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Holmes “saw” a prominence on one side of his head, a “corresponding diminution on the other side,” a deficiency on his nose and ear, and similar details in the length of various limbs.
    Then he turned his attention to Pitezel, indicating that from the first hour they met, he knew that he would kill the man. Everything he did for Pitezel that seemed to be a kindness was merely a way to gain his confidence. Pitezel “met his death” on September 2, 1894. Holmes showed him fake letters from Mrs. Pitezel in order to precipitate a bout of drinking. Holmes then watched and waited until he was able to come upon Pitezel in a drunken stupor in the middle of the day. He packed his bags in readiness to leave and then went to where Pitezel lay in bed, bound him, saturated his clothing and face with benzene, and lit a match. He literally burned his former accomplice alive.
    Apparently Pitezel cried out and prayed for mercy, begging Holmes to end his suffering with a speedy death, “all of which had on me no effect.” When Pitezel finally expired, Holmes extinguished the flames, removed the ropes, and poured chloroform into his stomach, to make the death appear to be accidentally brought about by an explosion. That way, the insurance company would quickly pay the full amount of the claim. He left the body in a position that exposed it to the sun for however long it would be before someone found him—presumably to further deform it for difficulty in identification. “I left the house,” he wrote, “without the slightest feeling of remorse for my terrible acts.”
    As for young Howard Pitezel, Holmes also had a story to tell. He had every intention of murdering the three Pitezel children, so he ensconced them in a hotel until he could find a way that would not draw suspicion. After a week, he poisoned the boy and then cut him into pieces small enough to go through the door of a stove he had purchased. He felt no remorse about these acts, only the pleasure he had gained from killing another person. He then took the girls to Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto, where Alice and Nellie met their fate. He claimed that they were the “twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh” of his victims.
    To get them ready, he told them they would soon be reunited with their mother. Then he compelled them to climb into a large trunk and closed them inside, leaving an airhole. Through it, he pumped gas, killing them. In the dirt cellar, he dug shallow graves, placing their naked bodies inside and covering them with dirt. He considered that “for eight years before their deaths I had been almost as much a father to them as though they had been my own children.”
    He also had a plan to end Mrs. Pitezel’s life, along with those of her two remaining children, with nitroglycerine, but he was arrested in Boston before he managed to achieve this goal. He closed his confession by saying that his last public utterance would be of remorse for these vile acts. He did not expect anyone to believe him. Geyer later says in his memoir that Holmes’s account, published in many papers on April 12, 1896, was so inconsistent with the facts that it was “at once discredited in police circles.”
    Then, according to Geyer, Holmes recanted the confession, and some of his “victims” turned up alive. When told by police that his tale was untrue, he supposedly said, “Of course it is not true, but the newspapers want a sensation and they got it.”
    On May 7, 1896, H. H. Holmes went to the hangman’s noose, and even then, he was changing his story. Now he claimed to have killed only two people, and tried to say more, but at 10:13 the trapdoor opened and he was hanged. It took him fifteen minutes to strangle to death on the gallows.
    Afraid of body snatchers who might want to steal his corpse, Holmes had made a request: he wanted no autopsy and he instructed his attorneys to see that he was buried in a coffin filled with cement. No stone was erected to mark where it was