title: A Competent Witness: Georgiana Yoke and the Trial of H. H. Holmes
author:  Judith Nickels 
description: A masterful study . . . Nickels writes very well and researches thoroughly . . . The portrait of Georgiana is wonderfully fleshed out . . . sensitively and well-limned. <i>-- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)</i>
zlib_text: 
  
  
  ## [One](thesixthwife_split_002.xhtml#ch_01)
  
  
  
  
  
  ### ![logo](image1.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  I won’t testify. They’ll get no help from me. Not that they need it, the trial
  being a formality. It’s over already for him. No need for this investigation,
  the intimidation and confessions. And anyway they should have left him to it,
  saved themselves the bother. He’d have ended up doing the job for them. He’d
  have got nowhere, in the end. Got away with nothing.
  
  
  It seems they have little better to do, though, than rubbish the memory of a
  good woman who’s barely cold in the ground. That’s what’s happening: it’s
  making her look bad, what they’re digging up on her widower. Making her look
  as if she was beguiled and hapless.
  
  
  _Kate?_
  
  
  Listen: she’d dealt with it; it was all dealt with. She’d dealt with Thomas
  and the mess he’d made. She’d saved everybody’s skin.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  One mistake: that was all Thomas was in her life. Could just as easily not
  have been a fatal one, that mistake; just the turn of events m