The Devil's Dozen (5 page)

“In conclusion,” he wrote, “I wish to say that I am but a very ordinary man...and to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrongdoing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power.” He asked the general public to withhold their judgment until he could prove his innocence at his trial. He would also work to bring justice to those “for whose wrong doings I am today suffering.” However, this publication was so transparently self-serving, not to mention boring, that readers preferred the more lurid tales provided in newspapers.

Holmes’s attorneys attempted to get his trial continued, but were unsuccessful. In addition, there was a struggle between Chicago and Philadelphia authorities as to who would get to try him first, but he remained in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the judge allowed only testimony relevant to the single murder he was charged with there, that of Benjamin Pitezel, so there are no court records about other evidence, including Geyer’s discovery of the murdered children.

The trial commenced as scheduled on October 28—three days before Halloween—and lasted five days. Judge Arnold allowed Holmes to defend himself, so he questioned the prospective jury members, at which point his team of attorneys left the courtroom. He demonstrated the coolness with which he handled stress and tried rejecting each person who said he had read the papers, but the judge pointed out that this was not considered a cause for challenge. “Newspapers are so numerous,” he said, “that everybody now reads them, and of course, they obtain impressions from them.”

The best account of what lay ahead in terms of witnesses is found in D.A. Graham’s speech, reprinted in Geyer’s book. He spoke for nearly two hours, describing how Pitezel had died and how chloroform had been injected into the victim’s stomach after death to mimic a suicide. He also suggested that Holmes had “ruined” Alice when she was in his care in the city. Holmes appeared to be surprised by this allegation.

A reporter for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
described Holmes’s performance in court as vigorous and “remarkable.” He was deferential to the judge but nasty to the prosecutor. He asked for an analysis of the liquid that he was accused of using as a poison for the children (which the D.A. did not have in his possession), and he wanted reports from the most recent work done on toxicology, claiming that as a doctor, he himself could analyze them (though his credentials were false). This left the impression of a man who knew his stuff and was prepared to use science to exonerate himself.

Yet Holmes often deflected the questioning with forays into minutiae, and he frequently squabbled with the prosecutor, who was likely disturbed at having to spar in court as an equal with the defendant. Holmes made an error when, after Pitezel’s corpse was described in gruesome detail, he requested a lunch break because he was hungry. He appeared to have no sense of sorrow over the supposed suicide of a longtime partner and friend, noted by the jury. For the rest of that day, while he handled his questioning in a professional manner, he failed to score any points to support his innocence. The professional witnesses all concluded that Pitezel could not, as Holmes claimed, have committed suicide.

Holmes asked that the court allow his two defense attorneys to reenter the case, and with that he relinquished his role as a criminal lawyer. While he now had competent counsel, he had probably hurt his case. Between his antics and his obvious fatigue by the end of the first day, the jury had a good look at the defendant’s loss of confidence and inability to shake the strongest witnesses. He may not have admitted his guilt, but his actions indicated he’d admitted defeat. He got up only once to examine another witness—his latest paramour and third wife, who testified against him. Using a heavy dose of emotion, as if stricken by her betrayal, he nevertheless failed to move her to change her testimony about his behavior on the day that Pitezel was allegedly murdered.

The prosecution prepared to show his activities by producing thirty-five witnesses from the various places where Holmes had gone after the Pitezel murder. But the judge had ruled that the trial must be limited to the Pitezel murder, so Graham showed how he had made Pitezel’s identification, and added whatever he could about Holmes’s reprehensible behavior. The prosecution proved with doctors that the chloroform that supposedly had been self-administrated had actually been forced into Pitezel postmortem.

Given Holmes’s admissions about being with the victim, there was really no other choice for the fact finders who were listening. In his closing argument, which lasted over two hours, Graham called Holmes the “most dangerous man in the world” and asked the jurors not to be afraid to do their duty. They were not; they convicted Holmes of Benjamin Pitezel’s murder and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.

After his conviction, and as his attorneys prepared an appeal for a new trial (which failed), Holmes took up the pen again to make a confession, largely inspired by a $10,000 payment from the Hearst newspaper syndicate. He published it in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
. Aiming now to become the most notorious killer in the world, he claimed to have killed over one hundred people. Apparently having second thoughts, he reduced that number to twenty-seven, including Pitezel and his children. He insisted that he could not help what he’d done. “I was born with the Evil One as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world,” he lamented. “It now seems a fitting time, if ever, to make known the details of the twenty-seven murders, of which it would be useless to longer say I am not guilty.”

Holmes claimed that he wanted to make the confession at this point for several reasons. He assured his readers that he was not seeking attention and that the entire enterprise was distasteful to him. As he admitted to the murders, he said he was “thus branding myself as the most detestable criminal of modern times.” He thought his countenance was changing as he sat in prison, and that he looked more satanic than before. “I have become afflicted with that dread disease, rare but terrible...a malformation...My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.” He self-diagnosed “acquired homicidal mania” and “degeneracy.”

The criminological theories at the time were fueled by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian anthropologist and professor at the University of Turin. Lombroso had published
L’uomo delinquente,
in which he stated that certain people were born degenerates, identifiable by specific physical traits, such as bulging brows, long arms, and apelike noses. In this context, Holmes “saw” a prominence on one side of his head, a “corresponding diminution on the other side,” a deficiency on his nose and ear, and similar details in the length of various limbs.

Then he turned his attention to Pitezel, indicating that from the first hour they met, he knew that he would kill the man. Everything he did for Pitezel that seemed to be a kindness was merely a way to gain his confidence. Pitezel “met his death” on September 2, 1894. Holmes showed him fake letters from Mrs. Pitezel in order to precipitate a bout of drinking. Holmes then watched and waited until he was able to come upon Pitezel in a drunken stupor in the middle of the day. He packed his bags in readiness to leave and then went to where Pitezel lay in bed, bound him, saturated his clothing and face with benzene, and lit a match. He literally burned his former accomplice alive.

Apparently Pitezel cried out and prayed for mercy, begging Holmes to end his suffering with a speedy death, “all of which had on me no effect.” When Pitezel finally expired, Holmes extinguished the flames, removed the ropes, and poured chloroform into his stomach, to make the death appear to be accidentally brought about by an explosion. That way, the insurance company would quickly pay the full amount of the claim. He left the body in a position that exposed it to the sun for however long it would be before someone found him—presumably to further deform it for difficulty in identification. “I left the house,” he wrote, “without the slightest feeling of remorse for my terrible acts.”

As for young Howard Pitezel, Holmes also had a story to tell. He had every intention of murdering the three Pitezel children, so he ensconced them in a hotel until he could find a way that would not draw suspicion. After a week, he poisoned the boy and then cut him into pieces small enough to go through the door of a stove he had purchased. He felt no remorse about these acts, only the pleasure he had gained from killing another person. He then took the girls to Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto, where Alice and Nellie met their fate. He claimed that they were the “twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh” of his victims.

To get them ready, he told them they would soon be reunited with their mother. Then he compelled them to climb into a large trunk and closed them inside, leaving an airhole. Through it, he pumped gas, killing them. In the dirt cellar, he dug shallow graves, placing their naked bodies inside and covering them with dirt. He considered that “for eight years before their deaths I had been almost as much a father to them as though they had been my own children.”

He also had a plan to end Mrs. Pitezel’s life, along with those of her two remaining children, with nitroglycerine, but he was arrested in Boston before he managed to achieve this goal. He closed his confession by saying that his last public utterance would be of remorse for these vile acts. He did not expect anyone to believe him. Geyer later says in his memoir that Holmes’s account, published in many papers on April 12, 1896, was so inconsistent with the facts that it was “at once discredited in police circles.”

Then, according to Geyer, Holmes recanted the confession, and some of his “victims” turned up alive. When told by police that his tale was untrue, he supposedly said, “Of course it is not true, but the newspapers want a sensation and they got it.”

On May 7, 1896, H. H. Holmes went to the hangman’s noose, and even then, he was changing his story. Now he claimed to have killed only two people, and tried to say more, but at 10:13 the trapdoor opened and he was hanged. It took him fifteen minutes to strangle to death on the gallows.

Afraid of body snatchers who might want to steal his corpse, Holmes had made a request: he wanted no autopsy and he instructed his attorneys to see that he was buried in a coffin filled with cement. No stone was erected to mark where it was buried. Holmes’s attorneys turned down an offer of $5,000 for his body and refused to send his brain to Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute, where scientists had hoped to analyze it.

So many people who’d rented rooms from Holmes during the fair had actually gone missing that estimates of his victims reached around two hundred; though the toll is unsubstantiated, it is sometimes cited even to this day. We might not know the number of his victims, but we do know that Holmes was among the cleverest serial killers of all time, and our inability to fully document his crimes attests to how well he exploited chaotic times and the lack of record keeping to cover his tracks. In light of this, Detective Geyer’s painstaking detection is quite brilliant, and his work inspired many like-minded sleuths well into the next century.

While Geyer relied on logic and persistence, our next story links another fortuitous discovery in science with the investigation of a brutal serial killer who targeted children two at a time.

 

 

Boswell, Charles, and Lewis Thomas.
The Girls in the Nightmare House.
Hold Medal, 1955.

Boucher, Anthony.
The Quality of Murder.
New York: E. E. Dutton, 1962.

Franke, David.
The Torture Doctor.
New York: Hawthorn Books, 1975.

Geyer, Frank.
The Holmes-Pitezel Case: A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century.
Salem, MA: Publisher’s Union, 1896.

Holmes, H. H.
Holmes’ Own Story.
Burk and McFetridge, 1895. _. Confession.
Philadelphia Inquirer,
April 12, 1896.

Larson, Erik.
The Devil in the White City.
New York: Crown, 2003.

Schechter, Harold.
Depraved: The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer.
New York: Pocket, 1994.

The H. H. Holmes Case,
a film by John Borowski. Waterfront Productions, 2003.

It was early afternoon on September 9, 1898, in Lechtingen, Germany, near Osnabrück. Jadwiga Heidemann was awaiting her seven-year-old daughter’s return from school. When Hannelore failed to arrive as expected, Jadwiga went to a neighbor, Irmgard Langmeier, whose daughter, Else, was a year older. The two girls often played together. But Irmgard had not seen Else either, so together they contacted the school. To their horror, neither girl had been seen that day. They alerted friends and family, and enlisted as many people as they could to search the surrounding woods. They were at it the rest of the day, without result. None of the girls’ friends had seen them.

Then, as dusk settled in, one searcher came across what looked like the dismembered limbs of a child scattered on the ground. From clothing and personal effects on the ground nearby, Jadwiga identified the remains of her daughter. She was shocked and grief-stricken. Irmgard held out hope, since her daughter was not there in the immediate area. However, the girl had not yet returned home, so the searchers continued. An hour later, when it was nearly too dark to search any longer, they found her in an equally brutalized condition, hidden deeper in the woods within some bushes. Despite the evidence of a person committing these crimes who was aware of the need to hide them, the villagers considered other explanations, such as a roving beast. It would not be the first time that wolves had killed children, but it was early fall, not winter, when wolves were most hungry, and it was difficult to imagine them venturing this close to civilization. Even so, for the moment, it seemed the most likely explanation.