Detective Frank Geyer was one of Philadelphia's top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had inspected about two hundred murders. His current assignment (not June 1895) dealt with the suspect already in custody, arrested seven months earlier on account of insurance fraud. This suspect was of course Holmes who had once lived in Chicago where he and an associate, Benjamin Pitezel, had run a hotel during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. They had moved from Chicago to Fort Worth to St. Louis to Philadelphia committing frauds along the way. While in Philadelphia, Holmes had swindled the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Nearly $10,000 by apparently faking the death of its policyholder Ben Pitezel. Holmes confessed to the fraud and by June of 1895 is became apparent that Holmes did not fake the death of Pitezel but he actually killed him. Now three of Pitezel's children were missing and were last seen in Holmes's company.
Geyer then tells the story of how he went from city to city looking for the three missing children being lead by letters from the two girls sent to their mother. After much investigation, Geyer had realized that Holmes was shuffling around three different parties of travelers--the three children, Carrie Pitezel and her other two children, and Holmes wife Georgiana Yoke--without their knowledge of one another.
The story shifts back to Holmes's stay in Moyamensing Prison and details his daily routine of washing up, working out, and reading. It also portrays a letter Holmes wrote to Carrie Pitezel discussing how there was no reason he could kill young, innocent children with or without a motive and how the children were safe with Mrs.W.
However, Geyer finally found the two girls buried in the cellar of a house in Toronto. The coroner, unable to find any marks of violence, theorized that Holmes had placed the two girls in the big trunk then filled it with gas from a lamp valve. Upon burying the girls nude, Holmes had amputated Nellie's feet because she was clubfooted thus he had disposed of her feet in order to remove this distinctive clue to her identity. Great satisfaction came to Geyer with the discovery of the two girls yet he was tempered by the fact that Howard was still missing.
Holmes heard of the children's discovery in the paper and wasted no time before getting a publicist to market his memoir.
While Geyer restarted his search for the missing boy, Howard, he and his men also began to unravel the secrets of Holmes's "castle". After investigation, the team found numerous bones, piles of clothes, charred shoes, gobs of hair clogging pipelines, rooms with no windows and air-tight doors, and at least three air-tight vaults connected to gas lines with control in Holmes's personal apartment. On August 19, 1895, Holmes's Castle was burnt to the ground.
Howard's remains were found burnt in the chimney in a house outside of Indianapolis. Carrie Pitezel identified his coat and scarf and one of his sister's crochet needles and his most prized possession--a tin-man mounted on top of a top that his father had gotten him from the World Fair.
Dr. Herman W. Mudgett, alias Holmes, kept a look of indifference drenched upon his face during the trial. The jury found him guilty;the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. Holmes's attorneys appealed the conviction and lost. As Holmes await execution, he prepared a long confession in which he admitted to killing twenty-seven people. Exactly how many people he killed will never be known. At the very least he killed nine: Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand, Minnie and Anna Williams, Benjamin Pitezel and his children Alice, Nellie, and Howard.
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