The Devil in the White City: Part IV–Epilogue

Holmes confessed to the fraud and agreed to be extradited to Philadelphia for trial.

Geyer found Holmes to be smooth and glib, a social chameleon.

“Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation,” Geyer wrote, “and all of his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of his statements..."

In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.

In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.

In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.

At the morgue he not only helped locate a distinctive wart on the dead man’s neck, he pulled out his own lancet and removed the wart himself, then matter-of-factly handed it to the coroner.

He and Schnooks thanked the clerk for his kind attention, then set out to canvass more hotels.

The letters not only provided irrefutable proof that the children had been with Holmes but contained geographic references that allowed Geyer to plot the broad contours of the route Holmes and the children had followed.

Geyer was getting a feel for his quarry. There was nothing rational about Holmes, but his behavior seemed to follow a pattern.

The dates and places were correct; his description of his boyhood as a typical country idyll was most certainly a fabrication.

“Had [Howard] been placed in some institution, as Holmes had intimated his intention of doing, or was he hidden in some obscure place beyond reach or discovery? Was he alive or dead? I was puzzled, nonplussed, and groping in the dark.”

Geyer found the city transfixed by the revelations emerging from the castle. Press coverage had been exhaustive, taking up most of the front page of the daily newspapers.

The failure to find Howard after so much effort was frustrating and puzzling. “The mystery,” Geyer wrote, “seemed to be impenetrable.”

“All the toil,” Geyer said, “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, when I saw the veil about to lift.”

If Philadelphia failed to convict him, there would be two more chances; if the city succeeded, the other indictments would be moot, for given the nature of the Pitezel murder, a conviction in Philadelphia would bring a death sentence.

He asked the public to suspend judgment while he worked to disprove the charges against him, “a task which I feel able to satisfactorily and expeditiously accomplish..."

And here I cannot say finis—it is not the end—for besides doing this there is also the work of bringing to justice those for whose wrong-doings I am to-day suffering, and this not to prolong or save my own life, for since the day I heard of the Toronto horror I have not cared to live; but that to those who have looked up to and honored me in the past it shall not in the future be said that I suffered the ignominious death of a murderer.

Certainly the fair made a powerful impression on the Disney family. It proved such a financial boon that when the family’s third son was born that year, Elias in gratitude wanted to name him Columbus.

Henry Demarest Lloyd saw it as revealing to the great mass of Americans “possibilities of social beauty, utility, and harmony of which they had not been able even to dream. No such vision could otherwise have entered into the prosaic drudgery of their lives, and it will be felt in their development into the third and fourth generation.”

The fair taught men and women steeped only in the necessary to see that cities did not have to be dark, soiled, and unsafe bastions of the strictly pragmatic. They could also be beautiful.

Sullivan was thirty-eight and incapable of cultivating the relationships that might have generated enough new commissions to keep him solvent.

He drank heavily and took mood-altering drugs called bromides.

“Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave—in a land declaring its fervid democracy, its inventiveness, its resourcefulness, its unique daring, enterprise and progress.”

For Burnham personally the fair had been an unqualified triumph.

In a eulogy two friends said Ferris had “miscalculated his powers of endurance, and he died a martyr to his ambition for fame and prominence.”

I have such grave doubts about myself whenever I stop to think about the subject, that a word of encouragement from one who has so wonderfully sounded out his life, gives me a new impetus.

“The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe cannot help musing over the end of the child, whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises which her mind can image or whether he may meet death upon the scaffold.”

This request, too, the lawyers refused, much to the regret of Milton Greeman, curator of Wistar’s renowned collection of medical specimens.

And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.