The Devil in the White City

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.”