MrBallen Podcast: Strange, Dark & Mysterious Stories - The Man in the Bowler Hat (PODCAST EXCLUSIVE EPISODE)

Episode Date: August 1, 2022

In the late 1800s, a very strange hotel was constructed in Chicago, Illinois. From the outside, it looked perfectly normal, but the inside of the hotel was anything but. Hallways were a maze of twists and turns, and there were trap doors, sliding walls and secret stairwells everywhere. But the shock factor of this hotel was part of its allure. Walking around and getting lost could actually be kind of thrilling. But, what guests didn't know was that every time they got lost in that hotel, they might never find their way out again...For 100s more stories like this one, check out my YouTube channel just called "MrBallen" -- https://www.youtube.com/c/MrBallenIf you want to reach out to me, contact me on Instagram, Twitter or any other major social media platform, my username on all of them is @MrBallenSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

In the late 1800s, a very strange hotel was constructed in Chicago, Illinois. From the outside, it looked perfectly normal. But the inside of the hotel was anything but. Hallways were a maze of twists and turns, and there were trap doors, sliding walls, and secret stairwells everywhere. But the shock factor of this hotel was part of its allure. Walking around and getting lost could actually be kind of thrilling. But what guests didn't know was that every time they got lost in

that hotel, they might never find their way out again. But before we get into today's story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark, and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast because that's all we do and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday. So if that's of interest to you, please offer to house-sit for the five-star review button, and when you're there, cut all the drawstrings on their sweatpants. Also, please subscribe to the Mr. Ballin Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss any of our weekly uploads. Okay, let's get into today's story. I'm Peter Frankopan.

And I'm Afua Hirsch. And we're here to tell you about our new season of Legacy, covering the iconic, troubled musical genius that was Nina Simone. Full disclosure, this is a big one for me. Nina Simone, one of my favourite artists of all time. Somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of all time, somebody who's had a huge impact on me, who I think objectively stands apart for the level of her talent, the audacity of her message. If I was a first year at university, the first time I sat down and really listened to her and engaged with her message, it totally

floored me. And the truth and pain and messiness of her struggle that's all captured in unforgettable music that has stood the test of time. Think that's fair, Peter? I mean, the way in which her music comes across is so powerful, no matter what song it is. So join us on Legacy for Nina Simone. Hello, I'm Emily and I'm one of the hosts of Terribly Famous, the show that takes you inside the lives of our biggest celebrities.

And they don't get much bigger than the man who made badminton sexy. OK, maybe that's a stretch, but if I say pop star and shuttlecocks, you know who I'm talking about. No? Short shorts? Free cocktails? Careless whispers? OK, last one. It's not Andrew Ridgely. Yep, that's right. It's Stone Cold icon George Michael. From teen pop sensation to one of the biggest solo artists on the planet, join us for our new series, George Michael's Fight for Freedom.

From the outside, it looks like he has it all. But behind the trademark dark sunglasses is a man in turmoil. George is trapped in a lie of his own making with a secret he feels would ruin him if the truth ever came out. Follow Terribly Famous wherever you listen to your podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. It was the summer of 1888, and the residents of Englewood, Chicago, had something new and exciting to talk about. The young, prosperous, and handsome owner of the neighborhood's local

pharmacy, who had only arrived in Illinois three years earlier, had just bought the big, empty lot on the corner of 63rd and Wallace Street. And since then, the owner, 28-year-old Dr. Henry Holmes, had let his many customers know that he was planning to build a grand hotel on that site, the likes of which this village on the south side of the largest Midwestern city in America had never seen before. But some Englewood residents had their doubts. On their way to or from work that July and August, groups of businessmen in black top hats and starched white collars paused at the huge vacant lot, tut-tutting over the cost of building on such

marshy land, while sweat-stained day laborers shook their heads over the challenges of sinking a basement and foundation into that soft and shifting ground. But as Dr. Holmes himself looked at that ugly barren property just across the street from his neat and profitable drugstore, all he felt was thrilled. It was the Gilded Age in America when captains of industry in Chicago lived in mansions so enormous that they looked like castles, showy and glittering gems spread out along South Prairie Avenue and North Lakeshore Drive. And now, after three years of hard work and saving money, Dr. Holmes was sure that building and owning this hotel would be his first big step towards joining the exalted ranks of the city's self-made millionaires.

The design for the building had come to Dr. Holmes months earlier, all at once, a complete picture right from the start of how the hotel would look both on the outside and on the inside. It would be three stories high, the first floor would house retail shops, he would sell his current drugstore and open a new one inside of his hotel on the first floor, along with a jewelry store, a restaurant, a barbershop, and a business that would sell the huge glass window panes that were in such high demand for the skyscrapers that were going up all over the heart of Chicago. The second and third floors of what Dr. Holmes thought of as his castle would each contain 35 rooms, with the third floor offering suites of rooms for long-term residents.

His own office would be located on the second floor, in a corner overlooking the street. His quarters would also include rooms in the basement that he would use for his medical research. From the outside, the hotel would look impressive but ordinary. It was the interior of the hotel that Holmes intended to design in ways that he hoped would startle and delight the people who came to stay. It didn't take long for Dr. Holmes to commit this vision to paper, and by summer of the following year, 1889, he had the hotel blueprints and design finished and enough money to start hiring construction workers. And just a few months later, on a hot day in July,

Dr. Holmes watched with shining eyes from the doorway of his pharmacy as workers sank the first shovel into the wet earth across the street. His hotel project had officially begun. But despite his excitement, it would turn out that both the businessmen who had tut-tutted and shaken their heads over the cost of the project and the day laborers who had shaken their heads over the difficulty of building in marshy ground were right. The construction of Dr. Holmes' hotel would end up dragging for nearly two years until 1891 when they actually opened the hotel, but even then it wasn't done. They still had a year or two before it was actually finished. But as delayed as the project was, it actually would have taken even longer if Dr. Holmes had not been lucky enough to hire the man who would become not only his

trusted construction foreman, but also his close personal friend. That man was Benjamin Peitzel. Benjamin Peitzel had arrived in Chicago from Indiana around the time Dr. Holmes' hotel was starting to be built. Benjamin was a tall, strong, 33-year-old carpenter who made up for his tendency to drink too much by his absolute devotion to his wife, Carrie, and their five children, who ranged in age from a few months old to 14 years old. Benjamin had come to Chicago determined to take any job he could that would provide for his growing family, and as he helped his wife and children off the train into Chicago's Grand Depot, he took special care with his

nine-year-old daughter Nellie, who had been born with a club foot, a birth defect that twisted her foot out of shape and made it difficult for her to walk. Like so many people arriving in Chicago for the first time, the Peitzel family could hardly believe the noise and crowds and the skyscrapers in the center of the city that towered above the streets like the walls of a canyon. Another thing they couldn't believe was the smell from the huge stockyards in South Chicago. It wasn't just the smell of livestock, it was the stink from the slaughterhouses located

along the Southside Railroad that made Chicago the meatpacking capital of the United States and the hog butcher for the world. After getting off the train, the older Pite Cell children immediately covered their noses, but Benjamin told them that the smell wouldn't be so bad once they hopped aboard the next train that would take them out to the village of Englewood, where he'd heard that a hotel was going up and the owner always seemed to need more workers, so maybe there was a job for him. It wasn't hard for Benjamin to go to the construction site and locate Dr. Holmes, who

was now spending most of his time feeling frustrated by what he saw as the shoddy work done by many of the men he had hired. But few, if any, of the workers that Dr. Holmes had let go, and withheld wages from afterwards, ever stuck around to complain about it. In fact, a lot of these fired workers actually felt relieved as soon as they were let go, because there was something truly unsettling about the hotel's very unorthodox design. The outside was like any other hotel at the time, but the inside was unlike anything they had ever been asked to build before. The blueprints called for secret

staircases, false walls and ceilings, trap doors and passageways that dead-ended into doors that when you opened them, you were just looking at a wall, into a room the blueprints also showed rooms that had no doors or windows and were only accessible via sliding walls or secret passageways and other rooms on the blueprints appeared normal but they were actually padded around the outside with a layer of asbestos that made them soundproof inside Dr Dr. Holmes' personal office space, workers were ordered to construct a large walk-in vault with a special room built around the outside of it to ensure that the vault could never be removed from the hotel unless the room itself was dismantled first. After one architect was declared incompetent by Dr. Holmes, he proceeded to walk off the site

wondering whether he'd been asked to build a hotel or a carnival-style funhouse. But anytime questions were raised about Dr. Holmes' design, the doctor would just say, I gave you the blueprints, please just build my hotel. So on the afternoon that Benjamin Pitzel made his way over to the hotel construction site and found Dr. Holmes, he saw that the doctor was in the middle of an argument with the man that he had hired to build a glass bending furnace in the basement that would produce the windows he hoped to sell in his retail store on the first level. The doctor was telling the furnace maker that the furnace he had just installed was not reaching high was telling the furnace maker that the furnace he had just

installed was not reaching high enough temperatures, a charge that the tradesman did not believe was true. After the furnace maker angrily stalked away, Dr. Holmes turned to Benjamin, who had put on his best suit and brushed off his worn top hat in preparation for what he hoped would turn into a job interview, and Dr. Holmes immediately noted the effort that Benjamin had clearly made in his appearance, and he instantly took a liking to the tall carpenter with the well-defined chin. To Dr. Holmes, Benjamin immediately seemed like the kind of person he needed to help guide this gargantuan construction project to the finish line. Someone who really knew carpentry and who

could handle themselves in what the doctor had come to feel was an increasingly hostile work site. By the end of their initial 15-minute conversation, Dr. Holmes had indeed offered Benjamin a job, and he recommended temporary lodgings in Englewood for Benjamin and his family. Within just a few weeks, Benjamin had stepped into a supervisory role at the construction site, and sure enough, under his direction, both the quality and pace of work picked up dramatically. And while this was certainly very exciting for Dr. Holmes, it was nothing compared to the excitement he felt in early 1890 when he realized his investment into

this hotel was about to pay off big time. In early 1890, Chicago got the news that they had just been named as the location for the 1893 World's Fair, beating out both New York City and St. Louis, Missouri. Chicago politicians and the team of architects who would design the buildings and exhibits for the extravaganza were already estimating that the massive event would attract at least 25 million visitors to the so-called Windy City, a nickname that Chicago had just earned not for the cold breeze that blew off of nearby Lake Michigan, but because of all the windy talk by Chicago politicians who had assured the World Fair Selection Committee that their upstart city in the Midwest could throw a party like no

one on earth had ever seen before. So even as Dr. Holmes tallied up the ever-rising costs of building this hotel, he knew as soon as that fair came to town, he was virtually guaranteed to become a very rich man. Because by that time, his hotel would be complete and all those fair attendees would come pouring through his doors looking to rent rooms. In late 1890, about 10 months or so after the announcement of the location of the World's Fair, Ned and Julia Connor were hired by Dr. Holmes to work on the first floor of his nearly completed hotel. Ned was hired to manage the newly opened little jewelry store, and Ned's wife, Julia, had been hired to keep the books in the new drugstore. And if that wasn't good news enough

for the couple, the doctor had also offered them, along with their eight-year-old daughter Pearl, free room and board on the second floor of the hotel until the parents earned enough money to buy or rent a place of their own. While Ned was a fairly average man who admired the ambitions of other men more than pursuing any big dreams himself, his wife, Julia, was a six-foot-tall beauty who was often annoyed by her husband's timidity. Back in Iowa, their lives had been quiet and predictable. Here in Chicago, Julia loved the flow of people into and out of the stores, and she also began to enjoy the attention of the men who were struck by her good looks and small-town naivete.

One man in particular, a regular at the hotel who always wore a black bowler hat and who had rooms on the second floor, began spending quite a lot of time in the drugstore listening very attentively to anything Julius said and standing very close to her when they talked. Ned was totally oblivious, but his customers were not. They could tell that there was obviously something going on between Ned's wife Julia and the man in the bowler hat. A visit from Ned's sister, Gertrude, warmed the increasingly chilly atmosphere that had settled over the room where Ned and Pearl and Julia lived, but not long into what was supposed to be an extended stay, Gertrude suddenly cut her visit short. She didn't give much of an explanation other than to say that she found the

hotel very gloomy and strange, and once or twice in the evening she had lost her way in the maze of hallways and she was certain someone was following her. With Gertrude gone, tensions in the Connor marriage came to a boiling point. Ned didn't know what was wrong with his wife, but it was clear she wanted nothing more to do with him. In the summer of 1891, when he finally threatened to leave her if things did not improve, her answer was immediate and final. Our separation can't happen soon enough. A few months after that, in November of 1891, Julia told the man in the bowler hat, who had gone from just paying close attention to her to sharing her bed, that she was pregnant. The man instantly agreed to marry her, but he had one very specific condition for marriage. Julia agreed to his terms, and after that, they set a date of Christmas Eve

to actually perform this very specific thing that the man in the bowler hat required in order to marry her. On Christmas Eve, December 24th, Julia tucked her eight-year-old daughter Pearl into bed. Pearl had missed her father terribly of late, but she was very excited about the presents that might be waiting for her tomorrow under the tree. After Pearl had fallen asleep, Julia left the room and quietly made her way down the dim hotel hallway to a suite of rooms where some of her friends lived. It was Mr. and Mrs. Crow who were long-term hotel guests. The couple would be leaving the next morning to spend Christmas with their relatives, but Mrs. Crow had invited Julia to decorate a tree in the

apartment for Pearl to enjoy the next day. While they hung ornaments, Julia chatted excitedly about Christmas and about her plans to go to Davenport, Iowa soon with Pearl for the wedding of Julia's older sister. The next morning, Mrs. Crow and her husband got up early and waited by the door patiently for Julia and Pearl to arrive at their apartment. Their plan was to let them in and chat with them for a few minutes and wish them a Merry Christmas before they left for their own Christmas celebration. But Julia and Pearl never arrived, and when Mrs. Crow went down the hallway to knock on Julia's door, there was no answer. Around the same time, while Dr. Holmes was on Christmas vacation himself,

he started to receive a number of letters from parents and relatives of women who had vanished. In all of these letters, these heartbroken parents, sisters, and brothers would say that their missing loved one had mentioned being in Englewood, Chicago before they went missing, and so could Dr. Holmes check to see if maybe they were at his hotel or if they had been there recently. Dr. Holmes was alarmed and kind of overwhelmed by these letters, and so he decided to just put them in his desk until he got back to work after the holiday. And when the holiday was over and he did go back to work at the hotel, before he could even begin to dive into these letters, Mrs. Crow

approached him and asked him if he knew where his employee, Julia Connor, and her daughter Pearl were, as they still had not been seen or heard from since Christmas Eve. When Dr. Holmes asked his janitor to check on Julia's room, the room looked as though Julia and Pearl had simply gotten up and walked out the door, intending to return at any moment, but obviously they hadn't. As strange as this was, Dr. Holmes knew Julia's marriage had collapsed and that she was trying to plan a trip back to Iowa with her daughter to see family, and so he told Mrs. Crow that Julia and Pearl must have just decided to go to Iowa early.

Mrs. Crow was not entirely sold because the whole thing seemed very strange, but she accepted the answer and walked away. After that, Dr. Holmes would spend some time looking into those letters about the other missing women, and he would send some follow-up responses to the family members and friends who had written him, mostly just saying that yes, some of these women had been at his hotel, but he really didn't know what happened to them after they left. Eventually, after looking at so many letters, Dr. Holmes decided that, you know, these missing people were really not his responsibility, and so he kind of just stopped writing back. A few months later, in the spring of 1892, a few weeks before the scheduled start of construction

of the Chicago World's Fair, Dr. Holmes hired another bookkeeper to replace Julia, who was still gone. The replacement bookkeeper was a 24-year-old friendly young woman named Emmeline Sagrand. She was from Indiana, and she had the lightest color blonde hair Dr. Holmes had ever seen. She was excited at the prospect of working right next to the World's Fair, and she'd brought her life savings with her, $800, which today would be worth more than $26,000.

Emmeline rented rooms in a boarding house near the hotel, and it wasn't long after starting her job at the hotel before Emmeline too had bumped into the handsome fellow who had earlier won the heart of Julia Connor, the man in the bowler hat. Soon, Emmeline and this man were spending as much time together as they could. Emmeline's handsome suitor taught her how to ride one of the newly designed bicycles that were all the rage, and when Emmeline wasn't working at the hotel, she and the man in the bowler hat, who had quickly become her lover, took long rides along the pathways just outside of Jackson Park, where the fair was slowly being set up.

Like hundreds of other residents of neighborhoods near Jackson Park, Emmeline and the man in the bowler hat watched arm-in-arm as the so-called White City of the Chicago's World Fair began to take shape in front of them. The White City was this huge stretch of land at the center of Jackson Park where big white stucco buildings were being built to house the fair's thousands of shows and exhibits. That summer, Emmeline's lover had asked her to marry him, and Emmeline hardly waited for him to finish his proposal before she said yes. But by the fall of that year, something had changed inside of Emmeline. She began talking to one of her good friends, her name was Mrs. Lawrence, about her desire to take a trip back to her family in Indiana, and hinting that it likely would be a long visit,

that she really needed a break from Englewood. Then, sometime during the first week of December of that year, Emmeline visited Mrs. Lawrence, who lived on the second floor of Dr. Holmes' hotel. But, not long after arriving, Emmeline told Mrs. Lawrence that she just hated being in that hotel. It was gloomy and dark and oppressive, and she just hated it. During this visit, Emily would also tell Mrs. Lawrence that she was worried about her life savings. She had handed it over to her fiancé, the man in the bowler hat, for safekeeping, as he had suggested. But every time she asked him to return it, he would just kind of blow her off. And as much as it pained her to say this out loud, she could tell his interest in her was also just

waning. Before she left, Emmeline would give Mrs. Lawrence a Christmas gift that she had bought for her. Mrs. Lawrence would smile and thank her, and she would tell Emmeline to be sure to come back closer to Christmas because she had a gift for her as well. But shortly after that visit, Emmeline, just like Julia Connor and her daughter Pearl, seemed to have vanished. Hello, I am Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of Wondery's podcast, British Scandal. On our latest series, The Race to Ruin, we tell the story of a British man who took part in the first ever round-the-world sailing race.

Good on him, I hear you say. But there is a problem, as there always is in this show. The man in question hadn't actually sailed before. Oh, and his boat wasn't seaworthy. Oh, and also, tiny little detail, almost didn't mention it. He bet his family home on making it to the finish line. What ensued was one of the most complex cheating plots in British sporting history.

To find out the full story, follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Hey, Mr. Ballin fans. Did you know you can listen to episodes of this very show ad-free and one month early on Amazon Music with your Prime membership? That's right.

All your favorite Mr. Ballin episodes can be heard on Amazon Music ad-free, and you'll always be the first one to catch our new episodes. But that's not all. You get access to other amazing shows like Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries, Morbid, 48 Hours, and 2020, all ad-free too. And you know what that means, uninterrupted listening, so no more cliffhangers. Amazon Music is your home for all things true crime and offers the most ad-free top podcasts, so we definitely have something for you. And it's already included in your Prime membership. To listen now, all you need to do is go to amazon.com slash ballin. That's amazon.com

slash ballin or download the free Amazon Music app. It's just that easy. When Mrs. Lawrence noticed Emmeline's absence, she went to Dr. Holmes' office to see if he knew where she went. And Dr. Holmes, with a slight look of frustration on his face, said that Emmeline had come to him and said she was leaving to get married and go on a honeymoon to Europe, and so he didn't know if she was coming back or not, which meant, once again, Dr. Holmes was without a bookkeeper and would need to hire yet another one. Three months later, in March of 1893, Dr. Holmes received yet another inquiry about a missing woman, but this time it was about a woman he recognized. The sender was Emmeline Sagran's father, asking if Dr. Holmes had information that might help the Sagrands find their daughter. Dr. Holmes was surprised and wrote back the same thing he had told Mrs. Lawrence,

that Emmeline had left the hotel in December because of her marriage plans. Dr. Holmes suggested that the Sagrand family contact her other employers and see if maybe they know something, and if they did learn anything about Emmeline's whereabouts to please contact him and let him know. Emmeline's disappearance put Julia's and Pearl's disappearance in a whole new light for Dr. Holmes. It also made Dr. Holmes look differently at all those letters he had gotten from the family and friends of other missing women in the area. But Dr. Holmes was a busy man, and so not long after writing back to Emmeline's father,

he was back focusing on expanding his business empire. An empire that included not only his hotel business, but also his mail order company that sold various ointments and elixirs he'd developed, including one he claimed cured alcoholism. A few months after Emmeline's father had sent that letter to Dr. Holmes, the World's Fair finally opened its doors. Thousands of people an hour strolled through the gleaming white exhibit halls inside of White City, where visitors from all over the world experienced, for the first time time things like elevators, moving pictures, voice recordings, Wrigley's chewing gum, Cracker Jack popcorn, and the zipper, which would

revolutionize women's fashion. It was the first time people would taste brownies and the sausages that would later become the Chicago-style hot dog. 38,000 people a day rode on the world's first Ferris wheel, which was more than 25 stories tall and equipped with compartments that looked like rail cars and that held up to 60 people each. There was one man in particular who seemed to attend the fair every night, and that was the man in the bowler hat. He was handsome and refined looking, and he smiled at all the ladies buying them cold dishes of ice cream while they watched the incredibly popular Wild West show put on by the famous frontiersman Wild Bill Cody. This same man who had seduced Julia Connor and Emmeline

Sagran before they went missing now graciously opened a path in the crowds for the older wealthy women whose families back home didn't expect to see them for days, and who would never know until it was too late that this wealthy mother or grandmother or relative was never going to come home at all. Smiling and attentive, the man in the bowler hat drifted in and out of the pavilions that housed exotic encampments of people from other countries and walked along the lagoons dotted with sailboats powered by brand new electric motors. Some nights, the man in the bowler hat left the fairgrounds alone. But other nights, as he headed toward Dr. Holmes' World Fair Hotel, he would be holding

the arm of a woman, leaning over her protectively as the two of them made their way toward the gloomy castle on 63rd and Wallace. By the time the fair ended on October 30th, 1893, Chicago had in fact shown the world that the Windy City could throw the party to end all parties. The fair wound up breaking all sorts of attendance records, with a staggering 27 million people passing through their gates into the White City, which now stood empty and abandoned inside of Jackson Park. But as successful as the fair had been, it also had a dark side. During the fair, 12 firefighters had died trying to put out a blaze that burned down the Hall of Electricity.

The mayor of Chicago, who was scheduled to be a part of the fair's closing ceremonies, was assassinated in his home just two days prior by a disgruntled and mentally ill voter. And police and private detective agencies were getting flooded with more and more reports of missing men and women, people who had left homes far away to see the wonders

of the world at this fair, and then were never seen again. But with a homicide rate of four murders a day in Chicago at the time, police were so overwhelmed by violent crimes that only a very small handful of these missing persons reports got any attention. As for Dr. Holmes, the fair had indeed made him a rich man, but it was bittersweet. Julia and her daughter Pearl were still missing, as was Emmeline, and many of the other missing people in the city had stayed at his hotel before they vanished. This of course caused Dr. Holmes a considerable amount of distress, but fortunately, during the fair, Dr. Holmes had met someone. And now, when he was with her, whatever stress he had just seemed to melt away. Her name was Georgiana Yoke. She was 23, small,

blonde, and had large blue eyes and a sharp mind. Together, they had wandered the fairgrounds, riding the Ferris wheel, and quickly falling in love. By the time the fair ended, they had gotten married. And then, not long after that, with his wife's encouragement, Dr. Holmes decided that as much as he wanted to help all of these families and people who kept writing to him about their missing loved ones, he simply couldn't. He didn't have any answers to give them. And so from then on, he simply began tucking the new letters he would receive every week into his desk drawer, and then he just did his best to keep going forward in his own life, assuming that the police would handle all of these missing people. But, as Dr. Holmes would eventually learn,

no matter what he did or where he went, he would forever be tied to those missing people. Because, before those people vanished, they encountered the monster that roamed the halls of his hotel. The man in the bowler hat. After the World's Fair ended, Dr. Holmes decided he needed to pursue a new business opportunity. And the idea he thought of was one that he had come up with years earlier

when he was a medical student at Michigan University. But at the time, for whatever reason, he had just not acted on this idea. The idea was a little complicated, but the payoff could be huge. However, in order to make it work, the doctor needed a very trustworthy partner. So, late in the summer of 1894, roughly eight months after the World's Fair had ended, Dr. Holmes looked up his good old trusty hotel construction foreman and close friend, Benjamin Peitzel, who was now living in St. Louis with his wife and children. Benjamin's drinking had only gotten worse over the years, and after finishing up the hotel project, he had struggled to make ends meet financially. So, after hearing Dr. Holmes' pitch about this new business idea, even though it required Ben

to move away from his wife and kids temporarily to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, something he really didn't want to do, and even though the plan seemed very risky, Ben ultimately agreed to do it. As for Benjamin's wife, Carrie, she was not thrilled at the idea of her husband being gone for an extended period of time, but like her husband, she trusted Dr. Holmes' business instincts. And just the year before, Dr. Holmes had actually paid out of pocket for Ben to get a life insurance policy worth $10,000, which is approximately $350,000 by today's standards. And as morbid as it was, the thought of that life insurance policy eased the anxiety Carrie felt about her husband temporarily relocating because if something

happened to him, their family would be okay, at least financially. So eventually, Carrie would give the plan her blessing. On the face of it, their plan was simple. Ben would rent office space in Philadelphia and get set up as a patent investor, someone who evaluates the potential success of newly patented inventions and invests money in the ones that look like they have good earning potential. With his knack for gadgets and machinery, all Ben really had to do was identify a couple of good money-making prospects. And then from there, Dr. Holmes would handle the rest. By August of 1894, Benjamin had arrived in Philadelphia and had found a small office with an upstairs set of bedrooms. In the downstairs

office window, anyone who was walking by could see a new, neatly lettered sign that read, Patents Bought and Sold. Ben didn't have to wait very long before he had his first customer. It was a young carpenter whose invention for improving the production and quality of handsaws was promising enough that Ben scheduled a second meeting with him for the following week. But when the young man came back the following week to the patent office on Tuesday, September 4th, Benjamin was nowhere to be found. After waiting nearly an hour downstairs, the young man began calling out for Benjamin, but there was no answer. So the young man decided to

go investigate. He stood up from the chair he was in and walked around the desk toward the back door of the office that led to a set of creaky stairs. He took those stairs up to the second floor, and as he turned down the short upstairs hallway toward a partially opened door, the young man suddenly stopped. There was this horrible smell in the air. He clapped his hand over his mouth and his nose, and with a terrible sense of dread, he walked forward and then pushed that partially open door all the way open. A minute later, gagging at what he had just seen, the young man was back out on the street. He ran to a nearby drugstore and he told the store owner that something terrible had just happened inside of the new patent investment office a few doors down. A few minutes later, the young man and that shop owner were looking down at the bloated and putrefying corpse of Benjamin Peitzel. Ben was lying on his back on the floor,

baking in the hot sunlight that was beating into the room through the glass of the closed window nearby. His hair and part of his face had been badly burned. His tongue was swollen and stuck out of his mouth. Also, draining out of his mouth was a stream of strange-looking red fluid. Just from the looks of it, it seemed fairly obvious that Benjamin had been dead at least for a couple of days. On the floor near Benjamin's body, there was a broken smoking pipe, a match, and a broken glass jar that had contained benzene, a highly flammable liquid that Ben had apparently been mixing with other acids to make a washing powder. An initial investigation by the police determined that Ben had died an accidental death. He must have just been standing too close to the jar of benzene

when he struck a match to light his pipe, and then the liquid must have exploded and killed him, burning his face and hair in the process. But based on an examination of Benjamin's body later that afternoon, a very different picture started to emerge about what really happened to Benjamin. And it would turn out what happened to Benjamin had everything to do with the monster inside of Dr. Holmes' hotel, the man in the bowler hat. Based on a series of discoveries that were made following Benjamin's death, this is a reconstruction of what really happened to him and who this monster really was. Two days before the young man discovered Benjamin's dead body, Benjamin was sitting at the big wooden

table in one of the rooms above his patent office. He'd just received a letter from his wife, Carrie, that said she and their two-year-old son, Wharton, were sick. Worried, Ben poured himself another glass of whiskey and fiddled absently with his pipe and tobacco pouch. Maybe he should abandon the plan and just go home to St. Louis, at least until Carrie and the children were all healthy again. But just when the whiskey had really started to warm his insides, Ben suddenly heard footsteps on the creaky stairway that led up to the room where he was now sitting. He felt a flash of concern. He wasn't expecting any visitors that day, and whoever had come inside had not rung the bell at the front

desk. Getting up from the table, Ben walked unsteadily to the door and peered down the hallway. But who he saw standing there immediately put him at ease. It was the man in the bowler hat. A man Benjamin knew well and had seen many times at Dr. Holmes' hotel in Chicago. But what on earth was the man doing here now? The man in the bowler hat casually slipped right past Ben and settled himself at the wooden table. bowler hat casually slipped right past Ben and settled himself at the wooden table. Without a word, he pulled a brand new pint of whiskey out of a coat pocket and put that down on the table as well. An hour later, just before Ben's eyes closed and his chin dipped to his chest, the man in the bowler hat realized with satisfaction that Ben was very, very drunk. Once he was sure Ben was asleep, the man in the bowler hat pulled

a small bottle of chloroform from another coat pocket, along with a big square of clean white cloth. The man tipped the contents of the bottle onto the cloth. Then, standing up and walking over to Ben, the man in the bowler hat pressed the cloth over Ben's mouth and nose. In low doses, chloroform can dull the sensation of pain. In high doses, when inhaled or swallowed, it can be deadly. The man in the bowler hat repeated the sequence several times, gradually upping the amount of chloroform he was administering to his victim. The man did not rush. He enjoyed feeling the slight jerk every time he pressed the cloth against Ben's face. Once the man was sure that Ben was dead, or at least close to it, he pulled Ben's body onto the floor on his back

and then poured another two ounces of the chloroform straight down Ben's throat, pressing down on Ben's chest at regular intervals to ensure that the drug made its way into Ben's stomach. Once he was satisfied that Ben was dead, the man in the bowler hat carefully arranged the scene so it would look like an accident, and just before he left, he set fire to Ben's hair and coaxed the flame down along the skin of Ben's face. But it would turn out the killer made a huge miscalculation, because the doctors at the morgue who would examine Benjamin's body just hours after it was discovered two days later on September 4th, they would find evidence that Ben's death was not an accident. That red fluid they saw draining out of the side of Ben's mouth was apparently a telltale sign that large amounts of chloroform had been

forced into his stomach. It would turn out Benjamin was not the man in the bowler hats' first murder victim. Many of the missing people back in Chicago, including Julia Connor, her daughter Pearl, and Emmeline Sagrand, whose heartbroken families and friends had written letters to Dr. Holmes asking for his help, had been lured into Dr. Holmes' hotel by this man in the bowler hat where he would kill them. And to everyone's shock, the man in the bowler hat was none other than Dr. Holmes himself. But as shocking as that was, it was nothing compared to the horrific details of the crimes Dr. Holmes committed. The tip that broke the case wide open and revealed Dr. Holmes' killing spree came from a fellow criminal who had met Dr. Holmes in St. Louis,

Missouri. In exchange for the name of a shady attorney who could help Holmes set up the patent office in Philadelphia, Holmes had revealed every detail of the intricate insurance scam he was going to pull off with Benjamin, and he promised this criminal a cut of the profits. According to the plan, Benjamin would arrive in Philadelphia, and once he was all set up as a patent investor, he and Holmes would fake Ben's death and then collect on Ben's life insurance policy, the one that Dr. Holmes had bought for him. And the way they had planned to fake his death was relatively simple. The doctor would substitute a badly decomposed and seemingly unidentifiable dead body from the morgue right in

the back of the patent office, and then when the body was discovered, the doctor and Ben's wife Carrie would both claim that the body was that of Benjamin PitecellSell, and then the Pite-Sells and Dr. Holmes would split the huge payout from the life insurance policy 50-50. Except that Dr. Holmes never had any intention of splitting that payout with anyone. Instead, immediately after Dr. Holmes had actually killed his close friend Ben, Dr. Holmes had returned to St. Louis and told Ben's wife Carrie that her husband was alive and well, the plan was going exactly as it should, but Ben would need to stay out of town for a while since people couldn't know he was actually alive. However, Dr. Holmes told Carrie that he knew where Benjamin was and that Benjamin really, really wanted to see his kids. And so Carrie

agreed to let her 13-year-old Alice, 11-year-old Nellie, and 8-year-old Howard go with Dr. Holmes to go see their father for a little while. And Carrie said she would join them all as soon as she and her other kids were well again. In reality, what Dr. Holmes had done was kidnap the three Pite Cell children. He took them away from their mother so he could hold them hostage while he forced her to give him more and more of her share of the insurance money. On November 17th, 10 weeks after Benjamin's death, detectives from the famous Pinkerton Private Security and Detective Agency, who had been hired by Philadelphia Fidelity Insurance Company, finally tracked Dr. Holmes down in Boston, Massachusetts. They immediately arrested

him, and even though they totally suspected he had killed Benjamin, they didn't have proof, so they could only charge him with fraud, and then they sent him to Philadelphia to stand trial. But it wasn't the fraud charges that would grip the world's attention. It was the fact that three of the Pitecell children were still missing, and the last time anyone had seen them, they were with the man suspected of killing their father. had seen them, they were with the man suspected of killing their father. And when Dr. Holmes and Ben's wife Carrie both appeared in court in Philadelphia to face these fraud charges, the stricken mother could not have cared less about the money. She had only one question for the police and for Dr. Holmes and for all of America. Where are my children? It was a question

that would become banner headlines across the country. It would also become an absolute obsession for one Philadelphia detective named Frank Geiser who was determined to find the answer. Throughout the summer of 1895, everyone in the country held their breath as they followed the path of Detective Geyser as he crisscrossed the United States and Canada looking for the missing Pite Cell children. Using letters that little Alice and Nellie had written to their mother over the weeks they were dragged from place to place by their captor, Dr. Holmes, Detective Geyser would eventually make three heartbreaking discoveries.

Dr. Holmes, of course, never actually sent these letters the girls had written, in which they had named and described different places they were staying, and they had begged their mother to come get them, or at least write back to them. Instead, Dr. Holmes kept their letters in a metal box that police would find among his possessions. On July 15th, buried in the backyard of a charming little house that Dr. Holmes had rented back in October of the previous year, Detective Frank Geiser found the bodies of the two Pitzel sisters. Alice and Nellie had been forced by Dr. Holmes to climb inside of a trunk together where they were gassed to death.

The doctor then dragged their small bodies outside and tossed them into a shallow grave. Before covering their bodies with earth, Dr. Holmes had cut off Nellie's legs so her body could not be identified by the girl's clubbed foot. It wasn't until weeks later on August 27th that Detective Geiser finally succeeded in finding the third missing pipe cell child, eight-year-old Howard. Dr. Holmes had poisoned the little boy, cut his body into pieces, and then burned the pieces inside of a coal stove in another house the doctor had rented in Indiana. Along with a clotted mass of the boy's hair and bones that had gotten caught inside of the stovepipe, Detective Geiser found the little boy's most

treasured possession collecting dust in the corner of the living room. It was a brightly colored spinning top with a handle in the shape of a tiny man that Benjamin had bought for his son at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. As news spread about the discovery of the three Pite Cell children's bodies, Dr. Holmes was finally charged with four counts of murder. On July 19th, shortly after the discovery of Alice and Nellie, Chicago police lined up outside of Dr. Holmes' hotel and began a floor-by-floor, room-by-room search of the building. And what they discovered would finally explain why the layout of Dr. Holmes' hotel was so strange. It was because he had literally built the hotel to kill people.

The moving doors and dead-end passages were perfect for stalking his disoriented guests, mostly young vulnerable women and older wealthy women whom he could rob before killing. After he killed them, he would slip their bodies into an opening in the wall on the second floor that led to a greased chute, and then the bodies would tumble down the chute into the basement where he could dispose of the corpses at his leisure. The furnace in the basement was not a glass-bending furnace. It was a furnace for cremating bodies. The hotel's soundproof rooms with the peepholes and the secret gas piping that led directly into them

meant that he could gas his victims and watch them slowly die in agony while no one could hear their screams and cries for help. And in one room, investigators discovered a blood-soaked wooden dissection table along with women's bloody clothes and undergarments and a bag of the doctor's lethal surgical tools. It was here on that dissection table that Dr. Holmes had taken Julia Connor late on Christmas Eve in 1891. She was pregnant with Dr. Holmes' baby, and the specific condition for marriage that Dr. Holmes had required that Julia had agreed to was that Julia would get an abortion performed by Dr. Holmes himself. But after Julia climbed up on that table to have this operation done, the doctor just began stabbing and slicing her.

After he killed Julia and then went upstairs and promptly killed her eight-year-old daughter Pearl, it's believed Dr. Holmes then stripped all the flesh from their bones and sold their skeletons to a nearby medical school. As for Emmeline Sagrand, instead of marrying his young assistant as promised on those afternoons they spent at the World's Fair, he lured her inside of the walk-in vault in his office and then shut and locked the door behind her. For a while, Dr. Holmes just allowed himself to enjoy the sound of her sobs and cries for help in the airless, soundproof chamber. But once those delicious noises began to ebb, he turned on the gas that led into the vault. Police would discover a print of Emmeline's foot stamped into the door of the vault where,

in her final moments, she had pressed with all of her might to try to force the door open. At Dr. Holmes' trial for the murder of Benjamin and the three Peitzel children, Dr. Holmes' wife, Georgiana Yoke, was shocked for a lot of reasons, but she was especially shocked to discover that she was actually one of three women all married to the same man, Dr. Holmes. Three living wives, that is. Dr. Holmes is also assumed to have killed one other woman who he married in order to inherit her deed to a valuable piece of land in Texas. As Dr. Holmes abandoned one wife after another without legally divorcing them, he also abandoned at least two legitimate children he had fathered. In April of 1896, convicted of murder, locked in prison, and facing the death penalty,

Dr. Holmes confessed to having committed at least 27 murders. confessed to having committed at least 27 murders. In his autobiography, Dr. Holmes wrote, I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer no more than a poet can help the inspiration to sing. On May 7, 1896, Dr. Holmes stepped up onto the gallows at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia. After kneeling down and murmuring a prayer to himself, Dr. Holmes stood and the guards put a black cloth bag over his head and placed a noose around his neck. At 10.13 a.m., the trap door underneath Dr. Holmes' feet suddenly opened, and down he fell.

It would take 15 minutes of violent squirming and jerking around before America's first serial killer was finally dead. Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast. If you got something out of this episode and you haven't done this already, please offer to house sit for the five-star review button. And when you're there, cut all the drawstrings on their sweatpants. Also, please subscribe to the Mr. Ballin podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Google, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. This podcast airs every Monday and Thursday morning. But in the meantime, you can always watch one of the hundreds of stories we have posted on our YouTube channel, which is just called Mr. Ballin. We now have a

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So she wound up taking him to the hospital right away so he could get treatment. While Dorothy's friend waited for his prescription, Dorothy went to grab her car to pick him up at the exit. But she would never be seen alive again, leaving us to wonder, decades later, what really happened to Dorothy Jane Scott? From Wondery, Generation Y is a podcast that covers notable true crime cases like this one and so many more. Every week, hosts Aaron and Justin sit down to discuss a new case covering every angle and theory, walking through the forensic evidence, and interviewing those close to the case to try and discover what really happened.

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