The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

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.”

Moyamensing Prison

HOLMES SAT IN HIS CELL at Moyamensing Prison, a large turreted and crenellated building at Tenth and Reed streets, in south Philadelphia. He did not seem terribly troubled by his incarceration, although he complained of its injustice. “The great humiliation of feeling that I am a prisoner is killing me far more than any other discomforts I have to endure,” he wrote—though in fact he felt no humiliation whatsoever. If he felt anything, it was a smug satisfaction that so far no one had been able to produce any concrete evidence that he had killed Ben Pitezel or the missing children.

He occupied a cell that measured nine by fourteen feet, with a narrow barred window high in its outer wall and a single electric lamp, which guards extinguished at nine o’clock each night. The walls were whitewashed. The stone construction of the prison helped blunt the extreme heat that had settled on the city and much of the country, but nothing could keep out the humidity for which Philadelphia was notorious. It clung to Holmes and his fellow prisoners like a cloak of moist wool, yet this too he seemed not to mind. Holmes became a model prisoner—became in fact the model of a model prisoner. He made a game of using his charm to gain concessions from his keepers. He was allowed to wear his own clothes “and to keep my watch and other small belongings.” He discovered also that he could pay to have food, newspapers, and magazines brought in from outside. He read of his increasing national notoriety. He read too that Frank Geyer, a Philadelphia police detective who had interviewed him in June, was now in the Midwest searching for Pitezel’s children. The search delighted Holmes. It satisfied his profound need for attention and gave him a sense of power over the detective. He knew that Geyer’s search would be in vain.

Holmes’s cell was furnished with a bed, a stool, and a writing table, upon which he composed his memoir. He had begun it, he said, the preceding winter—to be exact, on December 3, 1894.

He opened the memoir as if it were a fable: “Come with me, if you will, to a tiny quiet New England village, nestling among the picturesquely rugged hills of New Hampshire…. Here, in the year 1861, I, Herman W. Mudgett, the author of these pages, was born. That the first years of my life were different from those of any other ordinary country-bred boy, I have no reason to think.” The dates and places were correct; his description of his boyhood as a typical country idyll was most certainly a fabrication. It is one of the defining characteristics of psychopaths that as children they lied at will, exhibited unusual cruelty to animals and other children, and often engaged in acts of vandalism, with arson an especially favored act.

Holmes inserted into his memoir a “prison diary” that he claimed to have kept since the day he arrived at Moyamensing. It is more likely that he invented the diary expressly for the memoir, intending it as a vehicle for reinforcing his claims of innocence by fostering the impression that he was a man of warmth and piety. He claimed in the diary to have established a daily schedule aimed at personal betterment. He would wake at six-thirty each day and take his “usual sponge bath,” then clean his cell. He would breakfast at seven. “I shall eat no more meat of any kind while I am so closely confined.” He planned to exercise and read the morning newspapers until ten o’clock. “From 10 to 12 and 2 to 4 six days in the week, I shall confine myself to my old medical works and other college studies including stenography, French and German.” The rest of the day he would devote to reading various periodicals and library books.

At one point in his diary he notes that he was reading Trilby, the 1894 best seller by George Du Maurier about a young singer, Trilby O’Farrell, and her possession by the mesmerist Svengali. Holmes wrote that he “was much pleased with parts of it.”

Elsewhere in the diary Holmes went for the heart.

One entry, for May 16, 1895: “My birthday. Am 34 years old. I wonder if, as in former years, mother will write me….”

In another entry he described a visit from his latest wife, Georgiana Yoke. “She has suffered, and though she tried heroically to keep me from seeing it, it was of no avail: and in a few minutes to again bid her goodbye and know she was going out into the world with so heavy a load to bear, caused me more suffering than any death struggles can ever do. Each day until I know she is safe from harm and annoyance will be a living death to me.”

From his cell Holmes also wrote a long letter to Carrie Pitezel, which he composed in a manner that shows he was aware the police were reading his mail. He insisted that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were with “Miss W.” in London, and that if the police would only check his story in detail, the mystery of the children would be solved. “I was as careful of the children as if they were my own, and you know me well enough to judge me better than strangers here can do. Ben would not have done anything against me, or I against him, any quicker than brothers. We never quarrelled. Again, he was worth too much to me for me to have killed him, if I had no other reason not to. As to the children, I never will believe, until you tell me so yourself, that you think they are dead or that I did anything to put them out of the way. Knowing me as you do, can you imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any motive?”

He explained the lack of mail from the children. “They have no doubt written letters which Miss W., for her own safety, has withheld.”

Holmes read the daily papers closely. Clearly the detective’s search had borne little fruit. Holmes had no doubt that Geyer soon would be forced to end his hunt and return to Philadelphia.

The prospect of this was pleasing in the extreme.

The Tenant

ON SUNDAY, JULY 7, 1895, Detective Geyer took his search to Toronto, where the city’s police department assigned Detective Alf Cuddy to assist him. Together Geyer and Cuddy scoured the hotels and boardinghouses of Toronto and after days of searching found that here, too, Holmes had been moving three parties of travelers simultaneously.