Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  “The task laid before me is this: I must point out from the evidence the facts which prove conclusively that this prisoner at the bar murdered Benjamin F. Pitezel at number 1316 Callowhill Street on the second day of September 1894 so conclusively that there will not be a single doubt lurking in your mind, so positively that you will feel under your oaths as jurors that there is but one course left open for you, and that is to find the verdict pointed out to you in the opening of this case—the highest known to the law—a verdict of murder in the first degree.”

  Graham’s recap followed a straightforward, chronological course, beginning with Monday’s first witnesses. He paid particular attention to the medical experts, whose testimony had clearly proven that the victim had been poisoned by chloroform, not killed by an accidental explosion. “While the broken jar and other evidences of an explosion were present,” Graham stated, “they were artificially produced by somebody with the intention to deceive. There was no explosion.”

  Moreover, the testimony both of the medical witnesses and of the merchants who had sold Pitezel his cigars and whiskey on the evening before his death contradicted the allegation of suicide. “This man who was out the night before, apparently happy, and making provision for the next day, not intending to die but intending to have some of the things he considered necessary for his comfort—Holmes claims has committed suicide. This man who was writing to his wife, ‘I am coming out to see you, and if I can make arrangements to conduct business in Philadelphia, I am going to bring you and the children to Philadelphia, and we’ll live there’—this man, Holmes says, committed suicide. All the surroundings in this case deny that he thought of suicide, and the story that Holmes tells is absolutely impossible and is rebutted by the evidence.”

  Taking up Holmes’s claim that he had moved the body from the third floor to the second, Graham appealed to the jurors’ common sense. “The first question I ask is, why did he not leave him on the third-story floor? What necessity was there for bringing him down to the second story? Could he not just as well have burned and disfigured him up there on the third-story floor as he could have on the second story?

  “Gentlemen,” Graham said gravely, “that body was never on the third-story floor. The relaxation of the involuntary muscles, and the involuntary discharges from the person, took place at or immediately before dissolution. These discharges were found on the second-story floor, not on the third-story floor, clearly indicating that death took place where the body was found. This is a very significant fact.”

  Having established that “the dead man had been poisoned” and that “the poison had not been self-administered,” Graham reviewed “the second step in the progress of the case”—namely, the identification of the victim. “The Commonwealth must show, for we can assume nothing, that the dead man was Benjamin F. Pitezel, the man named in the indictment as the subject of this murder.” To accomplish that end, the Commonwealth had summoned a host of witnesses, beginning with Coroner Ashbridge.

  “Why Coroner Ashbridge?” Graham asked, his voice taking on a sudden, mournful note. “We could not call Alice Pitezel, the child who identified him before the coroner. We could not call her to prove that the stiff and disfigured corpse upon which her young eyes gazed at the potter’s field was the body of her dead father. We could not produce her for that purpose, for the mother has told us that the last she saw of her was her dead body in the morgue in the city of Toronto.”

  Graham shook his head sadly before continuing. “No, that piece of evidence the Commonwealth could not produce. But the Commonwealth proceeds formally and in an orderly manner to establish to your satisfaction that this body was the body of Benjamin F. Pitezel.”

  Besides the witnesses Graham had called, there was other, even more convincing evidence of the corpse’s identity. “Not only have these half dozen people said Perry and Pitezel were the same, but we go to the grave itself, and from its dark recesses we bring forth silent but persuasive testimony on the question of identity. Pieces of the clothing from the dead body were taken by the doctor. Here is a piece of the shirt that this man wore. Poor Mrs. Pitezel was called back to that stand, and you may remember the broken sobs with which she exclaimed, ‘Oh, that’s Benny’s shirt that he took with him when he left St. Louis for Philadelphia.’ That burned fragment is part of the clothing that the wife identifies as that of her husband. Buried with the body, deep down in that dark grave, it comes forth to the living light to proclaim that the body resting there is the body of Holmes’s friend, Benjamin F. Pitezel.”

  Having shown that it was Pitezel who had died at the Callowhill Street address and that he “was not self-destroyed but destroyed by a second person in that house,” the Commonwealth was next obliged to prove that the killer was Holmes. Accordingly, Graham proceeded with a detailed synopsis of the insurance conspiracy, of Holmes’s financial motives for eliminating his partner, and of his suspicious behavior on the day of Pitezel’s death, when the defendant, “in the company of his wife, practically fled from the city of Philadelphia.”

  With withering scorn, Graham described Holmes’s initial statements to the police. “They are marvelous productions in the line of fiction. They are wonderful statements, with scarcely an element of truth in them. The facility with which this man could utter one falsehood after another must be apparent to you in your observation of this testimony, and from the statements you have heard, not only from the officials but from the lips of this pure, good woman whom he called his wife, Miss Yoke.

  “Think of it!” Graham cried, his voice ringing with indignation. “Think of it! Think of the deception and the falsehood! Think of his deceit to her! He meets her in St. Louis. He is going to engage her as his wife. He then tells her the story of a fictitious uncle, with his millions, or whatever the estate may have been, and who requested that he, H. H. Holmes, should take the name of Henry Mansfield Howard, and thenceforth be known as his heir. He enters into one of the most sacred relations in life with deception and deceit upon him. He marries her as Henry Mansfield Howard. During all of his journeys, he never once places his own name upon the register of a hotel. Lies supply the place of truth at every point, and false registry is the order of his journey at every hotel.”

  Swiveling away from the jury box, Graham stabbed an accusing finger in the direction of the prisoner, who seemed to quail before the thrust. “Upon every step, from point to point, as we go through this evidence, we find Mudgett, alias Holmes, a fabricator and a falsifier!”

  Graham turned back to the jurors. “But this is a digression, so I ask your attention to his statement again. He tells you that a body was substituted. Was there a body substituted? Don’t you believe with me that this man”—here, Graham held up the photograph of Pitezel he had shown to Dessie on the second day of the trial—“was the man who was buried in potter’s field? Don’t you think that this is the man whose body was found in the second-story room? Lie number one. But he says, ‘B. F. Pitezel is down in South America and he has little Howard with him.’

  “Oh, gentlemen, that is an awful, a frightful statement. What fearful twisting and destruction of the truth! Pitezel in South America! He had seen the body taken up out of the potter’s field and made little Alice testify that it was the body of the father. Down in South America! It is a wonder that the lie did not scorch his lips, as the flames scorched the dead body of Pitezel and consumed the flesh. Little Howard with his father in South America! Gentlemen, think of it, and then recall in that connection the broken utterances of that poor woman Mrs. Pitezel, as she was about to leave the stand, when she said—in answer to the question, where did you see Howard last?—‘I last saw little Howard’s belongings in the coroner’s office in Indianapolis.’ Little Howard in South America with his father? God help such a liar!”

  Graham paused for a moment, as though to recover his composure after being swept away by the force of his outrage. When he spoke again, his voice seemed weighted down with a terrible pathos.

 
“Then comes the story of Mrs. Pitezel. Gentlemen, you remember that story. I am not going to weary you by its repetition. In all the fifteen years of my service in this office, I do not remember a story that stirred my heart or moved my sensibilities like the broken sentences of that woman when, with evident suffering in every line and mark upon her face, in the supreme effort that she made to control herself and to avoid breaking down, she told that pitiful, yet marvelous, story, of how this man led her from place to place in the pursuit of her husband. That was a strange story, gentlemen. If you and I had read it in fiction, we would say, perhaps, that the novelist had overstated the facts, that he had overdrawn the story and made it stronger than our imagination or fancy could tolerate.”

  In spite of his promise not to “weary” the jurors with a repetition of the tale, Graham, in fact, went on to recall it at some length. “Was ever power over a family more complete than this man’s?” he marveled. “Every letter intercepted—no communication between them. Not one syllable from child to mother. Not one syllable from mother to child. Did I speak wrongfully, gentlemen, or was I cruel in making the statement when I said that this was a man of steel, with a heart of stone? Anyone that would take these children’s letters addressed to their mother and hide and conceal them may justly be charged with being heartless, and with being cruel beyond comparison.

  “He is the jailer of the family. He suppresses their mail. But”—and here Graham allowed a grim smile to play about his lips—“he does not destroy it. For in almost every case of villainy and criminality, somehow or other, whether it be providential for the detection and punishment of the rascal or not, I cannot tell, but somehow, the villain overreaches himself in his efforts at concealment, and here and there a telltale fact comes to light and points the unerring finger of accusation at him, saying, ‘That’s the guilty man.’ Yes, this is a marvelous story, and the conclusion of it is not less marvelous than the rest.”

  Graham wound up his address by retracing the steps of his argument, marking out a path that could lead to only one possible conclusion. “See how far in our progress we have come. We have established that this is Benjamin F. Pitezel. We have established that he has died of chloroform poisoning. We have established that it was not self-administered but administered by a second person. We have shown that Holmes was there in the house on that fateful Sunday alone with the dead man. We have shown that every story told by him to explain his presence was false. We have shown that his allegation of suicide was false. We have shown the effort at concealment when there was no other object unless it be that the defendant knew he had committed a murder and was telling these falsehoods, one after the other, to conceal it.

  “Upon no other hypothesis can his conduct be explained than that he was concealing the crime of murder. That is what made him flee from city to city. That is what made him take his wife with him upon this wonderful journey. That is what made him take the children along. That is what made him conceal the letters. And that is what made him shut off communication between the different members of that household.

  “This man was fleeing from the shadow of murder. That was the crime he was seeking to avoid. That was what he was fleeing from. It was the menace of pursuit and detection that made him take this journey, which, if it had not been interrupted at Boston, would only have terminated when he reached Berlin with his alleged wife, Miss Yoke.”

  The speech ended quietly, as though—having marshaled such compelling evidence of the defendant’s guilt—Graham had no further need of eloquence. “Now this strange story is drawing to a close. It has been dramatic in its incidents, but those incidents have nothing to do with the case. The fact that this man appears without counsel and then with counsel has nothing to do with his guilt or innocence. The simple question is: Has the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as it is bound to do, made out its case beyond a fair and reasonable doubt? If you believe it has, then your duty is to find a verdict of murder of the first degree against this man. There is no middle ground. If this man was poisoned, then there was purpose to kill, and it was a willful, premeditated, and deliberate murder, and this prisoner is responsible in the highest form of verdict you can render.”

  Thanking them for their “patient and earnest attention,” the district attorney bowed to the jurors and returned to his seat. The murmured approbation of the crowd made it clear that—had such demonstrations been permitted in the courtroom—Graham, like any virtuoso, would have been rewarded with a standing ovation.

  51

  And when the jury returned its verdict, Justice cried, “Amen!”

  —Frank P. Geyer, The Holmes-Pitezel Case

  Rotan’s closing argument did not get under way until three P.M., following a one-hour lunch recess. His speech was a good deal briefer than the district attorney’s, and not nearly as accomplished. Still, the young lawyer won praise from his listeners for an able performance in the face of overwhelming odds.

  Aware that he was battling not only against Graham but also against the unbridled allegations of the press, Rotan began by reminding the jurors that Holmes was entitled to the presumption of innocence. In doing so, Rotan displayed his own flair for dramatic metaphor:

  “While there may have been opinions formed by you from the newspapers in reference to this case, you have promised to put all that aside as unreliable. You have come here, and after looking at this defendant, by the law you must say, ‘This man is to my mind an innocent man.’ This man, as you look upon him, is as though he were clothed in armor. This armor is that presumption of innocence with which the law surrounds him, and while all the poisonous influences which you may have found in the papers, and all the condemning evidence in this case, beat up against and pierce that armor, the presumption is not removed until the whole armor is shattered and falls clanging to the ground.”

  Cleverly (and necessarily, since the defense had made no case of its own), Rotan used the Commonwealth’s witnesses to his own advantage. Far from challenging their testimony, he freely conceded its truth, while arguing that it only served to bolster the defense’s position—that Pitezel had taken his own life.

  He admitted that the dead man was Benjamin Pitezel; that Pitezel and Holmes were not only intimate friends but co-conspirators in the insurance fraud; that Holmes had visited the Callowhill Street house on the day of the death; that Pitezel’s stomach contained several ounces of chloroform; and that Holmes had kept Carrie on the move by pretending that her husband was still alive.

  Nevertheless, he insisted, “if you look at the evidence, you will see by analyzing it carefully that every fact in the case is more consistent with the theory of suicide than it is with the crime of murder.”

  In essence, Rotan’s argument consisted of a series of questions designed to elicit that “reasonable doubt” on which he hoped to win an acquittal. Why, he asked, would Holmes—the purported criminal mastermind—have made it so hard for himself to collect the insurance money if he had intended to murder Pitezel from the start? Why was the insurance policy made payable to Carrie instead of to Holmes? Why would Holmes have introduced chloroform into the corpse’s stomach, thereby making it appear as though Pitezel had poisoned himself? “Can you imagine a man killing another in a manner which would show that there was suicide when the policy contained a clause against suicide?”

  And there were other weak links in the Commonwealth’s supposedly flawless chain of evidence. How could Holmes—“a weak, light, frail man, effeminate in his manner, effeminate in his strength”—have overcome a “strong, muscular, powerfully built” individual such as Pitezel, who outweighed him by at least twenty-five pounds? According to the district attorney, Pitezel had drunk himself into a stupor the evening before and was still unconscious when Holmes arrived at Callowhill Street. But the Commonwealth’s own medical experts had testified that there was “nothing in the stomach to show that there was alcohol in any considerable amount, nothing in the brain to show that there was alcohol there.

  “Wh
at then could it have been?” exclaimed Rotan. “Could it have been that Pitezel was asleep? The defendant never left the boardinghouse on North Fifteenth Street until half-past ten or eleven o’clock in the morning, and it took from twenty to twenty-five minutes at the very least to come down to Thirteenth and Callowhill. This would bring it to ten or twenty minutes of eleven. Is it likely that the man would have been asleep at that time? Is there anything to show that he was lying in bed? He was lying on the floor. Would a man naturally lie on the floor to go to sleep? It is not natural to infer that when a man goes to a room he lies down on the floor, and you find him there asleep at half-past ten or twenty minutes of eleven on Sunday morning.”

  Rotan acknowledged that Holmes had manipulated Carrie Pitezel by promising her that she would soon be reunited with her husband. But here, too, he argued, there was nothing to suggest that Holmes was guilty of any crime worse than insurance fraud.

  Why,” asked Rotan, “was Holmes taking this woman around with him—to Toronto, Detroit, Prescott, Ogdensburg? It was evidently his intention to make for the seacoast and get them all out of the country. Since Mrs. Pitezel knew of the insurance conspiracy, Holmes could not very well have left her in St. Louis, or at the home of her parents in Galva, since she would have been found readily by the police and would have been a witness against him in the fraud.

  “If Holmes had stated to Mrs. Pitezel that Pitezel was dead, what would have been the result? In the first place, she would have broken down, and in the second place, she might have said, ‘My husband being dead, I will travel no further.’ Thus, he kept holding out this inducement for her to travel. He was exercising control over her to keep her moving with him, to get her and all of them out of the country so that, if the fraudulent collection of the insurance money were found out, he would be safe and the witnesses against him out of reach.”