Beating the Devil's Game: A History of Forensic Science and Criminal (14 page)

In the end, Lizzie won. The jury took just over an hour to find her not guilty. Relieved, she took her inheritance and moved to a finer house. The verdict is still controversial to this day.

The country barely had time to recover when the entire world was shocked by a devious man whose arrest brought attention to the criminal psychopath, as well as focus on a “real-life Sherlock Holmes.” Ironically, the criminal had adopted that very surname as his own.

THE GAMESMAN

It was the discovery of a murder staged to resemble a suicide in October 1894 in Philadelphia that evolved into a case that eclipsed Jack the Ripper in its magnitude and invited criminal-mind specialists to test their theories. Marion Hedgepeth, a one-time cellmate of a man who went by the name H. M. Howard, informed the police about a scam. It had involved insuring a man named Benjamin Pitezel for $10,000 with the Fidelity Mutual Life Association in 1893 in Chicago, and then faking his death in a laboratory explosion by substituting a cadaver. The three parties to the fraud were then to share in the insurance payment, but Howard had run off with the money. Hedgepeth’s letter alerted the company and they soon realized that H. M. Howard was actually H. H. Holmes (who was actually Herman Mudgett).

A company representative reexamined the circumstances of a body found badly burned at 1316 Callowhill Street in Philadelphia, which Holmes, accompanied by Benjamin Pitezel’s young daughter, had identified as Pitezel. He had collected the money and left town with the girl and two of her four siblings. Company officers hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and these agents gathered information about Holmes’s numerous frauds in Chicago, which had provided him with funds to build a sinister three-story hotel not far from the grounds of the Chicago World’s Exposition. On November 16, 1894, thanks to good leads, Holmes was arrested in Boston as he was preparing to leave the country. However, the Pitezel children were not with him.

On June 3, 1895, Holmes was tried for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company, and since the sentence was minimal, his attorneys advised him to plead guilty. Between that and the date for sentencing, reporters pressed for information about the Pitezel children, as did their mother, Carrie Pitezel. Detective Frank Geyer went on a highly publicized expedition to find them, and later penned a book about his painstaking trek. While Holmes had identified himself with Conan Doyle’s famous fictional detective, Geyer would win renown as a real-life intellectual sleuth.

Geyer’s wife and daughter had died in a recent fire, so his loss weighed heavily as he searched for children who were possibly dead. Holmes had said he had left them with a guardian, Minnie Williams, who took them to England. Geyer would later write, “Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation.” The man, he believed, was an accomplished con artist, so his words could not be trusted (especially in light of the fact that Minnie Williams was also missing, along with her younger sister, Nettie).

Yet Holmes did admit to having had Alice Pitezel, fifteen, in his custody and to picking up Howard, eight, and Nellie, eleven. Alice and Nellie had written letters to their mother documenting their daily journey with Holmes, letters that he had never mailed and which were found in his possession upon his arrest. Geyer found no trace of Minnie Williams or the children where Holmes had said she would be, and the street name in London that Holmes had offered did not exist. Instead of going to England, where the clever offender was trying to direct him, Geyer focused closer to home.

On June 26, he set out by train into the Midwest, with Alice’s and Nellie’s letters to orient him, along with photos of Holmes and of the children, as well as an inventory of items and clothing associated with them. The possibility of finding evidence was minimal, yet the insurance company had readily provided funds for the trip. In Cincinnati, Ohio, Geyer showed photographs and asked around in various hotels for anyone who might have seen Holmes or the children, and he finally found someone who remembered the small group of travelers under the alias Alex E. Cook—a name Holmes had used in business matters before. That clerk pointed Geyer to a different neighborhood and through much questioning, he came across a woman who had seen Holmes and a boy together in a house to which a large stove had been delivered. But Holmes had then given her the stove. Geyer now felt that he “had firm hold of the end of a string that was to lead me ultimately to the consummation of my difficult mission.” He went from there to Indianapolis, Indiana, Holmes’s next known destination.

Here, Geyer found a trail that clarified Holmes’s inexplicable game: He was moving his wife (one of three, all of whom were oblivious to the others) and the three children about in the same city without any party being aware of the others. Geyer could not understand why, if Holmes intended to kill the children, he would go to such effort and expense to move them so often. The puzzle deepened.

Geyer then went to Chicago and Detroit, the town from which Alice had written the last letter to her mother. He also learned that Holmes had added a third group to his game—Mrs. Carrie Pitezel and her other two children. He had placed her three blocks from where he roomed the three children in his care, but had not allowed them to realize it or see one another. Geyer spotted Holmes’s pattern: He played games with people for his own satisfaction, adjusting his strategy to whatever seemed necessary to move them around. But Alice wrote something from that location to her mother that made Geyer pause with concern: “Howard is not with us now.”

On a tip, Geyer went to Toronto and looked up real estate agents to find out if a man had rented a house for only a few days. “It took considerable time to impress each agent with the importance of making a careful search for us.” He found a house that Holmes had rented, surrounded by a six-foot fence. Geyer struck out there, as the renter turned out to have been another man. Yet the intrepid detective felt certain the children had been killed somewhere in that town, so he persisted and found another rental that seemed suspicious. He learned that a man with children had asked for the loan of a spade to plant potatoes in the cellar and had brought only a bed, mattress, and large trunk to the house. A woman identified Holmes as the man who had rented the house from a photograph that Geyer carried. Geyer discovered that the house had a dark cellar accessible via trap door, and found an area of soft dirt. When he pushed a shovel into it, a stench arose and he knew his long, dark journey had produced what he had feared: human remains. After digging three feet, he found a small arm bone, so he employed an undertaker to take charge. In short order, they exhumed the corpses of two unclothed girls, which they believed to be Nellie and Alice Pitezel.

“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.” A crew of men transferred them to a pair of coffins. “Thus it was proved,” Geyer later wrote, “that little children cannot be murdered in this day and generation, beyond the possibility of discovery.”

Searchers found a toy in the house that was listed in Carrie Pitezel’s inventory of things that her children had owned, which assisted Geyer with a firm identification of the remains, as did pieces of partially burnt clothing. Carrie Pitezel, brought to Toronto, confirmed their identities.

But Geyer still knew they had yet to find Howard. He used logic and items mentioned in the letters to determine that Howard had been separated from the girls prior to their arrival in Detroit, so it was time to return to Indianapolis. He arrived on July 24 and proceeded with queries to real estate agents about short-term rentals from the previous October. By this time, Geyer’s trek had drawn national interest and the Indianapolis newspapers heralded his arrival as a real-life Sherlock Holmes, which proved to be both a curse and a boon. He received a great many leads, but most of them came from people attempting to associate themselves with the famous quest, and they 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 and he despaired of finding the last child. His own grief spurred him onward.

In Philadelphia, Holmes kept track of Geyer’s journey in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Initially he felt empowered at Geyer’s lack of success, but with the detective’s discovery of the girls’ remains, Holmes was forced to devise a way to blame others. Even as he did so, investigators were analyzing the children’s letters, and they sent ideas to Geyer based on things that had been previously overlooked. Geyer realized that the children had been in Indianapolis four days longer than investigators had believed, so he narrowed to two days the time frame not accounted for. He heard about the skeleton of a child found in Chicago and went to check, but it was not the young Pitezel. Instinct told him to stay in Indianapolis. “No less than nine hundred supposed clues were run out,” he later wrote, but he persisted.

Geyer went to several outlying towns in the area, going through them as systematically as he had done in Indianapolis. In Irvington, he struck pay dirt. A man who had rented a house in October remembered Holmes because he’d been so rude, and he’d had a boy with him. Certain that he was at the trail’s end, Geyer went to the rental property. However, he could detect no disturbance in the cellar’s dirt floor, which discouraged him, but he found a trunk in a small alcove, and near it some disturbed dirt. Geyer dug into the area but turned up nothing. In a barn, he came across a coal stove, stained with a substance that resembled dried blood. He telegrammed Philadelphia with a description of the trunk and Carrie Pitezel identified it as hers.

A doctor poking around in a chimney at this place showed Geyer pieces of a charred bone—part of a skull and a femur—that he believed belonged to a male child. Geyer dismantled the chimney and found a 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.” Holmes had killed Howard here and incinerated him in the stove.

It was now August 27, fully two months after Geyer had left Philadelphia, but he now had everything he needed to prove Holmes a multiple murderer. It wasn’t necessary, however, as Holmes went to trial for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, wrote a confession in which he admitted to more than two dozen murders (although he later recanted), and his castle in Chicago had received a great deal of attention as a place of torture and murder. Found guilty of killing Pitezel, he was hanged. While he is remembered as one of America’s more fiendish murderers, few people know the name of Detective Frank Geyer. Nevertheless, his investigative feat was heralded in his day as one of the stunning achievements of modern law enforcement.

THE STUDY OF MAN

European culture dominated many parts of the world, supported by Darwinian ideas that superior nations ought to rule inferior ones. The European white male was the standard against which other races were measured. While scientists proclaimed the neutrality of their methods, human bias nevertheless corrupted interpretations, filtering into legal proceedings. Alphonse Bertillon was among those infected. He played a key role in the 1894 court-martial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of spying for Germany against France. At first, Bertillon indicated that the handwriting on a suspect document was unlike that of Dreyfus, but in an effort to win favor for authorities who clearly wanted to put Dreyfus away, he changed his opinion. He claimed that he simply hadn’t spotted the way Dreyfus had disguised his handwriting during the interrogation in which he’d been forced to supply samples. The result was that Dreyfus went to prison, while a military cover-up protected the real perpetrator. The public was not duped, however, and the shameful affair divided France. It also triggered widespread scorn for the supposed science of handwriting analysis.

In another arena, Swiss anatomist Wilhelm His undertook a controlled study of the relationship of the skull to the face in 1895. He had acquired a skull that many believed was that of the late composer Johann Sebastian Bach, but he dared not experiment with such a precious item. Instead, he used data from working on twenty-eight cadavers, measuring the thickness of the soft tissue, to finally sculpt a likeness from the “Bach” skull. It turned out to resemble the composer closely enough to confirm that His was in possession of the right skull. To find out the general depth of the skin and muscles over the skull, His had plunged oiled needles into the corpses’s faces and then attached a cork to the needles. Once the needle hit bone, the cork rested at the skin’s surface. He then pulled the needles out, measured them, and made drawings based on the measurements from different areas. Thus, he devised a sort of topographical map, leaving a legacy for future anthropologists and forensic sculptors.

Around this time, Lombroso came back into the picture with a new invention, the sphygmograph, which measured changes in blood pressure and pulse during the interrogation of suspects. The person donned an airtight volumetric glove attached to a thin piece of rubber that stimulated a pen to record the variations evident in the suspect’s blood flow. Lombroso assumed that when the person lied, his or her blood pressure would change, and when compared to what was said during that time frame, it could be established as truth or a lie. Thus, he provided the first lie detector, based on physiological changes.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered x-rays that year and founded the science of x-ray crystallography, wherein refracting x-rays through a crystal diffracted them, allowing them to be caught on a photograph. While not yet applied to criminal investigations, hindsight would eventually note this discovery.

In addition, odontology got another boost, albeit from an enormous tragedy in Paris in 1897. Under France’s Third Republic, the first charity sales lured crowds of aristocrats to come to stalls to purchase goods, thereby supporting worthy causes. During one such bazaar on May 4, in front of the wooden building where more than one hundred charities were represented, a gas lamp exploded in a cinematograph. The fire spread quickly, and even before the fire brigades arrived, the building had collapsed. While many survivors were pulled out, 140 had been killed, which left officials with a massive number of identifications to make among weeping and frightened relatives of potential victims. The bodies were taken to the nearby Palais of Industry and laid out in rows. Relatives managed to identify most of them, taking them away for burial, but thirty bodies were so badly burned they remained where they were. Among those who came to find a loved one was the Paraguayan consul, looking for the body of Duchesse d’Alencon, sister to the empress Elizabeth of Austria. Observing that the teeth of these victims remained intact, he called on dentists who may have treated the victims to attempt to use their records to identify them, and with this approach most were returned to their families. The reports about these dental identifications, while not forensic in the legal sense, were preserved for future students of dentistry and forensic odontology.