The Devil in the White City

“Property of H. H. Holmes”

DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels and mystery stories. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison.

The suspect was a physician whose given name was Mudgett but was known more commonly by the alias H. H. Holmes. He once had lived in Chicago where he and an associate, Benjamin Pitezel, had run a hotel during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They had moved next to Fort Worth, Texas, then to St. Louis, and on to Philadelphia, committing frauds along the way. In Philadelphia Holmes had swindled the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of nearly $10,000 by apparently faking the death of a policyholder, Ben Pitezel. Holmes had bought the insurance in 1893 from Fidelity’s Chicago office, just before the close of the exposition. As evidence of fraud accumulated, Fidelity had hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—“The Eye That Never Sleeps”—to search for Holmes. The agency’s operatives picked up his trail in Burlington, Vermont, and followed him to Boston, where they arranged to have him arrested by police. Holmes confessed to the fraud and agreed to be extradited to Philadelphia for trial. At that point the case appeared to be closed. But now in June 1895 it was becoming increasingly apparent that Holmes had not faked the death of Ben Pitezel, he had killed him and then arranged the scene to make the death seem accidental. Now three of Pitezel’s five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—were missing, last seen in Holmes’s company.

Geyer’s assignment was to find the children. He was invited to join the case by Philadelphia district attorney George S. Graham, who over the years had come to rely on Geyer for the city’s most sensitive investigations. Graham had thought twice this time, however, for he knew that just a few months earlier Geyer had lost his wife, Martha, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Esther, in a house fire.

Geyer interviewed Holmes in his cell but learned nothing new. Holmes insisted that when he had last seen the Pitezel children, they were alive and traveling with a woman named Minnie Williams, en route to the place where their father was hiding out.

Geyer found Holmes to be smooth and glib, a social chameleon. “Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation,” Geyer wrote, “and all of his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of his statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.”

Holmes claimed to have secured a cadaver that resembled Ben Pitezel and to have placed it on the second floor of a house rented especially for the fraud. By coincidence or out of some malignant expression of humor, the house was located right behind the city morgue, a few blocks north of City Hall. Holmes admitted arranging the cadaver to suggest that Pitezel had died in an accidental explosion. He poured a solvent on the cadaver’s upper body and set it on fire, then positioned the body on the floor in direct sunlight. By the time the body was discovered, its features had been distorted well beyond recognition. Holmes volunteered to assist the coroner in making an identification. At the morgue he not only helped locate a distinctive wart on the dead man’s neck, he pulled out his own lancet and removed the wart himself, then matter-of-factly handed it to the coroner.

The coroner had wanted a member of the Pitezel family also to be present at the identification. Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, was ill and could not come. Instead she sent her second-eldest daughter, Alice, fifteen years old. The coroner’s men draped the body so as to allow Alice to see only Pitezel’s teeth. She seemed confident that the corpse was her father. Fidelity paid the death benefit. Next Holmes traveled to St. Louis, where the Pitezel family now lived. Still in possession of Alice, he persuaded Carrie to let him pick up two more of her children, explaining that their father, in hiding, was desperate to see them. He took Nellie, eleven, and Howard, eight, and embarked with all three children on a strange and sad journey.

Geyer knew from Alice’s letters that initially she found the trip to be something of an adventure. In a letter to her mother, dated September 20, 1894, Alice wrote, “I wish you could see what I have seen.” In the same letter she expressed her distaste for Holmes’s treacly manner. “I don’t like him to call me babe and child and dear and all such trash.” The next day she wrote again, “Mamma have you ever seen or tasted a red banana? I have had three. They are so big that I can just reach around it and have my thumb and next finger just tutch.” Since leaving St. Louis, Alice had heard nothing from home and feared her mother’s illness might have gotten much worse. “Have you gotten 4 letters from me besides this?” Alice wrote. “Are you sick in bed yet or are you up? I wish that I could hear from you.”

One of the few things that Detective Geyer knew with certainty was that neither of these letters ever reached Carrie Pitezel. Alice and Nellie had written to their mother repeatedly while in Holmes’s custody and had given the letters to Holmes with the expectation that he would mail them. He never did. Shortly after his arrest police discovered a tin box, marked “Property of H. H. Holmes,” containing various documents and a dozen letters from the girls. He had stored them in the box as if they were seashells collected from a beach.

Now Mrs. Pitezel was nearly crushed with anxiety and grief, despite Holmes’s latest assurances that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were in London, England, under the able care of Minnie Williams. A search by Scotland Yard had found no trace of any of them. Geyer had little hope that his own search would fare any better. With more than half a year having elapsed since anyone had heard from the children, Geyer wrote, “it did not look like a very encouraging task to undertake, and it was the general belief of all interested, that the children would never be found. The District Attorney believed, however, that another final effort to find the children should be made, for the sake of the stricken mother, if for nothing else. I was not placed under any restrictions, but was told to go and exercise my own judgment in the matter, and to follow wherever the clues led me.”

Geyer set out on his search on the evening of June 26, 1895, a hot night in a hot summer. Earlier in June a zone of high pressure, the “permanent high,” had settled over the middle Atlantic states and driven temperatures in Philadelphia well into the nineties. A humid stillness held the countryside. Even at night the air inside Geyer’s train was stagnant and moist. Leftover cigar smoke drifted from men’s suits, and at each stop the roar of frogs and crickets filled the car. Geyer slept in jagged stretches.

The next day, as the train sped west through the heat-steamed hollows of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Geyer reread his copies of the children’s letters to look for anything he might have missed that could help direct his search. The letters not only provided irrefutable proof that the children had been with Holmes but contained geographic references that allowed Geyer to plot the broad contours of the route Holmes and the children had followed. Their first stop appeared to have been Cincinnati.

Detective Geyer reached Cincinnati at seven-thirty P.M. on Thursday, June 27. He checked into the Palace Hotel. The next morning he went to police headquarters to brief the city’s police superintendent on his mission. The superintendent assigned a detective to assist him, Detective John Schnooks, an old friend of Geyer’s.

Geyer hoped to reconstruct the children’s travels from Cincinnati onward. There was no easy way to achieve his goal. He had few tools other than his wits, his notebook, a handful of photographs, and the children’s letters. He and Detective Schnooks made a list of all the hotels in Cincinnati located near railroad stations, then set out on foot to visit each one and check its registrations for some sign of the children and Holmes. That Holmes would use an alias seemed beyond doubt, so Geyer brought along his photographs, even a depiction of the children’s distinctive “flat-top” trunk. Many months had passed since the children had written their letters, however. Geyer had little hope that anyone would remember one man and three children.

On that point, as it happens, he was wrong.

The detectives trudged from one hotel to the next. The day got hotter and hotter. The detectives were courteous and never showed impatience, despite having to make the same introductions and tell the same story over and over again.

On Central Avenue they came to a small inexpensive hotel, the Atlantic House. As they had done at all the other hotels, they asked the clerk if they could see his registration book. They turned first to Friday, September 28, 1894, the day that Holmes, while already in possession of Alice, had picked up Nellie and Howard from their St. Louis home. Geyer guessed Holmes and the children had reached Cincinnati later that same day. Geyer ran his finger down the page and stopped at an entry for “Alex E. Cook,” a guest who according to the register was traveling with three children.

The entry jogged Geyer’s memory. Holmes had used the name before, to rent a house in Burlington, Vermont. Also, Geyer by now had seen a lot of Holmes’s handwriting. The writing in the ledger looked familiar.

The “Cook” party stayed only one night, the register showed. But Geyer knew from the girls’ letters that they had remained in Cincinnati an additional night. It seemed odd that Holmes would go to the trouble of moving to a second hotel, but Geyer knew from experience that making assumptions about the behavior of criminals was always a dangerous thing. He and Schnooks thanked the clerk for his kind attention, then set out to canvass more hotels.

The sun was high, the streets steamed. Cicadas scratched off messages from every tree. At Sixth and Vine the detectives came to a hotel called the Bristol and discovered that on Saturday, September 29, 1894, a party identified as “A. E. Cook” had checked in, with three children. When the clerk saw Geyer’s photographs, he confirmed that the guests were Holmes, Alice, Nellie, and Howard. They checked out the next morning, Sunday, September 30. The date fit the likely chronology of events: Geyer knew from the children’s letters that on that Sunday morning they had left Cincinnati and by evening had arrived in Indianapolis.

Geyer was not yet ready to leave Cincinnati, however. Now he played a hunch. The Pinkertons had found that Holmes sometimes rented houses in the cities through which he traveled, as he had done in Burlington. Geyer and Schnooks turned their attention to Cincinnati’s real estate agents.

Their search eventually took them to the realty office of J. C. Thomas, on East Third Street.

Something about Holmes must have caused people to take notice, because both Thomas and his clerk remembered him. Holmes had rented a house at 305 Poplar Street, under the name “A. C. Hayes,” and had made a substantial advance payment.

The date of the agreement, Thomas said, was September 28, 1894, the Friday when Holmes and the children had arrived in Cincinnati. Holmes held the house only two days.

Thomas could offer no further details but referred the detectives to a woman named Henrietta Hill, who lived next door to the house.

Geyer and Schnooks immediately set out for Miss Hill’s residence and found her to be an acute observer and a willing gossip. “There is really very little to tell,” she said—then told them a lot.

She first had noticed the new tenant on Saturday, September 29, when a furniture wagon stopped in front of the rental house. A man and a boy descended. What most caught Miss Hill’s attention was the fact that the furniture wagon was empty save for an iron stove that seemed much too large for a private residence.

Miss Hill found the stove sufficiently strange that she mentioned it to her neighbors. The next morning Holmes came to her front door and told her he was not going to stay in the house after all. If she wanted the stove, he said, she could have it.

Detective Geyer theorized that Holmes must have sensed an excess of neighborly scrutiny and changed his plans. But what were those plans? At the time, Geyer wrote, “I was not able to appreciate the intense significance of the renting of the Poplar Street house and the delivery of a stove of such immense size.” He was certain, however, that he had “taken firm hold of the end of the string” that would lead to the children.

Based on the girls’ letters, Geyer’s next stop was obvious. He thanked Detective Schnooks for his companionship and caught a train to Indianapolis.

It was even hotter in Indianapolis. Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.

Early Sunday morning Geyer went to the police station and picked up a new local partner, Detective David Richards.

One part of the trail was easy to find. In Nellie Pitezel’s letter from Indianapolis, she had written “we are at the English H.” Detective Richards knew the place: The Hotel English.

In the hotel’s register Geyer found an entry on September 30 for “three Canning children.” Canning, he knew, was Carrie Pitezel’s maiden name.

Nothing was simple, however. According to the register, the Canning children had checked out the next day, Monday, October 1. Yet Geyer knew, again from their letters, that the children had remained in Indianapolis for at least another week. Holmes seemed to be repeating the pattern he had established in Cincinnati.

Geyer began the same methodical canvass he had conducted in Cincinnati. He and Detective Richards checked hotel after hotel but found no further reference to the children.

They did, however, find something else.

At a hotel called the Circle Park they discovered an entry for a “Mrs. Georgia Howard.” Howard was one of Holmes’s more common aliases, Geyer now knew. He believed this woman could be Holmes’s latest wife, Georgiana Yoke. The register showed that “Mrs. Howard” had checked in on Sunday, September 30, 1894, and stayed four nights.

Geyer showed his photographs to the hotel’s proprietor, a Mrs. Rodius, who recognized Holmes and Yoke but not the children. Mrs. Rodius explained that she and Yoke had become friends. In one conversation Yoke had told her that her husband was “a very wealthy man, and that he owned real estate and cattle ranches in Texas; also had considerable real estate in Berlin, Germany, where they intended to go as soon as her husband could get his business affairs into shape to leave.”

The timing of all these hotel stays was perplexing. As best Geyer could tell, on that one Sunday, September 30, Holmes somehow had managed to maneuver the three children and his own wife into different hotels in the same city, without revealing their existence to one another.

But where had the children gone next?

Geyer and Richards examined the registers of every hotel and boardinghouse in Indianapolis but found no further trace of the children.

The Indianapolis leg of Geyer’s search seemed to have reached a dead end, when Richards remembered that a hotel called the Circle House had been open during the fall of 1894 but had since closed. He and Geyer checked with other hotels to find out who had run the Circle House, and learned from its former clerk that the registration records were in the possession of a downtown attorney.

The records had been poorly kept, but among the guests who had arrived on Monday, October 1, Geyer found a familiar entry: “Three Canning children.” The register showed the children were from Galva, Illinois—the town where Mrs. Pitezel had grown up. Geyer now felt a pressing need to talk to the hotel’s past manager and found him running a saloon in West Indianapolis. His name was Herman Ackelow.

Geyer explained his mission and immediately showed Ackelow his photographs of Holmes and the Pitezel children. Ackelow was silent a moment. Yes, he said, he was sure of it: The man in the photograph had come to his hotel.

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 boarding-houses. 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.”