her daughter had disappeared, but in August, 1895, the police
found in the castle some clothes identified as theirs, and the janitor,
Quinlan, admitted having seen the dead body of Mrs. Connor in the
castle. Holmes, questioned in his prison in Philadelphia, said that Mrs.
Connor had died under an operation, but that he did not know what had
become of the little girl.

In the year of Mrs. Connor's disappearance, a typist named Emily
Cigrand, who had been employed in a hospital in which Benjamin Pitezel
had been a patient, was recommended by the latter to Holmes. She entered
his employment, and she and Holmes soon became intimate, passing as
"Mr. and Mrs. Gordon." Emily Cigrand had been in the habit of writing
regularly to her parents in Indiana, but after December 6, 1892, they
had never heard from her again, nor could any further trace of her be
found.

A man who worked for Holmes as a handy man at the castle stated to the
police that in 1892 Holmes had given him a skeleton of a man to mount,
and in January, 1893, showed him in the laboratory another male skeleton
with some flesh still on it, which also he asked him to mount. As there
was a set of surgical instruments in the laboratory and also a tank
filled with a fluid preparation for removing flesh, the handy man
thought that Holmes was engaged in some kind of surgical work.

About a month before his execution, when Holmes' appeals from his
sentence had failed and death appeared imminent, he sold to the
newspapers for 7,500 dollars a confession in which he claimed to have
committed twenty-seven murders in the course of his career. The day
after it appeared he declared the whole confession to be a "fake."
He was tired, he said, of being accused by the newspapers of having
committed every mysterious murder that had occurred during the last
ten years. When it was pointed out to him that the account given in his
confession of the murder of the Pitezel children was clearly untrue,
he replied, "Of course, it is not true, but the newspapers wanted
a sensation and they have got it." The confession was certainly
sensational enough to satisfy the most exacting of penny-a-liners, and a
lasting tribute to Holmes' undoubted power of extravagant romancing.

According to his story, some of his twenty-seven victims had met their
death by poison, some by more violent methods, some had died a lingering
death in the air-tight and sound-proof vault of the castle. Most of
these he me