Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  “If that corpse they found in Philadelphia really was Ben Pitezel,” Quinlan said, “you can wager good money that Holmes was the one who done it. And if he done for Pitezel, then he’s murdered the children, too.”

  A few moments later, Geyer and McGlinn rose from their chairs, thanking Quinlan for his time. The janitor followed them to the door.

  Geyer was halfway across the threshold when Quinlan reached out and grabbed him by the coat sleeve. “If you find out those little ones is dead, I hope Holmes swings for it,” he said fervently. “And when that day comes, I’d be glad to be the man that springs the trap.”

  40

  Time shall unfold what plighted cunning hides.

  —Shakespeare, King Lear

  Frank Geyer was a man on a mission, and he had no intention of resting until the children were found. And so on Thursday, July 4—while his compatriots laid aside their summer labors for the flag-waving festivities of Independence Day—Geyer traveled to Detroit, where several eyewitnesses had reportedly seen Holmes with Howard Pitezel.

  Arriving around six P.M., Geyer checked into the Hotel Normandie, then proceeded immediately to police headquarters. There he met an old friend, Detective Thomas Meyler, who introduced him to the captain in charge. Early the following morning, Geyer was back at headquarters to confer with Superintendent Starkweather, who assigned a detective named Tuttle to assist him in his search.

  Geyer and Tuttle headed first for the local office of the Fidelity Mutual Life Association, whose investigators had turned up an important lead—the name of the real estate agent who had rented Holmes a house the previous October. The two detectives immediately called on the agent, a man named Bonninghausen, who informed them that Holmes had come by his office looking to rent a place “on the outskirts of the city” and had put down a $5 advance for a vacant house on East Forest Avenue. Bonninghausen seemed to recall that Holmes had a little boy with him, about nine or ten years old. His clerk, a fellow named Moore, was under the same impression.

  Over the years, Geyer had learned to trust his hunches. Intuitively, he continued to believe that Howard had been murdered in Indianapolis. But he couldn’t discount the testimony of Bonninghausen and Moore, which contradicted that theory. He decided to make a search of the city’s hotels and lodging houses, to see if he could turn up any proof of Howard’s presence in Detroit.

  Beginning in the neighborhood of the train depot, he and Tuttle visited half a dozen hostelries before coming upon an entry for “Etta and Nellie Canning” in the registry of the New Western Hotel. The proprietor, P. W. Cotter, needed only one look at Geyer’s photographs to identify the girls as the Pitezel sisters and Holmes as the man who had checked them into the hotel. But Cotter had seen no sign of the little boy.

  From Alice’s last, pathetic letter to her grandparents, Geyer knew that the girls had been taken next to Lucinda Burns’s boardinghouse at 91 Congress Street. The landlady had a vivid memory of Alice and Nellie, recalling them as unusually “quiet and reserved” children, who never left their room and seemed to spend the entire time reading and drawing.

  Like P. W. Cotter, however, Mrs. Burns testified that the girls had been alone. She had never laid eyes on the dark-eyed little boy in the photograph Geyer showed her.

  It was possible, of course, that—for his own diabolical reasons—Holmes had wanted to keep Howard close by his side. Shifting his focus away from the girls, Geyer decided to see if he could discover where Holmes had stayed in Detroit and whether he had been accompanied by a little boy. In the register of the Hotel Normandie, the detective came upon an entry for “G. Howell and wife” and immediately recognized both the handwriting and the alias as Holmes’s.

  After that, however, Geyer and his partner ran into a dead end. Searching through the records of all the hotels in the city, they failed to turn up any further trace of Holmes. They decided to try the boardinghouses.

  The following day, the pair spent hour after tedious hour tramping through the sweltering streets, ringing dozens of doorbells and questioning countless landlords and ladies, none of whom recognized the photograph of Howard Pitezel or of Holmes.

  Finally, as evening came on, they happened upon Ralston’s rooming house at 54 Park Place, where Holmes—posing as “a member of the theatrical profession”—had stayed briefly with Georgiana. The proprietress, Mrs. May Ralston, clearly recollected the handsome couple. When Geyer questioned her about Howard, however, she declared absolutely that Holmes and his wife did not have a child with them.

  Within two days of his arrival in Detroit, Geyer had managed to reconstruct the movements of the Pitezel girls and Holmes. But—except for the statements of Bonninghausen and Moore—he had failed to turn up any leads on Howard. His trip out to East Forest Avenue to check out the house Holmes had rented proved equally fruitless.

  Admitted by the current tenant, Geyer and Tuttle made a thorough examination of the house. They scrutinized the cellar, inspected the furnace, and (in Geyer’s words) “searched every spot of ground adjacent to the premises to see if the earth had been disturbed.” Nothing seemed to be amiss.

  The tenant, however, revealed that, shortly after moving in, he had discovered a peculiar excavation in the basement, which he had since refilled. Measuring about four feet long, three feet wide, and three and a half feet deep, the hole had evidently been dug by his predecessor—the mysterious gentleman who had occupied the house for a few days the previous fall.

  Perhaps, the tenant speculated, the gentleman had been digging a place to store turnips and potatoes for the winter.

  Geyer, however, guessed that it had been dug for a far more sinister purpose—and he wondered what unexpected turn had kept Holmes from carrying out his dark design.

  The mystery of the children’s missing trunk continued to vex Geyer. Before leaving Detroit, he did his best to find it, questioning scores of liverymen and hackmen and visiting virtually every freight depot, omnibus company, and express office in the city. But—much to his annoyance—he could turn up no clue to its whereabouts.

  Geyer was troubled by another matter, too. The records of the Circle House in Indianapolis indicated that the Pitezel children had checked out on Saturday, October 6. According to the registry of the New Western Hotel, the girls had arrived in Detroit on Friday, October 12. It disturbed Geyer that he was not able to account for the six-day gap between locations.

  In spite of these unresolved questions, Geyer believed that he had accomplished as much as he could in Detroit. There was only one more visit he wanted to make before setting off on the next leg of his journey.

  During his interview with Carrie Pitezel, Geyer had learned that, upon her arrival in Detroit with Dessie and the baby, Holmes had checked them into Geis’s European Hotel. Early Sunday morning, July 7, Geyer walked to the hotel and interviewed the housekeeper, Miss Minnie Mulholland, who took one look at Carrie’s photograph and immediately identified her as the anguished woman she had known as Mrs. Adams. Geyer pressed her for information, but the housekeeper had no revelations to offer—only a heartbreaking description of the desolate Mrs. Adams, a woman so ravaged by care that she moved like an invalid.

  Geyer’s route back to his hotel led him past Lucinda Burns’s place at 91 Congress Street. The rooming house, where Holmes had boarded the two Pitezel sisters for five days, was located only a few blocks away from Geis’s Hotel, where Carrie had been lodged during the same period with Dessie and Wharton.

  Pausing before the little wood-frame building, Geyer thought of Alice’s terrible longing for her mother, older sister, and infant brother, all of whom—at the very moment she was writing her last, wrenching letter to them—were less than a five-minute walk away. Even for Geyer, a man accustomed to tragedy, it was a circumstance almost too painful to dwell on.

  As he turned his steps back toward the hotel, he was struck anew by Holmes’s monstrous nature—the heartless cunning of a man who had contrived to keep two desperately homesick children apar
t from their mother while coolly plotting their utter destruction.

  41

  Thus it was proved that little children cannot be murdered in this day and generation beyond the possibility of discovery.

  —Frank P. Geyer, The Holmes-Pitezel Case

  Geyer left Detroit on Sunday evening, July 7. At around nine-thirty the next morning, he stepped off the train in Toronto.

  Geyer had visited the city before and had several acquaintances on the police force, among them Detective Alf Cuddy, who was promptly detailed to assist him.

  The two men got off to a promising start. Within a few hours of commencing their search, they had traced Holmes first to the Walker House, then to the Palmer; Carrie, Dessie, and Wharton to the Union Hotel; and Alice and Nellie to the Albion.

  At the last of these, Geyer learned an ominous fact from the chief clerk, Herbert Jones. After examining the photograph of Holmes, Jones identified him as the gentleman who had taken the two girls out sight-seeing every morning during their stay. The girls had generally returned alone in the late afternoon, well in time for supper.

  On the morning of October 25, after paying their daily board bill, Holmes had gone off with the girls as usual. This time, however, the children had never returned. “It was the last time they were seen by me or anyone in the hotel,” Jones said.

  Having retraced Holmes’s steps from city to city, Geyer was thoroughly familiar with the man’s modus operandi. He also knew that Holmes had abruptly departed Toronto on October 26. Putting all the facts together—including what he’d found out from Jones—Geyer drew a grim conclusion. The following morning, he conveyed it in a letter to his superior, Police Superintendent Linden:

  “It is my impression that Holmes rented a house in Toronto, the same as he did in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and that on the 25th of October he murdered the girls and disposed of their bodies by either burying them in the cellar, or some convenient place, or burning them in the heater. I intend to go to all the real estate agents and see if they can recollect having rented a house about that time to a man who only occupied it for a few days and who represented that he wanted it for a widowed sister.”

  Even as he penned the final line, Geyer realized that he faced a daunting task. But the detective was imbued with the can-do spirit of a confident era. He never doubted for a moment that (as he later put it) “perseverance and energy would bring forth some good result.”

  Early Wednesday morning, July 10, he armed himself with a city directory and proceeded to police headquarters to meet with his partner. Over the next few hours—while Cuddy read and Geyer copied—the two detectives compiled a list of every real estate agent in Toronto. Then they headed out into the city.

  They began in the business district. It quickly became clear to Geyer that the job was going to take much longer than he’d expected. At every office on their list, he and Cuddy had to start from scratch, patiently explaining the nature of their investigation and waiting while the agent checked his books. Before they knew it, night was upon them and the agencies had shut down for the day.

  Clearly, the detectives needed a different approach. One of Geyer’s great strengths as a police officer was his bulldog tenacity. Now, mulling over the problem, he displayed another, far less common, gift, too—a sophisticated sense of the media’s power. Long before the era of press agents and PR specialists, Geyer was astute enough to recognize the uses of publicity. He decided to call a news conference.

  That night, Geyer’s room at the Rossin House was crammed with reporters, who were quick to perceive the story’s dramatic appeal: an intrepid detective on the trail of three missing children who had fallen victim to a fiend. Geyer provided complete details of the case, passed around the children’s photographs, and made a plea to “all the good citizens” of Toronto for their full cooperation.

  The tactic worked. The next morning, every newspaper in the city carried at least two front-page columns on the case. This time, when Geyer and Cuddy made the rounds of the real estate offices, their job was much easier, since they were relieved of the need to repeat the story at every stop. Most of the agents had already checked their records before the detectives appeared.

  Still, the day was disappointing. Once again, the two men came up empty-handed. When they returned to police headquarters that evening, however, they found a message from a local real estate agent who had read about Geyer’s investigation. The man wished to report that, the previous fall, he had rented a house on the outskirts of the city to an individual named Holmes. The house, situated at Perth and Bloor streets, stood in the middle of a field and was surrounded by a six-foot-high fence.

  Reluctant to wait until morning, the two detectives hastened to the address. They found the house occupied by an elderly couple and their twenty-year-old son. Geyer ran through his story yet again, concluding with his opinion that Holmes had killed the children and buried them somewhere under the house.

  The old man listened attentively. “That would account for that pile of loose dirt under the main building,” he said to his son.

  Cuddy and Geyer exchanged a significant look. Then Cuddy turned to the son and said, “Get a shovel.”

  While the young man hurried away, his father led the detectives to a hatch leading down to the crawl space. Pulling off their coats, the two men squeezed under the floor and quickly came upon the mound of loosened dirt. It was fully dark by then and the detectives called for some light. The son, who had returned with a shovel, went off to fetch some coal lamps, which he passed down the hatchway to the detectives. Taking turns, Geyer and Cuddy dug a hole about four-feet square and several feet deep—without turning up anything. Sopping and breathless in the suffocating space, they decided to call it a day.

  Early the next morning, they sought out the real estate man who had contacted the police. The agent studied Holmes’s mug shot for a few moments, then shook his head emphatically. The face in the photograph was completely unknown to him, he declared. It certainly did not belong to the man who had rented the house at Perth and Bloor.

  Deeply frustrated by this development, Geyer switched tacks and spent the remainder of the day interviewing railway ticket agents in an effort to determine where Holmes had gone after leaving Toronto. By evening, he felt sure that Holmes had traveled to Prescott. Writing to his chief, Geyer announced his decision to make that city his “next stopping place … in the event of my not meeting with success in Toronto.”

  Still, Geyer wrote, he remained so firmly convinced “that Holmes disposed of the children in Toronto that I cannot think of leaving until I have made a more extended search.”

  On Saturday morning, Geyer took a quick trip to Niagara Falls, where Holmes had gone sight-seeing with Georgiana. Geyer located their names in the registry of the King’s Imperial Hotel. The chief clerk verified that the couple had been there by themselves, without any children—confirming Geyer’s belief that Georgiana had known nothing about the Pitezel girls. Though the bigamous Holmes had betrayed Georgiana’s trust from the start, he had, at least, shielded her from the knowledge of his most reprehensible crimes. It was the single redeeming feature Geyer was willing to concede to the man.

  Returning to Toronto in the early afternoon, Geyer spent the rest of the day searching through the newspaper morgues, checking the classifieds for all the private renters who had advertised houses the previous fall. Beginning Monday, he intended to call upon every one of them.

  Meanwhile, the papers continued to run daily updates on the case.

  When Geyer called for Cuddy on Monday morning, his partner was in a chipper mood. The police had just received word from a man named Thomas Ryves, who had been following Geyer’s progress in the papers. Ryves recollected that, toward the tail end of the previous October, a man matching Holmes’s description had rented the house next door to his own. The fellow had been accompanied by two young girls. But when he left abruptly about one week later, the children were not with him. The house in qu
estion was located at 16 St. Vincent Street.

  Consulting the classified ads he had culled from the newspaper files, Geyer discovered one for the St. Vincent Street place. The ad stated that interested parties should contact Mrs. Frank Nudel at 54 Henry Street.

  As it happened, Cuddy was acquainted with Frank Nudel, who held a job as a clerk for the Educational Department of Toronto. Cuddy suggested to Geyer that the two of them pay a visit to Nudel before proceeding to St. Vincent Street.

  Geyer didn’t allow himself the luxury of exaggerated hope. He had already been involved in too many wild-goose chases. Still, Ryves’s recollection seemed the strongest lead to date. The two detectives set off at once for the Educational Department.

  Nudel’s eyes widened when the detectives told him the reason for their visit. He confirmed that the house had been rented the previous fall, then abruptly abandoned only a week or so later. But that was as much as he knew. The house belonged to his wife, who took care of the rentals. She was the one to talk to.

  The two detectives decided to first pay a visit to Thomas Ryves—the elderly gentleman who had notified the police. When Geyer showed Ryves the photographs of Holmes and the Pitezel girls, Alice was the only one he had no trouble identifying. But his story left little doubt that the mysterious stranger who had briefly been his neighbor was Holmes.

  As Ryves told it, the fellow had dropped by one morning, explaining that he had rented the house next door for his widowed sister, who would be arriving in a few days. He wanted to dig a place in the cellar where his sister could store potatoes and asked if he might borrow a shovel. Ryves had obliged.

  That afternoon, the old man had watched through a window as the stranger moved a mattress, an old bed, and a large trunk into the house. Several days later, Ryves had observed him hauling away the trunk.

  That was the last Ryves had seen of him.