Part 6
I laughingly said to him, “Ben, you are sure they are not spent already?” He answered, “Oh, no! I have them placed away safely upstairs; I can go up and get them if you want me to;” and then started as if to do so. I gave him the money, saying that I did not require him to verify his statement.
That evening he came to my place of residence at about 8.30. I noticed at once that he had been drinking, and spoke to him of it, though not in anger, as it had always been my custom to wait until he became sober before chiding him. He told me that he had received word that one of his children was sick, and it might become necessary for him to go home. I asked him which child it was, and also told him he had better telegraph and instruct his wife to wire him if she thought it was necessary for him to go. He then spoke of leaving his business, and asked me what he should do about it if the man he was expecting to take an interest with him did not come on at once. I told him I thought it best for him to select the most trustworthy of his agents to leave in the office for a few days, reminding him that I had to go to St. Louis upon some legal business early in the week, and therefore could not aid him. I then bade him good night, telling him I had to go to the market near by before it should be closed. He said he would go with me. He waited at the market while I made my purchases, and returned with me almost without speaking. I then again said “good night.”
He said, “Can’t you come out again? I want to see you.” I told him as my wife was not well, I could not very well be absent longer, attributing his unusual request to his having been drinking; I also reminded him that I was to see him early the next day. He said in reply, “Then come out a moment now, and I will go home.” I did so, and he said, “You will have to let me have some money in case I have to go to St. Louis.” I said, “that will hardly be necessary; use what you have, and if the child dies or other unforeseen expense arises, I shall be in St. Louis during the week, and can then see to it.” He replied, “Well, I will have to tell you; I have not got any money save what you gave me to-day, and I have used part of that for liquor instead of paying my rent with it.” I said, “Ben, this makes over $1,600 you have wasted in debauchery and drink within the last seven months while your family have needed it. I am done. I told you in Fort Worth if it occurred again I should settle our business affairs, and thereafter you would have to care for yourself. I don’t want to talk with you to-night, but to-morrow I will go to your house, and I want to settle up not only the patent work, as we had intended, but all our other affairs, and in the future if I can spare any money it will be given to your family instead of to you, but I will go to see them upon my arrival in St. Louis, and will, if the child is dangerously sick, send you money to go home with.”
He said they had no money then to live on. I said, “If I find this to be so, I will give them some. It will not be the first time I have done so, and far in excess of what would have come to them had you been working elsewhere. For your own part, you will have to keep sober here in Philadelphia in order to make a living, which I know you can do if you try.” He was crying at the time. He then asked me if I would not help him to carry out the insurance work, having it appear he had been robbed there in the Callowhill street house. I replied, that inasmuch as he was persisting in drinking, it would not be a month after it was carried out before he told some one of it. He said, “You are in earnest; you will not help me anymore; I can do nothing alone.”
I replied, “I am in earnest, and will talk it all over with you to-morrow, and plan as best we can for the family,” and again bade him good night, and as he reluctantly started away I asked him to promise me not to drink again that evening, and to go at once to his home and to bed.
He promised to do this after first going again to the telegraph office to see if there were any messages for him. He then left me, and that is the last time I ever saw him alive.
I wish to say, however, that while I thought it wise and for his advantage for him to suppose he had got to care for himself in the future, I had no intention of abandoning him, if for no other reason than that he was too valuable a man, even with his failings taken into consideration, for me to dispense with. I should have gone through a form of settlement with him next day, and upon my return from St. Louis, if I found him sober, have gone on as before.
The next morning I went to the Callowhill street house, reaching there about 11 o’clock, entering with a key he had given me some weeks before to use if I came there in his absence. I found no one in the front portion of the house, and passed back into the kitchen; finding that also deserted, I went to the stairway and called him by name; receiving no answer, I went up the stairs so that I could look into the room where he slept.
He was not there, and I was much worried, thinking that, instead of coming home as he had promised, he had gone about the city and perhaps had been arrested. Upon returning to the kitchen, however, I noticed that there were evidences of a fire having recently been built in the stove, and, therefore, did not think more of the matter, concluding that he had gone to the post-office or telegraph office.
I then left the house, but before doing so I placed a chair in a narrow passageway at the end of a counter, to denote to him, if he returned before I did, that I had been there. I went to the Mercantile Library and read the foreign papers for about an hour, went to a place on Eleventh street where I had a box for my private mail, and then, buying a Philadelphia Sunday paper, I returned to the Callowhill street house, entering as before.
The chair was as I had left it. I sat down for a few minutes to read, then went into the kitchen and rekindled the fire, so that he could prepare us a light lunch as soon as he returned, while I was making up the necessary papers.
The fire soon making the lower rooms uncomfortably warm, I went up stairs and lay down upon his bed and resumed the reading of the paper. While there I noticed an unusual odor and finally got up. Upon going into the adjoining room I found perhaps two dozen small bottles containing a certain cleaning fluid upon the mantel, some of which were uncorked. This fluid contained some chloroform, ammonia and benzine among other ingredients, all being of a volatile nature.
I don’t know how long I stayed there, nor what time it was when I finally thought it best to go home, and I then went down stairs to his desk to write him a note. There among the paper I found a note written in a cipher we sometimes used, which read, “Get letter in bottle in cupboard,” or words to that effect. (This note being one that no one could read without my aid, I carried it in the small watch pocket of my pantaloons, until in Toronto, having a new suit of clothing made, from which my tailor had omitted such a pocket, I placed the note in a tin box of papers that later was taken by the authorities. The note is now, or should be, in their hands.)
I went to the kitchen cupboard, which was the only one I had noticed in the house, and there I found a whiskey flask, within which I could see some paper.
To get at it I quickly broke the bottle, and upon opening the letter I read, “I am going to kill myself, if I can do it. You will find me up stairs. I am worth more dead than alive.” I did not wait to finish the letter at that time, but went hurriedly up stairs. The only place on the second floor I had not had occasion to visit that morning was a small room under the stairway, and looking into it I found it empty.
I then ran up this stairway to the third story, a portion of the house I had never before been in.
It consisted of two low, small rooms, each having one small window. The door to one of these rooms was open. I instinctively turned to the room that was closed. Thrusting open the door and stepping within, I saw Pitezel lying upon the floor. I rushed to him, but before I had remained longer than to remove a large towel that was wrapped around his head, and not having time to find if he were alive, I was forced, owing to the overpowering odor of chloroform, together with the shock of coming upon him so suddenly and in such a condition, to leave the room, falling upon my knees and crawling a portion of the way until I finally reached the window in the adjoining room, which I opened, and in a few minutes had recovered myself sufficiently to return to the room where Pitezel lay, but again was forced to leave before I could make a satisfactory examination.
This time I had opened the window in this room as well, and presently was able to ascertain that he was dead. I then went to the hallway and sat down upon the stairs. I do not know how long I sat there, nor what I thought in the meantime. I had not yet wholly recovered from the effects of the chloroform, and was dazed. This was not due to having come suddenly upon a dead body, for my medical experience of years before had rendered me accustomed to disagreeable sights and scenes—but the man had been to me far more than an ordinary employee; one whom, although most of our tastes were dissimilar, I had always liked and had had fewer disagreements with than would likely have been the case had he been my own brother. And to come upon him thus had unmanned me.
I know the thought never came to me while sitting there that it might be dangerous for my own safety, the street door being then unlocked. After a time I returned to the room and made a careful examination.
He lay upon his back, his lower limbs fully extended, one arm folded upon his chest, the other thrown out at his side.
His head was slightly raised by means of a coarse colored blanket, closely folded. He was fully dressed, except his coat and vest which hung on a chair beside him. The pockets of his trousers were turned inside out, and in the waistband was a letter within an envelope addressed “C. A. P.”[2]
If asked to express an absolutely true opinion as to how long he had been dead, I should say not more than six hours.
Upon the chair was a large gallon bottle laying upon its side, so arranged that it would nearly empty itself, it being held in position upon one side by a hammer and upon the other by a small block of wood; from the bottle, and connected thereto by a perforated cork in which an ordinary quill toothpick had been inserted, there trailed a long piece of small rubber tubing, terminating at its free end in the towel I had removed upon first entering the room. This tube was constricted midway by a piece of cord tied about it, so that the flow of liquid would be slow.
Owing to the time that had elapsed after his death all the chloroform that could escape from the bottle, in the position in which it lay, had passed through the tube, filling his mouth and, as I later learned from the Coroner’s physician, his stomach as well; this one fact alone being sufficient to prove to any scientific person, or physician at least, that any one having a medical training would not, if obliged to use chloroform for such a purpose, carry it to such an extent if he wished it to appear later that the man died as the result of inhaling the vaporous fumes of chloroform and benzine, that had exploded in a bottle held in the victim’s hands.
The excess of the liquid had then run out upon the floor and on the blanket underneath his head. The only other articles in the room besides those already enumerated were some small pocket belongings, a knife, memoranda book, match box, containing some of our patent stamps, and perhaps twenty small coins; all these were placed on the chair beside the bottle. Upon the window-sill was a small handful of tacks with which he had fastened some newspapers upon the sash in lieu of a curtain.
By this time, owing to the excoriating effect of the chloroform his face had become somewhat discolored, and I went to the rooms below and procured a wet towel, and after covering the face with it I started down the stairs fully intending to call in some of the neighbors. Then came the thought that, instead of filling the house with a crowd of curious people, it would be better to go direct to the Coroner.
I know this thought was in my mind as I passed down the stairway, for I distinctly remember wondering in what part of the city the Coroner’s office was located, whether at the City Hall or elsewhere, and if it would be open on Sunday.
Reaching the kitchen I picked up the letter which, in my haste, I had let fall before going up stairs in search of him. The substance of the letter, beside that already given, was that he had tried to take his life in Mississippi during the previous June, and now with his drinking habit growing so much stronger day by day, he could not hope to make a living without my aid. He wished me to so arrange his body in one of two ways that it would appear that his death had been either accidental or that he had been attacked by burglars and killed, giving the details of how I was to carry out either course:—
First, that his family should not at present know of his death;[3] second, that the children should never know he had committed suicide (this he also repeated in the letter left for his wife); that the insurance money should be used to place the Fort Worth building in an earning condition, and that I should exchange some Chicago property we owned for some house in a city with good school advantages; that none of the money should be so placed that relatives could borrow it away from his wife. He spoke of our close connection for years, and that he could depend upon my aiding him now and in the future, ending his directions with the words:—
“Do enough with me so there won’t be any slip-up on the insurance; I shan’t feel it.” The letter was poorly written, and it took me some minutes to decipher it, and upon finishing it, I sat down for a time and re-read parts of it. This gave me time to consider my own position, and as soon as it came into my mind, but before I had decided to carry out his instructions, I went into the front office and locked the street door.
The thought that troubled me most at that time was, that under no conditions, whether the insurance part was carried out or not, was I the one to discover his dead body. I was here in Philadelphia under an assumed name. A few years earlier I had stopped at some hotels and met people under the name of Holmes. Some years before that I had done business here under still another name, and at another time, earlier yet, I had visited relatives here under my true name.
And now at this time, to be called as a witness before a Coroner’s jury, would almost certainly cause me to be identified by some one; and if under the name of Holmes, it was more than likely to be seen in the papers by some Fort Worth people, and would probably result in my arrest upon the charges there, and my arrest at this time I was satisfied would mean death to my wife.
Again, I had an engagement in St. Louis for the following Thursday morning, to fail to keep which would result in the loss of a considerable sum of money, and also prove a source of great annoyance to my attorney, who was personally responsible for my appearance there. Besides this, Pitezel was dead; nothing I could do here would aid him, while in St. Louis I could be of the utmost benefit to his family, by forestalling the announcement of his death reaching them through the newspapers, by seeing them personally, and also caring for the child that was sick, if need be. This portion of the matter was settled in my mind at once, then came the question whether I should do anything to aid in the deception of the insurance matter or simply remove the letter he had written to his wife, lest it contain matters that should not be made public and go away. One of his plans I did not entertain for a moment, the one involving striking him upon the head severely enough to crush his skull. Had my own life depended upon it, I could not have forced myself to strike his dead body even had I been sure there was no suicide clause in his insurance policy. I should have preferred to have told his family at once of his death, contrary to his wishes, in preference to doing anything to mislead the authorities, involving, as it necessarily must, some mutilation of the body.
I had never seen the policy, but from my friend the insurance agent’s statement that it was similar to mine, I judged it contained such a clause. Nor did I know whether or not the suicide clause was inoperative in Pennsylvania as it is in many other States. (All these things I most certainly should have found out previously if I had been intending to immediately carry out the fraud.) After considerable deliberation, I went to the room in the second story that he had partially prepared, uncorked the small bottles I had previously found there, and also found the pipe he had filled with tobacco, the top of which was slightly burned as though he had just lighted it before his accident occurred.
He did this part of the work previous to his death, knowing that I did not smoke or knew little of filling pipes intelligently enough to deceive any one. Having placed the room in the condition necessary (breaking the large bottle, placing pipe upon the floor, etc.), I moved his body as carefully as possible to this second-story room. I found that the chloroform had given the side of the face and neck and part of the chest quite the appearance of having been burned, and this made my task the easier, although it seemed terrible enough in any event.
At last I forced myself to burn the clothing upon one side of the body, smothering the flames when they reached the flesh, and in this way produced partially successful results; then hastily gathering together several small articles that I wished to take away with me, I placed the room somewhat in order, and after going again to the room where he lay to see him, as I then supposed for the last time, I at once left the house, disguising myself to some extent by wearing one of his hats, for I had been fully alive to the necessity of care after I had first had time to think of the matter. Among the things taken from the house was a bottle of chloroform, which he had previously bought in Philadelphia, and prepared to send to Chicago to be placed with the clothing and other things for Hedgpeth’s use.
In going out of the house I was careful to leave the door both unlocked and open, in order to call attention to the condition of affairs within as soon as possible. Upon reaching the more pure air of the street I was seized with a feeling of nausea and dizziness, resulting probably as an after-effect of the chloroform-laden air within.
I knew my general appearance must have been that of an intoxicated person. To become relieved of this feeling somewhat if possible, I decided to walk a portion of the distance to my residence, and while doing so decided that it was best, my wife being well enough, to leave Philadelphia at once, thinking that Pitezel had no doubt spoken of me to some of his newly-made friends, and perhaps told them where I lived. I, therefore, went to the Broad Street Station and ascertained that a train would leave in half an hour (so I know now that I left the Callowhill street house, at about 3.45 o’clock, as the train referred to was the regular 4.30 Western train); I found that another train left for the West at 10.25 P. M.; and although my wife was not able to do so, I took her as carefully as I could to this train and left at that hour.
I have often since that day tried to analyze the feelings which I had at the time of Pitezel’s death. I felt it to be a terrible matter, and certainly could not have deplored it more had he been a relative, but I did not then, nor have I since felt the great horror concerning it that I experienced at the time of Nannie Williams’ death in Chicago, which was wholly unprovoked and for which I felt that I was the indirect cause; while in this case, his death occurred as the result of his own premeditation, in consequence of his having allowed himself to slowly drift into pernicious habits for which he was more than any one else to blame. Upon reaching Indianapolis, I was occupied until Wednesday noon, September 5th, in arranging comfortable quarters for my wife, at which time I started for St. Louis, reaching that city about 7 P. M., having bought upon the train a St. Louis _Globe-Democrat_, giving in a Philadelphia dispatch an account of the finding of Pitezel’s (Perry’s) body in the Callowhill street house upon the previous day.
After a short delay I went at once to Mrs. Pitezel’s place of residence, about an hour’s ride from the centre of the city, hoping to be in time to tell them of the matter myself. Upon reaching the house, however, I found all in a state of commotion.
The neighbors were there, a physician had been summoned, and it was some time before I could obtain a suitable opportunity to talk with Mrs. Pitezel. I found her in a very nervous and over-wrought condition, and I thought it best to palliate her fears for a time, and, therefore, said to her, “Perhaps Ben is not dead. There may be a mistake in the person, as I saw him alive last week.”
To which she answered, “Oh, no! I am sure it is he, for I have been writing to him under that name and at that address.” Just at this moment Dessie, the oldest daughter, called me to one side and said, “Do you think papa is really dead?” I replied that I feared so, but that her mother should not be told until we were certain of it. She said, “I don’t think he is. Last spring, when I was sick and he was leaving me, he told me that if I ever heard that he was dead not to believe it, as some work he was going to do might require him to have people think so for a time.” I asked her if he had told her mother of this, and she said, “No; her father had told her not to tell any one.” As soon as a favorable opportunity occurred, I said to Mrs. Pitezel, “Did Ben ever say anything to you about not worrying if you heard of his death?” She replied, “Yes;” and, after stopping a moment, added, “If he has gone and done that without letting us know, leaving us to worry ourselves to death, I could almost wish he was dead. Is it the insurance matter?” “I guess it is,” I replied, in such a tone that she would think that I knew it to be so. She then asked if he would get the money all right, and I told her that it would be paid to her, if anyone. She asked, “Where is Ben now?” I replied that it was his plan to go South at once. She said, “Well, I do not want him writing to me; all his letters for me must go to you; and the children need not know but that he is really dead, for they would certainly tell of it; they are young, and will soon get over the worry.” I asked if the insurance policy was there in the house, and she said, “I do not know; I will see; he ought to have given it to you if he was going through with it so soon; it may be in Chicago among some things stored in a warehouse there.”