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.

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 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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.