by the book, spending a few days in Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis. Give copies to the newspapers in these cities to comment upon, it will assist the sale. . . .”

  Aware that this letter, too, would be read by the authorities, Holmes used it to reinforce, obliquely, his claims of innocence. He urged King that when his sales effort took him to Chicago, he should to go a particular hotel and look for evidence in the register, and collect affidavits from clerks, proving that Minnie Williams had stayed there with Holmes long after she was supposed to have been murdered.

  “If she was a corpse then,” Holmes wrote to King, “she was a very lively corpse indeed.”

  “All the Weary Days”

  IT WAS A STRANGE MOMENT for Geyer. He had examined every lead, checked every hotel, visited every boardinghouse and real estate agent, and yet now he had to begin his search anew. Where? What path was left? The weather remained stifling, as if taunting him.

  His instincts kept telling him that Holmes had killed Howard in Indianapolis. He returned there on July 24 and again received the assistance of Detective David Richards, but now Geyer also called in the press. The next day
every newspaper in the city reported his arrival. Dozens of people visited him at his hotel to make suggestions about where he ought to look for Howard. “The number of mysterious persons who had rented houses in and about Indianapolis multiplied from day to day,” Geyer wrote. He and Richards trudged through the heat from office to office, house to house, and found nothing. “Days came and passed, but I continued to be as much in the dark as ever, and it began to look as though the bold but clever criminal had outwitted the detectives . . . and that the disappearance of Howard Pitezel would pass into history as an unsolved mystery.”

  Meanwhile the mystery of Holmes himself grew deeper and darker.

  Geyer’s discovery of the girls prompted Chicago police to enter Holmes’s building in Englewood. Each day they delved more deeply into the secrets of the “castle,” and each day turned up additional evidence that Holmes was something far worse than even Geyer’s macabre discoveries indicated. There was speculation that during the world’s fair he might have killed dozens of people, most of them young women. One estimate, certainly an exaggeration, put the toll at two hundred. To most people, it seemed impossible that Holmes could have done so much killing without detection. Geyer would have agreed, except that his own search had revealed again and again Holmes’s talent for deflecting scrutiny.

  Chicago detectives began their exploration of the castle on the night of Friday, July 19. First they made a broad survey of the building. The third floor contained small hotel rooms. The second floor had thirty-five rooms that were harder to classify. Some were ordinary bedrooms; others had no windows and were fitted with doors that made the rooms airtight. One room contained a walk-in vault, with iron walls. Police found a gas jet with no apparent function other than to admit gas into the vault. Its cut-off valve was located in Holmes’s personal apartment. In Holmes’s office they found a bank book belonging to a woman named Lucy Burbank. It listed a balance of $23,000. The woman could not be located.

  The eeriest phase of the investigation began when the police, holding their flickering lanterns high, entered the hotel basement, a cavern of brick and timber measuring 50 by 165 feet. The discoveries came quickly: a vat of acid with eight ribs and part of a skull settled at the bottom; mounds of quicklime; a large kiln; a dissection table stained with what seemed to be blood. They found surgical tools and charred high-heeled shoes.

  And more bones:

  Eighteen ribs from the torso of a child.

  Several vertebrae.

  A bone from a foot.

  One shoulder blade.

  One hip socket.

  Articles of clothing emerged from walls and from pits of ash and quicklime, including a girl’s dress and bloodstained overalls. Human hair clotted a stovepipe. The searchers unearthed two buried vaults full of quicklime and human remains. They theorized the remains might be the last traces of two Texas women, Minnie and Anna Williams, whom Chicago police had only recently learned were missing. In the ash of a large stove they found a length of chain that the jeweler in Holmes’s pharmacy recognized as part of a watch chain Holmes had given Minnie as a gift. They also found a letter Holmes had written to the pharmacist in his drugstore. “Do you ever see anything of the ghost of the Williams sisters,” Holmes wrote, “and do they trouble you much now?”

  The next day the police discovered another hidden chamber, this one at the cellar’s southwest corner. They were led to it by a man named Charles Chappell, alleged to have helped Holmes reduce corpses to bone. He was very cooperative, and soon the police recovered three fully articulated skeletons from their owners. A fourth was expected from Chicago’s Hahneman Medical College.

  One of the most striking discoveries came on the second floor, in the walk-in vault. The inside of the door showed the unmistakable imprint of a woman’s bare foot. Police theorized the print had been made by a woman suffocating within. Her name, they believed, was Emeline Cigrand.

  Chicago police telegraphed District Attorney Graham that their search of the Holmes building had uncovered the skeleton of a child. Graham ordered Geyer to Chicago to see if the remains might be those of Howard Pitezel.

  Geyer found the city transfixed by the revelations emerging from the castle. Press coverage had been exhaustive, taking up most of the front page of the daily newspapers. One Tribune headline had cried VICTIMS OF A FIEND, and reported that the remains of Howard Pitezel had been found in the building. The story took up six of the seven columns of the front page.

  Geyer met with the lead police inspector and learned that a physician who had just examined the child’s skeleton had ruled it to be that of a little girl. The inspector thought he knew the girl’s identity and mentioned a name, Pearl Conner. The name meant nothing to Geyer.

  Geyer telegraphed his disappointment to Graham, who ordered him back to Philadelphia for consultation and rest.

  On Wednesday evening, August 7, with temperatures in the nineties and traincars like ovens, Geyer set out again, this time accompanied by Fidelity Mutual’s top insurance investigator, Inspector W. E. Gary. Geyer was glad for the company.

  They went to Chicago, then to Indiana, where they stopped in Logansport and Peru, then to Montpelier Junction, Ohio, and Adrian, Michigan. They spent days searching the records of every hotel, boardinghouse, and real estate office they could find, “all,” Geyer said, “to no purpose.”

  Although Geyer’s brief rest in Philadelphia had recharged his hopes, he now found them “fast dwindling away.” He still believed his original instinct was correct, that Howard was in Indianapolis or somewhere nearby. He went there next, his third visit of the summer.

  “I must confess I returned to Indianapolis in no cheerful frame of mind,” Geyer wrote. He and Inspector Gary checked into Geyer’s old hotel, the Spencer House. The failure to find Howard after so much effort was frustrating and puzzling. “The mystery,” Geyer wrote, “seemed to be impenetrable.”

  On Thursday, August 19, Geyer learned that during the preceding night Holmes’s castle in Englewood, his own dark dreamland, had burned to the ground. Front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune shouted, “Holmes’ Den Burned; Fire Demolishes the Place of Murder and Mystery.” The fire department suspected arson; police theorized that whoever set the fire had wanted to destroy the secrets still embedded within. They arrested no one.

  Together Detective Geyer and Inspector Gary investigated nine hundred leads. They expanded their search to include small towns outside Indianapolis. “By Monday,” Geyer wrote in a report to headquarters, “we will have searched every outlying town, except Irvington, and another day will conclude that. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we shall go.”

  They went to Irvington on Tuesday morning, August 27, 1895, aboard an electric trolley, a new kind of streetcar that drew its power through a wheeled conducting apparatus on the roof called a troller. Just before the trolley reached its final stop, Geyer spotted a sign for a real estate office. He and Gary resolved to begin their search there.

  The proprietor was a Mr. Brown. He offered the detectives each a chair, but they remained standing. They did not think the visit would last long, and there were many other offices to touch before nightfall. Geyer opened his now-soiled parcel of photographs.

  Brown adjusted his glasses and examined the picture of Holmes. After a long pause he said, “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.” Geyer and Gary stood very still. Brown continued: “I remember the man very well, because I did not like his manner, and I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.”

  The detectives looked at each other. Both sat down at the same time. “All the toil,” Geyer said, “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 moment, when I saw the veil about to lift.”

  At the inquest that fol
lowed a young man named Elvet Moorman testified he had helped Holmes set up a large woodstove in the house. He recalled asking Holmes why he didn’t install a gas stove instead. Holmes answered “that he did not think gas was healthy for children.”

  The owner of an Indianapolis repair shop testified that Holmes had come into his shop on October 3, 1894, with two cases of surgical instruments and asked to have them sharpened. Holmes picked them up three days later.

  Detective Geyer testified how during his search of the house he had opened the base of a chimney flue that extended from roof to cellar. While sifting the accumulated ash through a fly screen, he found human teeth and a fragment of jaw. He also retrieved “a large charred mass, which upon being cut, disclosed a portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard.” The organs had been packed too tightly into the chimney and thus never had burned.

  And of course Mrs. Pitezel was summoned. She identified Howard’s overcoat and his scarf pin, and a crochet needle that belonged to Alice.

  Finally the coroner showed her a toy that Geyer himself had found in the house. It consisted of a tin man mounted on a spinning top. She recognized it. How could she not? It was Howard’s most important possession. Mrs. Pitezel herself had put it in the children’s trunk just before she sent them off with Holmes. His father had bought it for him at the Chicago world’s fair.

  Malice Aforethought

  ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1895, a Philadelphia grand jury voted to indict Holmes for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. Only two witnesses presented evidence, L. G. Fouse, president of Fidelity Mutual Life, and Detective Frank Geyer. Holmes stuck to his claim that Minnie Williams and the mysterious Hatch had killed the children. Grand juries in Indianapolis and Toronto found this unconvincing. Indianapolis indicted Holmes for the murder of Howard Pitezel, Toronto for the murders of Alice and Nellie. If Philadelphia failed to convict him, there would be two more chances; if the city succeeded, the other indictments would be moot, for given the nature of the Pitezel murder, a conviction in Philadelphia would bring a death sentence.