The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

In June 1895 Detective Frank Geyer visited a physician by the name of Mudgett but more commonly known as H. H. Holmes, incarcerated for insurance fraud in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. From Fort Worth, Holmes had moved to St. Louis, and finally Philadelphia, committing frauds on the way. In Philadelphia, Holmes had faked the death of Ben Pitezel to defraud the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of nearly $10,000. The company hired Pinkerton Detective Agency to investigate. It was becoming gradually clearer that Holmes had not faked Pitezel’s death but murdered him, and now Geyer’s job was to locate the three of Pitezel’s five children last seen with Holmes.

Geyer had recently lost his wife and daughter in a house fire when he interviewed a “glib” Holmes, who insisted the children were traveling with a woman called Minnie Williams. Holmes claimed to have obtained a cadaver that resembles Pitezel and instigated an explosion in a rented property ironically close to the city morgue. Holmes assisted in identifying the cadaver and nonchalantly lanced the identifying wart on Pitezel’s neck. His 15-year-old daughter Alice identified her father’s teeth. Holmes had taken Alice, 11-year-old Nellie, and 8-year-old Howard, telling their mother, Carrie, that their father was desperate to see them. Alice’s letters never reached Carrie but were collected in a tin box labelled “Property of H. H. Holmes.” Using the letters, Geyer traced the contours of Holmes’ trip with the children.

Geyer discovered an alias of Holmes’ in a hotel ledger in Cincinnati. Renting an apartment on Poplar Street in the same city, a neighbor told Geyer that Holmes appeared to change his mind after just two days, when the installation of a huge stove attracted a great deal of neighborly scrutiny. The girls’ letters took the detectives to Indianapolis, where at the Hotel English, they found Holmes’ record under another pseudonym. Georgiana Yoke and her husband stayed four nights, without the children, at a different hotel. Holmes had moved them to a now closed hotel across town. The ex-manager, Herman Ackelow, remembered often hearing the children crying during their stay. Ackelow told Geyer that Holmes was trying to place Howard in an institution due to poor behavior. Expecting the worst, Geyer visited Chicago to interview the chambermaid at the children’s hotel and then Detroit, where the last of the letters were written. In Detroit he found that Holmes had maneuvered Carrie Pitezel and her two other children into another hotel in town. They were placed in hotels just three blocks apart.