Later, Geyer gave a graphic account of the harrowing scene that followed:
“I found that Coroner Johnston, Dr. Caven and several of his assistants, had removed the putrid flesh from the skull of Alice. The teeth had been nicely cleaned and the bodies covered with canvas. The head of Alice was covered with paper, and a hole sufficiently large had been cut in it, so that Mrs. Pitezel could see the teeth. The hair of both children had been carefully washed and laid on the canvas sheet which was covering Alice.
“Coroner Johnston said that we could now bring Mrs. Pitezel in. I entered the waiting room and told her we were ready, and with Cuddy on one side of her and I on the other, we entered and led her up to the slab, upon which was lying all that remained of poor Alice. In an instant she recognized the teeth and hair as that of her daughter, Alice. Then, turning around to me she said, ‘Where is Nellie?’ About this time she noticed the long black plait of hair belonging to Nellie lying on the canvas. She could stand it no longer, and the shrieks of that poor forlorn creature are still ringing in my ears. Tears were trickling down the cheeks of strong men who stood about us. The sufferings of the stricken mother were beyond description.
“We gently led her out of the room and into the carriage. She returned to the Rossin House completely overcome with grief and despair and had one fainting spell after another. The ladies in the hotel visited her in her room and spoke kindly to her and expressed their sympathy with her in her sad bereavement, and this seemed in a measure to ease her mind.”
Later that afternoon, Geyer received word from Coroner Johnston, who wanted Carrie to testify that very evening at the inquest. Though somewhat taken aback by this request, Geyer put it to Carrie, who replied that she wished “to go and get through with it.”
She remained on the stand for over two hours, answering questions in a tremulous, barely audible voice. When the Crown’s Attorney dismissed her around ten, the strain of that unendurable day finally broke her, and she gave way to her grief, shrieking wildly for Alice, Nellie, and Howard. Several doctors in attendance helped calm her. She was returned to the Rossin House in the care of a professional nurse, who remained at her bedside throughout the night.
The remains of Alice and Nellie Pitezel were buried in St. James Cemetery the following afternoon, Saturday, July 20, 1895, the funeral expenses being borne by the City of Toronto.
* * *
Her daughters were gone. But Carrie still held out hope that Howard was alive. Geyer did not share her optimism, though he kept his opinion to himself. In any case, he was resolved to discover the little boy’s fate.
On Sunday morning, July 21, the pair boarded a train for the States. Carrie traveled to Chicago, where the good women of the Christian Endeavor Society helped take care of her.
Geyer got off at Detroit.
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To parallel such a career one must go back to past ages and to the time of the Borgias or Brinvilliers, and even these were not such human monsters as Holmes seems to have been. He is a prodigy of wickedness, a human demon, a being so unthinkable that no novelist would dare to invent such a character. The story, too, tends to illustrate the end of the century.
—The Chicago Times-Herald, May 8, 1896
In the meantime, Holmes continued to protest that he was “as innocent as a newborn babe of murdering the Pitezel children”—and on Thursday, July 18, a mysterious stranger came forward to lend weight to that claim.
His name was Francis Winshoff, and he appeared that morning at the office of Holmes’s attorney, William A. Shoemaker, to announce that he was an “old pal” of the accused. He had been with Holmes in Toronto, “knew the Pitezel children well,” and was willing to swear that “Holmes had no hand in the murder.”
Newsmen covering the case were openly dubious of Winshoff, partly because he was such an odd-looking character—squat and shaggy-browed, with dark, piercing eyes, a headful of bushy black hair, and a mouth concealed beneath a matted clump of grizzled whiskers. He had an excitable manner, gesticulating wildly with his hands (one of which was bereft of all but a single finger). He identified himself as a Canadian, which led his listeners to conclude that his thick foreign accent was French.
The papers reported his story in tones ranging from polite skepticism to outright scorn, The Philadelphia Inquirer deriding it as “one of the most beautiful and picturesque romances yet spun” in the case. Lawyer Shoemaker, however, confidently declared that Winshoff was a “living witness” who knew “just who killed the children” and would positively “clear Holmes of complicity” in the crime.
The newspapers turned out to be right.
By Friday afternoon, Winshoff was revealed to be a fiftyyear-old Russian émigré and “spiritualistic crank” who resided on Brown Street, where he made his living by conducting séances for a small but devoted following. In his spare time, he bottled and sold his own patented “nerve medicine” and attempted, through the application of his occult powers, to transform clay balls into diamonds by rolling them around in his one good hand.
Though Winshoff subsequently confessed that he had never actually met Holmes, he stuck to his story, insisting that he had received his information from unimpeachable sources in the spirit world.
That a crackpot like Winshoff could attract so much attention was a sign of the public’s continuing fascination with the Holmes case. But for all its intensity, that fascination was still comparatively mild. Fueled by the excesses of the yellow press, it was about to explode into something like frenzy.
The story of the Holmes-Pitezel affair first broke at a particularly bitter moment in the nation’s life. The country’s economy was (as one contemporary observer put it) “in the throes of an unprecedented fiasco,” brought about by the devastating panic of 1893. It was a time of widespread industrial collapse, massive unemployment, and violent labor disputes. Chicago—scene of the dramatic Pullman strike of 1894—was especially hard hit by the depression.
The public’s obsessive interest in Holmes derived in part from these grim economic conditions (which persisted until 1896). To many, Holmes personified everything that had gone wrong with the country. He symbolized all the hollowness and corruption at the heart of the American “success ethic”—what the poet Walt Whitman decried as “the depravity of the business classes.” He was the living incarnation of “money lust,” of the evils to which the unbridled pursuit of individual wealth could lead.
In the third week of July 1895, however, the public’s perception of Holmes underwent a dramatic shift. Suddenly, he was seen as something infinitely more diabolical than a bold, ruthless schemer who had killed his accomplice for money. Partly, this change resulted from the discovery of the murdered Pitezel girls, whose deaths could not be attributed to simple greed.
But something else occurred, too, that caused Holmes to be seen not simply as “the boss crook of the century” but as a being of monstrous, indeed mythical, proportions—a creature on the order of Bluebeard, Dr. Jekyll, even the Devil himself.
This transformation—from “archswindler” to “archfiend”—took place literally overnight. For on Friday evening, July 19, 1895, the Chicago police finally entered and began exploring Holmes’s Castle.
From the moment of Holmes’s arrest, rumors had been circulating that the bodies of the missing Williams sisters were buried in the cellar of his Englewood building. The police had been planning to investigate the stories for weeks but were deterred by the protests of the Castle’s shopkeeps, who were reluctant to have an army of officers digging up the basement—presumably because it would be bad for business. When the buried corpses of the Pitezel girls were uncovered in Toronto, however, Inspector Fitzpatrick of Chicago’s Central Detective Detail immediately resolved to go ahead with the excavation.
Investigators began on Friday night, but the size of the cellar, which measured more than fifty by one hundred sixtyfive feet, made the dig a daunting task. After poking around by lamplight for a few hours, the men retired for t
he night.
They were back early Saturday morning, supplemented by a crew of city construction workers. Armed with picks and shovels, they set about their work, searching for a likely spot—perhaps a hidden well—where Holmes might have deposited his victims.
In the meantime, Inspectors Fitzpatrick and Norton, accompanied by reporters from the city’s major newspapers, ascended to the second story of the building. They were dumbfounded by what they encountered—a dizzying maze of unmistakably sinister design. Groping their way around the twisting passages, they came upon secret rooms and hidden stairwells, blind hallways and mysterious sliding walls, trapdoors opening onto tightly sealed chambers and camouflaged chutes feeding into the cellar.
Stunned and bewildered, the explorers struggled to make sense of what they were seeing. But there was simply too much to take in. Indeed, it would be several more weeks before the second-floor labyrinth was fully surveyed and charted—and even then, the precise function of some of its more bizarre architectural features would defy explanation.
But one thing seemed immediately clear: in the midst of America’s most booming metropolis, Dr. Holmes had built himself a dwelling place that brought to mind a castle of horrors from a gothic romance.
Proceeding to the top floor, the searchers found several other grim surprises, including Holmes’s enormous walk-in vault, its walls heavily padded with asbestos—presumably (so the police quickly theorized) to deaden any sounds from within. Adjacent to the vault was Holmes’s private office, which contained an immense iron stove, fully eight feet tall and three feet in circumference. Opening the door (which, as one witness noted, was “sufficiently large to admit a human body”), Inspector Fitzpatrick began poking through the debris with his cane. Suddenly, he frowned, reached in a hand, and pulled out a charred object that bore a striking resemblance to a human rib bone.
Tearing off his jacket and rolling up a shirtsleeve, Fitzpatrick stuck his arm into the stove and scooped the remaining contents onto the floor. Scattered among the ashes were more burned, bonelike fragments. There were also several small buttons that had evidently come from a woman’s dress and the remains of what appeared to be a lady’s gold watch chain.
Later that day, the police showed the six-inch piece of chain to C. E. Davis, who ran the jewelry shop on the Castle’s ground floor. Though the links were partially melted, Davis identified the chain at once.
He had made it himself, he told the police. It had been purchased by H. H. Holmes as a gift for his lady friend, Minnie Williams.
As Fitzpatrick knelt on the floor, carefully wrapping the evidence in a handkerchief, one of the newspaper reporters took down the stovepipe and peered into the chimney. All at once, he let out a cry, reached into the opening, and came out with a clump of charred human hair whose length made it plain that it had come from a woman.
By that time, the crew excavating the cellar had made some discoveries of their own, including a singed woman’s slipper and a charred scrap of grosgrain silk from a woman’s garment, both sifted from an ash heap in a dark corner of the cellar. Still, there was no sign of a buried well.
As they made their way along the south wall, however, rapping it at regular intervals with their implements, they discovered a hollow spot about twenty-five feet from the Wallace Street side. Applying their picks, the workmen quickly broke through the wall. Peering into the opening, they were astonished to see a mysterious wooden tank, bristling with pipes.
One of the men squeezed through the opening and gave the tank a sharp, exploratory rap with his pick. The pickpoint pierced the wood, releasing such a foul vapor that the entire crew dropped their tools and fled.
A plumber was summoned, but before he could arrive, three of the men returned to the basement to see if the fumes had evaporated. As they made their way through the dark murk of the cellar, one struck a match against a wall.
The basement exploded.
The blast shook the Castle to its foundations and sent the terrified ground-floor storekeepers fleeing into the street. A policeman patrolling nearby hurriedly put in an alarm, and within minutes, Fire Chief Joseph Kenyon was on the scene with Engine No. 51 and Truck No. 20. By then, several of the workmen had dashed down to the basement and pulled out their critically injured comrades.
Before the firemen could set up their equipment, the flames had burned themselves out. Chief Kenyon decided to open the tank and let the noxious gas dissipate. He and several of his men made their way down to the cellar but were so overcome by the vapor that they barely managed to stagger back up to the street. Kenyon was delirious for over two hours and, at one point, seemed close to death. But he was sufficiently recovered by late afternoon to oversee the cleaning out and boarding up of the deadly chemical tank.
By Sunday morning, the basement air was breathable again and the investigators were back on the job. Their work was somewhat hampered by the crowds of curiosity seekers who swarmed through the building, drawn by the lurid headlines about H. H. Holmes’s “murder factory.” The police finally managed to clear out the Castle, though not before the intruders had helped themselves to assorted souvenirs, including personal letters and financial records from Holmes’s office.
Apart from a bloodstained woman’s undergarment, which Inspector Fitzpatrick turned up in an ash heap in the northeast corner of the cellar, the police made no significant discoveries on Sunday. They did, however, make a sensational revelation to the press, announcing that the Williams sisters were not the only objects of their search.
For several weeks they had been investigating the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Julia Conner, who was known to have fallen under the baneful influence of Holmes. Mr. and Mrs. L. G. Smythe of Davenport, Iowa, parents of the missing woman, had been pressing the Chicago authorities to step up their search.
In light of recent developments, the police were now persuaded that both Mrs. Conner and her four-year-old daughter, Pearl, had been killed by the “fiend of Sixty-third Street.”
The diggers redoubled their efforts on Monday, though they unearthed nothing besides the sole of a woman’s shoe (size four), the broken lid of an opera-glass case, and some skeletal fragments that appeared to be chicken bones.
At the west end of the cellar, however, they came upon a padlocked storage chamber, which they promptly broke open. The floor of the chamber was littered with rubbish, and at the bottom of the rubbish the police discovered a length of stout rope. One end of the rope had been made into a plaited loop.
The opposite end—darkly stained with what looked like dried blood—had been tied into a hangman’s noose.
“The length of the rope is such,” wrote a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, “that were the plaited loop attached to the upstairs wall of the secret dumb-waiter shaft, a body hanging from the noose would just clear the floor at the bottom of the shaft. This coincidence convinced some of the detectives that Holmes’ alleged victims had been pushed through the upstairs door in the dumb-waiter and strangled to death in the shaft below.”
Meanwhile, Detective Sergeant Norton, reading through the papers in Holmes’s third-floor office, came upon a poignant letter from Julia Conner’s mother, mailed from Davenport and dated October 1, 1892. The contents suggested that Mrs. Smythe had made at least one attempt to contact her daughter at the Castle and had received a reply in which Holmes denied any knowledge of Julia’s whereabouts.
“[Your letter] surprised us very much,” Mrs. Smythe had written back, “as we supposed our daughter Julia in your company. We are very anxious to know her whereabouts, and her daughter also, and by answering this letter and telling us where she is you will greatly relieve her poor old gray-haired father and mother.”
The police felt certain that Holmes—“the Modern Bluebeard,” as the newspapers had taken to calling him—had dispatched his former mistress, as he had Minnie and Nannie Williams, though to date they had no hard proof to back up their suspicions. On the afternoon of Tuesday, July 23, however, one myster
y appeared to be solved: the fate of Julia’s little daughter, Pearl.
Sifting through a mass of quicklime they had found in the cellar, the searchers turned up part of a decomposed skeleton. Examining the bones by lamplight, Dr. C. P. Stringfield pronounced that they were almost certainly the rib cage and pelvis of a human being and that—judging by their size—they could only have come from a child between the ages of four and eight.
Apprised of this grisly discovery, Holmes vehemently denied any part in the killing of Julia Conner or her daughter, though he finally admitted that his former mistress was, in fact, dead—the tragic consequence, he claimed, of a botched abortion. “Mrs. Conner got into trouble,” he told reporters, resorting to the euphemisms of the day, “and a Chicago doctor performed an operation. The job was such a bungling one that the woman died.”
As for the Williams sisters, he reverted to his original story, the one he had told at the time of his arrest to Detective Thomas Crawford. “Soon after Nannie Williams arrived in Chicago,” Holmes told the newsmen, “Minnie began to get jealous of her. One day in a fit of anger, Minnie hit her sister with a chair and killed her. I put the body in a trunk and dropped it into Lake Michigan. Then at my advice, Minnie transferred her property to me and fled to Europe.”
But no one—not the public, the police, or the press—believed a word of it. “The man is an infernal liar,” growled Superintendent Linden of the Philadelphia Bureau of Police.
As the excavation of the Castle continued, the authorities realized that they were dealing with a frightening new phenomenon—so unique in their experience that they couldn’t put a name to it. A Chicago journalist came up with the term multimurderer. Nearly a hundred years would pass before criminologists coined the phrase serial killers to describe creatures like Holmes.
Each day now, the names of new alleged victims appeared in the papers: Emeline Cigrand, the lovely twenty-year-old stenographer who had gone to work for Holmes in the summer of 1892 and abruptly disappeared the following December. Emily Van Tassel, a pretty grocer’s cashier who vanished shortly after striking up an acquaintance with Holmes in 1893. Wilfred Cole, a wealthy lumberman from Baltimore who traveled to Chicago for some unspecified business dealings with Holmes and was never heard from again. A physician named Russler, reportedly an intimate acquaintance of Holmes’s, who hadn’t been seen since 1892. Harry Walker, a young man who had gone to work as Holmes’s private secretary in 1893 and disappeared a few months later after taking out a $15,000 life insurance policy. A handsome—and wealthy—widow named Mrs. Lee who had kept company with Holmes, then dropped out of sight “as completely and mysteriously as though she had fallen off the earth” (in the words of one witness).
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