The Devil's Dozen (3 page)

Notorious turn-of-the century serial killer H. H. Holmes.

The case began in Philadelphia. On September 3, 1894, a man looking for a patent dealer on Callowhill Street ascended the stairs to an office. A stench filled the air and appeared to grow worse on the second floor. When the caller spotted a decomposing corpse with a blackened face lying on the floor, he fetched the police.

They arrived and found that the victim’s head, chest, and right arm were badly burned, and a match and a broken bottle of chloroform lay nearby. It appeared that he’d accidentally struck a match near an explosive solvent.

The victim was identified as Benjamin F. Pitezel, and when his wife, Carrie, was notified, she requested the life insurance payment from Fidelity Mutual of $10,000. However, an imprisoned convict informed the company that the whole thing was a scam; someone else’s body had been substituted for that of the alleged victim. His warning came too late. A man named H. H. Holmes had already brought Pitezel’s oldest daughter, Alice, to identify the body and settle the claim.

Given these details, an officer for the insurance company tried unsuccessfully to track down Holmes, so officials hired agents from the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to go after the scoundrel. These more experienced investigators followed Holmes’s trail from state to state, gathering information about his numerous frauds, thefts, and seductions. They learned about insurance scams years earlier in Chicago that had provided him with sufficient funds to build a three-story hotel. As they built their case, they realized that Holmes, whose real name was Her-man Mudgett, was among the most successful and versatile swindlers they had ever come across. If he hadn’t gotten greedy and brought his schemes too close to home, he’d have still been in business. But this time, they believed they could get him.

The agents followed his trail through Chicago, Detroit, Ontario, New York, and New England. Finally, they caught up to Holmes near his childhood haunts in Vermont. They put him under surveillance and gave the information of his whereabouts, along with that of Carrie Pitezel, to police. On the afternoon of November 16, H. H. Holmes was apprehended in Boston as he prepared to board a steamship. The arresting officers told him he was being charged with the theft of a horse in Texas, so he surrendered easily, probably amused, because he knew he’d committed much more serious crimes. So did they, but they did not let on that he’d soon be extradited for murder charges to the commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

Detective Frank Geyer, who became famous for tracking Holmes’s victims down.

Philadelphia Detective Thomas Crawford arrived with an arrest warrant for both Holmes and Carrie Pitezel, but she alerted them to her missing children. The travelers had split into small groups to evade detectives and Holmes had taken three of the Pitezel children with him. Yet they were not with him now. Holmes claimed they were in the care of a woman, Minnie Williams, who had already sailed for England. He admitted to fraud, saying Benjamin Pitezel was in South America, and agreed to return to Philadelphia.

Further investigation over the next few months revealed that even the scammers had been duped: Pitezel, a supposed scammer, was indeed the victim. Holmes said that Pitezel had decided to commit suicide, but it seemed more likely that he’d been duped. Investigators surmised that Holmes had persuaded Pitezel to get insured and use his family to collect the money after his “death,” but then Holmes had killed him in order to take the funds for himself. That he had committed murder raised the possibility that he might have done away with the Pitezel children as well, especially since “Minnie Williams” was nowhere to be found. Carrie Pitezel, against whom all charges had been dropped, was frantic, so Holmes was taken to the private office of District Attorney George S. Graham for further questioning.

This is where, in June 1895, Detective Frank Geyer came face-to-face with his nemesis for the first time. He had already seen Holmes that morning in the courtroom, where he’d pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the insurance company. Now Geyer would have a chance to watch the fiend under pressure.

Balding and stocky, Geyer sported a thick mustache that matched his dark eyebrows and made him an imposing and memorable figure. He arrived at the D.A.’s office with the captain of police, pushing through a crowd of reporters in the hallway outside before closing the door in their faces. Although the reporters did not yet have the details they craved, they seemed to sense the buildup of a media-worthy case.

Inside, Graham told Holmes that authorities suspected that he had murdered not only Pitezel but also the missing children. “Tell us where the children are,” he demanded. Their mother was anxious to be reunited with them. If they were still alive, it would be in Holmes’s best interest to produce them.

Geyer wrote that Holmes played games and adjusted his strategy to whatever seemed necessary to defend himself. He watched as the trickster demonstrated a hallmark behavior of a smart psychopath: quick recovery once caught in a lie, so as to offer another that seemed more plausible. Holmes even professed delight in the opportunity to assist in finding the children. His voice failed slightly, as if he genuinely cared about these kids, and he asked the men around the table to consider what reason he might have for killing innocent babes. He was deeply offended, he said, by the accusation.

Geyer, savvy about criminals, knew better than to accept anything Holmes said at face value, despite the surprising degree of detail he provided. But he also knew that within the story Holmes told were kernels of truth, so he made a mental note of the cities that Holmes mentioned while describing his final journey. Holmes admitted to having had Alice Pitezel, fifteen, in his custody; it was she who had helped him to identify her father’s corpse for the insurance payout. He had also picked up Howard, eight, and Nellie, eleven, telling Carrie where to meet him at a later date. Alice and Nellie had written letters to her, documenting their daily journey, but Holmes had never mailed them. These letters had been found on his person, giving Geyer good clues about where the children had been before they disappeared. Holmes tried to direct him to England, but Geyer knew there was no Minnie Williams and that the street in London that Holmes gave as her address was bogus. Only God knew whether Williams was even alive. From the children’s letters, Geyer focused his efforts on the Midwest and certain areas in Canada.

It seemed likely that Holmes had been careful to erase every trace of what he had done. Given how widely he had traveled, the children could have been left almost anywhere—including murdered and buried—yet the D.A. was convinced that a patient investigator could uncover the necessary clues if he retraced Holmes’s route.

There was no question but that Geyer was the man for the job. With twenty years of experience in the Philadelphia Bureau of Police, he had diligently achieved a reputation as the best the city had to offer. The insurance company offered funds for the trip, since they would retrieve the money from Pitezel’s “accident,” so Geyer agreed to make the effort, despite the fact that he was still grieving for his wife and twelve-year-old daughter, who had died only three months earlier in a tragic fire that consumed the Geyer home. While he could not get his own child back, he hoped he could spare Carrie Pitezel the agony of losing three of hers.

On June 26, 1895, the detective set out by train, carrying photos of Holmes and each of the children, along with an inventory of items and clothing associated with them. He also had photographs of the three large travel trunks they had used. He knew that a prodigious task lay before him, and, fortunately for posterity, he kept detailed notes. Much of what is known about his demanding journey derives from his own memoir.

Arriving in Cincinnati, where he joined Detective John Schnooks, he showed photographs and asked around in a few hotels for anyone who might have seen Holmes or the children. He finally found someone who remembered the small group of travelers. On September 28, they had checked into a cheap hotel under the name Alex E. Cook, one of Holmes’s aliases. It was the first viable lead. The same man pointed Geyer in another direction and he soon found the next hotel at which they had stayed.

Geyer and Schnooks then talked with Realtors. Through extensive questioning, they located a woman who had seen a man resembling Holmes with a ragtag boy the age of Howard. They had come into her neighborhood to rent a house, bringing only a large stove. But Holmes had then given the stove to this woman and vacated the place. Geyer surmised that his sudden change of mind was motivated by the realization that he’d been spotted. Geyer now believed that Holmes had done away with Howard, if not all three children, and that disposing of their bodies had been on his mind.

At this point, the detective believed he “had firm hold of the end of a string which was to lead me ultimately to the consummation of my difficult mission.” However, when nothing more turned up in this area, he went to Indianapolis, which, according to the letters, had been Holmes’s next destination. In any event, the children were still writing letters while in this location.

Working with another local detective, Geyer located clues that gave him a better sense of where the children had been. It was an exceedingly hot day, which made the investigation burdensome, but here Holmes’s perverse game became clear: like pawns, he was moving his wife (one of three) and the children around in hotels in the same city, without any party being aware of the others. He seemed to derive a thrill from the control and secrecy. Geyer could not understand why, if Holmes intended to kill the children, he would go to so much effort and expense. In those days, little was known about the motivations of dangerous psychopaths, generally referred to as people who had a mania without delirium or moral degeneracy. That Holmes might simply get a kick out of being the puppeteer who pulled the strings of his victims, while they continued to trust him, was beyond anyone’s ability to hypothesize. And there was one other item of concern: one person who recalled Holmes said he’d mentioned his desire to be rid of the boy, because he’d become troublesome.

Despite his intuition that Howard had been killed in Indiana, Geyer went to Chicago and Detroit. He learned that Holmes had now added a third party to his game of rotation—Carrie Pitezel and her other two children. He had even placed her only three blocks from where he had boarded her older children, but had not allowed any of them to realize their proximity. From this location, Alice wrote something to her mother that made Geyer’s blood run cold: “Howard is not with us now.” If he was not with the girls and not with his mother, then where could Holmes have taken the boy? It was a solid suggestion that Holmes had killed him, especially since one of the three trunks was now missing, but since there was some slight hope that the girls could still be found, Geyer decided to concentrate on the other locations.

Holmes had said he’d left the children’s trunk at a hotel in Detroit, but after questioning everyone he could find in this general area, Geyer turned up no accounts of Holmes or his companions. Another lie.

Moving on to Toronto, where the last letters from the girls had been written, Geyer found a boardinghouse where they had briefly resided. He intended to look up real estate agents to find out if a man had rented a house for only a few days. It seemed likely that if Holmes had decided to kill one or both girls, he would have tried to hide the deed in a secluded setting. Since he had arranged short-term rentals in other places, this appeared a likely modus operandi. Yet even with the help of a local detective, the task was prodigious. Geyer then enlisted a cadre of reporters. They used photos and printed the story, asking citizens for assistance. This helped inform many local Realtors of the case.

“It took considerable time to impress each agent with the importance of making a careful search for us,” Geyer wrote. Publicity reduced the amount of time they spent at each office, as the checking of records had already been done. Geyer managed to locate a house that someone using the name Holmes had rented, and noticed that there was, ominously, a six-foot fence surrounding it. The family residing there was aware of some loose dirt in one place under the house. Geyer enlisted the aid of some men and led an organized dig in this area, firmly believing they would find the remains of one or more of the children.