There Georgiana rested for the next two days. Holmes remained close to her side for much of the time, though he occasionally went out for an hour or two, presumably to check for messages and attend to unspecified business.
Late in the afternoon of Wednesday, September 5, he returned from one of these outings with some news. He had just received a telegram from a business associate in St. Louis, who required Holmes’s presence at once.
Holmes assured Georgiana that he would be back in a few days. In the meantime, he had asked the hotelkeeper’s wife to look in regularly and see to it that Georgiana received proper care.
Departing on Wednesday night, Holmes arrived in St. Louis the following day and headed directly for the law office of McDonald and Howe. Finding it closed, he proceeded to the Pitezels’ flat, where he discovered the children in hysterics and Carrie at a point of near-collapse.
Though Carrie felt no fondness for Holmes, her misery and loneliness were such that, at the sight of his face, she threw herself against his chest and relapsed into helpless sobs. Patting her consolingly, Holmes led her to a chair, pulled an oversize handkerchief from his pocket, and pressed it into her hands. As Carrie wept into his hankie, Holmes noted that it was identical to the one he had used to asphyxiate her husband only a few days earlier. The thought seemed vaguely amusing.
Standing over her chair, he touched her shoulder again and assured her that Benny was fine. The dead body described in the papers was a substitute corpse that he had procured in New York City. This information, however, did little to soothe the distraught woman.
“Why do you carry on so?” Holmes asked, a slight note of impatience creeping into his voice. “You are making a terrible fuss about it, more so than if it were true.”
“I am sick, the baby is sick,” Carrie answered through her sobs. “Oh, how could Benny do this and get us all into trouble?”
“What is the case with the children?” Holmes inquired after a moment. “What do they believe?”
Her tears having somewhat subsided, Carrie wiped her face with Holmes’s hankie and heaved a ragged sigh. “They believe their father is dead.”
Holmes nodded. “Good. Do not relieve them of that notion. It will make matters easier.”
Stepping to the kitchen doorway, Holmes beckoned to Dessie. Assuming an air of avuncular kindliness, he assured her that everything would be fine, that he had arrived to take care of them all. Then he instructed her to seek out the nearest doctor and fetch him to the house.
While Dessie was gone, Holmes crouched by Carrie’s chair and spoke to her in low, urgent tones. She must get hold of herself. She had an important role to play over the next few days. The success of the plan depended on her participation.
Reaching into his coat pocket, he extracted a business card and placed it in her hands. Tomorrow morning, he explained, she must go to this address, bringing with her the $10,000 life insurance policy that Benny had left in her care. The office was located downtown in the Commercial Building.
Through her red, brimming eyes, Carrie stared down at the card. The name imprinted in its center was Jeptha D. Howe, Esq.
On that very day, a close acquaintance of Lawyer Howe’s came upon the notice of B. F. Perry’s death in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. He, too, had been reading the papers regularly, searching for some indication that the swindler Howard had been telling the truth.
At the sight of the article, the man let out a wordless exclamation. In spite of Howe’s assurances, he had never believed that Howard would really go through with the fraud. During the time they had spent as cellmates, Howard had struck him as a bag full of hot air.
A guard who was patrolling the corridor just outside the man’s cell stopped short and peered through the bars. He had never heard Marion Hedgepeth make such a sound before and wondered what had provoked it.
The sound was something between a bark and a laugh—the sound of a man who has just received a surprise. A very pleasant surprise.
21
In the domain of fabrication Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes, is entitled to a very high place. With him, lying assumed the form of an art…and to this, in large measure at least, his wonderful success in so long concealing his crimes must be attributed.
—Matthew Worth Pinkerton, Murder in All Ages (1898)
George B. Stadden, manager of the St. Louis branch of Fidelity Mutual, was seated at his desk on Saturday morning, September 8, when the envelope arrived. Folded inside were a brief letter and a newspaper clipping about the death of a Philadelphia man named B. F. Perry. The letter—written in a neat, feminine hand, though peppered with misspellings—was from a Mrs. Carrie A. Pitezel, who wished to inform the company that the individual described in the article was her husband, Benjamin Freelon Pitezel, holder of life insurance policy number 044145.
Stadden read the article again, this time more slowly. Then he pushed his chair away from his desk and hurried from his office.
The president of Fidelity Mutual Life Association was a portly gentleman named Levi G. Fouse, who—seeking to set a good example for his subordinates—normally arrived for work no later than nine A.M., even on Saturdays. On this particular Saturday, however, personal matters had detained him at home, and it was almost eleven before he showed up at the company’s Philadelphia headquarters on Walnut Street.
No sooner had he positioned himself behind his imposing mahogany desk than an office boy delivered a telegram from his St. Louis manager, George Stadden. The message read: “B. F. Perry, found dead in Philadelphia, is claimed to be B. F. Pitezel, who is insured on 044145. Investigate before remains leave there.”
Fouse—a firm believer in Benjamin Franklin’s injunctions against idleness—lost no time in notifying his claims manager, whose name, as it happened, was also Perry: O. LaForrest Perry. Locating file number 044145, Perry discovered that Benjamin F. Pitezel’s life was indeed insured for $10, 000—an impressive sum in 1894 currency. The policy had been issued on November 9, 1893, through the branch office in Chicago.
Several features of the case instantly struck Fouse and Perry as peculiar. The policy had been purchased less than a year before the man’s sudden death—a circumstance that automatically provokes a certain leeriness in insurers. Moreover, the final payment had arrived by telegraphic money order on the very last day of the grace period. And then there was the matter of the man’s alias. Why had he been going by the name Perry?
His suspicions aroused, Fouse immediately sent for another trusted aid, the company treasurer, Col. O. C. Bobyshell, and dispatched him to the city morgue, to see if the corpse matched the physical description of Pitezel as recorded on the policy application. Bobyshell returned after lunchtime to report that, though the dead man’s face was badly disfigured, his general appearance did indeed tally with that of Pitezel. Bobyshell also brought back the basic facts of the case, which he had learned from the coroner.
Armed with this information, O. LaForrest Perry proceeded to 1316 Callowhill Street, where, in the company of an officer from the Buttonwood police station, he spent the better part of an hour examining the crime scene. Except for the removal of the corpse, the little room had been left untouched. The corncob pipe, burned match, and broken bottle lay exactly where they had been found on the previous Tuesday.
To Perry, the evidence suggested a setup, not an accidental explosion, as the police continued to claim. Thanking the officer for his assistance, Perry returned to company headquarters. Upon arrival he reported his findings to President Fouse, who immediately wired a message to Edwin H. Cass, manager of the Chicago branch office, instructing him to learn everything possible about Benjamin F. Pitezel and, in particular, to ascertain the names of his acquaintances.
Devoted as he was to the Fidelity Mutual Life Association, President Fouse was not the sort of man who permitted business to interfere with his domestic pleasures. By the time he returned home that Saturday evening, he had already managed to put the troublesome matter of th
e B. F. Perry case out of his mind.
When he arrived at his office on Monday morning, however, he found a message awaiting from a St. Louis lawyer named Jeptha D. Howe, attorney for Mrs. Carrie A. Pitezel. Lawyer Howe wished to inform President Fouse that, along with a member of the Pitezel family, he would soon be traveling to Philadelphia to identify the body and collect on the $10, 000 policy.
From his experience with insurance companies, H. H. Holmes knew that a family member would be called upon to identify the remains, and he did not want that person to be Pitezel’s widow. The woman simply could not be trusted to carry off the deception. She was already in a hopelessly overwrought state. Another shock—the sight of the decomposed corpse, for example, or even a few tough questions by insurance investigators—and she might break down completely and blurt out the truth.
Worse, she might recognize that the body laid out in the morgue really was her husband and not a substitute corpse at all. Foreseeing this possibility, Holmes had done what he could to obliterate Pitezel’s features. But he would feel safer if Carrie did not have a chance to view the corpse at all. So he was prepared to take whatever tack was necessary—from heartfelt pleas to open threats—to persuade her to stay in St. Louis.
As it turned out, he did not have to bother, thanks to Carrie’s ill health and the fortuitous sickness of her infant, Wharton. Carrie protested that she could not possibly travel such a distance. Nor could her oldest daughter, Dessie, who was needed at home to help tend to the young ones.
That left the next oldest child, Alice. As far as Holmes was concerned, the fifteen-year-old girl was the ideal choice—smart enough to follow instructions but not so clever that she might figure things out for herself and so jeopardize the plot.
Although Carrie had qualms about sending the girl off with Jeptha Howe, a more or less total stranger, Holmes assured her that Alice would be in good hands. Holmes had already arranged for a cousin of his to take charge of the girl as soon as she and Howe reached Philadelphia. This cousin, Holmes explained, was a lovely, highly responsible young woman who could be trusted implicitly.
Her name was Minnie Williams.
That evening—Sunday, September 9—Holmes and Howe met to make their final preparations. The following morning, Holmes departed from St. Louis, catching an early train to Wilmette, Illinois.
At roughly the same time that Holmes was boarding his Pullman, Edwin Cass—manager of the Chicago office of Fidelity Mutual—was mulling over the telegram he had just received from Philadelphia. After digging out the records on policy 044145 and identifying the agent who had sold it to Pitezel, he immediately sought out the man, whose name was Leon Fay.
Did Fay happen to know anyone acquainted with Pitezel? Cass inquired.
As it happened, Fay did. Several years earlier, before he entered the insurance business, Fay had been involved in various enterprises, one of which had brought him into contact with a well-to-do gentleman who made his home in Englewood. The previous September, this fellow had unexpectedly appeared in Fay’s office to inquire about the cost of a $10, 000 life insurance policy for himself. Fay had supplied him with the information but had heard nothing more from the man. Several months later, however, Benjamin Pitezel—explaining that he had been referred by Fay’s acquaintance—showed up and applied for his own policy for precisely that amount.
In response to Cass’s next question, Fay explained that the gentleman in question was the owner of a large office building at Sixty-third and Wallace, popularly known as the Castle. His name was H. H. Holmes.
The following day, Cass traveled out to Englewood, disembarking from the train into the bustle and din of Wallace Street. He had no trouble finding the Castle, which loomed like a great dark fortress on the corner across from the station. Approaching the building, Cass—with his trained, investigator’s eye—immediately spotted the black signs of fire damage near the roofline. The top two stories of the structure seemed entirely vacant, the windows dark and empty. The street-level floor, however, was lined with shops, most of them open for business.
It didn’t take long for Cass to discover that Holmes hadn’t been seen in Englewood for nearly a year. One of the store owners, however—a jeweler named Davis—provided Cass with a promising lead. Though Holmes’s rakish behavior suggested otherwise, rumor had it that he was a married man with a wife and baby daughter living somewhere out in Wilmette.
Urgent affairs kept Cass confined to his office the next day, but on Thursday, September 13, he journeyed out to Wilmette, having ascertained Holmes’s suburban address—38 North John Street, between Central and Lake avenues. The house turned out to be a tidy, red-frame affair, two stories high, with a pair of small wooden turrets flanking the porch roof. The front door was opened by a servant girl, who ushered Cass into the parlor, then bustled off to fetch her mistress.
Though Mrs. Myrta Holmes treated Cass politely, she seemed discomfited by his presence. Her husband, she explained, was rarely at home, his business affairs keeping him more or less constantly on the move. The two of them corresponded regularly, however, and she would be happy to transmit any messages that Mr. Cass cared to leave.
What Cass didn’t know, of course, was that, only two days earlier, Myrta had received a sudden, unexpected visit from Holmes, who had stopped off at Wilmette on his way back to Indianapolis. Part of his motive was to see how his wife and daughter were getting along. In the years since Myrta had moved out to Wilmette, Holmes had continued to provide well for her and little Lucy, and to pay them periodic visits.
But, as was always the case with Holmes, he had an ulterior motive, too. Anticipating the very situation that Myrta now faced—a sudden call from an insurance investigator—he wanted to make sure that she knew what to say.
Cass wrote out a list of questions for Myrta to convey to her husband. He also handed her something else to pass along to Holmes—a news clipping about B. F. Perry’s death, taken from a local paper, The Chicago Report.
The story had been copied from the wire service. But whoever had transcribed it had committed a single, significant error—an error that might have been Holmes’s undoing, had the Pitezel family been blessed with better luck.
22
These letters … exhibit the enormous capacity of Mr. Holmes for duplicity and deceit. In view of the subsequent developments of the case, they portray his many resources for meeting an occasion, and a sagacity which would have served him well, had he chosen to earn an honest living.
—Frank P. Geyer, The Holmes-Pitezel Case (1896)
Following his brief stopover in Wilmette, Holmes had traveled straight to Indianapolis, arriving at Stubbins’ Hotel early Tuesday evening, September 11. He found Georgiana much improved in health, though disgruntled with the poor accommodations. Her spirits rose considerably when Holmes presented her with a gift he had brought back from his travels—a heart-shaped locket on a golden chain. Her mood brightened even more when, within an hour of his arrival, he packed up her belongings and conveyed her to the far more luxurious surroundings of the Grand Hotel.
For the next few days, Holmes acted the part of the attentive husband, treating Georgiana to a shopping spree, taking her to the fanciest restaurants in town, accompanying her on an overnight trip to her parents’ home in Franklin. Returning to Indianapolis on Saturday afternoon, September 15, they checked into the Circle Park Hotel. Later that day, while Georgiana rested in bed, Holmes slipped out of their suite to check for messages. When he returned a half hour later, he told Georgiana that he had just received a telegram from the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, informing him that the cash payment for his copiers was ready and waiting in Philadelphia.
A communication had, in fact, arrived for Holmes, but it wasn’t a message from the railroad company. It was an envelope from Myrta, containing the list of questions Edwin Cass had given her, along with the clipping from the Chicago Report.
Holmes was impressed at how quickly the insurance company had connected him with Pit
ezel, and he was ready with a reply. In spite of his busy schedule, he would be willing to come to Philadelphia to help identify the remains, etc., etc. But as he glanced over the newspaper clipping, his eye fell on a glaring mistake.
Though correct in other respects, the article reported that B. F. Perry’s body had been placed in the morgue in Chicago, not Philadelphia.
Holmes had every reason to feel lucky. Had he failed to spot the error, he might have given the game away by revealing that he knew more—much more—about Pitezel’s death than he was supposed to.
But how to deal with the erroneous information? It didn’t take him long to decide. He would have to pretend that Pitezel’s corpse was where the article claimed.
That evening, Holmes packed a bag and bid Georgiana goodbye, explaining that he was journeying to Philadelphia to collect the money for his copiers. Instead, he caught a late-night train to Columbus, Ohio. Taking a room in a hotel near the station, he sat down at once and composed a letter to Edwin Cass.
To Cass’s first question—Who did Pitezel’s dental work?—Holmes replied that he did “not think [Pitezel] took very good care of his teeth and may have had none done. I remember that seven or eight years ago when working for me, he had to give up work for some time on account of neuralgia in his teeth.”
Turning next to the matter of identifying marks, Holmes wrote:
In a general way I should describe him a man nearly six feet high (at least five feet ten inches), always thin in flesh and weighing from one hundred and forty-five to one hundred and fifty-five lbs., having very black and somewhat coarse hair, very thick, with no tendency to baldness; his mustache was a much lighter color and I think of a red tinge, though I have seen him have it colored black at times, which gave him quite a different appearance. I remember also that he had some trouble with his knees, causing them to become enlarged directly below or in front of same, as a result of floor laying when he was in the contracting business, but whether this was a temporary or permanent affair, I am unable to state. He also had some sort of warty growth on the back or side of his neck, which prevented him from wearing a collar when working. Aside from these points, I can think of nothing to distinguish him from other men, unless it be that his forehead was lower than the average and crown of head higher, causing one to notice same. I do remember, however, that he had, or at least had late in 1893, a boy about twelve years of age who looked so much like him that if compared with body supposed to be his father would show the identity I should think…. If the identity is not cleared up by the time you receive this letter and you wish me to, I will go to Chicago any time after Wednesday next, provided you will pay my transportation there and return…. I should be willing to go without pay in ordinary times, but can hardly afford to do so now.
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