more than a month's search he
was traced to his father's house at Gilmanton, N. H., and arrested in
Boston on November 17.

Inquiry showed that, early in 1894, Holmes and Pitezel had acquired some
real property at Fort Worth in Texas and commenced building operations,
but had soon after left Texas under a cloud, arising from the theft of a
horse and other dubious transactions.

Holmes had obtained the property at Fort Worth from a Miss Minnie
Williams, and transferred it to Pitezel. Pitezel was a drunken "crook,"
of mean intelligence, a mesmeric subject entirely under the influence of
Holmes, who claimed to have considerable hypnotic powers. Pitezel had a
wife living at St. Louis and five children, three girls--Dessie, Alice,
and Nellie--a boy, Howard, and a baby in arms. At the time of Holmes'
arrest Mrs. Pitezel, with her eldest daughter, Dessie, and her little
baby, was living at a house rented by Holmes at Burlington, Vermont. She
also was arrested on a charge of complicity in the insurance fraud and
brought to Boston.

Two days after his arrest Holmes, who dreaded being sent back to Texas
on a charge of horse-stealing, for which in that State the punishment is
apt to be rough and ready, made a statement to the police, in which he
acknowledged the fraud practised by him and Pitezel on the insurance
company. The body substituted for Pitezel had been obtained, said
Holmes, from a doctor in New York, packed in a trunk and sent to
Philadelphia, but he declined for the present to give the doctor's name.
Pitezel, he said, had gone with three of his children--Alice, Nellie
and Howard--to South America. This fact, however, Holmes had not
communicated to Mrs. Pitezel. When she arrived at Boston, the poor woman
was in great distress of mind. Questioned by the officers, she attempted
to deny any complicity in the fraud, but her real anxiety was to get
news of her husband and her three children. Alice she had not seen since
the girl had gone to Philadelphia to identify the supposed remains of
her father. Shortly after this Holmes had come to Mrs. Pitezel at St.
Louis, and taken away Nellie and Howard to join Alice, who, he said,
was in the care of a widow lady at Ovington, Kentucky. Since then Mrs.
Pitezel had seen nothing of the children or her husband. At Holmes'
direction she had gone to Detroit, Toronto, Ogdensberg and, lastly, to
Burlington in the hope of meeting either Pitezel or the children, but
in vain. She believe