The Devil in the White City: Part 4, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

It is June of 1895, and Detective Frank Geyer, one of Philadelphia’s most notable detectives, contemplates his current assignment, a man named Mudgett who goes by the alias H.H. Holmes. Holmes has been put in custody, arrested seven months ago for insurance fraud.

Holmes, who used to live in Chicago, had traveled to Forth Worth, St. Louis, and Philadelphia, cheating insurance companies. In Philadelphia, Holmes gained 10,000 dollars, seemingly by faking the death of Benjamin Pitezal. The insurance company, Fidelity, had hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to track down Holmes; Pinkerton found him in Vermont. Once arrested, Holmes confessed to fraud. Later, it became clear that he had murdered Pitezal, not faked his death. Detectives also learned that three of Pitezal’s children were missing, and last seen with Holmes.

Geyer interviews Holmes in his jail cell. Holmes insists that he last saw Pitezal’s three children with Minnie Williams, who was taking them to see Pitezal himself, now in hiding. Geyer doesn’t trust Holmes, and finds him to be suspiciously smooth.

Holmes claims that he found a cadaver that looked like Pitezal, set it on fire, and then pretended that the body was Pitezal’s. To verify, the coroner asked that a member of Pitezal’s family confirm the body’s identity. Pitezal’s wife, who was ill, sent her second-eldest daughter Alice, who was fifteen years old. She confirmed that the body was Pitezal’s. Holmes convinced Pitezal’s wife to take Alice and two of her other children, including a boy, Howard, to see Pitezal.

Alice wrote letters to her mother, saying that she disliked Holmes and didn’t find his manner charming. Geyer knows that this letter never reached Alice’s mother. Holmes collected the children’s letters in a box. Mrs. Carrie Pitezal is worried because she hasn’t heard from her children, though Holmes assures her that they’re in London with Minnie Williams. Geyer isn’t sure if he’ll be able to find the children, but the District Attorney encourages him to look further.

Geyer travels to Cincinnati, where he tries to reconstruct the children’s journey. He goes to the Atlantic House hotel and finds records of an “Alex E. Cook,” one of Holmes’s aliases, written in Holmes’s handwriting. This leads Geyer to the realty office of J.C. Thomas, who remembers a man of Holmes’s appearance staying there. Thomas refers Geyer to a woman named Henrietta Hill, who lives near the house where Holmes seems to have stayed. Hill tells Geyer that she saw a large iron stove being delivered to Holmes’s residence. Geyer guesses that Holmes had planned to use the stove, but then left when he noticed that he was drawing attention from his neighbors.

Geyer, now assisted by Detective David Richards, traces Holmes to a hotel called Circle Park, where he finds records of a Mrs. Georgia Howard, a name he believes refers to Holmes’s fiancée, Georgiana Yoke. Geyer begins to see that Holmes led Yoke and three children into different hotels in the same night. He goes to a saloon in West Indianapolis, where a man named Herman Ackelow tells him that he remembers seeing Holmes with three children.

Reading through the Pitezal children’s letters, Geyer sees that they were kept in cold, lonely rooms and isolated from their family, but also fed well and taken to the zoo. Geyer can’t understand why Holmes would kill three children for no rational reason, especially since he fed them well and traveled with them all over the country.

Geyer begins to understand that Holmes is not a rational human being. Geyer travels to different hotels, always asking for information about Holmes. He is persistent and tireless — but his weakness, Larson notes, is that he thinks that evil has limits. Geyer learns that Mrs. Pitezal traveled with her two other children, meaning that Holmes was now manipulating three different groups — his fiancée, Mrs. Pitezal and her two children, and her three other children. Geyer realizes, amazed, that the latter two parties were only a few blocks away from each other, though they were cold and desperate to see each other.

Geyer realizes that Holmes moves his travel companions for his own amusement, enjoying their confusion and sadness. Geyer is also confused by a phrase from one of Alice’s letters, “Howard is not with us now.”