The Devil in the White City

“All the Weary Days”

IT WAS A STRANGE MOMENT for Geyer. He had examined every lead, checked every hotel, visited every boardinghouse and real estate agent, and yet now he had to begin his search anew. Where? What path was left? The weather remained stifling, as if taunting him.

His instincts kept telling him that Holmes had killed Howard in Indianapolis. He returned there on July 24 and again received the assistance of Detective David Richards, but now Geyer also called in the press. The next day every newspaper in the city reported his arrival. Dozens of people visited him at his hotel to make suggestions about where he ought to look for Howard. “The number of mysterious persons who had rented houses in and about Indianapolis multiplied from day to day,” Geyer wrote. He and Richards trudged through the heat from office to office, house to house, and found nothing. “Days came and passed, but I continued to be as much in the dark as ever, and it began to look as though the bold but clever criminal had outwitted the detectives … and that the disappearance of Howard Pitezel would pass into history as an unsolved mystery.”

Meanwhile the mystery of Holmes himself grew deeper and darker.

Geyer’s discovery of the girls prompted Chicago police to enter Holmes’s building in Englewood. Each day they delved more deeply into the secrets of the “castle,” and each day turned up additional evidence that Holmes was something far worse than even Geyer’s macabre discoveries indicated. There was speculation that during the world’s fair he might have killed dozens of people, most of them young women. One estimate, certainly an exaggeration, put the toll at two hundred. To most people, it seemed impossible that Holmes could have done so much killing without detection. Geyer would have agreed, except that his own search had revealed again and again Holmes’s talent for deflecting scrutiny.

Chicago detectives began their exploration of the castle on the night of Friday, July 19. First they made a broad survey of the building. The third floor contained small hotel rooms. The second floor had thirty-five rooms that were harder to classify. Some were ordinary bedrooms; others had no windows and were fitted with doors that made the rooms airtight. One room contained a walk-in vault, with iron walls. Police found a gas jet with no apparent function other than to admit gas into the vault. Its cutoff valve was located in Holmes’s personal apartment. In Holmes’s office they found a bank book belonging to a woman named Lucy Burbank. It listed a balance of $23,000. The woman could not be located.

The eeriest phase of the investigation began when the police, holding their flickering lanterns high, entered the hotel basement, a cavern of brick and timber measuring 50 by 165 feet. The discoveries came quickly: a vat of acid with eight ribs and part of a skull settled at the bottom; mounds of quicklime; a large kiln; a dissection table stained with what seemed to be blood. They found surgical tools and charred high-heeled shoes.

And more bones:

Eighteen ribs from the torso of a child.

Several vertebrae.

A bone from a foot.

One shoulder blade.

One hip socket.

Articles of clothing emerged from walls and from pits of ash and quicklime, including a girl’s dress and bloodstained overalls. Human hair clotted a stovepipe. The searchers unearthed two buried vaults full of quicklime and human remains. They theorized the remains might be the last traces of two Texas women, Minnie and Anna Williams, whom Chicago police had only recently learned were missing. In the ash of a large stove they found a length of chain that the jeweler in Holmes’s pharmacy recognized as part of a watch chain Holmes had given Minnie as a gift. They also found a letter Holmes had written to the pharmacist in his drugstore. “Do you ever see anything of the ghost of the Williams sisters,” Holmes wrote, “and do they trouble you much now?”

The next day the police discovered another hidden chamber, this one at the cellar’s southwest corner. They were led to it by a man named Charles Chappell, alleged to have helped Holmes reduce corpses to bone. He was very cooperative, and soon the police recovered three fully articulated skeletons from their owners. A fourth was expected from Chicago’s Hahneman Medical College.

One of the most striking discoveries came on the second floor, in the walk-in vault. The inside of the door showed the unmistakable imprint of a woman’s bare foot. Police theorized the print had been made by a woman suffocating within. Her name, they believed, was Emeline Cigrand.

Chicago police telegraphed District Attorney Graham that their search of the Holmes building had uncovered the skeleton of a child. Graham ordered Geyer to Chicago to see if the remains might be those of Howard Pitezel.

Geyer found the city transfixed by the revelations emerging from the castle. Press coverage had been exhaustive, taking up most of the front page of the daily newspapers. One Tribune headline had cried VICTIMS OF A FIEND, and reported that the remains of Howard Pitezel had been found in the building. The story took up six of the seven columns of the front page.

Geyer met with the lead police inspector and learned that a physician who had just examined the child’s skeleton had ruled it to be that of a little girl. The inspector thought he knew the girl’s identity and mentioned a name, Pearl Conner. The name meant nothing to Geyer.

Geyer telegraphed his disappointment to Graham, who ordered him back to Philadelphia for consultation and rest.

On Wednesday evening, August 7, with temperatures in the nineties and traincars like ovens, Geyer set out again, this time accompanied by Fidelity Mutual’s top insurance investigator, Inspector W. E. Gary. Geyer was glad for the company.

They went to Chicago, then to Indiana, where they stopped in Logansport and Peru, then to Montpelier Junction, Ohio, and Adrian, Michigan. They spent days searching the records of every hotel, boardinghouse, and real estate office they could find, “all,” Geyer said, “to no purpose.”

Although Geyer’s brief rest in Philadelphia had recharged his hopes, he now found them “fast dwindling away.” He still believed his original instinct was correct, that Howard was in Indianapolis or somewhere nearby. He went there next, his third visit of the summer.

“I must confess I returned to Indianapolis in no cheerful frame of mind,” Geyer wrote. He and Inspector Gary checked into Geyer’s old hotel, the Spencer House. The failure to find Howard after so much effort was frustrating and puzzling. “The mystery,” Geyer wrote, “seemed to be impenetrable.”

On Thursday, August 19, Geyer learned that during the preceding night Holmes’s castle in Englewood, his own dark dreamland, had burned to the ground. Front-page headlines in the Chicago Tribune shouted, “Holmes’ Den Burned; Fire Demolishes the Place of Murder and Mystery.” The fire department suspected arson; police theorized that whoever set the fire had wanted to destroy the secrets still embedded within. They arrested no one.

Together Detective Geyer and Inspector Gary investigated nine hundred leads. They expanded their search to include small towns outside Indianapolis. “By Monday,” Geyer wrote in a report to headquarters, “we will have searched every outlying town, except Irvington, and another day will conclude that. After Irvington, I scarcely know where we shall go.”

They went to Irvington on Tuesday morning, August 27, 1895, aboard an electric trolley, a new kind of streetcar that drew its power through a wheeled conducting apparatus on the roof called a troller. Just before the trolley reached its final stop, Geyer spotted a sign for a real estate office. He and Gary resolved to begin their search there.

The proprietor was a Mr. Brown. He offered the detectives each a chair, but they remained standing. They did not think the visit would last long, and there were many other offices to touch before nightfall. Geyer opened his now-soiled parcel of photographs.

Brown adjusted his glasses and examined the picture of Holmes. After a long pause he said, “I did not have the renting of the house, but I had the keys, and one day last fall, this man came into my office and in a very abrupt way said I want the keys for that house.” Geyer and Gary stood very still. Brown continued: “I remember the man very well, because I did not like his manner, and I felt that he should have had more respect for my gray hairs.”

The detectives looked at each other. Both sat down at the same time. “All the toil,” Geyer said, “all the weary days and weeks of travel—toil and travel in the hottest months of the year, alternating between faith and hope, and discouragement and despair, all were recompensed in that one moment, when I saw the veil about to lift.”

At the inquest that followed a young man named Elvet Moorman testified he had helped Holmes set up a large woodstove in the house. He recalled asking Holmes why he didn’t install a gas stove instead. Holmes answered “that he did not think gas was healthy for children.”

The owner of an Indianapolis repair shop testified that Holmes had come into his shop on October 3, 1894, with two cases of surgical instruments and asked to have them sharpened. Holmes picked them up three days later.

Detective Geyer testified how during his search of the house he had opened the base of a chimney flue that extended from roof to cellar. While sifting the accumulated ash through a fly screen, he found human teeth and a fragment of jaw. He also retrieved “a large charred mass, which upon being cut, disclosed a portion of the stomach, liver and spleen, baked quite hard.” The organs had been packed too tightly into the chimney and thus never had burned.

And of course Mrs. Pitezel was summoned. She identified Howard’s overcoat and his scarf pin, and a crochet needle that belonged to Alice.

Finally the coroner showed her a toy that Geyer himself had found in the house. It consisted of a tin man mounted on a spinning top. She recognized it. How could she not? It was Howard’s most important possession. Mrs. Pitezel herself had put it in the children’s trunk just before she sent them off with Holmes. His father had bought it for him at the Chicago world’s fair.