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.
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label non-fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
The Devil in the White City pg. 288-320
Although Holmes has kept Minnie and her sister Anna alive for quite some time now, their lives are beginning to look towards the end. Holmes has convinced Anna that she is very talented and should study art in Europe. So Anna writes to her family in Texas explaining that her, Minnie, and Holmes will be going to Milwaukee, then Maine, the New York then sail to Germany, England, and France. Holmes says that her parents won't need to worry about the girls because he will take care of them financially.
Before leaving for Milwaukee the next day, Minnie prepares the flat for the next tenants as Holmes takes Anna to see his World's Fair Hotel. He asks Anna if she would mind going into the walk-in vault to retrieve a document he had left inside. Of course she cheerfully complies. Little does she know Holmes is going to shut her in the vault and release a deadly gas. Anna is embarrassed as she believes that she accidentally shut the door. She begins pounding on the door with her heel waiting for Holmes to let her out. After a couple of minutes with no answer from Holmes she believes that he has gone elsewhere in the building or left to check on the shops below.
Just outside the vault Holmes was pondering his three options: He could, in the last few seconds, "rush to the door, throw it open, hold her in his arms, and weep with her at the tragedy just barely averted; he could "open the door and look in on Anna and give her a big smile--just to let her know that this was no accident--then close the door again, slam it, and return to his chair to see what might happen next"; or, he could "flood the vault, right now, with gas." Holmes, a fiend of instant gratification, of course, chose to flood the vault with gas.
Two days later, Holmes called upon Cephas Humphrey to pick up a box (about the dimensions of a coffin) and a trunk (Anna's belongings). Later evidence suggests that he drove the trunk to the home of Charles Chappell, the man who had converted Holmes's past two ladies into skeletons. As for the rectangular, wooden box, Holmes gave Pitezel's wife, Carrie, a collection of dresses, shoes, and hats that had belonged to "his cousin Minnie Williams." Holmes suggested that Carrie cut up the dresses and use the material to make clothing for her three daughters.
Holmes soon moved on and proposed to Georgiana Yoke, a young blond from Franklin, Indiana. He did warn her that for the marriage he would have to use his dead uncle's name Henry Mansfield Howard.
Before leaving for Milwaukee the next day, Minnie prepares the flat for the next tenants as Holmes takes Anna to see his World's Fair Hotel. He asks Anna if she would mind going into the walk-in vault to retrieve a document he had left inside. Of course she cheerfully complies. Little does she know Holmes is going to shut her in the vault and release a deadly gas. Anna is embarrassed as she believes that she accidentally shut the door. She begins pounding on the door with her heel waiting for Holmes to let her out. After a couple of minutes with no answer from Holmes she believes that he has gone elsewhere in the building or left to check on the shops below.
Just outside the vault Holmes was pondering his three options: He could, in the last few seconds, "rush to the door, throw it open, hold her in his arms, and weep with her at the tragedy just barely averted; he could "open the door and look in on Anna and give her a big smile--just to let her know that this was no accident--then close the door again, slam it, and return to his chair to see what might happen next"; or, he could "flood the vault, right now, with gas." Holmes, a fiend of instant gratification, of course, chose to flood the vault with gas.
Two days later, Holmes called upon Cephas Humphrey to pick up a box (about the dimensions of a coffin) and a trunk (Anna's belongings). Later evidence suggests that he drove the trunk to the home of Charles Chappell, the man who had converted Holmes's past two ladies into skeletons. As for the rectangular, wooden box, Holmes gave Pitezel's wife, Carrie, a collection of dresses, shoes, and hats that had belonged to "his cousin Minnie Williams." Holmes suggested that Carrie cut up the dresses and use the material to make clothing for her three daughters.
Holmes soon moved on and proposed to Georgiana Yoke, a young blond from Franklin, Indiana. He did warn her that for the marriage he would have to use his dead uncle's name Henry Mansfield Howard.
Monday, January 31, 2011
The Devil in the White City pg. 121-152
Holmes is such a freak. I honestly don't know how to say that in any other way. I mean, this very attractive mountebank not only traps people in insurance scams but then he turns around and murders them in order to cash in on the profit of their life insurance policies. Yeah, thats really bad but that isn't why I call the phyisician/entrepreneur/serial killer a freak. The man is a freak because of the inhumane actions he carries out with his victims after killing them.
Ned is a young jeweler with a wife named Julia and a daughter named Pearl who moves his family to Chicago in 1891 in the search of opportunity--an kind of opportunity at all. He soon found himself managing a jewelry counter that occupied one wall of Holmes's drug store and for once in his life he saw the future gleam. The back story is pretty boring and rambles on for a few pages however it begins to take form of a potential murder when Holmes's catches a glimpse of the "tall and felicitously proportioned" Julia.
To make a long story short, Holmes seems inordinately attentive to Julia. Different parts of this section concerning Holmes's intense glares towards Julia and their flirtatious work ethic imply that a secretive liaison between the two is occurring right in front of her plain, insecure husband's face. Once Ned finally snaps and can't put up with the arguments between him and his wife anymore, he ends the marriage and leaves for Iowa, leaving Julia and his daughter in the care of Holmes.
This story becomes especially eary when Julia informs Holmes that she is pregnant and that he has no other choice but to marry her. He reacted to her proposal of marriage with warmth but insisted that he would only marry her on one condition--she was to have an abortion....on Christmas Eve. He was a physician and had executed the operation before: he would use chloroform and she would feel no pain whatsoever. Its not hard to guess what happens next. Holmes of course kills Julia by suffocating her with the chloroform drenched rag and then easily performs the same method on her daughter Pearl.
The whole scenario becomes even freakier when he offers Charles Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and RETURN to him a FULLY ARTICULATED SKELETON! Chappell completes his work and returns the skeleton to Holmes who then turns around and sells it to Hahneman Medical College in Chicago for a great profit.
Okay, seriously, that's soooo messed up! Most have seen a skeleton in a doctor's office or a science room but those are made of plastic and have no emotional effect on us. But could you imagine personally knowing someone, hearing that they've been murdered, and then look at their skeleton? I definitely could not imagine that and if you can then you are a freak too.
Ned is a young jeweler with a wife named Julia and a daughter named Pearl who moves his family to Chicago in 1891 in the search of opportunity--an kind of opportunity at all. He soon found himself managing a jewelry counter that occupied one wall of Holmes's drug store and for once in his life he saw the future gleam. The back story is pretty boring and rambles on for a few pages however it begins to take form of a potential murder when Holmes's catches a glimpse of the "tall and felicitously proportioned" Julia.
To make a long story short, Holmes seems inordinately attentive to Julia. Different parts of this section concerning Holmes's intense glares towards Julia and their flirtatious work ethic imply that a secretive liaison between the two is occurring right in front of her plain, insecure husband's face. Once Ned finally snaps and can't put up with the arguments between him and his wife anymore, he ends the marriage and leaves for Iowa, leaving Julia and his daughter in the care of Holmes.
This story becomes especially eary when Julia informs Holmes that she is pregnant and that he has no other choice but to marry her. He reacted to her proposal of marriage with warmth but insisted that he would only marry her on one condition--she was to have an abortion....on Christmas Eve. He was a physician and had executed the operation before: he would use chloroform and she would feel no pain whatsoever. Its not hard to guess what happens next. Holmes of course kills Julia by suffocating her with the chloroform drenched rag and then easily performs the same method on her daughter Pearl.
The whole scenario becomes even freakier when he offers Charles Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and RETURN to him a FULLY ARTICULATED SKELETON! Chappell completes his work and returns the skeleton to Holmes who then turns around and sells it to Hahneman Medical College in Chicago for a great profit.
Okay, seriously, that's soooo messed up! Most have seen a skeleton in a doctor's office or a science room but those are made of plastic and have no emotional effect on us. But could you imagine personally knowing someone, hearing that they've been murdered, and then look at their skeleton? I definitely could not imagine that and if you can then you are a freak too.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
The Devil in the White City pg. 58-101
Well, it was really hard for me to pay attention to Burnham and his troubles getting the Fair into production but I got through it . Barely. Pretty much it was about twenty pages about boring architecture and the obstacles they face when creating a new building/city. And the list of ongoing architects confused me. I got lost as to which architect was which and which side of the Fair debate they were on. I don't really have anything more to say about this aspect of the book.
Holmes and his story are just starting to get rolling on the other hand. It can be inferred that he killed the old lady that he bought his pharmacy from because he told her loyal customers that she went to California and fell in love with it. Supposedly. The main point of these forty some pages was Holmes and his new project. This project was to create a building with the first floor being retail shops and the second and third floors to be apartment complexes. It would also have a basement for other "material." I personally took this to be dead bodies mainly because Holmes refers to dead bodies as just another type of material in the previous section I read. Anyway, in this basement he has a "kiln" that is approximately eight feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep in which he will use for his glass shop (one of the retail stores on the first floor). I find it funny that this 3,000 degree Fahrenheit "kiln" is the perfect size and temperature to incinerate a human being.
That's about all that happened in the past fifty pages. It was kind of a slow read but now that I'm cutting out the crap about the architect hopefully it will pick up a little bit. I just looked at the clock and it is 12:oo a.m. which is when I call it quits. My goal for this next week is to not procrastinate (or even just to remember) my blog assignments.
Holmes and his story are just starting to get rolling on the other hand. It can be inferred that he killed the old lady that he bought his pharmacy from because he told her loyal customers that she went to California and fell in love with it. Supposedly. The main point of these forty some pages was Holmes and his new project. This project was to create a building with the first floor being retail shops and the second and third floors to be apartment complexes. It would also have a basement for other "material." I personally took this to be dead bodies mainly because Holmes refers to dead bodies as just another type of material in the previous section I read. Anyway, in this basement he has a "kiln" that is approximately eight feet long, three feet wide, and three feet deep in which he will use for his glass shop (one of the retail stores on the first floor). I find it funny that this 3,000 degree Fahrenheit "kiln" is the perfect size and temperature to incinerate a human being.
That's about all that happened in the past fifty pages. It was kind of a slow read but now that I'm cutting out the crap about the architect hopefully it will pick up a little bit. I just looked at the clock and it is 12:oo a.m. which is when I call it quits. My goal for this next week is to not procrastinate (or even just to remember) my blog assignments.
The Devil in the White City pg. 35-57
So this next section that I read was another biography however it was about Dr. H.H. Holmes, the serial killer, rather than the architect. This may sound creepy and twisted, but I find the story of serial killers to be quite fascinating, therefore I favored this biography over the other.
It is so interesting to me how investigators look back into the past of a serial killer and find obvious red flags that that person is not normal. For example, Holmes as a child was fearful of the doctor's office (which is ironic seeing as he later becomes a doctor). Two older boys discovered his fear and trapped him in the office and left him there "until [he] had been brought face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize [him]." As innocent as the story is, it takes a disturbing turn as Holmes insists that "when his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled." Holmes' response to the raillery of his classmates is the first glimpse of his dark nature.
Twenty years later, Holmes was in desperate need of money for he was staring starvation in the face. He recalled a scam one of his classmates back in medical school had thought of: for one of them to buy life insurance, make the other the beneficiary, and then use a cadaver to fake the one insured. Holmes expanded on this plan by using a "family" of cadavers in order to rake in a higher profit. He and his conspirators would then divide their $40,000 (or more than $1,000,000 in today's society). Holmes takes this plan to a whole other level of creepy when he stores his "portion" of the cadaver family in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse in Chicago and takes the other with him to New York City and stores it "in a safe place." EW. That's disgusting.
Sorry. It gets even weirder. Holmes backed out of the plan because he finally realized how well organized and well prepared the leading insurance companies were to detect and punish this kind of fraud. Actually, he was lying. Because he was a doctor, Holmes knew that (at the time) there was no method that existed for establishing the identities of burned, dismembered corpses. This line out of this section shook me up the most:
On that note I would like to leave you wondering how much creepier this guy can get. I'll have an update in an hour or two seeing as I still need one more post by tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm not a procrastinator or anything.....
It is so interesting to me how investigators look back into the past of a serial killer and find obvious red flags that that person is not normal. For example, Holmes as a child was fearful of the doctor's office (which is ironic seeing as he later becomes a doctor). Two older boys discovered his fear and trapped him in the office and left him there "until [he] had been brought face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize [him]." As innocent as the story is, it takes a disturbing turn as Holmes insists that "when his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled." Holmes' response to the raillery of his classmates is the first glimpse of his dark nature.
Twenty years later, Holmes was in desperate need of money for he was staring starvation in the face. He recalled a scam one of his classmates back in medical school had thought of: for one of them to buy life insurance, make the other the beneficiary, and then use a cadaver to fake the one insured. Holmes expanded on this plan by using a "family" of cadavers in order to rake in a higher profit. He and his conspirators would then divide their $40,000 (or more than $1,000,000 in today's society). Holmes takes this plan to a whole other level of creepy when he stores his "portion" of the cadaver family in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse in Chicago and takes the other with him to New York City and stores it "in a safe place." EW. That's disgusting.
Sorry. It gets even weirder. Holmes backed out of the plan because he finally realized how well organized and well prepared the leading insurance companies were to detect and punish this kind of fraud. Actually, he was lying. Because he was a doctor, Holmes knew that (at the time) there was no method that existed for establishing the identities of burned, dismembered corpses. This line out of this section shook me up the most:
"And he did not mind handling bodies. They were 'material' no different from firewood, although somewhat more difficult to dispose of."
On that note I would like to leave you wondering how much creepier this guy can get. I'll have an update in an hour or two seeing as I still need one more post by tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm not a procrastinator or anything.....
Monday, January 10, 2011
The Devil in the White City pg. 1-34
A serial killer on the loose during a time of architectural competition between the individual states as well as between countries. The United States was out to upstage Paris and its newest architectural wonder, the Eiffel Tower. What better timing than that of the four hundred year anniversary since the discovery of the New World? It was up to Burnham and Rook, the top team of architectures in Chicago, to create an entire city in what seemed to be an impossible window of time. The challenge of this vast project is interesting enough to stand on its own however the twist of the serial killer takes the story from interesting to intriguing. Murder mysteries are one of my favorite genres of books. One of my guilty pleasures if you will. So when I heard about how this book told the story of a serial killer at the World Fair and that it was a true story, I simply could not resist.
I was completely entangled in the first couple pages of The Devil in the White City as it started from the end. The broken time line lets you see where the main architect, Daniel Burnham, is after the tragedy of the World Fair and the effect that the tragedy has on him. As I was reading I could not believe that this was a story of non-fiction. Erik Larson's writing style is intriguing and so easily distracts you from the fact that you are reading history. I am not a fan of history at all so being able to read a true story and not feel like I am reading fact stated after fact keeps me interested and wanting to move on and discover what is waiting on the next page.
As the story shifted focus to the beginning of the time line, Larson shifted focus from Burnham and his character to more of a biography of Burnham. At first, it was written like a typical biography. Name. Date of birth. Place of birth. Family. Education. I thought to myself, "okay this is kinda boring but maybe it will get better." And it did. I'm glad I kept reading because even though Larson was describing his architectural accomplishments with his partner Rook (which would be really boring outside of the context of the book), he was also shifting back to his novelistic technique rather than blatantly describing the historical context of the story.
I haven't actually met the serial killer yet however it is a long book and I've only scratched its surface so far. I look forward to the next couple of chapters hoping the thrill of the murders and their cover ups will begin to be revealed.
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