The Devil in the White City

Holmes

IN THE FALL OF 1895 Holmes stood trial in Philadelphia for the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel. District Attorney George Graham brought thirty-five witnesses to Philadelphia from Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Irvington, Detroit, Toronto, Boston, Burlington, and Fort Worth, but they never were called. The judge ruled that Graham could present only evidence tied directly to the Pitezel murder and thus eliminated from the historical record a rich seam of detail on the murders of Dr. Herman W. Mudgett, alias Holmes.

Graham also brought to the courtroom the wart Holmes had removed from Benjamin Pitezel’s corpse and a wooden box containing Pitezel’s skull. There was a good deal of macabre testimony about decomposition and body fluids and the effects of chloroform. “There was a red fluid issuing from his mouth,” testified Dr. William Scott, a pharmacist who had accompanied police to the house where Pitezel’s body had been discovered, “and any little pressure on the stomach or over the chest here would cause this fluid to flow more rapidly…”

After one particularly grisly stretch of Dr. Scott’s testimony, Holmes stood and said, “I would ask that the Court be adjourned for sufficient time for lunch.”

There were sorrowful moments, especially when Mrs. Pitezel took the stand. She wore a black dress, black hat, and black cape and looked pale and sad. Often she paused in midsentence and rested her head on her hands. Graham showed her the letters from Alice and Nellie and asked her to identify the handwriting. These were a surprise to her. She broke down. Holmes showed no emotion. “It was an expression of utmost indifference,” a reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger said. “He made his notes with a manner as unconcerned as if he were sitting in his own office writing a business letter.”

Graham asked Mrs. Pitezel whether she had seen the children since the time in 1894 when Holmes took them away. She answered in a voice almost too soft to hear, “I saw them at Toronto in the morgue, side by side.”

So many handkerchiefs appeared among the men and women in the gallery that the courtroom looked as if it had just experienced a sudden snowfall.

Graham called Holmes “the most dangerous man in the world.” The jury found him guilty; the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. Holmes’s attorneys appealed the conviction and lost.

As Holmes awaited execution, he prepared a long confession, his third, in which he admitted killing twenty-seven people. As with two previous confessions, this one was a mixture of truth and falsehood. A few of the people he claimed to have murdered turned out to be alive. Exactly how many people he killed will never be known. At the very least he killed nine: Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand, the Williams sisters, and Pitezel and his children. No one doubted that he had killed many others. Estimates ranged as high as two hundred, though such extravagance seems implausible even for a man of his appetite. Detective Geyer believed that if the Pinkertons had not caught up with Holmes and arranged his arrest in Boston, he would have killed the rest of the Pitezel family. “That he fully intended to murder Mrs. Pitezel and Dessie and the baby, Wharton, is too evident for contradiction.”

Holmes, in his confession, also clearly lied, or at least was deeply deluded, when he wrote, “I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure…. My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.”

His description of killing Alice and Nellie rang true, however. He said he placed the girls in a large trunk and made an opening in its top. “Here I left them until I could return and at my leisure kill them. At 5 P.M. I borrowed a spade of a neighbor and at the same time called on Mrs. Pitezel at her hotel. I then returned to my hotel and ate my dinner, and at 7:00 P.M. I again returned to the house where the children were imprisoned, and ended their lives by connecting the gas with the trunk, then came the opening of the trunk and the viewing of their little blackened and distorted faces, then the digging of their shallow graves in the basement of the house.”

He said of Pitezel, “It will be understood that from the first hour of our acquaintance, even before I knew he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my blood-thirstiness, I intended to kill him.”

Afraid that someone would steal his own body after his execution, Holmes left instructions with his lawyers for how he was to be buried. He refused to allow an autopsy. His lawyers turned down an offer of $5,000 for his body. The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia wanted his brain. This request, too, the lawyers refused, much to the regret of Milton Greeman, curator of Wistar’s renowned collection of medical specimens. “The man was something more than a mere criminal who acted on impulse,” Greeman said. “He was a man who studied crime and planned his career. His brain might have given science valuable aid.”

Shortly before ten A.M. on May 7, 1896, after a breakfast of boiled eggs, dry toast, and coffee, Holmes was escorted to the gallows at Moyamensing Prison. This was a difficult moment for his guards. They liked Holmes. They knew he was a killer, but he was a charming killer. The assistant superintendent, a man named Richardson, seemed nervous as he readied the noose. Holmes turned to him and smiled, and said, “Take your time, old man.” At 10:13 Richardson released the trap and hanged him.

Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported.

Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

No stone or tomb marks the grave of Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes. His presence in Holy Cross Cemetery is something of a secret, recorded only in an ancient registry volume that lists his location as section 15, range 10, lot 41, at the center of graves 3 and 4, just off a lane that the cemetery calls Lazarus Avenue, after the biblical character who died and was restored to life. The entry also notes “ten feet of cement.” At the gravesite there is only an open lawn in the midst of other old graves. There are children and a World War I pilot.

No one ever left flowers here for Holmes, but as it happens, he was not entirely forgotten.

In 1997 police in Chicago arrested a physician named Michael Swango at O’Hare Airport. The initial charge was fraud, but Swango was suspected of being a serial killer who murdered hospital patients through the administration of lethal doses of drugs. Eventually Dr. Swango pled guilty to four murders, but investigators believed he had committed many more. During the airport arrest police found in Swango’s possession a notebook in which he had copied passages from certain books, either for the inspiration they provided or because of some affirming resonance. One passage was from a book about H. H. Holmes called The Torture Doctor by David Franke. The copied passage sought to put the reader into Holmes’s mind.

“‘He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world,’” Swango’s notebook read. “‘He could feel that he was a god in disguise.’”