The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

by Erik Larson

  That night the exposition illuminated the fairgrounds one last time. “Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre,” Stead wrote, “but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet’s dream, silent as a city of the dead.”

  The Black City

  THE EXPOSITION PROVED UNABLE to hold the Black City at bay for very long. With its formal closure thousands more workers joined the swelling army of the unemployed, and homeless men took up residence among the great abandoned palaces of the fair. “The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World’s Fair,” wrote novelist Robert Herrick in The Web of Life. “In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed…. The city’s huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenant-less buildings.” It was the contrast that was so wrenching. “What a spectacle!” wrote Ray Stannard Baker in his American Chronicle. “What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair which had so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.”

  In that first, brutal winter Burnham’s photographer, Charles Arnold, took a very different series of photographs. One shows the Machinery Building soiled by smoke and litter. A dark liquid had been thrown against one wall. At the base of a column was a large box, apparently the home of an out-of-work squatter. “It is desolation,” wrote Teresa Dean, the columnist, about a visit she made to Jackson Park on January 2, 1894. “You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”

  Six days after her visit the first fires occurred and destroyed several structures, among them the famous Peristyle. The following morning Big Mary, chipped and soiled, stood over a landscape of twisted and blackened steel.

  The winter became a crucible for American labor. To workers, Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers came increasingly to seem like saviors, Chicago’s merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company’s treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman’s friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On May 11, 1894, two thousand Pullman workers went on strike with the support of Debs’s American Railway Union. Other strikes broke out around the country, and Debs began planning a nationwide general strike to begin in July. President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago and placed them under the command of General Nelson A. Miles, previously the grand marshal of the exposition. Miles was uneasy about his new command. He sensed in the spreading unrest something unprecedented, “more threatening and far-reaching than anything that had occurred before.” He followed orders, however, and the former grand marshal of the fair wound up fighting the men who had built it.

  Strikers blocked trains and burned railcars. On July 5, 1894, arsonists set fire to the seven greatest palaces of the exposition—Post’s immense Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, Hunt’s dome, Sullivan’s Golden Door, all of them. In the Loop men and women gathered on rooftops and in the highest offices of the Rookery, the Masonic Temple, the Temperance Building, and every other high place to watch the distant conflagration. Flames rose a hundred feet into the night sky and cast their gleam far out onto the lake.

  Belatedly, Burnham had gotten his wish. “There was no regret,” observed the Chicago Tribune, “rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbian season.”

  Later, in the next year, came the wonder:

  “There are hundreds of people who went to Chicago to see the Fair and were never heard from again,” said the New York World. “The list of the ‘missing’ when the Fair closed was a long one, and in the greater number foul play suspected. Did these visitors to the Fair, strangers to Chicago, find their way to Holmes’ Castle in answer to delusive advertisements sent out by him, never to return again? Did he erect his Castle close to the Fair grounds so as to gather in these victims by the wholesale … ?”

  Initially the Chicago police had no answers, other than the obvious: That in Chicago in the time of the fair, it was so very easy to disappear.

  The secrets of Holmes’s castle eventually did come to light, but only because of the persistence of a lone detective from a far-off city, grieving his own terrible loss.

  PART IV

  Cruelty Revealed

  1895

  Dr. H. H. Holmes.

  “Property of H. H. Holmes”

  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.

  The suspect was a physician whose given name was Mudgett but was known more commonly by the alias H. H. Holmes. He once had lived in Chicago where he and an associate, Benjamin Pitezel, had run a hotel during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They had moved next to Fort Worth, Texas, then to St. Louis, and on to Philadelphia, committing frauds along the way. In Philadelphia Holmes had swindled the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of nearly $10,000 by apparently faking the death of a policyholder, Ben Pitezel. Holmes had bought the insurance in 1893 from Fidelity’s Chicago office, just before the close of the exposition. As evidence of fraud accumulated, Fidelity had hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—“The Eye That Never Sleeps”—to search for Holmes. The agency’s operatives picked up his trail in Burlington, Vermont, and followed him to Boston, where they arranged to have him arrested by police. Holmes confessed to the fraud and agreed to be extradited to Philadelphia for trial. At that point the case appeared to be closed. But now in June 1895 it was becoming increasingly apparent that Holmes had not faked the death of Ben Pitezel, he had killed him and then arranged the scene to make the death seem accidental. Now three of Pitezel’s five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—were missing, last seen in Holmes’s company.

  Geyer’s assignment was to find the children. He was invited to join the case by Philadelphia district attorney George S. Graham, who over the years had come to rely on Geyer for the city’s most sensitive investigations. Graham had thought twice this time, however, for he knew that just a few months earlier Geyer had lost his wife, Martha, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Esther, in a house fire.

  Geyer interviewed Holmes in his cell but learned nothing new. Holmes insisted that when he had last seen the Pitezel children, they were alive and traveling with a woman named Minnie Williams, en route to the place where their father was hiding out.

  Geyer found Holmes to be smooth and glib, a social chameleon. “Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation,” Geyer wrote, “and all of his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of his statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor,
becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.”

  Holmes claimed to have secured a cadaver that resembled Ben Pitezel and to have placed it on the second floor of a house rented especially for the fraud. By coincidence or out of some malignant expression of humor, the house was located right behind the city morgue, a few blocks north of City Hall. Holmes admitted arranging the cadaver to suggest that Pitezel had died in an accidental explosion. He poured a solvent on the cadaver’s upper body and set it on fire, then positioned the body on the floor in direct sunlight. By the time the body was discovered, its features had been distorted well beyond recognition. Holmes volunteered to assist the coroner in making an identification. At the morgue he not only helped locate a distinctive wart on the dead man’s neck, he pulled out his own lancet and removed the wart himself, then matter-of-factly handed it to the coroner.

  The coroner had wanted a member of the Pitezel family also to be present at the identification. Pitezel’s wife, Carrie, was ill and could not come. Instead she sent her second-eldest daughter, Alice, fifteen years old. The coroner’s men draped the body so as to allow Alice to see only Pitezel’s teeth. She seemed confident that the corpse was her father. Fidelity paid the death benefit. Next Holmes traveled to St. Louis, where the Pitezel family now lived. Still in possession of Alice, he persuaded Carrie to let him pick up two more of her children, explaining that their father, in hiding, was desperate to see them. He took Nellie, eleven, and Howard, eight, and embarked with all three children on a strange and sad journey.

  Geyer knew from Alice’s letters that initially she found the trip to be something of an adventure. In a letter to her mother, dated September 20, 1894, Alice wrote, “I wish you could see what I have seen.” In the same letter she expressed her distaste for Holmes’s treacly manner. “I don’t like him to call me babe and child and dear and all such trash.” The next day she wrote again, “Mamma have you ever seen or tasted a red banana? I have had three. They are so big that I can just reach around it and have my thumb and next finger just tutch.” Since leaving St. Louis, Alice had heard nothing from home and feared her mother’s illness might have gotten much worse. “Have you gotten 4 letters from me besides this?” Alice wrote. “Are you sick in bed yet or are you up? I wish that I could hear from you.”

  One of the few things that Detective Geyer knew with certainty was that neither of these letters ever reached Carrie Pitezel. Alice and Nellie had written to their mother repeatedly while in Holmes’s custody and had given the letters to Holmes with the expectation that he would mail them. He never did. Shortly after his arrest police discovered a tin box, marked “Property of H. H. Holmes,” containing various documents and a dozen letters from the girls. He had stored them in the box as if they were seashells collected from a beach.

  Now Mrs. Pitezel was nearly crushed with anxiety and grief, despite Holmes’s latest assurances that Alice, Nellie, and Howard were in London, England, under the able care of Minnie Williams. A search by Scotland Yard had found no trace of any of them. Geyer had little hope that his own search would fare any better. With more than half a year having elapsed since anyone had heard from the children, Geyer wrote, “it did not look like a very encouraging task to undertake, and it was the general belief of all interested, that the children would never be found. The District Attorney believed, however, that another final effort to find the children should be made, for the sake of the stricken mother, if for nothing else. I was not placed under any restrictions, but was told to go and exercise my own judgment in the matter, and to follow wherever the clues led me.”

  Geyer set out on his search on the evening of June 26, 1895, a hot night in a hot summer. Earlier in June a zone of high pressure, the “permanent high,” had settled over the middle Atlantic states and driven temperatures in Philadelphia well into the nineties. A humid stillness held the countryside. Even at night the air inside Geyer’s train was stagnant and moist. Leftover cigar smoke drifted from men’s suits, and at each stop the roar of frogs and crickets filled the car. Geyer slept in jagged stretches.

  The next day, as the train sped west through the heat-steamed hollows of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Geyer reread his copies of the children’s letters to look for anything he might have missed that could help direct his search. The letters not only provided irrefutable proof that the children had been with Holmes but contained geographic references that allowed Geyer to plot the broad contours of the route Holmes and the children had followed. Their first stop appeared to have been Cincinnati.

  Detective Geyer reached Cincinnati at seven-thirty P.M. on Thursday, June 27. He checked into the Palace Hotel. The next morning he went to police headquarters to brief the city’s police superintendent on his mission. The superintendent assigned a detective to assist him, Detective John Schnooks, an old friend of Geyer’s.

  Geyer hoped to reconstruct the children’s travels from Cincinnati onward. There was no easy way to achieve his goal. He had few tools other than his wits, his notebook, a handful of photographs, and the children’s letters. He and Detective Schnooks made a list of all the hotels in Cincinnati located near railroad stations, then set out on foot to visit each one and check its registrations for some sign of the children and Holmes. That Holmes would use an alias seemed beyond doubt, so Geyer brought along his photographs, even a depiction of the children’s distinctive “flat-top” trunk. Many months had passed since the children had written their letters, however. Geyer had little hope that anyone would remember one man and three children.

  On that point, as it happens, he was wrong.

  The detectives trudged from one hotel to the next. The day got hotter and hotter. The detectives were courteous and never showed impatience, despite having to make the same introductions and tell the same story over and over again.

  On Central Avenue they came to a small inexpensive hotel, the Atlantic House. As they had done at all the other hotels, they asked the clerk if they could see his registration book. They turned first to Friday, September 28, 1894, the day that Holmes, while already in possession of Alice, had picked up Nellie and Howard from their St. Louis home. Geyer guessed Holmes and the children had reached Cincinnati later that same day. Geyer ran his finger down the page and stopped at an entry for “Alex E. Cook,” a guest who according to the register was traveling with three children.

  The entry jogged Geyer’s memory. Holmes had used the name before, to rent a house in Burlington, Vermont. Also, Geyer by now had seen a lot of Holmes’s handwriting. The writing in the ledger looked familiar.

  The “Cook” party stayed only one night, the register showed. But Geyer knew from the girls’ letters that they had remained in Cincinnati an additional night. It seemed odd that Holmes would go to the trouble of moving to a second hotel, but Geyer knew from experience that making assumptions about the behavior of criminals was always a dangerous thing. He and Schnooks thanked the clerk for his kind attention, then set out to canvass more hotels.

  The sun was high, the streets steamed. Cicadas scratched off messages from every tree. At Sixth and Vine the detectives came to a hotel called the Bristol and discovered that on Saturday, September 29, 1894, a party identified as “A. E. Cook” had checked in, with three children. When the clerk saw Geyer’s photographs, he confirmed that the guests were Holmes, Alice, Nellie, and Howard. They checked out the next morning, Sunday, September 30. The date fit the likely chronology of events: Geyer knew from the children’s letters that on that Sunday morning they had left Cincinnati and by evening had arrived in Indianapolis.

  Geyer was not yet ready to leave Cincinnati, however. Now he played a hunch. The Pinkertons had found that Holmes sometimes rented houses in the cities through which he traveled, as he had done in Burlington. Geyer and Schnooks turned their
attention to Cincinnati’s real estate agents.

  Their search eventually took them to the realty office of J. C. Thomas, on East Third Street.

  Something about Holmes must have caused people to take notice, because both Thomas and his clerk remembered him. Holmes had rented a house at 305 Poplar Street, under the name “A. C. Hayes,” and had made a substantial advance payment.

  The date of the agreement, Thomas said, was September 28, 1894, the Friday when Holmes and the children had arrived in Cincinnati. Holmes held the house only two days.

  Thomas could offer no further details but referred the detectives to a woman named Henrietta Hill, who lived next door to the house.

  Geyer and Schnooks immediately set out for Miss Hill’s residence and found her to be an acute observer and a willing gossip. “There is really very little to tell,” she said—then told them a lot.

  She first had noticed the new tenant on Saturday, September 29, when a furniture wagon stopped in front of the rental house. A man and a boy descended. What most caught Miss Hill’s attention was the fact that the furniture wagon was empty save for an iron stove that seemed much too large for a private residence.

  Miss Hill found the stove sufficiently strange that she mentioned it to her neighbors. The next morning Holmes came to her front door and told her he was not going to stay in the house after all. If she wanted the stove, he said, she could have it.