then filled it with gas from a lamp valve. Indeed, when police found the trunk they discovered a hole drilled through one side, covered with a makeshift patch.
“Nothing could be more surprising,” Geyer wrote, “than the apparent ease with which Holmes murdered the two little girls in the very center of the city of Toronto, without arousing the least suspicion of a single person there.” If not for Graham’s decision to send him on his search, he believed, “these murders would never have been discovered, and Mrs. Pitezel would have gone to her grave without knowing whether her children were alive or dead.”
For Geyer, finding the girls was “one of the most satisfactory events of my life,” but his satisfaction was tempered by the fact that Howard remained missing. Mrs. Pitezel refused to believe Howard was dead; she “clung fondly to the hope that he would ultimately be found alive.”
Even Geyer found himself hoping that in this one case Holmes had not lied and had done exactly what he had told the clerk in Indianapolis.
“Had [Howard] been placed in some institution, as Holmes had intimated his intention of doing, or was he hidden in some obscure place beyond reach or discovery? Was he alive or dead? I was puzzled, nonplussed, and groping in the dark.”
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
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
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
“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.”
“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.
