Read The Devil's Dozen for Free Online Page A

to have no sense of sorrow over the supposed suicide of a longtime partner and friend, noted by the jury. For the rest of that day, while he handled his questioning in a professional manner, he failed to score any points to support his innocence. The professional witnesses all concluded that Pitezel could not, as Holmes claimed, have committed suicide.
    Holmes asked that the court allow his two defense attorneys to reenter the case, and with that he relinquished his role as a criminal lawyer. While he now had competent counsel, he had probably hurt his case. Between his antics and his obvious fatigue by the end of the first day, the jury had a good look at the defendant’s loss of confidence and inability to shake the strongest witnesses. He may not have admitted his guilt, but his actions indicated he’d admitted defeat. He got up only once to examine another witness—his latest paramour and third wife, who testified against him. Using a heavy dose of emotion, as if stricken by her betrayal, he nevertheless failed to move her to change her testimony about his behavior on the day that Pitezel was allegedly murdered.
    The prosecution prepared to show his activities by producing thirty-five witnesses from the various places where Holmes had gone after the Pitezel murder. But the judge had ruled that the trial must be limited to the Pitezel murder, so Graham showed how he had made Pitezel’s identification, and added whatever he could about Holmes’s reprehensible behavior. The prosecution proved with doctors that the chloroform that supposedly had been self-administrated had actually been forced into Pitezel postmortem.
    Given Holmes’s admissions about being with the victim, there was really no other choice for the fact finders who were listening. In his closing argument, which lasted over two hours, Graham called Holmes the “most dangerous man in the world” and asked the jurors not to be afraid to do their duty. They were not; they convicted Holmes of Benjamin Pitezel’s murder and the judge sentenced him to death by hanging.
    After his conviction, and as his attorneys prepared an appeal for a new trial (which failed), Holmes took up the pen again to make a confession, largely inspired by a $10,000 payment from the Hearst newspaper syndicate. He published it in the Philadelphia Inquirer . Aiming now to become the most notorious killer in the world, he claimed to have killed over one hundred people. Apparently having second thoughts, he reduced that number to twenty-seven, including Pitezel and his children. He insisted that he could not help what he’d done. “I was born with the Evil One as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world,” he lamented. “It now seems a fitting time, if ever, to make known the details of the twenty-seven murders, of which it would be useless to longer say I am not guilty.”
    Holmes claimed that he wanted to make the confession at this point for several reasons. He assured his readers that he was not seeking attention and that the entire enterprise was distasteful to him. As he admitted to the murders, he said he was “thus branding myself as the most detestable criminal of modern times.” He thought his countenance was changing as he sat in prison, and that he looked more satanic than before. “I have become afflicted with that dread disease, rare but terrible...a malformation...My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.” He self-diagnosed “acquired homicidal mania” and “degeneracy.”
    The criminological theories at the time were fueled by Cesare Lombroso, an Italian anthropologist and professor at the University of Turin. Lombroso had published L’uomo delinquente, in which he stated that certain people were born degenerates, identifiable by specific physical traits, such as bulging brows, long arms, and apelike noses. In this context,