"Property of H. H. Holmes"
- Part IV is called "Cruelty Revealed," so you just know it's going to be messed up.
- Detective Frank Geyer is one of Philadelphia's top detectives. He knows murder well.
- In June of 1895 Holmes is arrested for insurance fraud, but it's pretty obvious that he killed Pitezel to collect the insurance claim.
- Geyer is hired by Pitezel's wife, Carrie, to find her missing children Alice, Nellie, and Howard—last seen in Holmes' custody.
- Geyer begins his search by interviewing Holmes, who states the children are traveling around Europe with a woman named Minnie Williams.
- Holmes admits to fraud, but doesn't admit to murdering Pitezel. He says he had a cadaver that looked identical to Pitezel and needed his fifteen-year-old daughter Alice to identify the body at the coroner's office so he could claim the insurance money.
- Geyer is no fool. He knows Holmes is lying about the cadaver.
- Geyer soon discovers that this is how things actually went down: Holmes killed Pitezel. He then persuaded Carrie to allow three of the children to travel with him.
- Geyer, in possession of Alice's letters to her mother, re-traces the children's travels with Holmes. They are letters Holmes never sent and instead kept in a box marked "Property of H. H. Holmes."
- Holmes likely assured Carrie that the children were happily enjoying their time in London under the care of Minnie Williams.
- As Geyer travels from city to city, hotel to hotel, what he finds is unnerving.
- Holmes made the children stay for a few days at a time in a hotel before moving to the next.
- The children were miserable and wrote to their mother of their misery.
- But guess where she was? At a hotel a few blocks away.
- So while Carrie thought her children were in Europe, the children thought their mother was receiving their letters back home. In reality, both parties were just ten minutes away from each other.
- It was a game for Holmes, Geyer realized. "He possessed them all and reveled in his possession" (4.1.60).