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

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2003

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Part 4, Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4: “Cruelty Revealed”

Part 4, Chapter 2 Summary: “Moyamensing Prison”

Reading of his increasing fame in the national newspapers, Holmes sat smugly in his cell. He wrote a largely fictional memoir and a letter to Carrie Pitezel designed to exculpate himself from blame, in which he claims, “I was as careful with the children as if they were my own” (352).

Part 4, Chapter 3 Summary: “The Tenant”

When the three parties moved again to Toronto, none of the hoteliers remembered seeing Howard. By this time Geyer had become a national celebrity and he and his partner followed up on one of many tips, from a Thomas Ryves. Ryves said Holmes had arrived at the house with little furniture, a large trunk, and asked to borrow a shovel, which he returned the following day. He never saw Holmes again. On St Vincent Street, Geyer borrowed the same shovel from Ryves, and discovered the nude corpses buried three feet beneath the basement. Nellie’s feet had been amputated. Mrs. Pitezel learned of the discovery of her children via the newspaper. She came to identify them. Holmes had killed them with gas piped into the trunk. Howard remained missing.

Part 4, Chapter 4 Summary: “A Lively Corpse”

Holmes read that the children’s bodies had been discovered. In his memoir, he claimed that Minnie had an associate named Hatch, who carried out the killings. Holmes was driven to Broad Street City Hall where he remained silent under the weight of accusations. Holmes made a deal with A publisher John King who would publish his memoir, issuing specific instructions for its marketing. He maintained his innocence in this letter, quipping that if Minnie Williams was dead, she would be “a very lively corpse indeed” (361).

Part 4, Chapters 2-4 Analysis

The metaphorical relationship between storyteller and serial killer deepens further in these chapters as Holmes’ story reaches its climax: “Holmes became a model prisoner—became in fact the model of a model prisoner. He made a game of using his charm to gain concessions from his keepers” (351). Holmes reads about his actions along with the rest of society, and for the first time receives them passively from his prison cell, as he had once made his victims powerless. The narrative and the investigation gain momentum, Geyer’s horrifying discoveries contributing to the surreal quality of events as Larson describes them: “He read of his increasing national notoriety […] [and] opened the memoir as if it were a fable” (351).

Holmes assumes his new role as writer and begins a diary, in which “he notes that he was reading Trilby, the 1894 best seller by George Du Maurier about a young singer, Trilby O’Farrell, and her possession by the mesmerist Svengali. Holmes wrote that he “was much pleased with parts of it” (352). As Holmes’ identity is unmasked, meta layers accumulate to almost unbearable levels. Geyer muses: “Holmes […] had arranged the insurance fraud for the money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people” (354). Holmes steps fully into the role of narrator when he decides to publish his own version of events: “If he could not exert his great powers of persuasion directly, he could at least attempt to do so indirectly. He struck a deal with a journalist named John King to arrange publication and market the book” (360). Larson suggests that life was never fully real for the master manipulator, and that this was an important motive for his killing.