PhiladelphiaWeekly.com
It’s a windy day in Philadelphia–so windy, men’s ties flip and twist like fish and women search the bottom of their crowded pocketbooks for hair bands. It’s not cold out, but people scurry as if they’re in a blizzard, surprised by the breezes that bend tree trunks and make stoplights wobble. It’s a strange, surreal day–overcast and quiet. People go home early. Drivers stop honking at the bicyclists they generally despise. An old man says to a young girl, “It’s a windy one, ain’t it?” and she smiles instead of scowls.
On such a day you can almost imagine what Philadelphia might have been like in 1895–less populated, less congested, a friendlier city in a friendlier time, when people nodded politely as they passed, and were naive enough to believe certain things weren’t possible–things like serial murder.
At 1316 Callowhill St., where murderer H.H. Holmes and his partner Ben Pitezel set up a phony patent office, there’s now a parking lot that stretches the length of the block. Across the street, where the sturdy North American Building resides, there used to be a station for the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad.
Ask the attendant what the address of the lot is–or if he knows where 1316 Callowhill would have been–and he gives a sweeping look at the cars, as if they might know something. Then he shrugs. “We don’t have an address here,” he says in heavily accented English. “Maybe you go that way?”
He points toward the building that houses The Philadelphia Inquirer–the paper that covered Holmes’ trial with a frenzy–then hurries to get out of the wind and back to his Plexiglas booth.
Traveling down Callowhill, trying to find remnants of Holmes’ past, there’s the Miller Detective Agency at 309 N. 13th St., a strange little place with a 1940s-style sign that seems to pop up out of nowhere, and evokes images of Humphrey Bogart and cigarette-smoking gumshoe detectives.
Walk through a tunnel smelling of urine between 11th and 12th and there’s the J&J Trestle Inn, which juts out of a crumbling building on a deserted corner. The old script on the sign advertising go-go girls takes you back to an indefinable time–it could be the ’50s, could be the ’70s. Either way, the building is coated with a seamy veneer.
This is an odd half-neighborhood now, filled mostly with abandoned buildings, tucked between Chinatown and the poverty of North Philadelphia. But when H.H. Holmes roamed these streets, the city was very different.
*****
In the early 19th century Philadelphia was the largest, wealthiest city in the country. Where other towns had wooden shacks and dirt roads, Philly had white marble buildings and cobblestone streets busy with horse-and-buggy traffic. It wasn’t only the center of a new nation’s political life. It was the height of fashion and high society.
By the late 19th century Philadelphia’s grand status had evolved even further–with the largest population of African-Americans in the North, and painters like Thomas Eakins forging a link between this city and Paris. City Hall, that opulent example of Second Empire French architecture, was crowned with a statue of William Penn in 1894, as if to cement its grandeur. Philadelphia was so respected, a company chose the city’s name to lend culinary sophistication to its cream cheese.
But the city’s shine diminished in the last years of the century. Political power moved to Washington, and cultural power slid toward New York. Philadelphia became industrial, and with that industry came dirt, crowds and crime. It was this Philadelphia–half gleaming symbol, half grimy pioneer territory–that H. H. Holmes invaded, taking advantage of the confusion a city on the brink engendered.
*****
Romanticizing the past is easy. The same can be said for criminals, who, no matter their sins, fascinate us. Ask the average guy on the street to name the president of China, and he’ll balk. But ask about serial killers, and the names will come fast: Ted Bundy. Jeffrey Dahmer. Son of Sam. The Boston Strangler.
Most serial killers are psychopaths. They tend to share certain key characteristics. They’re manipulative, cold, and lack what we might call a moral compass–they know right from wrong but are not invested in that distinction. Their only concern with their “wrong” behavior is getting caught, but because they are deceitful, callous and not subject to anxiety, they easily elude capture.
H.H. Holmes was, in this way, a model serial killer. Before he was finally executed in Philadelphia, it’s believed he’d killed at least 100 people. Popular estimates at the time placed the toll as high as 200.
Holmes was born Herman Webster Mudgett in the small village of Gilmanton, N.H., in May 1861. If Mudgett or his brother or sister were bad, their strict Methodist parents sent them to the attic for a full day without speaking or eating. Mudgett’s father was especially abusive after he’d been drinking–which was often.
Mudgett was curiously detached from the start. He’d attack animals in the woods and dissect them while they were still alive. And he had no friends–the one he did have died while the two were playing. Despite his odd upbringing–and the distance he kept from other children, who found him arrogant–he grew into an imposing young man. He was polished, bright and handsome, and was good at making people feel special. At 16 he left home, became a teacher and cajoled a young woman into marrying him. At 19 he went to medical school, and left his wife.
In the 1880s Mudgett–now Holmes–came to Philadelphia. He got a job as a “keeper” at the Norristown Asylum, which is now Norristown State Hospital. The experience horrified him, so he took a position at a drugstore instead. After a customer who took medicine he dispensed died, he left town.
His criminal career kicked into high gear in Englewood, Ill., just outside of Chicago, where he worked as a pharmacist and impressed people not only with his medical knowledge but with his power over women–who flocked to the store just to flirt with him. The proprietress of the drugstore sold it to Holmes after her husband died, but never saw any money from Holmes. When she filed a lawsuit, Holmes told people she’d gone to see family in California. She was never heard from again.
Though it’s believed that Holmes killed people all over the country, the “Castle” he built in Englewood was the culmination of all his murderous desires–and a pleasure palace for the budding psychopath.
(Rick Geary)
Holmes built the Castle in the vacant lot across from the drugstore in the fall of 1888, the same year Jack the Ripper started killing women in London. Holmes served as the architect, and when the building was finished two years later, he marketed it as a boarding house for young single women who were visiting Chicago or coming from neighboring towns to find a better life. As many as 50 of the women who came to the Castle during the World’s Fair never left.
The Inquirer printed his confession, which mentioned only 27 victims but revealed some of his methods. Before he killed many of the victims, he asked them to write letters to relatives or friends explaining they’d gone away so their absences wouldn’t be noticed. Two women, one of them pregnant, were told if they wrote the letters, they’d go free. But as soon as they signed the letters Holmes killed them.
In his confession, he wrote, “These were particularly sad deaths, both on account of the victims being exceptionally upright and virtuous women and because Mrs. Sarah Cook, had she lived, would have soon become a mother.”
Because it was a boarding house, the Castle had a reception room, a waiting room and several rooms for residents. Aside from those and some hallways, the house was comprised of secret chambers, trap doors, hidden laboratories and rooms devoted to killing people.
One of them, which the media dubbed “the Vault,” was a walk-in room with iron walls and gas jets that Holmes controlled from his bedroom. There was a dumbwaiter for lowering bodies and a “hanging chamber.” He had a medieval torture rack in the basement, and a greased chute that went from the roof to the basement so he could dump bodies. He had a maze he sent his victims through and a terrifying “blind room.”
Several rooms were airtight and without windows–one of them fitted with iron plates, another lined with asbestos. There was an asphyxiation chamber with gas jets that could be turned into blowtorches, perhaps to roast people alive.
When the police inspected the Castle after Holmes was in jail, they were horrified. It was beyond belief–for any century, but especially the 1800s.
(Rick Geary)
There were claw marks on the walls of the Vault from people who’d tried to escape. In the basement there was a bloodstained dissecting table and surgical instruments. There was a vat of acid with human bones in it, and piles of quicklime, one of which yielded a girl’s dress. There was an enormous stove to burn bodies in–and a stovepipe with human hair in it.
They found human skulls, a shoulder blade, ribs, a hip socket and countless other remains. They also found–perhaps more disturbingly–Holmes’ victims’ belongings: watches, buttons, photographs, half-burnt ladies’ shoes.
The only comfort inspectors had as they traipsed through the building was that Holmes was already in custody at Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison. But the story was far from over.
*****
The tale of H. H. Holmes has been told before. It was told by Philly detective Frank Geyer in his book written immediately after the case. It was told in the trial transcript. It was the subject of the exhaustively researched true-crime book Depraved by Harold Schecter, and was featured in Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, which juxtaposes Holmes’ Chicago crimes with the story of the Chicago World’s Fair. It was told in the media at the time and is also told–though not to many–in John Borowski’s documentary H.H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer, which is awaiting distribution. Supposedly, both Tom Cruise and Leonardo DiCaprio are working on projects about Holmes.
Despite being America’s first serial killer, Holmes is hardly a familiar name, and until now we haven’t had any popular visual record of his crimes. But next month comes Rick Geary’s graphic novel The Beast of Chicago: The Murderous Career of H.H. Holmes, the sixth in his series of graphic novels about 19th-century murders. Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murder series includes Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper and President Garfield’s assassin.
Asked what got him started on these graphic novels, Geary says, “I’ve always been fascinated by true-crime cases and the Victorian period, and I first combined them in the early ’80s with stories I did for National Lampoon and various graphic story anthologies. The first volume of Treasury of Victorian Murder, made up of three separate stories, came out in 1987.”
Geary’s style in Beast is simple and friendly, but it recreates in painstaking detail what the World’s Columbian Exhibition looked like–the constructed “nations of the world” pavilion with an Egyptian temple, Moorish palace and Japanese bazaars. He has a keen eye for period specifics, like the hats the men wore and the high collars of women’s dresses. Even the bottles in Holmes’ pharmacy are period-perfect, marked “Mrs. Lymon’s Blood Tonic for Ladies” or “Stomach Bitters.”
Of such period details and historical markers, Geary says, “I aim, above all, for accuracy and clarity in the depiction of these cases, and I believe that the graphic story form is a perfect vehicle for achieving this. I’m especially drawn to the unsolved cases, and I love to make use of maps and overhead views in order to let the facts speak for themselves. For cases like Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden, I have no theories of my own to promote; I just enjoy the fact that they’re mysteries. With someone like Holmes, as with any psychopath, the mystery is that of human motivation, and is more difficult to portray graphically.”
Geary’s visual portrait of Holmes has one distinguishing feature you won’t get in the written accounts: eyes that betray a lingering sadness. On one page, Geary devotes a single panel to those haunting eyes–and you can’t help but feel a little sympathy mixed in with the horror. It’s a bold choice to make Holmes slightly vulnerable, and it belies Geary’s merry narration and clean lines.
“Holmes was different from other killers I’ve depicted in that his particular character, that of a seductive con artist without a conscience, was the template for so many 20th-century killers.”
*****
During the Castle years, Holmes acquired a second wife–though he wasn’t divorced from the first one–and pursued several other romantic entanglements. If they didn’t resolve to his liking, or if a girlfriend got too needy, the woman in question would disappear.
Minnie Williams, poisoned and buried in the basement
One of his relationships was with Minnie Williams, who was a Texas heiress. Minnie’s sister, Nannie, came to visit for the Exposition, but they both vanished in 1893. Detectives would later find Nannie’s footprint in the Vault, which Holmes admitted was made “in the violent struggles before her death.” Minnie’s will left everything to Holmes’ personal assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, who lived nearby with his wife and four children.
When Holmes and Pitezel went to Texas to try to collect on Minnie’s will, they were almost arrested, so they left town. Holmes was soon picked up in St. Louis for stealing from a drugstore, but was released shortly thereafter.
For reasons unknown, Holmes chose Philadelphia as the site for his next venture. He insured Pitezel for $10,000 and made Pitezel’s wife, Carrie–who’d stayed behind in St. Louis–the beneficiary. The plan was to fake Pitezel’s death, collect the money from the insurance company and split the profits between them.
He installed Pitezel in a fake patent dealership at 1316 Callowhill St., which was right in front of the city morgue. Pitezel hung a sheet of muslin that read “BF PERRY PATENTS BOUGHT AND SOLD” outside the building to make it look legitimate. (Holmes had an apartment at 1905 N. 11th St., which is now on Temple’s main campus.)
A patent-seeking carpenter named Eugene Smith came to the office one day in September 1894 looking for the man he assumed was named Perry. No one was in, but the door was open. The Holmes-Pitezel Case: A History of the Greatest Crime of the Century, by Detective Geyer, says Smith “hallooed” several times but didn’t get a response.
When Smith went upstairs, Geyer writes, “His gaze met a sight that chilled his blood.” It was a man lying on his back, his face “disfigured beyond recognition by decomposition and burning.” It seemed there’d been some kind of explosion, and the rigid body was singed on one side–including half his mustache. There was, according to Geyer’s book, “a considerable quantity of fluid” spreading out for more than a foot around the body.
(Rick Geary)
The only person who knew the true identity of the corpse was H.H. Holmes, and he was more than happy to come forward to identify it as Ben Pitezel’s. He even brought Pitezel’s daughter, Alice, with him from St. Louis to seal the deal. Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, still believed it was all a scheme, and that Ben was hiding out and waiting for her.
In his confession, Holmes said he’d been planning to kill Pitezel from the moment he met him, and that everything he did with the man, for seven years, led up to that very moment. Such a long-term investment, wrote Holmes, “furnishes a very striking illustration of the vagaries in which the human mind will, under certain circumstances, indulge,” and compares the anticipation of Pitezel’s murder to “the seeking of buried treasure at the rainbow’s end.”
The reality of Pitezel’s death was far worse than what Eugene Smith saw. Holmes wrote in his confession that he went to 1316 Callowhill and found Pitezel drunk and passed out, as he expected. (Holmes had earlier forged a series of hurtful letters from Pitezel’s wife, which caused Pitezel to start drinking–all part of the plan.) He bound Pitezel’s hands and feet, and then he wrote, “I proceeded to burn him alive by saturating his clothing and his face with benzine and igniting it with a match. 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.”
After he collected the money, Holmes went to St. Louis and convinced Pitezel’s widow to lay low too. He offered to place her children with his cousin, whom he called “Minnie Williams,” until she and Ben could come out of hiding.
Geary writes, “Through the man’s unimaginable powers of persuasion, Carrie agreed to surrender two more of her children.” There was no pragmatic reason for Holmes to take the children. But as he wrote in his confession, he chose Pitezel as a victim “even before I knew he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my bloodthirstiness.”
And so began the horrible journey of Alice, Nellie and Howard Pitezel.
Nellie Pitezel
*****
A letter to Carrie Pitezel from Alice Pitezel, dated Sept. 20, 1894: Just arrived Philadelphia this morning … I am going to the Morgue after awhile … We stopped off at Washington, Md., this morning, and that made it six times that we transferred to different cars … Mr. H says that I will have a ride on the ocean. I wish you could see what I have seen. I have seen more scenery than I have seen since I was born … You had better not write to me here for Mr. H. says that I may be off tomorrow.
*****
A letter to Carrie Pitezel from Alice Pitezel, dated Sept. 21, 1894:
I have to write all the time to pass away the time … Mama have you ever seen or tasted a red banana? I have had three. They are so big that I can just reach around it and have my thumb and next finger just tutch. I have not got any shoes yet and I have to go a hobbling around all the time. Have you gotten 4 letters from me besides this? … I wish that I could hear from you … I have not got but two clean garments and that is a shirt and my white skirt. I saw some of the largest solid rocks that I bet you never saw. I crossed the Patomac river.”
Imperial Hotel, Eleventh, above Market Street, Hendricks and Scott, Propr’s
These letters, and others like them, were never sent. Holmes kept them in a tin box, “stored them,” Larson writes in Devil in the White City, “as if they were seashells collected from a beach.” He dragged the children from city to city to complete various schemes, and sometimes took them to the zoo, which Alice wrote to her mother about. No matter what they did together, the outcome was to be the same: Holmes would kill all three Pitezel children.
*****
By June 1895 the Fidelity Mutual Life Association, near 23rd and Fairmount Avenue, was suspicious of Holmes. Hadn’t Pitezel’s stomach emitted the stench of chloroform when the autopsy was performed? And didn’t that suggest foul play?
Fidelity hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to find out if Holmes had faked Pitezel’s death or simply killed him. When they determined it was the latter, the Pinkertons chased Holmes to Boston and arrested him. They brought him back to Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison at 10th and Reed streets, where he occupied a 9-by-14-foot cell.
Larson writes, “The stone construction of the prison helped blunt the extreme heat that had settled on the city and much of the country, but nothing could keep out the humidity for which Philadelphia was notorious. It clung to Holmes and his fellow prisoners like a cloak of moist wool.” Some things never change.
But Holmes was well taken care of. The guards let him read the newspaper, wear his own clothes and get food from the outside. Holmes’ friendship with his jailers was just another example of his charm and manipulation.
The city of Philadelphia had more to worry about than Holmes’ accommodations. Where, for instance, were Carrie Pitezel’s children, who hadn’t been seen or heard from since she entrusted them to Holmes’ care? Holmes maintained the children were alive, and kept up the charade even in private documents.
Detective Frank Geyer was assigned to find the children. Geyer wrote about himself in the third person in his book: “He had been for 20 years an esteemed and trusted member of the Philadelphia Detective Bureau. He had had a vast experience in detective work, and more particularly in murder cases and justly enjoyed the friendship and confidence of the District Attorney.”
Larson puts it differently: “[Geyer] knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels or the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” By the time the trial was over, Geyer was known across the country as America’s own Sherlock Holmes.
Using the scant geographical information the children’s letters provided, Geyer took train after train to cities across the country, even going as far as Toronto, where he and a fellow investigator found the bodies of Alice and Nellie Pitezel, who’d been buried in a cellar. Nellie’s feet were gone; Holmes had cut them off so police wouldn’t be able to identity her by her clubfoot. He’d killed them by stuffing the two girls in a large trunk, poking a hole in it and leaking gas from the lamp into the trunk. When Carrie Pitezel was called to identify her girls’ bodies, all that was left of Nellie was her thick black braid. The rest of her body had decomposed.
Weeks later, Geyer–who called Holmes “verily an artist in roguery”–found the body of Howard Pitezel in Indianapolis, where Holmes had strangled him, cut up his body and burned the remains in a large stove. Finding Howard was the tragic end to Geyer’s mission.
In his book, Geyer wrote of the moment of Howard Pitezel’s discovery: “All the toil; all the weary days and weeks of travel,–toil and travel in the hottest months of the year, alternating between faith and hope, and discouragement and despair, all were recompensed in that one moment.”
*****
Moyamensing Prison at 10th and Reed streets was once an enormous turreted building towering over the city like a dark cloud. Go to 10th and Reed now, and the prison has become an Acme. On the other corners of that same street are a CVS, a Colonial Village and the legendary Triangle Tavern. Passyunk Avenue and the bright lights of Geno’s and Pat’s twinkle in the distance, and people slam car doors in the large parking lots.
Standing at that crossroads of 21st-century Philadelphia, you need a bold imagination to conjure old ghosts. The street is painted now with thick yellow stripes, and the horse-and-buggies have become Volkswagens and Fords. Awnings that once snapped in the wind are now neon signs.
But certain things remain the same. When Holmes was imprisoned here, perhaps between the produce section and the laundry detergent, it was to the excruciating pleasure of Philadelphia’s news media. As the case unraveled bit by bit, with Detective Geyer’s revelations coming every day, the local press was in a frenzy to get the best coverage.
When Pitezel’s body was dug up once again from the American Mechanics Cemetery at 22nd and Diamond in September 1895, the paper gave what it billed “A GRUESOME HISTORY,” including the upcoming plan to have Carrie Pitezel identify her husband’s teeth. “Dr. Sidebothom will boil [Pitezel’s] head and remove what remains of the rotting flesh. He will then bleach and articulate the skull, taking great care to keep the teeth in their original positions. The head will then be mounted and turned over to District Attorney Graham … When Mrs. Pitezel … reaches the city the head will be shown to her, and if she can identify it by the peculiar teeth of her husband, another strong link will be added to the chain of evidence that is gradually closing in around H.H. Holmes.”
The details provided were always elaborate. Every move Geyer made, every word Holmes spoke, every tooth submitted for identification became the subject of thick columns of labored prose.
In March 1896 the Supreme Court denied Holmes’ petition for a new trial, and he was sentenced to death for the murders of Pitezel and his children. The other murders–at the Castle and elsewhere–weren’t even pursued; law enforcement just wanted Holmes dead. The Inquirer provided several heads and subheads for the article trumpeting this success, as was customary at the time: “HOLMES’ DOOM FIXED.” “MUST PAY THE PENALTY.” “LAWYER ROTAN’S SAD ERRAND.” “ON HEARING THE NEWS THE MURDERER ALMOST LOST HIS GREAT SELF-CONTROL.” The paper ran a prepared statement by the district attorney, as well as an in-depth dissection of the legal opinion.
If the editors at the Inquirer thought they had a good story with the ongoing Holmes case, they lost all self-control when he decided to publish his confession with them. In the issue of April 10, 1896, they hyped the confession with enormous ads and headlines: “The Most Fearful and Horrible Murderer Ever Known in the Annals of Crime. His Confession Was Written Exclusively for Next SUNDAY’S INQUIRER. The Most Remarkable Story of Murder and Inhuman Villainy Ever Made Public. CONVICTION LIES IN EVERY LINE. The only way to describe it is to say it was written by Satan himself or one of his chosen monsters.”
Other ads for next Sunday’s edition focused on the Inquirer‘s dominance in the media marketplace: “Holmes’ original confession has been secured by the Inquirer and now lies locked in the safe at the Inquirer‘s office. No other paper can get it. No other paper can print it. Don’t miss this exclusive chapter of the crimes of a century. The only way to get it is to read next SUNDAY’S INQUIRER.”
Even the paper’s advertisers got in on the act. One ad, in a bold circle, read, “HOLMES’ CONFESSION is not as startling in its effect, or is it half as profitable to read, as the great bargains offered in Pianos and Organs at the warerooms of The Cunningham Piano Co. 1105 Chestnut St.”
When the confession finally appeared, it took up more than four full pages of the newspaper, including illustrations of the house on Callowhill Street, of Holmes murdering the Pitezel girls in the trunk, of Holmes closing the Vault, of the cottage where Howard Pitezel was murdered, as well as drawings of the entire Pitezel clan and a floor plan of the Castle.
The day before the confession appeared, there was yet another front-page article on Holmes, this one headlined “HOLMES IS CHEERFUL.” “HOW HE SPENT THE DAY.” “His Mind at Rest by Reason of His Confession Through the Inquirer.” In the meantime, they published the sad ongoing saga of Carrie Pitezel, who was in poor health, had no money and relied on sewing and her parents to scrape by.
In the month before Holmes’ execution at Moyamensing, the press slowly began to lose interest in the famous prisoner. The Wednesday before the hanging, it ran an inside article with a small headline called “IN THE SHADOW OF DEATH,” with a crude illustration of a guard sitting and watching Holmes in his cell. Though the paper printed a letter from Holmes to Carrie through her Philadelphia lawyer in which he declared his innocence, the comparatively short article was positioned between advertorial about homeopathic medicine and a piece about a race between two Delaware tugboats.
*****
On the day Holmes died–May 7, 1896–a huge crowd showed up for the execution. Spectators had to be driven back by lines of policemen. The Inquirer wrote, quite eloquently, “There was a good deal of fin de siecle brutality about the crowds. There was nothing that they could possibly see, but the high forbidding walls. There was nothing they could hear. Yet they all seemed drawn to the spot by some morbid fascination. Coarse jests were bandied from lip to lip as the crowd surged to and fro.”
It was pandemonium. A certain number of tickets were granted for the execution, but twice that got inside by sheer force.
When Holmes began to speak as he was standing on the gallows, the crowd went silent. He made a brief statement denying he’d killed Pitezel or his children. The executioner’s hands trembled, and Holmes reassured him by saying–charming as always–“Take your time, old man.”
“Death was indeed merciful to the man who in his life had shown so little mercy,” read the Inquirer‘s account published on the same day. “For a few minutes there was a faint beating of the pulse, but the dying man felt no pain. With the springing of the trap, his neck had been broken.
After the execution, Carrie Pitezel told an Inquirer reporter, “Yes, it is a relief to me to know that he did not succeed in escaping the gallows. Still, that does not bring my husband and my poor little children back to me.” Surely if the families of Holmes’ many other victims could speak, they’d say the same thing.
*****
It’s another windy day in Philadelphia. The sun peeks through dark smudges of clouds. In a neighborhood with busy streets, kids chasing each other on the sidewalks, storefronts blaring music and buses rolling by, Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon feels like a quiet little town unto itself. Its graves are in straight lines, and many are marked by towering and extravagant tombs. One building looks like the old Merchants’ Exchange Building at Third and Walnut streets, and if you look inside some of the tomb windows, you’ll see gilded crucifixes, colorful stained glass and family portraits.
On one grave is a statue of an angel, her wings like parentheses around her body. In her hand she holds a wilting pink rose that someone placed between her stone fingers. The people buried here are mostly Italian and Irish, with names like Spatiola, Nardi and Toland. Some of the gravestones tell stories, like twins who both died at age 5. Too often, a husband dies only a couple months after his wife. If you’re of a certain bent, you’ll assume he died of heartbreak.
Holy Cross Cemetery is also where H.H. Holmes–now Herman Mudgett–is buried. After his jailhouse conversion to Catholicism–during which he claimed he was the devil–he requested burial here, in this spacious, tree-filled mini city.
Before his death, his body was the subject of some debate. The Wistar Institute wanted to buy his brain, but Holmes wouldn’t allow it. When he died, the undertaker–following Holmes’ orders–filled his coffin with cement, put his body in and covered it with more cement. At Holy Cross the coffin was lowered 10 feet into the ground and covered with yet more cement.
There is no headstone, and the place where he’s buried is now a large patch of grass. Though Holmes’ intention was to keep his body from being dug up, this inattention afforded him something else: anonymity. Without any marker on his grave–and with a new century beginning–Holmes and his crimes slowly receded into the annals of history. Finding his grave now is like a macabre parlor game.
Also buried at Holy Cross are several Philadelphia mobsters: Angelo Bruno, Antonio Pollina (who once tried to kill Bruno), Salvatore “Chickenman” Testa and Michael Maggio. Their graves are marked, and people feel a certain thrill when they see the tombstones of such evil–and charismatic–men.
As mob aficionados traipse across the grass with their cemetery maps looking for the understated elegance of Bruno’s gravestone, their feet may land on a block of cement covering the greatest criminal of the 19th century–and America’s first serial killer. They’ll never know it, though.
Detective Frank Geyer, in The Holmes-Pitezel Case, uses an unattributed quote to end the chapter on the discovery of Howard Pitezel’s body: “Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured but like the sun, only for a time.” But the sun–even in the leafy repast of Holy Cross Cemetery–always sets.
