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sensation and turn a profit. The Chicago police estimated the number of victims to be as high as 150, although this figure was never corroborated.
    To exonerate himself, Holmes, now thirty-four, penned Holmes’ Own Story, in which the Alleged Multimurderer and Arch Conspirator Tells of the Twenty-two Tragic Deaths and Disappearances in which he is Said to be Implicated. He described Gilmanton Academy, New Hampshire, the town in which he grew up as Her-man Webster Mudgett. He was born there in 1861 and claimed to have lived an ordinary life, with an ordinary set of parents and a normal schoolboy routine. He received a medical school diploma from the University of Michigan and then opened a practice. He attempted unsuccessfully to commit his first insurance fraud, helping someone to fake his own death with a purloined cadaver. From there, he did a stint as a doctor in an insane asylum. He changed his name to H. H. Holmes and posed as a pharmacist in Chicago.
    “In conclusion,” he wrote, “I wish to say that I am but a very ordinary man...and to have planned and executed the stupendous amount of wrongdoing that has been attributed to me would have been wholly beyond my power.” He asked the general public to withhold their judgment until he could prove his innocence at his trial. He would also work to bring justice to those “for whose wrong doings I am today suffering.” However, this publication was so transparently self-serving, not to mention boring, that readers preferred the more lurid tales provided in newspapers.

The End of the Line
    Holmes’s attorneys attempted to get his trial continued, but were unsuccessful. In addition, there was a struggle between Chicago and Philadelphia authorities as to who would get to try him first, but he remained in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, the judge allowed only testimony relevant to the single murder he was charged with there, that of Benjamin Pitezel, so there are no court records about other evidence, including Geyer’s discovery of the murdered children.
    The trial commenced as scheduled on October 28—three days before Halloween—and lasted five days. Judge Arnold allowed Holmes to defend himself, so he questioned the prospective jury members, at which point his team of attorneys left the courtroom. He demonstrated the coolness with which he handled stress and tried rejecting each person who said he had read the papers, but the judge pointed out that this was not considered a cause for challenge. “Newspapers are so numerous,” he said, “that everybody now reads them, and of course, they obtain impressions from them.”
    The best account of what lay ahead in terms of witnesses is found in D.A. Graham’s speech, reprinted in Geyer’s book. He spoke for nearly two hours, describing how Pitezel had died and how chloroform had been injected into the victim’s stomach after death to mimic a suicide. He also suggested that Holmes had “ruined” Alice when she was in his care in the city. Holmes appeared to be surprised by this allegation.
    A reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer described Holmes’s performance in court as vigorous and “remarkable.” He was deferential to the judge but nasty to the prosecutor. He asked for an analysis of the liquid that he was accused of using as a poison for the children (which the D.A. did not have in his possession), and he wanted reports from the most recent work done on toxicology, claiming that as a doctor, he himself could analyze them (though his credentials were false). This left the impression of a man who knew his stuff and was prepared to use science to exonerate himself.
    Yet Holmes often deflected the questioning with forays into minutiae, and he frequently squabbled with the prosecutor, who was likely disturbed at having to spar in court as an equal with the defendant. Holmes made an error when, after Pitezel’s corpse was described in gruesome detail, he requested a lunch break because he was hungry. He appeared