Alice Pitezel, having identified her father’s body in Philadelphia, left with H.H. Holmes, according to researcher Harry Brodribb Irving. Shortly afterward, Holmes showed up at the home of Mrs. Pitezel — sans Alice — to collect two of her other children, Nellie and Howard, allegedly to bring them to their sister. When Holmes was later arrested for insurance fraud, however, Alice, Nellie, and Howard were nowhere to be found.
Upon his arrest, Holmes admitted to insurance fraud, claiming the body found in Philadelphia hadn’t been Pitezel’s remains at all, and was instead a random corpse procured for fraudulent purposes. Pitezel and his children, he said, had ditched his wife and run off to South America.
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But Holmes’ stories kept changing. Even later, he claimed that his secretary Minnie Williams (after killing her sister Nannie) took the Pitezel children off on a European vacation. Clearly, something wasn’t right here, and the case came to the attention of a detective named Frank Geyer.
Geyer, after tracking Holmes and the children across the country, finally came to a home Holmes had rented in Toronto, according to his book on the investigation, “The Holmes-Pitezel Case” There, in a shallow grave in the basement, Geyer and his team discovered the remains of Alice and — lying on top of her — her sister, Nellie. “Everybody seemed to be pleased with our success, and congratulations, mingled with expressions of horror over the discovery were heard everywhere,” Geyer wrote.
