The Devil's Dozen (4 page)

They dug until it grew dark, and then utilized lamps for light, but finally they had to give up. Then Geyer learned that the former renter had been someone other than Holmes. All their effort had been futile. Nevertheless, the intrepid detective was certain the children had been killed somewhere in Toronto, since the letters had stopped at that city, so he persisted with his questions until he found another suspicious rental arrangement at number 16 St. Vincent Street. He went to check it out.

Geyer learned from neighbors that a man had moved in with children in tow, and had asked for the loan of a spade to plant potatoes in the cellar. He had moved in with only a bed, a mattress, and a large trunk. Geyer showed photographs around and someone identified Holmes as the renter. Inside, Geyer discovered that the cellar was accessible via a trapdoor. Going down into this small, dank area with a lantern, he looked around and soon found evidence of digging in soft dirt. He bent down to look closer and was certain the digging was recent. He retrieved a spade—the same one the renter had borrowed—and pushed the blade into the dirt.

It yielded easily, so he shoved deeper, digging dirt out until he was down about a foot. This raised a stench of putrefaction that told him he was in the right spot. “Our coats were thrown off,” he wrote, “and with renewed confidence, we continued our digging. The deeper we dug, the more horrible the odor became.”

Getting used to it, he prepared himself for a sad discovery. He doubted this was the grave of someone’s dead dog. After digging three feet, he turned up a small bone, which looked like it had been part of a child’s arm, so he called the local police inspector and employed a local undertaker to take charge. After much more digging, they slowly exhumed the unclothed corpses of two girls, which Geyer believed to be Nellie and Alice Pitezel. Images of his own dead daughter must have visited him at this point. Yet further digging failed to yield another body, so it appeared that Holmes had chosen this spot for the girls only.

“Alice was found lying on her side with her hand to the west,” Geyer wrote. “Nellie was found lying on her face, with her head to the south, her plaited hair hanging neatly down her back.” Nellie’s limbs were partly on top of Alice, so a crew of men lifted them carefully onto a sheet, carried them through the trapdoor, and transferred them to one of the pair of coffins set up in the kitchen. Her braided hair was so heavy it pulled the scalp away from her skull. Alice’s remains were likewise removed and taken to the deadhouse.

“By this time,” Geyer wrote, “Toronto was wild with excitement. The news had spread to every part of the city.” Reporters flocked to the house to get photos and possible quotes for their stories. They had assisted and now sought their just reward. “Congratulations, mingled with expressions of horror over the discovery, were heard everywhere.”

Geyer sent a telegram to Philadelphia about the day’s events and later concluded in his book, “Thus it was proved that little children cannot be murdered in this day and generation, beyond the possibility of discovery.”

But a definitive identification had yet to be made, and for this they needed Carrie Pitezel. She made the trip to Toronto, heavy of heart but still vaguely hopeful that the detective was wrong. Searchers had found a toy in the house that was listed in Carrie’s inventory of things her children had owned, and this supported the fact that Holmes had been the renter and these bodies were the missing Pitezel children, as did pieces of partially burned clothing from the fireplace. Since the corpses were so badly decomposed, Carrie was allowed only to see the children’s hair, laid on the canvas that covered them, and the teeth, seen through a hole. She recognized them at once and swooned in grief. She now knew that Holmes had lied to her and killed her children. The cause of death was found to be suffocation. It appeared that Nellie’s feet had been removed and were missing, something that remained a mystery. Both girls were buried in Toronto.

But Geyer knew there was one more child to find: little Howard. Despite all that he had done this far, his trek was not over. He believed Howard was dead, but was determined to deliver the body for proper burial and mourning. He went over all the letters again, relying on logic to determine that Howard had been separated from the girls prior to their arrival in Detroit, so it was time to return to Indianapolis. Although he had struck out here initially, his instincts urged him to go over old ground and look for clues he might have missed.

He arrived on July 24. As before, he proceeded to gain the assistance of real estate agents from around the city to learn the details of short-term rentals from the previous October. By this time, Geyer’s trek had attracted the attention of the nation. Newspapers reported his every move and readers followed the investigation the way they read a suspenseful piece of fiction. As a result, Geyer received many leads, which he followed, but most of them just wasted his time. “Days came and passed,” he wrote, “but I continued to be as much in the dark as ever.” Geyer feared that “the bold and clever criminal” might have bested him on this one. It seemed increasingly likely that little Howard would never be found.

Back in Philadelphia, Holmes read the newspapers to keep track of Geyer’s journey. At first he’d felt gleefully empowered, believing that Geyer could never find the children, but with the discovery of the girls’ remains, things looked grim. He had to think up a tale to exonerate himself and blame someone else. Even as he did so, a team of investigators was analyzing the children’s letters and wiring more ideas to Geyer. Some items in the letters, they had found, had been overlooked or misunderstood, and with renewed care, Geyer discovered that the children had been in Indianapolis four days longer than he’d initially realized. He rechecked the house he thought Holmes had rented and narrowed the time frame during which he lost track of their movements to only two days. He believed that Howard had disappeared at some point during those two days. If only he could establish exactly where Holmes had been during this time, he was certain he would learn where Howard’s body was hidden.

When Geyer heard that a child’s skeleton had been discovered in Chicago, he took a train there to learn what he could, but he found that these remains were not Howard’s. It was another dead end. He traveled to several more places, but instinct urged him to settle in Indianapolis and keep searching there. Despite his persistent lack of success, Geyer continued to believe he would have a breakthrough. “No less than nine hundred supposed clues were run out,” he later wrote. He needed a new strategy.

He and assisting officers went to smaller towns in the area, going through them as systematically as he had done in Indianapolis. In Irvington, Geyer finally struck pay dirt. A man who had rented out a cottage in October—around the time of the two days in which Geyer had lost track of Holmes—remembered Holmes from his rude and abrupt manner. Another person recalled a boy with this irascible short-term tenant. Relieved and certain that he was at the end of the trail, Geyer proceeded to the rental property in question. With the owner’s permission, he conducted a thorough search.

He found no disturbance in the floor of the cellar, which initially discouraged him, since that seemed to be Holmes’s modus operandi, but he collected pieces of a trunk from a small alcove, and near it he saw disturbed dirt. Geyer dug into the area but found nothing. In a barn, he spotted a coal stove, and remembering Holmes’s earlier purchase of a large stove which he’d then abandoned, Geyer suspected this was a clue. On top were stains that resembled dried blood. However, there was nothing else in the barn that indicated the boy was here. Digging in soft spots in the yard outside also failed to produce anything of interest. By nightfall, he and the owner were forced to wrap up their search, determined to renew it the following day.

Geyer went to town to send a telegram to Carrie Pitezel, asking if the missing trunk had a strip of blue calico over a seam. She wired back, identifying the trunk as belonging to her. While he was there, a newspaper editor came looking for him. Something had been found back at the property.

Geyer rushed back and learned that the owner of the cottage, along with his partner, had poked around. In a pipe hole in the chimney that led from the cellar, they discovered pieces of a charred bone—part of a skull and a femur—that had belonged to a male child. Reaching inside, they had pulled out ashes and more pieces of bone. In front of a crowd of curious people, Geyer dismantled the lower part of the chimney and found a complete set of teeth and a piece of jaw, identified by a dentist as being from a boy seven to ten years old. “At the bottom of the chimney,” Geyer recorded, “was found quite a large charred mass, which upon being cut, disclosed a portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard. The pelvis of the body was also found.”

Plenty of witnesses had seen Holmes back in October and identified him from the photograph that Geyer carried. He’d even left Howard’s coat with a grocer, which was now retrieved. One young man recalled helping Holmes to install the stove, though little did he realize it had been used to incinerate a murder victim. Carrie Pitezel arrived as well, and identified various items as belonging to Howard.

Convinced he had finally, albeit tragically, found Howard Pitezel, and having his discovery confirmed by other clues, Geyer “enjoyed the best night’s sleep” that he’d had in two months. The search for truth had finally reached fruition. It was now August 27, fully two months after he’d left on this journey, and five weeks since he’d found Howard’s unfortunate sisters.

On September 12 in Philadelphia, Holmes was indicted by a grand jury for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel. He entered a plea of not guilty and his trial date was scheduled for October 28. Even as he donned a role for the court, people were learning much more about him from what he had left behind in Chicago. Holmes, it seemed, had quite a list of murders to his credit. Attributing four to him was only the beginning.

Holmes had arrived in Chicago during the 1880s, already married to two women. The city was preparing for the world’s fair, or Great Exposition, which meant there was plenty of opportunity for a clever man to commit fraud and theft. Some twenty-seven million people went through the exposition during its six-month run, which overtaxed the city’s resources and inspired crime, most of which the police could not investigate. Holmes was among those who took advantage, and his scheme was probably the most well planned and devious of the lot.

He had foreseen the many visitors who would be searching for lodgings as close as possible to the fair, knowing that among them would be the most vulnerable prey: single, naive women who would easily succumb to the charms of a successful and charming “doctor.” He presented himself as a graduate of a prestigious medical school and a man of means. In fact, he had gained these credentials with other scams, and possibly with murder.

Holmes’s first Chicago employment was as a prescription clerk at Sixty-third and South Wallace streets, but he soon took over the business from Mrs. E. S. Holton, who then “went to California” with her daughter. No one ever heard from them again, but Holmes took control of the shop. Across the road was a property that he purchased. Soon he was gathering funds through fraud to build his three-story, hundred-room “castle,” as he referred to it. When he eventually felt the need to leave, he tried to burn it down to collect insurance, but did not succeed. Before that, he clearly used the place for his favorite pastime: torture.

Given the news about Holmes’s murder of the Pitezel girls, the police began an investigation of the property in July, even before Howard was found, relying on reports of missing women known to have been there with Holmes. The first floor consisted of shops and offices, but the second floor and cellar yielded something that exceeded the worst expectations. From reconstructions, it seemed that Holmes had tortured and murdered many women, disposing of their corpses in a massive furnace in the cellar or defleshing them and selling the skeletons to medical schools.

Holmes’s castle included soundproof sleeping chambers with peepholes, asbestos-padded walls, gas pipes, sliding walls, and vents that Holmes controlled from another room. Many of the rooms had trapdoors, with ladders leading to smaller rooms below. One asbestos-lined room appeared to be used to incinerate its occupant alive. There were greased chutes that emptied into a two-level cellar, in which Holmes had installed a large furnace, and an asbestos-lined chamber with gas pipes and evidence of something having been burned inside. It seemed that Holmes placed chosen victims in special chambers into which he pumped lethal gas and then watched them react. Sometimes he’d ignite the gas, or perhaps even stretch a victim on the “elasticity determinator,” an elongated bed with straps. When finished, he might have slid the corpses down the chutes into his cellar, where vats of acid awaited them. Searchers discovered several complete skeletons and numerous incinerated bone fragments, including the pelvis of a fourteen-year-old child. Some bone fragments, and a woman’s slipper and hair, were found in the large stove he kept in his third-floor office.

Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, Holmes insisted that he had nothing to do with any murders. Those people had either taken their own lives, he claimed, or someone else had killed them. Nevertheless, the
Chicago Tribune
announced that “The Castle is a Tomb!” and the
Philadelphia Inquirer
described many bones removed from the “charnel house.” It wasn’t long before true-crime pulp paperbacks were published to slake the public’s thirst for sensation and turn a profit. The Chicago police estimated the number of victims to be as high as 150, although this figure was never corroborated.

To exonerate himself, Holmes, now thirty-four, penned
Holmes’ Own Story, in which the Alleged Multimurderer and Arch Conspirator Tells of the Twenty-two Tragic Deaths and Disappearances in which he is Said to be Implicated.
He described Gilmanton Academy, New Hampshire, the town in which he grew up as Her-man Webster Mudgett. He was born there in 1861 and claimed to have lived an ordinary life, with an ordinary set of parents and a normal schoolboy routine. He received a medical school diploma from the University of Michigan and then opened a practice. He attempted unsuccessfully to commit his first insurance fraud, helping someone to fake his own death with a purloined cadaver. From there, he did a stint as a doctor in an insane asylum. He changed his name to H. H. Holmes and posed as a pharmacist in Chicago.