The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America
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He went on to identify for Ulrich the things that most worried him about the fair, among them the color scheme chosen by Burnham and the architects. “Let me remind you that the whole field of the Exposition has already come to be popularly called ‘THE WHITE CITY’. … I fear that against the clear blue sky and the blue lake, great towering masses of white, glistening in the clear, hot, Summer sunlight of Chicago, with the glare of the water that we are to have both within and without the Exposition grounds, will be overpowering.” This, he wrote, made it more important than ever to provide a counterbalance of “dense, broad, luxuriant green bodies of foliage.”
Clearly the possibility of failure at the exposition had occurred to Olmsted and troubled him. Time was short, the weather terrible. The spring planting season would be brief. Olmsted had begun to think in terms of fallback arrangements. He warned Ulrich, “Do not lay out to do anything in the way of decorative planting that you shall not be quite certain that you will have ample time and means to perfect of its kind. There can be little fault found with simple, neat turf. Do not be afraid of plain, undecorated, smooth surfaces.”
It was far better, Olmsted lectured, to underdecorate than to over-decorate. “Let us be thought over-much plain and simple, even bare, rather than gaudy, flashy, cheap and meretricious. Let us manifest the taste of gentlemen.”
Snow fell, bales of it. It fell day after day until hundreds of tons of it lay upon the rooftops at Jackson Park. The exposition was to be a warm-weather affair, set to run from May through October. No one had thought to design the roofs to resist such extreme loading from snow.
Men working at the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building heard the shriek of failed steel and ran for cover. In a great blur of snow and silvery glass the building’s roof—that marvel of late nineteenth-century hubris, enclosing the greatest volume of unobstructed space in history—collapsed to the floor below.
Soon afterward, a reporter from San Francisco made his way to Jackson Park. He had come prepared to admire the grand achievement of Burnham’s army of workers but instead found himself troubled by what he saw in the stark frozen landscape.
“This seems to be an impossibility,” he wrote. “To be sure, those in charge claim that they will be ready on time. Still the cold-blooded fact stares one in the face that only the Woman’s Building is anywhere near completion inside and out.”
Yet the fair was to open in little more than two months.
Acquiring Minnie
FOR HOLMES, DESPITE THE PERSISTENT deep cold of the first two months of 1893, things never looked better. With Emeline gone and neatly disposed of, he now was able to concentrate on his growing web of enterprises. He savored its scope: He owned a portion of a legitimate company that produced a machine for duplicating documents; he sold mail-order ointments and elixirs and by now had established his own alcohol-treatment company, the Silver Ash Institute, his answer to Keeley’s gold cure; he collected rents from the Lawrences and his other tenants and owned two houses, one on Honoré Street, the other the new house in Wilmette now occupied by his wife Myrta and daughter Lucy, which he himself had designed and then built with the help of as many as seventy-five largely unpaid workers. And soon he would begin receiving his first world’s fair guests.
He spent much of his time outfitting his hotel. He acquired high-grade furnishings from the Tobey Furniture Company, and crystal and ceramics from the French, Potter Crockery Company, and did so without paying a dime, though he recognized that soon the companies would attempt to collect on the promissory notes he had given them. This did not worry him. He had learned through experience that delay and heartfelt remorse were powerful tools with which he could fend off creditors for months and years, sometimes forever. Such prolonged standoffs would not be necessary, however, for he sensed that his time in Chicago was nearing an end. Mrs. Lawrence’s questioning had become more pointed, almost accusing. And lately some of his creditors had begun exhibiting an extraordinary hardening of resolve. One firm, Merchant & Co., which had supplied the iron for his kiln and vault, had gone so far as to secure a writ of replevin to take the iron back. In an inspection of the building, however, its agents had been unable to find anything they could identify conclusively as a Merchant product.
Far more annoying were the letters from parents of missing daughters and the private detectives who had begun showing up at his door. Independently of each other, the Cigrand and Conner families had hired “eyes” to search for their missing daughters. Although at first these inquiries troubled Holmes, he realized quickly that neither family believed he had anything to do with the disappearances. The detectives made no mention of suspecting foul play. They wanted information—the names of friends, forwarding addresses, suggestions on where to look next.
He was, of course, happy to oblige. Holmes told his visitors how much it grieved him, truly deeply grieved him, that he was unable to provide any new information to ease the worry of the parents. If he heard from the women, he of course would notify the detectives at once. Upon parting, he shook each detective’s hand and told him that if his work should happen to bring him back to Englewood anytime in the future, by all means stop in. Holmes and the detectives parted as cheerily as if they had known each other all their lives.
At the moment—March 1893—the greatest inconvenience confronting Holmes was his lack of help. He needed a new secretary. There was no shortage of women seeking work, for the fair had drawn legions of them to Chicago. At the nearby Normal School, for example, the number of women applying to become teacher trainees was said to be many times the usual. Rather, the trick lay in choosing a woman of the correct sensibility. Candidates would need a degree of stenographic and typewriting skill, but what he most looked for and was so very adept at sensing was that alluring amalgam of isolation, weakness, and need. Jack the Ripper had found it in the impoverished whores of Whitechapel; Holmes saw it in transitional women, fresh clean young things free for the first time in history but unsure of what that freedom meant and of the risks it entailed. What he craved was possession and the power it gave him; what he adored was anticipation—the slow acquisition of love, then life, and finally the secrets within. The ultimate disposition of the material was irrelevant, a recreation. That he happened to have found a way to make disposal both efficient and profitable was simply a testament to his power.
In March fortune brought him the perfect acquisition. Her name was Minnie R. Williams. He had met her several years earlier during a stay in Boston and had considered acquiring her even then, but the distance was too great, the timing awkward. Now she had moved to Chicago. Holmes guessed that he himself might be part of the reason.
She would be twenty-five years old by now. Unlike his usual selections, she was plain, short, and plump, her weight somewhere between 140 and 150. She had a masculine nose, thick dark eyebrows, and virtually no neck. Her expression was bland, her cheeks full—“a baby face,” as one witness put it. “She didn’t seem to know a great deal.”
In Boston, however, Holmes had discovered that she possessed other winning attributes.
Born in Mississippi, Minnie Williams and her younger sister, Anna, were orphaned at an early age and sent to live with different uncles. Anna’s new guardian was the Reverend Dr. W. C. Black, of Jackson, Mississippi, editor of the Methodist Christian Advocate. Minnie went to Texas, where her guardian-uncle was a successful businessman. He treated her well and in 1886 enrolled her at the Boston Academy of Elocution. He died in the midst of her three-year program and bequeathed to her an estate valued at between $50,000 and $100,000, (about $1.5 to $3 million in twenty-first-century dollars).
Anna, meanwhile, became a schoolteacher. She taught in Midlothian, Texas, at the Midlothian Academy.
When Holmes met Minnie, he was traveling on business under the alias Henry Gordon and found himself invited to a gathering at the home of one of Boston’s leading families. Through various inquiries Holmes learned of Minnie’s inheritance and of the fact that it cons
isted largely of a parcel of property in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas.
Holmes extended his Boston stay. Minnie called him Harry. He took her to plays and concerts and bought her flowers and books and sweets. Wooing her was pathetically easy. Each time he told her he had to return to Chicago, she seemed crushed, delightfully so. Throughout 1889 he traveled regularly to Boston and always swept Minnie into a whirl of shows and dinners, although what he looked forward to most were the days before his departure when her need flared like fire in a dry forest.
After a time, however, he tired of the game. The distance was too great, Minnie’s reticence too profound. His visits to Boston became fewer, though he still responded to her letters with the ardor of a lover.
Holmes’s absence broke Minnie’s heart. She had fallen in love. His visits had thrilled her, his departures destroyed her. She was perplexed—he had seemed to be conducting a courtship and even urged her to abandon her studies and run with him to Chicago, but now he was gone and his letters came only rarely. She gladly would have left Boston under the flag of marriage, but not under the reckless terms he proposed. He would have made an excellent husband. He was affectionate in ways she rarely encountered in men, and he was adept at business. She missed his warmth and touch.
Soon there were no letters at all.
Upon graduation from the Academy of Elocution, Minnie moved to Denver, where she tried to establish her own theatrical company, and in the process lost $15,000. She still dreamed about Harry Gordon. As her theater company collapsed, she thought of him more and more. She dreamed also of Chicago, a city everyone seemed to be talking about and to which everyone seemed to be moving. Between Harry and the soon-to-begin World’s Columbian Exposition, the city became irresistible to her.
She moved to Chicago in February 1893 and took a job as a stenographer for a law firm. She wrote to Harry to tell him of her arrival.
Harry Gordon called on her almost immediately and greeted her with tears in his eyes. He was so warm and affectionate. It was as if they had never parted. He suggested she come work for him as his personal stenographer. They could see each other every day, without having to worry about the interventions of Minnie’s landlady, who watched them as if she were Minnie’s own mother.
The prospect thrilled her. He still said nothing about marriage, but she could tell he loved her. And this was Chicago. Things were different here, less rigid and formal. Everywhere she went she found women her own age, unescorted, holding jobs, living their own lives. She accepted Harry’s offer. He seemed delighted.
But he imposed a curious stipulation. Minnie was to refer to him in public as Henry Howard Holmes, an alias, he explained, that he had adopted for business reasons. She was never to call him Gordon, nor act surprised when people referred to him as Dr. Holmes. She could call him “Harry” at any time, however.
She managed his correspondence and kept his books, while he concentrated on getting his building ready for the world’s fair. They dined together in his office, on meals brought in from the restaurant below. Minnie showed “a remarkable aptitude for the work,” Holmes wrote in his memoir. “During the first weeks she boarded at a distance, but later, from about the 1st of March until the 15th of May, 1893, she occupied rooms in the same building and adjoining my offices.”
Harry touched her and caressed her and let his eyes fill with tears of adoration. At last he asked her to marry him. She felt very lucky. Her Harry was so handsome and dynamic, she knew that once married they would share a wonderful life full of travel and fine possessions. She wrote of her hopes to her sister Anna.
In recent years the sisters had become very close, overcoming an earlier estrangement. They wrote to each other often. Minnie filled her letters with news of her fast-intensifying romance and expressed wonder that such a handsome man had chosen her to be his wife.
Anna was skeptical. The romance was advancing too quickly and with a degree of intimacy that violated all the intricate rules of courtship. Minnie was sweet, Anna knew, but certainly no beauty.
If Harry Gordon was such a paragon of looks and enterprise, why had he selected her?
In mid-March Holmes received a letter from Peter Cigrand, Emeline’s father, asking yet again for help in finding his daughter. The letter was dated March 16. Holmes responded promptly, on March 18, with a typed letter in which he told Cigrand that Emeline had left his employ on December 1, 1892. It is possible that Minnie in her role as Holmes’s personal secretary did the typing.
“I received her wedding cards about Dec. 10,” he wrote. She had come to see him twice since her marriage, the last time being January 1, 1893, “at which point she was disappointed at not finding any mail here for her, and my impression is that she spoke of having written to you previous to that time. Before going away in December she told me personally that the intention was that she and her husband should go to England on business with which he was connected, but when she called here the last time she spoke as though the trip had been given up. Please let me know within a few days if you did not hear from her and give me her uncle’s address here in the city and I will see him personally and ask if she has been there, as I know she was in the habit of calling upon him quite often.”
He added a postscript in ink: “Have you written her Lafayette friends asking them if they have heard from her? If not I should think it well to do so. Let me hear from you at all events.”
Holmes promised Minnie a voyage to Europe, art lessons, a fine home, and of course children—he adored children—but first there were certain financial matters that required their mutual attention. Assuring her that he had come up with a plan from which only great profit would result, Holmes persuaded her to transfer the deed to her Fort Worth land to a man named Alexander Bond. She did so on April 18, 1893, with Holmes himself serving as notary. Bond in turn signed the deed over to another man, Benton T. Lyman. Holmes notarized this transfer as well.
Minnie loved her husband-to-be and trusted him, but she did not know that Alexander Bond was an alias for Holmes himself, or that Benton Lyman actually was Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel—and that with a few strokes of his pen her beloved Harry had taken possession of the bulk of her dead uncle’s bequest. Nor did she know that on paper Harry was still married to two other women, Clara Lovering and Myrta Belknap, and that in each marriage he had fathered a child.
As Minnie’s adoration deepened, Holmes executed a second financial maneuver. He established the Campbell-Yates Manufacturing Company, which he billed as a firm that bought and sold everything. When he filed its papers of incorporation, he listed five officers: H. H. Holmes, M. R. Williams, A. S. Yates, Hiram S. Campbell, and Henry Owens. Owens was a porter employed by Holmes. Hiram S. Campbell was the fictive owner of Holmes’s Englewood building. Yates was supposed to be a businessman living in New York City but in reality was as much a fiction as Campbell. And M. R. Williams was Minnie. The company made nothing and sold nothing: It existed to hold assets and provide a reference for anyone who became skeptical of Holmes’s promissory notes.
Later, when questions arose as to the accuracy of the corporation papers, Holmes persuaded Henry Owens, the porter, to sign an affidavit swearing not only that he was secretary of the company but that he had met both Yates and Campbell and that Yates personally had handed him the stock certificates representing his share of the company. Owens later said of Holmes: “He induced me to make these statements by promising me my back wages and by his hypnotizing ways, and I candidly believe that he had a certain amount of influence over me. While I was with him I was always under his control.”
He added, “I never received my back wages.”
Holmes—Harry—wanted the wedding done quickly and quietly, just him, Minnie, and a preacher. He arranged everything. To Minnie the little ceremony appeared to be legal and in its quiet way very romantic, but in fact no record of their union was entered into the marriage registry of Cook County, Illinois.
Dreadful Things Done by Girls
At Jackson Park exhibits arrived daily, in ever-mounting volume. There was smoke, clatter, mud, and confusion, as if an army were massing for an assault on Chicago. Caravans of Wells-Fargo and Adams Express wagons moved slowly through the park, drawn by gigantic horses. Throughout the night freight trains huffed into the park. Switching locomotives nudged individual boxcars over the skein of temporary tracks to their destinations. Lake freighters disgorged pale wooden crates emblazoned with phrases in strange alphabets. George Ferris’s steel arrived, on five trains of thirty cars each. The Inman steamship line delivered a full-sized section of one of its ocean liners. Bethlehem Steel brought giant ingots and great slabs of military armor, including a curved plate seventeen inches thick meant for the gun turret of the dreadnought Indiana. Great Britain delivered locomotives and ship models, including an exquisite thirty-foot replica of Britain’s latest warship, Victoria, so detailed that even the links of chain in its handrails were to scale.