He had gone to Washington early Friday, arriving at 2 P. M., hired a furnished room near the Union Station, and two hours later walked over to the Capitol and found the Senate wing deserted. He placed a bomb near the telephone booth, timed so as to explode in eight hours. He idled away the evening, mailed the R. Pearce letters, took a midnight train to New York, stopped at the Mills Hotel for mail, and took an early train to Glen Cove Saturday morning. What his activities had been since then we well knew. But while the confession of his responsibility for the Washington outrage was a really surprising bit, it did not conclude our work, for he had pointed out several new alleys of possibility which we must search.
By seven o’clock we had, first, a sketch of Holt’s recent career as a teacher. This we proceeded to verify by telephone to New York and by telegraph thence to Ithaca, Dallas, Nashville, and Philadelphia. His account of the Washington bombing Mr. Scull telephoned to Washington, and Major Pullman left at once for Long Island to secure a more complete confession. We had the numbers of his revolvers and were already at work upon that clue. We had no information except the trade-mark of where he had got his dynamite, and knowing the strict city restrictions on its sale, I felt confident that he had accomplices who supplied it to him. The chances were, too, that Holt had more dynamite than the three sticks which he said had made up the Capitol bomb, and the three on his person. We knew he had called at the Mills Hotel, and we sent a man to search his room. We had a wholly unsatisfactory statement of his birthplace, which he had already contradicted once, and which lent color to the Germanic origin of his accent. And finally, Holt had given a description of the methods he used in making his bomb which I cannot detail here for obvious reasons, but which from my acquaintance with explosives I knew to be untrue. By no means all the particulars of his acquaintance with dynamite had been explained, and the fact that this remarkable teacher of foreign languages, a man apparently of fair intellect, had committed one major crime and confessed to another all in the same day, made the motive all the more obscure. But we had learned that he talked freely, and that meant that he would give us more information, either consciously or unconsciously.
Holt was moved about half past seven that night to safer keeping in the county jail at Mineola, and we reconvened there an hour later for further examination. Major Pullman joined us in the course of the evening and took part in the questioning. By that time I had word from New York that a telegram had arrived for Holt at the Mills Hotel signed by D. F. Sensabaugh, and inquiring for particulars. Thinking that this was a clue to possible accomplices I tried, taking several different angles of attack, to find out whether Holt had told Sensabaugh (who he said was his father-in-law), what he was going to do, and why he had written that evening to his wife. The result of this questioning was nil. Then we went over his course in Washington, step by step, and brought out nothing of significance; then returned to the topic of his views on the shipment of munitions, and tried to draw out any talks which he might have had with friends on that subject. His answer to this was:
“I have not talked to my friends about it, because my friends, in my position, they are not the kind of people who would talk on such things. Do you suppose that a university professor would undertake that sort of thing? I think that can be easily figured out that I could not have anybody else with me.”
That was the conclusion which we were being forced to accept. But the mystery of the dynamite purchase was still unsolved. Holt said we could not guess the reason why he was withholding the answer to it. I was inclined to agree with him just then. I couldn’t guess. But he betrayed in one of his replies the real factor which was to solve the mystery. Major Pullman asked:
“Why did you decide to go to the Capitol?”
“Merely,” replied the thin figure in the chair, “to get the most prominent place in the country. You see I wanted to call attention to my appeal.”
In this he had succeeded. The whole country was working on the case. If our feeling that Holt had bought more explosives was no more than a theory at first, it was strengthened when he admitted that he had spent nearly $275 in two weeks, had only six sticks of dynamite to show for it, and was able to account for only $50. He denied that he had ever been in the German Club in New York, reiterated that he was born in the United States, dodged the exact city, then suggested Milwaukee, said that the name of the college he had attended in Texas “wouldn’t come,” and sidestepped cleverly any admission which might allow us to trace the dynamite purchase. Thus ended Saturday, July 3, which had started out as a holiday. I left two men to watch Holt, and went home, tired out, and not at all satisfied.
While we had been busy with the prisoner, the wires to Boston and the trains to Chicago had been carrying out their routine tasks of syndicating news. A police officer in Cambridge in reading the description of Holt which had flashed out to the newspapers detected a familiar ring to the natural phrase “shambling walk” which had been used to describe Holt’s gait. Thousands of men whom we encounter in daily life have shambling walks, but to this officer only one man had a shambling walk in which he was interested, and that man was Erich Muenter, a Harvard instructor, whom he had suspected of wife-murder nine years before. Nine years is a long time, and the average person cannot recall offhand the gait of anyone whom he last saw nine years ago, but those two words had evidently typified to the Cambridge officer the murderer who got away. When the news photographs followed the description to Boston and the Cambridge police saw them, they were not so sure, for Muenter had had a beard, and in his Cambridge days his head was not bandaged. But suspicion had been aroused, and that was enough to issue the news throughout the country during the night. Reporters in Ithaca tried to verify it from Holt’s associates at Cornell, and failed, reporters two thousand miles away in Dallas tried to verify it from Holt’s confused father-in-law, and failed. Dallas, however, supplied the particulars of his previous life so far as anyone seemed to know them, and these particulars were again relayed, verified, and amplified in every city in which Holt had ever been known in recent years.
Sunday morning, Independence Day, I went early to Mineola and questioned Holt again, with little result. Meanwhile the Bomb Squad at work in New York had found one of the shops in Jersey City where Holt had purchased a revolver. He gave his name to the proprietor as “Henderson,” and his address as Syosset, Long Island—a little station not far from Glen Cove. I asked him why he gave this fictitious name and address; he replied he had happened to see Syosset on a timetable, and that the name Henderson popped into his head. We then returned to my favorite subject, dynamite, and Holt finally said that he would tell me on the following Wednesday, July 7, where he had bought it. Why Wednesday, July 7? He would not answer, and no amount of questioning served any end except that of further confusion.