Summary
Part IV: Cruelty Revealed
“Property of H.H. Holmes”
Detective Frank Geyer of Philadelphia is a talented officer who has seen it all. He is now working on the case of H.H. Holmes, given name Mudgett, who once lived in Chicago and ran a hotel there, and went to other cities with his associate Benjamin Pitezel and swindled many people. Holmes had been arrested when his life insurance claim on Pitezel, done in Philadelphia, raised eyebrows and the Pinkerton Detectives were dispatched to find him, tracking him through several cities. Holmes confessed to the fraud and was expedited back to Philadelphia. To Geyer it seems clear that Holmes actually killed Pitezel, and probably his three children as well, who were last seen with Holmes. Geyer’s main job is to find the children.
Geyer meets with Holmes, whom he finds glib and slick. Holmes admits to faking Pitezel’s death to get insurance money. Alice, Pitezel’s 15-year-old daughter, was sent to identify the body. Holmes wrote to Carrie, Pitezel’s wife, to send the other two older children, Nellie, 11, and Howard, eight, to visit their father in hiding. Alice and Nellie wrote to her mother often but the letters never made it and Holmes kept most of them.
Holmes insists the children are in England under the care of Minnie Williams, but there is no proof of that. Geyer privately thinks they will not be found, but heads out to Cincinnati, apparently Holmes’s first stop with the children. He reads the children’s letters for clues, knowing that he can at least check the route. In that city, an old friend of his, Detective John Schnooks, assists him. They know Holmes will have an alias so they carry photos of the children and their belongings.
The men go from one hotel to the next and finally catch a break when Geyer recognizes an alias of Holmes’s in the Atlantic House register. The man and children only stayed one night, and Geyer realizes they may have rented a house, something the Pinkertons had earlier discovered Holmes was wont to do. Indeed, a canvassing of rental offices reveals a place where they stayed for two days. A neighbor named Miss Hill tells the detectives a furniture wagon stopped there with a huge iron stove, which she found strange. The next day Holmes told her he was not going to stay there and she could have the stove.
In Indianapolis Geyer gets a new partner, Detective David Richards, and follows the trail from one of Nellie’s letters. They track Holmes and the children to the Hotel English, then the Circle Park, where there is evidence of Holmes’s latest wife Georgiana Yoke being with them, and then another now-closed hotel named Circle Park. Geyer tracks down the former manager, Herman Ackelow, who tells Geyer he recalls the children, specifically that they were often upset and missed their mother desperately. Geyer wonders if perhaps they still are alive, for why would Holmes have dragged them along so much?
Geyer travels to Chicago, then Detroit, the last place mentioned by Alice. Though Holmes seems irrational, there is a pattern and Geyer canvasses hotels and boardinghouses. To his astonishment, he realizes that Holmes had also been moving Carrie Pitezel and her other two children around, and that he had placed the mother and her older children only three blocks apart in hotels. Geyer realizes it was “a game for Holmes . . . He possessed them all and reveled in his possession” (350). There is one other phrase in Alice’s last letter that nags Geyer: “Howard . . . is not with us now” (350).
Moyamnesing Prison
Holmes sits in his cell in Philadelphia. He is a model prisoner, having gained concessions by charm. He reads the papers daily and delights in hearing of Geyer’s search, knowing it will be in vain.
He begins writing his memoir. Though most of the dates and places are correct, many other things are outright lies. He invents a prison diary to go into the memoir to enforce the sense that he is honest and pious. He tries to go for the heartstrings by evoking his wife’s sorrow. He also writes a letter to Carrie Pitezel because he knows the police are reading his correspondence, and says he has no doubt the children are all safe with Minnie and that he loves them.
The Tenant
Geyer heads to Toronto. Holmes is still moving three parties simultaneously—himself and Georgiana, Carrie and her younger children, and Alice and Nellie (with no sign of Howard). Geyer’s search has made him somewhat of a national fascination—“He had become the living representation of how men liked to think of themselves: one man doing an awful duty and doing it well, against the odds” (355). For his part, he has trouble understanding Holmes’s motives, and assumes the man is just having fun trying to bend the lives of people.
A tip comes in and Detective Alf Cuddy, Geyer’s new associate in Toronto, suggests they check it out. It is from a man named Thomas Ryves, who thinks Holmes rented the home next to his. Ryves says that he thought it was odd that the renter had very little furniture and that one day he’d asked to borrow a shovel and then removed a large trunk from his house the next day. The detectives confirm the rental with the realtor and race to the house.
Geyer and Cuddy arrive at the house and the current tenant lets them in. They go into the basement and find a soft spot in the ground. There, they unearth a human bone. They summon an undertaker and coffins.
The girls had been buried nude; Nellie, who had been club-footed, had her feet amputated. Because there is no additional sign of violence, Geyer believes Holmes locked them in the trunk and then filled it with gas from a lamp valve.
The discovery of the girls is very satisfying to the exhausted Geyer, but he is disappointed Howard is still missing. Carrie refuses to believe her son is dead.
A Lively Corpse
Holmes hears the news of the bodies being found and immediately begins promoting the idea that Minnie and her unsavory associate named “Hatch” must have killed the children. He knows he needs to get his memoir out as soon as possible to get sympathy. He strikes a deal with a journalist, John King, and advises him how to market the book to get it out to as many people as possible.
“All the Weary Days”
Geyer’s instincts tell him Holmes killed Howard in Indianapolis, so he returns there and works with Richards again.
In the meantime, investigation of Holmes’s Chicago building continues. Detectives surmise he may have killed dozens of people. The Chicago police methodically work through every room. They see the vault with its gas jet. They move into the basement where they find a vat of acid with bones, mounds of quicklime, a kiln, a dissection table, surgical tools, many bones, articles of clothing, human hair, more vaults with human remains (probably Anna and Minnie Williams), and, with the help of Charles Chappell who comes forward, another hidden chamber. Chappell tells them of the articulated skeletons, which are procured.
The news of all of this transfixes Chicago. Geyer is ordered to return because some of the remains in the Holmes house are of a human child. One inspector says it is a little girl, and suggests Pearl Connor, whom Geyer has not heard of.
Geyer heads back out on the road, traveling from city to city and feeling his frustration mount. He learns that Holmes’s home had just caught fire and the police believe it is arson. Further secrets will never be found.
Geyer and his insurance investigator associate W.E. Gary are at their wits’ end in Indiana, but they continue to go from small town to small town. In Irvington they visit a real estate office where a man named Mr. Brown examines a picture of Holmes and says he rented a house to him last fall.
More information comes out about this residence: Holmes installed a woodstove, and had surgical tools sharpened in town. Geyer searches the house and finds human teeth and a fragment of jaw in the chimney flue, as well as a hard mass of internal organs that had not burned. Mrs. Pitezel identifies Howard’s overcoat and scarf pin.
Malice Aforethought
Philadelphia indicts Holmes in 1895 for the murder of Benjamin Pitezel, Indianapolis of the murder of Howard, and Toronto for the murders of Alice and Nellie. Holmes’s memoir comes out, stressing that he is an ordinary man and he hopes to prove his own innocence. No one is quite sure how he had evaded Chicago police for so long, and, humiliatingly, how Chicago’s chief of police in his legal career had defended Holmes a dozen times in routine commercial lawsuits.
Epilogue: The Last Crossing
The fair influences numerous people, among them Walt Disney, L. Frank Baum, Frank Lloyd Wright. It gives rise to Columbus Day and the Ferris Wheel never lessens in popularity at carnivals and fairs. Its greatest impact, though, is “how it changed the way Americans perceived their cities and their architects” (373). William Stead writes a work called If Christ Came to Chicago, which jumpstarts the City Beautiful movement. Cities around the country try to clean up their streets, foster civic virtue in citizens, and implement master plans in their building.
There are many conversations among architects, Louis Sullivan being the most vocal about his distaste for the type of obsolete classical styles the fair featured (but only after Burnham’s death). Sullivan suffers for a while after the fair, but befriends Frank Lloyd Wright and their stars rise together.
As for Burnham, it is an unqualified personal triumph; he is truly the greatest architect in America during his day. He overcame tremendous odds and obstacles, especially the death of Root, which ironically made him a better and broader architect. He builds the Fuller, or, Flatiron, Building in 1901 as well as several other notable edifices.
Recessional
Olmsted is 77 in 1895, and he worries his health and mental state are declining too much to go on. He becomes depressed and paranoid, and his son lodges his father in the McLean Asylum in Massachusetts, grounds which he himself designed. He dies in 1903 and has a spare funeral which his wife does not attend.
The Ferris Wheel does well but begins losing money. Ferris dies of typhoid fever at 37. In 1903 the Chicago House Wrecking Company buys the wheel for a song, reassembles it for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and makes a great deal of money. It is then dynamited for scrap.
Sol Bloom emerges from the fair a rich man. He later becomes a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter of the United Nations.
Buffalo Bill makes a million dollars from his Wild West show, but his fortunes are not ideal after the fair closes: The Panic of 1907 ruins his Wild West, he hires himself out to circuses, and dies in Denver in 1907 without a penny to his name.
Dreiser marries Sara White and cheats on her repeatedly.
Prendergast stands trial, with Alfred S. Trude acting as his prosecuting attorney. Though Prendergast’s lawyers claim insanity, the jury believes otherwise. He is found guilty and sentenced to death.
Holmes
Holmes stands trial in Philadelphia in 1895 for the murder of Pitezel, but the judge rules the D.A. can only present evidence directly tied to that murder. There is a great deal of macabre testimony, sorrowful moments, and a lack of emotion on Holmes’s part. He is found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging; an appeal fails.
Holmes prepares a long confession in which he admits to 27 killings, but this is a mixture of truth and falsehood. No one knows just how many he killed, but he does admit to Alice and Nellie, Julia and Pearl, Howard, Emeline, the Williams sisters, and Pitezel. He writes that he believes his facial features are “growing to resemble the devil” (385).
Holmes makes preparations for his body, not allowing it to be used for science or an autopsy. He is to be covered in cement inside the coffin, then the coffin cemented again. He is hanged at 10:13 on May 7th, 1896.
There are strange things that happen after Holmes’s death, such as Geyer growing ill, the father of Emeline being grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion, the priest who gave the last rites falling dead, the jury foreman electrocuted in a freak accident, and more.
Aboard the Olympic
Burnham waits to hear from Millet, but soon learns the magnitude of the Titanic disaster and the loss of his friend. He is devastated, and only lives 47 more days. He slips into a coma as a result of ill health and sorrow, and dies on June 1, 1912. His wife lives for several more decades. Both are buried in Chicago, with John Root, Sullivan, Mayor Harrison, and others from the days of the fair nearby.
Analysis
Much of the last part of the work is dedicated to the pursuit of Holmes, or, rather, the truth of what Holmes did to Pitezel’s children. It is riveting in way true crime thrillers are, with the newly introduced Detective Frank Geyer standing in for every dogged, intelligent, and stubborn pursuer of evil. Holmes stays maniacally charming and twisted up until the very end, demonstrating a pathological need to charm and manipulate as many people as possible.
One of the strangest aspects of this last section is Holmes’s claim that “since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure . . . 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” (385). Larsen deems this either a lie or a delusion, either of which are disturbing. Truthfully, we will never know how many people Holmes killed or why, and since Holmes did not want his body to be used for science, even the smallest physiological insight into his behavior was precluded. Larsen also provides a short list of strange things that happened to people who were involved with Holmes and/or his end: “Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’ last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed” (387). Larsen is of course professional enough not to make any claims about Holmes somehow supernaturally carrying these things out, but they certainly make the reader think.
Larsen also spends his last pages tying up loose ends—telling us where all the personages end up, what the legacies are the fair were and are. One of the biggest legacies is the solidification of architecture as an art that perhaps more than any other affects the ways in which people live in and conceive of their city. The City Beautiful Movement arose out of it (see “Other” in this study guide), and Burnham and his peers would go on to design more buildings and plan cities in the wake of their triumph at the fair.
The fair’s legacy in regards to its manifestation and promulgation of America’s empire-building endeavors is perhaps less immediately visible than, say, Shredded Wheat or the Ferris Wheel; however, it is a conspicuous part of the fair’s success in that visitors—mostly white, Christian—saw exhibition after exhibition in which their race’s supremacy was inarguable and their country’s power was noble and benevolent. The American empire would be made not by aggressive military conquest but by its “civilizing” impulse and the saturation of foreign markets with American goods and with American investment. Scholar Mona Domosh writes, “Depictions of Native Americans at the Chicago Exposition highlighted America’s evolutionary progress—they gave visual evidence of the natural superiority of American civilization. Having proven itself superior, America could now sell its civilization elsewhere, in the form of proper domesticity, aided, of course, by American products.” Larsen does not take up this issue at all, but a keen reader or student of history can glean it nonetheless.
