Geyer Quotes

People lose sight of their dreams, only to hold tight their fears.

We all see the world through our own lies.

Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

Why had Holmes taken the children? Why had he engineered that contorted journey from city to city? What power did Holmes possess that gave him such control? There was something about Holmes that Geyer just did not understand. Every crime had a motive. But the force that propelled Holmes seemed to exist outside the world of Geyer’s experience. He kept coming back to the same conclusion: Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for the money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend the lives of people.

He resolved for Detective Geyer to undertake a careful and methodical search for the blunder which a criminal always makes between the inceptions and consummation of his crime.

At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year.

A smile is hidden beneath the mustache, it crinkles the corners of his hooded eyes. “I didn’t. I have other business in town and I told my friend I would attend to the matter of his son, as he could not do so himself.” “Very kind of you.” “Yes. I have been looking forward to it for quite some time.” Daddy’s lemonade is almost gone, he sips it carefully, turning his eyes back to the water. “Looking forward to seeing the lad or to conducting your business?” Daddy is toying with him. “Both. You see, I had never actually met his son.” The glass rests against Daddy’s lips, unmoving. Mr. Geyer watches him closely. “But now I have, so I can get on with my,” he fixes his own gaze on the water, as though trying to see whatever it is that has transfixed my father, “business.

DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels and mystery stories. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison

Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported. Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Holmes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

Geyer and Gary looked at each other and wearily sat down. All the weeks of travel in the hottest months of the year investigating lead after lead, alternating between faith, hope, discouragement, and despair.

Somewhere in the midst of a great story was a profound untruth so dark, that if true, would have wiped the direct line of Detective Frank Geyer’s future generations of family off the face of the earth.

It was more than a show of support for the new president, it was a show of immense compassion, for two months before his inauguration, Franklin Pierce and his wife, Jane, suffered an unthinkable tragedy…

Frank and other boys his age watched with wonder and excitement as squads drilled in vacant lots throughout the city. They fantasized about joining the Army to show support for the cause. If government let high-schoolers fight along side fathers, uncles and brothers, why not let fifth and sixth graders join the Army too?

Emotional and filled with unthinkable sorrow, Mrs. Pitezel had to see where Howard took his last breath—where Holmes ripped her son from her.

Thousands of soldiers, ink barely dry on discharge papers, begged in vain to start a new campaign of revenge.

The short, but powerful police officer left a saloon and went straight for the police station, set out to do exactly what he planned even if no one believed a drunk like him.

While Geyer was on the German steamship to Rio de Janeiro, his co-workers struggled to cope with intense emotions. The day after forty-five miners died in the Roslyn, Washington, explosion, Philadelphia suffered a tragedy of their own—one that would rock City Hall and its police force to its core.

It must have taken very careful management to have moved these three separate parties from Detroit to Toronto, without either of the three discovering either of the others, but this great expert in crime did it, and did it successfully,” Geyer later said.

Despite a protective Geyer threatening to “break the neck of the first reporter who attempted to interview the woman,” a determined reporter caught Mrs. Pitezel on her way out of the Rossin House dining room.

While United States sent troops to war, bitter racial tensions erupted into an all-out race riot in South Philadelphia. And unbeknownst to a petite, young, professional woman—she was the cause.

. . . the two families were about to be impacted in a major way as Philadelphia and the rest of the world were slammed with a pandemic so catastrophic that it killed more people than World War I.

Rot! Absolute rot! Hatch was merely an alias of Holmes. He had as many as a city directory, but he used the name Hatch frequently. If Hatch did the killing, Holmes will hang for it, for Holmes and Hatch are one and the same person,' Linden said.

As Baldwin writes: ‘the bombing raids’ indiscriminate destruction, blighting Bloomsbury as thoroughly as Brixton, prepared the ground psychologically for a wider sharing of risks.