Lore - Episode 63: Homecoming

Episode Date: June 26, 2017

Folklore and popular culture are filled with a type of event that seems both unusual and logical: time and time again, criminals return to the source. But as one man proved a century ago, it’s not always easy to go home. * * * Official Lore Website: www.lorepodcast.com Extra member episodes: www.patreon.com/lorepodcast Official Lore Merchandise: www.lorepodcast.com/shop Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support

They called him the Handsome Bandit, and he was, good-looking, well-groomed, and, according to the stories, quite the charmer. Don't judge a book by its cover, though. Smooth, yes. This man was a smooth criminal. Born in 1845, he was wanted for murder and robbery in two states before the age of 16, and it only got worse from there. But that life of crime came with a string of prison terms.

The first was a seven-year stay in Missouri State Prison, ending with his release in 1890. He was back in 1893 for 14 more years, and then, as if he hadn't learned his lesson yet, he was arrested and convicted for burglary in 1908, spending one more year behind bars. After that, he told them he was done. He was ready to behave. The crime was like a well-worn path in his life, and it was far too easy to slip back into the rut. So on New Year's Eve of 1910, he put on his best suit, his freshly polished shoes, and

that bowler hat he always wore and headed out into the cold Chicago air. When he entered the Pax Saloon on West 16th Street, he pulled a gun and shouted for everyone to fill his sack with their cash and jewelry, and he almost got away with it. At the last minute, though, a police officer walked in and caught him in the act. Shots were fired. Bullets tore through the clothing of both men, but only the handsome bandit toppled over. He died a few minutes later.

Some people see more than a shootout, though. Some believe there were other forces at work, a curse, they say, for betraying one of America's most notorious serial killers. And even though that killer had died 14 years earlier, it was more than logical that the handsome bandit, Marion Hedgepath, was his newest victim from beyond the grave. Who was he? Well, Hedgepath knew him as Henry Howard. That of course was just an alias.

To you and I, he'll always be known as H.H. Holmes. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. The man that history has come to know as H.H. Holmes certainly built a legacy for himself. Except his legacy was filled with secret chambers, trap doors, gas valves, and a list of victims that some historians think exceeds 200 innocent lives. And we've heard his story here before. Well, part of it. You see, the lion's share of historical attention always falls on the castle, the apartment

complex built by Holmes that functioned more like a dungeon than home sweet home. We're filled with a morbid fascination regarding his methods, his madness, and his mastery of the art of murder. But in an effort to uncover what went on behind the walls of the castle, we miss an entire chapter of his story. But first, a reminder. It was the 1893 Chicago World's Fair that brought his victims into his web. Some came for work, some for pleasure, and some for a chance to start a new life.

Most of them were young women, and upon arriving, they needed a place to stay. Holmes gladly accommodated as many as he could, and thanks to his methods, his tenant turnover rate was, well, brisk. When the World's Fair ended on October 30th of 1893, it was like the fire hose had been turned off. A rental income, along with that steady flow of new victims, dried up almost overnight. What didn't stop, though, was the knocking on the door by his creditors, who were starting to circle closer and closer, like vultures around a dying animal.

So Holmes did something unthinkable. He abandoned ship. Think about it for a moment. He spent years building the castle, planning his crimes, and then slaughtering dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people there. But it was either face the creditors and give them access to the building, or make a run for it while he still had a chance. And he didn't run alone.

Holmes had a helper named Benjamin Peitzel, who served as his right-hand man, and there was no one Holmes trusted more. Life hadn't been kind to Peitzel, though. Jobs had been hard to come by, and the work he performed for Holmes wasn't really the sort that left him feeling good about himself. He had in the pressures of supporting a wife and five young, hungry children, and it's no wonder that he had a reputation for being an alcoholic. So in early 1894, they made a run for it, hoping to find work on the road.

And their first stop was Fort Worth, Texas. You see, one of the women Holmes had killed months earlier. Many Williams had conveniently signed over her inheritance to him. It was a sizable sum, and he planned to collect it. But he and Peitzel quickly discovered that the authorities in Fort Worth were a bit too nosy for their taste, and they gave up. Before leaving Texas, Holmes managed to use forged documents and counterfeit money to purchase several train cars full of horses, and then he traveled north with them.

Once in St. Louis, he sold them, but the authorities there caught wind of it and tracked him down. By July of 1894, he'd been arrested and sentenced to prison under the false name of Henry Howard. It was during this time in prison that he got to know Marion Hedgepath, the handsome bandit. Hedgepath seemed like a smart man. He was experienced and well-connected, so Holmes began to tease more and more information out of him. Specifically, he was looking for a crooked lawyer who could help him get away with future insurance fraud and offered $500 for a solid tip.

Hedgepath claimed that he knew just the man for the job. After Holmes' third wife bailed him out, he quickly moved on and forgot the deal. He reconnected with Peitzel, who'd recently brought his wife and children to St. Louis to resettle and reached out to the attorney that Hedgepath had told him about. The man, Jeb the Howe, agreed to meet, and soon the three men began planning. Howe would later declare Holmes to be, and this is a quote, one of the smoothest and slickest men that he ever heard tell of. He was impressed with the killer's intellect and his ability to think around challenges,

and they were going to need that for their next scheme. Holmes, you see, wanted to die. Well, not really, but he wanted it to appear that he had, and for a number of really good reasons. There was all that evidence hidden away in the castle, his ever-growing criminal record, even the curious relatives of his victims. All of it threatened to catch up with him. He would be better if he just died, if only on paper.

Then there was the financial payoff, because, of course, he had a life insurance policy. So Holmes and Peitzel traveled to Rhode Island of all places, where they watched a local morgue for a body that looked enough like Holmes to fool the authorities. When they found one, the corpse was taken to the beach near one of the many luxury resorts and then burned. Holmes somehow managed to get the corpse identified as himself, and soon after, his crooked lawyer filed a claim with the insurance company. But after everything they had gone through to get to that point, the plan began to fall

apart. The insurance company didn't have a good feeling about the identity of the victim and refused to pay the policy. Now, Holmes couldn't very well fight for the claim himself. There was no way to prove the body was really his own other than the physical similarities, but the insurance company wanted irrefutable proof in either how nor Holmes could give them that. So instead, he and Peitzel dropped it and moved on to Philadelphia.

Holmes had a new idea, but it was going to take a lot of work to set up, and to do it, he would lean heavily on Peitzel for help. But as everyone knows, if you lean too hard, you're liable to fall over, and that's exactly what began to happen. But Holmes wouldn't go down alone. This time, it was Benjamin Peitzel's turn to die. It would be another insurance scam involving yet another body double, but this time they needed to do it right, and Holmes had finally figured it out.

You see, the insurance company would want solid proof, and a fake Peitzel wouldn't be enough because just pointing at a body and claiming it was a specific person no longer worked. Instead, Holmes believed that the body needed to be found in a place only Peitzel should be. The proof, Holmes believed, would be in the location of the body, not the appearance. But all of this required a long game. Peitzel used a false identity to rent a storefront at 1316 Callowale Street. The business would be a patent office and inventor's lab, perfect for a growing city

at the height of the Second Industrial Revolution. Then, Peitzel sent for his wife and children, who soon arrived to complete the picture of normal domestic life. At some point in late August, Peitzel bumped into a man named Eugene Smith, who was a carpenter looking for work. Peitzel told him about his inventor's laboratory and invited him to come by the following week to discuss employment. And on the afternoon of September 3, 1894, that's just what Smith did.

When he knocked on the shop window, no one answered, but the door was unlocked, and so he let himself in. He probably shouted hello into the empty room, a bit of confusion in his voice, and he probably walked a few steps in to see if the man he'd come to meet had somehow not heard him. And that's when the smell reached his nose. It was the scent of a charnel house, the acrid, bitter smell of burned flesh and blood, which would probably have sent most of us running in the other direction. But Smith needed a job, and it was an inventor's workshop, so he probably just told himself

it was part of some experiment and forced his feet to take him deeper in. He pushed a curtain aside and stepped into the back room, and then stopped. There it was a body on the floor, surrounded by a pool of crimson. The clothing looked familiar, but the head was horribly burned, almost beyond recognition. Almost. If he squinted, he was pretty sure, sort of, that it might be the man who asked him to come by that day. He thought.

So he called the authorities, gave them his statement, and then left them to do their job. And the Philadelphia police fell for it. They connected the dots between Smith's story and the name on the shop lease papers and stamped their seal of approval on the corpse's identity, which was what Holmes and the others had been waiting for. Howe filed the paperwork with Fidelity Mutual Life Association, and soon the men were looking at a check for $10,000, but their hard work had paid off.

Holmes gave Howe a quarter of the money and another 500 to Pytzel's wife. Her husband had gone into hiding, which was pretty obvious given the circumstances, except it was all a lie. After all, Holmes was very good at lying. Benjamin Pytzel wasn't in hiding, and he would never return to claim his share of the money, because he was dead. You see, while Pytzel was carrying out his part of the plan, Holmes had begun a second scheme behind the man's back.

It began with forged letters to Pytzel from his wife, Carrie. Holmes knew Pytzel wasn't alcoholic, and he knew that stress at home would set the man off. So he sent fake letters to him at the shop, hoping they would cause Pytzel to get drunk. And it worked. Early on the afternoon of September 5, just a few hours before Eugene Smith showed up for his job interview, Holmes entered the shop and found Pytzel in a drunken stupor. Think about that for a second.

I know it's easy to hear all the commentary on how skilled Holmes was and brush it off as hyperbole. But this was a man that would make Dexter jealous. So with a bit of smug satisfaction, he took a length of rope from the closet and tied Pytzel's hands and feet. Then he retrieved a bottle of benzene, a clear liquid used as an industrial solvent that also happens to be incredibly flammable. And then, well, why don't we let Holmes himself describe what happened next?

I proceeded to burn him alive, Holmes later wrote. So horrible was this torture that in writing of it, I have been tempted to attribute his death to some humane means, not with a wish to spare myself, but because I fear that it will not be believed that one could be so heartless and depraved. But that was Holmes in a nutshell, after all, heartless and depraved. Anything and everything was nothing more than a means to an end, and that end was almost always money. So when he handed Kerry Pytzel the $500 and lied to her about her husband, he did so

with joy. He later told the police that he'd wanted to kill Pytzel since the moment he'd met the man. Morbid or not, Holmes was feeling pretty good about his long-term goals. But he wasn't done yet. First, he took the money back from Kerry Pytzel, telling her that he wanted to invest it for her. And she handed it over without an ounce of worry.

Then Holmes gathered everyone in his little community, his third wife Georgiana, Kerry Pytzel, and the five Pytzel children, and ushered them onto a train out of town. Wait, I'm sorry. I just called them his community. In reality, they were all potential witnesses, eyes and ears that might notice something inconvenient to his plans, and as stereotypical as it might sound to our Hollywood-influenced minds, Holmes didn't want any loose ends. The witnesses, you see, would have to disappear.

It wasn't as easy as pushing everyone onto a train and leaving town, if only it were. No, Holmes had a problem. There were enough adults in the group that if they got to talking, they might start putting the pieces together, which would be a very bad thing for him. So Holmes flexed his manipulative muscles and managed to split them into three separate groups. He booked his wife Georgiana in one train car, Kerry Pytzel in another with her oldest and youngest children, and then the three middle children, Alice, Nellie, and Howard,

into a third. Over the next few weeks, the group traveled in the most bizarre fashion, all painstakingly managed by Holmes. In the entire time, Kerry Pytzel and Georgiana were unaware of the other woman's presence. When they stopped in various cities, Holmes would rent houses or rooms for them all that were just close enough, but never together, often keeping Kerry separated from her children. They seemed to travel everywhere. Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati, New York, the Holmes led them all across the eastern

half of the United States. He even slipped up into Canada for a short time, spending a few days in Toronto where he rented a house at 16 St. Vincent Lane. Not long after, at one of their many stops, Kerry Pytzel asked Holmes if she could see her children, but he told her no. He'd left them with an old widow back in Indianapolis, but promised they'd be reunited soon enough, which was another lie, one that Kerry fell for. The last big move happened in early November of 1894.

He sent Georgiana to stay with her parents back in Indiana and then took Kerry Pytzel north to Vermont. He rented her a house in Burlington before heading east to New Hampshire to visit his own elderly parents. Rumor says that while he was there, he also paid a visit to his first wife, Clara, and even bought their son a suit. But this deeply tangled web of lies that Holmes was stringing together was about to come unraveled. Weeks before, you see, Fidelity Mutual had become suspicious about the insurance claim

that Holmes had collected on. It's not that they doubted the identity of the body. No, it was the manner of death. They didn't believe that it was an accident. So they hired an investigator named Frank Geyer to help. Geyer was a member of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, sort of a private security and investigation company founded by Alan Pinkerton back in 1850. And when Geyer was handed the job, he dug in deep, quickly discovering that Henry Howard,

the false name used by Holmes, had a criminal record. That name took him to Missouri, where he interviewed Holmes's old cellmate, Marion Hedgepath, the handsome bandit. The man, you'll recall, that Holmes had promised to pay $500 before changing his mind. Feeling cheated, Hedgepath was more than eager to return the favor, so he confessed everything he knew about Howard to Geyer. After that, it was a matter of following the clues, of which there were few. Holmes was good at being invisible, after all, but Geyer was also good at his job.

And maybe it was the paper trail left by Georgiana when she bailed Holmes out of prison or their marriage certificate. Whatever it was, Geyer found it and was soon headed to Indiana to find her parents. Imagine his surprise then when he found Georgiana herself, and she pointed Geyer to Carrie Pytzel in Burlington, who, in turn, told him that Holmes had recently headed to Boston. Geyer moved quickly. On November 17th of 1894, he and his associates finally caught up with Holmes, and he took him into custody.

It was only after Holmes had been locked up in a Philadelphia jail cell on charges of insurance fraud that two significant things happened. First, the janitor for the building that Holmes had abandoned in Chicago decided to go to the police and tell them about the parts of the building that were off limits, which, of course, evolved into the investigation that's taught us everything we know about the castle. But the second was Carrie Pytzel's request for Geyer to find her three missing children, Alice, Nellie, and Howard.

His first stop was Detroit, but he found no sign of them there. He did, however, find evidence that some of the floorboards had been pulled up, where a shallow hole had been dug in the dirt. It wasn't until Geyer arrived in Toronto that his investigation began to gain traction. Interviews led him to the cottage at 16 St. Vincent Lane, where a neighbor recalled seeing a man with two little girls, a man, he said, who had borrowed a shovel to dig a potato patch. When the true meaning sank in, Geyer must have felt sick.

The bodies of Nellie and Alice Pytzel were found beneath several feet of loose dirt. They'd been murdered. That much was clear, and how it had been done was a mystery. It was only after Geyer and the others discovered the large trunk in one of the upstairs bedrooms in the rubber tubing that ran between it and a gas pipe that the story came into focus. Miles from his precious castle, H.H. Holmes, had crafted a temporary gas chamber to murder the Pytzel girls. But eight-year-old Howard Pytzel was still missing, so Geyer pressed on with urgency.

Desperate, he traveled back to Indiana, where he interviewed hundreds of people with the hope of finding the house that Holmes had rented there near Indianapolis. Some estimates claim Geyer followed up on over 900 leads, and that persistence eventually paid off. With a better understanding of how Holmes operated, Geyer had the house and property searched with incredible diligence. When they identified a bone fragment in the fireplace as human, the entire chimney was dismantled, which slowly exposed what little remained of young Howard.

Later, under oath, Holmes described how he drugged the boy and then burned his body piece by piece to destroy the evidence. Howard Pytzel was the last innocent life to be taken away by the hands of H.H. Holmes. Herman Mudgett spent his life building a Tower of Lies, his business ventures, his love affairs, his insurance scams, and his trail of bodies across so much of Northern America. Maybe that's why his Chicago Murder Castle is such a powerful image in our minds. That warren of body shoots, gas chambers, and torture rooms was a physical reminder of that world of lies.

So it's no surprise that at the end of it all, he headed back toward the only real life he ever had, the only place where there were no lies. Home. Maybe just maybe there was a small part of him that wished he could start over and do things differently. Then again, maybe not. After his execution on May 7th of 1896, an execution that didn't go according to plan, mind you, with his body writhing at the end of the news for over 15 minutes, Mudgett was

finally buried in Philadelphia's Holy Cross Cemetery. At his request, his body was placed in a simple pine coffin, which was then filled with cement. After it was placed in the grave, more cement was poured on top. There are rumors, of course, that Mudgett faked his death, that he somehow escaped to live on in Europe. Even as I record this, three of his great-grandchildren have announced plans to exhume his remains and test them, just to be sure. So whether or not the body in the grave truly belongs to the man we call H.H. Holmes, there

are those who believe that his evil was so deep, so horrific, and powerful, that it managed to live on, that the noose and cement weren't enough to stop him from killing again. The first was a physician who testified during the trial, Dr. William Matten. He died of blood poisoning shortly after Holmes was buried. A trial judge was next, followed by another of the medical witnesses. One of the priests who visited Holmes in his final hours died mysteriously near his own church, and a member of the jury was killed in an unusual electrical accident. Even Frank Geier, the man who brought Holmes to justice, became seriously ill after the

trial, although he somehow managed to survive. There were others, too. The father of one of the victims who passed away suddenly, the Fidelity Mutual Insurance Office, burned to the ground. The prison superintendent who committed suicide, and of course, the death of Marion Hedgepath in December of 1910. They call it the Holmes Curse, and it's built on a premise that's difficult to push aside completely, no matter how rational we might be.

Some people, it said, are just too evil to die. For those who believe it, it paints a horrifying picture. H. H. Holmes, the heartless and depraved architect of the Chicago Murder Castle. Might not be done, after all. This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marseet Crockett. Lore is much more than a podcast. There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season

of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released. Check them both out if you want more lore in your life. I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both. Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic. You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place.

The World of Lore.com slash now. And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.