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

by Erik Larson

  Burnham’s health began to decline early in the twentieth century, when he was in his fifties. He developed colitis and in 1909 learned he had diabetes. Both conditions forced him to adopt a more healthful diet. His diabetes damaged his circulatory system and fostered a foot infection that bedeviled him for the rest of his life. As the years passed, he revealed an interest in the supernatural. One night in San Francisco, in a bungalow he had built at the fog-licked summit of Twin Peaks, his planning shanty, he told a friend, “If I were able to take the time, I believe that I could prove the continuation of life beyond the grave, reasoning from the necessity, philosophically speaking, of a belief in an absolute and universal power.”

  He knew that his day was coming to an end. On July 4, 1909, as he stood with friends on the roof of the Reliance Building, looking out over the city he adored, he said, “You’ll see it lovely. I never will. But it will be lovely.”

  Recessional

  THE ROARING IN OLMSTED’S EARS, the pain in his mouth, and the sleeplessness never eased, and soon an emptiness began to appear in his gaze. He became forgetful. On May 10, 1895, two weeks after his seventy-third birthday, he wrote to his son John, “It has today, for the first time, become evident to me that my memory for recent occurrences is no longer to be trusted.” He was seventy-three years old. That summer, on his last day in the Brookline office, he wrote three letters to George Vanderbilt, each saying pretty much the same thing.

  During a period in September 1895 that he described as “the bitterest week of my life,” he confessed to his friend Charles Eliot his terror that his condition soon would require that he be placed in an asylum. “You cannot think how I have been dreading that it would be thought expedient that I should be sent to an ‘institution,’” he wrote on September 26. “Anything but that. My father was a director of an Insane Retreat, and first and last, having been professionally employed and behind the scenes in several, my dread of such places is intense.”

  His loss of memory accelerated. He became depressed and paranoid and accused son John of orchestrating a “coup” to remove him from the firm. Olmsted’s wife, Mary, took Olmsted to the family’s island home in Maine, where his depression deepened and he at times became violent. He beat the family horse.

  Mary and her sons realized there was little they could do for Olmsted. He had become unmanageable, his dementia profound. With deep sorrow and perhaps a good deal of relief, Rick lodged his father in the McLean Asylum in Waverly, Massachusetts. Olmsted’s memory was not so destroyed that he did not realize he himself had designed McLean’s grounds. This fact gave him no solace, for he saw immediately that the same phenomenon that had diminished nearly every one of his works—Central Park, Biltmore, the world’s fair, and so many others—had occurred yet again. “They didn’t carry out my plan,” he wrote, “confound them!”

  Olmsted died at two in the morning on August 28, 1903. His funeral was spare, family only. His wife, who had seen this great man disappear before her eyes, did not attend.

  The Ferris Wheel cleared $200,000 at the fair and remained in place until the spring of 1894, when George Ferris dismantled it and reassembled it on Chicago’s North Side. By then, however, it had lost both its novelty and the volume of ridership that the Midway had guaranteed. The wheel began losing money. These losses, added to the $150,000 cost of moving it and the financial damage done to Ferris’s steel-inspection company by the continuing depression, caused Ferris to sell most of his ownership of the wheel.

  In the autumn of 1896 Ferris and his wife separated. She went home to her parents; he moved into the Duquesne Hotel in downtown Pittsburgh. On November 17, 1896, he was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he died five days later, apparently of typhoid fever. He was thirty-seven years old. One year later his ashes were still in the possession of the undertaker who had received his body. “The request of Mrs. Ferris for the ashes was refused,” the undertaker said, “because the dead man left closer relatives.” In a eulogy two friends said Ferris had “miscalculated his powers of endurance, and he died a martyr to his ambition for fame and prominence.”

  In 1903 the Chicago House Wrecking Company bought the wheel at auction for $8,150, then reassembled it at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. There the wheel again became profitable and earned its new owners $215,000. On May 11, 1906, the wrecking company dynamited the wheel, for scrap. The first hundred-pound charge was supposed to cut the wheel loose from its supports and topple it onto its side. Instead the wheel began a slow turn, as if seeking one last roll through the sky. It crumpled under its own weight into a mountain of bent steel.

  Sol Bloom, chief of the Midway, emerged from the fair a rich young man. He invested heavily in a company that bought perishable foods and shipped them in the latest refrigerated cars to far-off cities. It was a fine, forward-looking business. But the Pullman strike halted all train traffic through Chicago, and the perishable foods rotted in their train-cars. He was ruined. He was still young, however, and still Bloom. He used his remaining funds to buy two expensive suits, on the theory that whatever he did next, he had to look convincing. “But one thing was quite clear…” he wrote. “[B]eing broke didn’t disturb me in the least. I had started with nothing, and if I now found myself with nothing, I was at least even. Actually, I was much better than even: I had had a wonderful time.”

  Bloom went on to become a congressman and one of the crafters of the charter that founded the United Nations.

  The fair made Buffalo Bill a million dollars (about $30 million today), which he used to found the town of Cody, Wyoming, build a cemetery and fairground for North Platte, Nebraska, pay the debts of five North Platte churches, acquire a Wisconsin newspaper, and further the theatrical fortunes of a lovely young actress named Katherine Clemmons, thereby deepening the already pronounced alienation of his wife. At one point he accused his wife of trying to poison him.

  The Panic of 1907 destroyed his Wild West and forced him to hire himself out to circuses. He was over seventy years old but still rode the ring under his big white hat trimmed in silver. He died in Denver at his sister’s house on January 10, 1917, without the money even to pay for his burial.

  Theodore Dreiser married Sara Osborne White. In 1898, two years before publishing Sister Carrie, he wrote to Sara, “I went to Jackson Park and saw what is left of the dear old World’s Fair where I learned to love you.”

  He cheated on her repeatedly.

  For Dora Root life with John had been like living upon a comet. Their marriage had brought her into a world of art and money where everything seemed energized and alive. Her husband’s wit, his musical talent, those exquisite long fingers so evident in any photograph imparted a gleam to her days that she was never able to recapture after his death. Toward the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, she wrote a long letter to Burnham. “It means so much to me that you think I have done well all these years,” she wrote. “I have such grave doubts about myself whenever I stop to think about the subject, that a word of encouragement from one who has so wonderfully sounded out his life, gives me a new impetus. If absorbing myself before the coming generation, and humbly passing on the torch, is the whole duty of women, I believe I have earned a word of praise.”

  But she knew that with John’s death the doors to a brighter kingdom had softly but firmly closed. “If John had lived,” she told Burnham, “all would have been different. Under the stimulus of his exhilarating life, I would have been his wife as well as the mother of his children. And it would have been interesting!”

  Patrick Eugene Joseph Prendergast stood trial in December 1893. The prosecutor was a criminal attorney hired by the state just for this case.

  His name was Alfred S. Trude.

  Prendergast’s lawyers tried to prove Prendergast was insane, but a jury of angry, grieving Chicagoans believed otherwise. One important piece of evidence tending to support the prosecution’s case for sanity was the care Prendergast had taken to keep an empty chamber under the hammer
of his revolver as he carried it in his pocket. At 2:28 P.M. on December 29, after conferring for an hour and three minutes, the jury found him guilty. The judge sentenced him to death. Throughout his trial and subsequent appeal, he continued to send Trude postcards. He wrote on February 21, 1894, “No one should be put to death no matter who it is, if it can be avoided, it is demoralizing to society to be barbarous.”

  Clarence Darrow entered the case and in a novel maneuver won for Prendergast a sanity inquest. This too failed, however, and Prendergast was executed. Darrow called him “a poor demented imbecile.” The execution intensified Darrow’s already deep hatred of the death penalty. “I am sorry for all fathers and all mothers,” he said, years later, during his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, accused of killing a Chicago boy for the thrill of it. “The mother who looks into the blue eyes of her little babe cannot help musing over the end of the child, whether it will be crowned with the greatest promises which her mind can image or whether he may meet death upon the scaffold.”

  Leopold and Loeb, as they became known worldwide, had stripped their victim to mask his identity. They dumped some of his clothes in Olmsted’s lagoons at Jackson Park.

  In New York at the Waldorf-Astoria a few years into the new century, several dozen young men in evening clothes gathered around a gigantic pie. The whipped-cream topping began to move. A woman emerged. She was stunning, with olive skin and long black hair. Her name was Farida Mazhar. The men were too young to remember, but once, a long while before, she had done the danse du ventre at the greatest fair in history.

  What the men noticed now was that she wore nothing at all.

  Holmes

  IN THE FALL OF 1895 Holmes stood trial in Philadelphia for the murder of Benjamin F. Pitezel. District Attorney George Graham brought thirty-five witnesses to Philadelphia from Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Irvington, Detroit, Toronto, Boston, Burlington, and Fort Worth, but they never were called. The judge ruled that Graham could present only evidence tied directly to the Pitezel murder and thus eliminated from the historical record a rich seam of detail on the murders of Dr. Herman W. Mudgett, alias Holmes.

  Graham also brought to the courtroom the wart Holmes had removed from Benjamin Pitezel’s corpse and a wooden box containing Pitezel’s skull. There was a good deal of macabre testimony about decomposition and body fluids and the effects of chloroform. “There was a red fluid issuing from his mouth,” testified Dr. William Scott, a pharmacist who had accompanied police to the house where Pitezel’s body had been discovered, “and any little pressure on the stomach or over the chest here would cause this fluid to flow more rapidly…”

  After one particularly grisly stretch of Dr. Scott’s testimony, Holmes stood and said, “I would ask that the Court be adjourned for sufficient time for lunch.”

  There were sorrowful moments, especially when Mrs. Pitezel took the stand. She wore a black dress, black hat, and black cape and looked pale and sad. Often she paused in midsentence and rested her head on her hands. Graham showed her the letters from Alice and Nellie and asked her to identify the handwriting. These were a surprise to her. She broke down. Holmes showed no emotion. “It was an expression of utmost indifference,” a reporter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger said. “He made his notes with a manner as unconcerned as if he were sitting in his own office writing a business letter.”

  Graham asked Mrs. Pitezel whether she had seen the children since the time in 1894 when Holmes took them away. She answered in a voice almost too soft to hear, “I saw them at Toronto in the morgue, side by side.”

  So many handkerchiefs appeared among the men and women in the gallery that the courtroom looked as if it had just experienced a sudden snowfall.

  Graham called Holmes “the most dangerous man in the world.” The jury found him guilty; the judge sentenced him to death by hanging. Holmes’s attorneys appealed the conviction and lost.

  As Holmes awaited execution, he prepared a long confession, his third, in which he admitted killing twenty-seven people. As with two previous confessions, this one was a mixture of truth and falsehood. A few of the people he claimed to have murdered turned out to be alive. Exactly how many people he killed will never be known. At the very least he killed nine: Julia and Pearl Conner, Emeline Cigrand, the Williams sisters, and Pitezel and his children. No one doubted that he had killed many others. Estimates ranged as high as two hundred, though such extravagance seems implausible even for a man of his appetite. Detective Geyer believed that if the Pinkertons had not caught up with Holmes and arranged his arrest in Boston, he would have killed the rest of the Pitezel family. “That he fully intended to murder Mrs. Pitezel and Dessie and the baby, Wharton, is too evident for contradiction.”

  Holmes, in his confession, also clearly lied, or at least was deeply deluded, when he wrote, “I am convinced that since my imprisonment I have changed woefully and gruesomely from what I was formerly in feature and figure…. My head and face are gradually assuming an elongated shape. I believe fully that I am growing to resemble the devil—that the similitude is almost completed.”

  His description of killing Alice and Nellie rang true, however. He said he placed the girls in a large trunk and made an opening in its top. “Here I left them until I could return and at my leisure kill them. At 5 P.M. I borrowed a spade of a neighbor and at the same time called on Mrs. Pitezel at her hotel. I then returned to my hotel and ate my dinner, and at 7:00 P.M. I again returned to the house where the children were imprisoned, and ended their lives by connecting the gas with the trunk, then came the opening of the trunk and the viewing of their little blackened and distorted faces, then the digging of their shallow graves in the basement of the house.”

  He said of Pitezel, “It will be understood that from the first hour of our acquaintance, even before I knew he had a family who would later afford me additional victims for the gratification of my blood-thirstiness, I intended to kill him.”

  Afraid that someone would steal his own body after his execution, Holmes left instructions with his lawyers for how he was to be buried. He refused to allow an autopsy. His lawyers turned down an offer of $5,000 for his body. The Wistar Institute in Philadelphia wanted his brain. This request, too, the lawyers refused, much to the regret of Milton Greeman, curator of Wistar’s renowned collection of medical specimens. “The man was something more than a mere criminal who acted on impulse,” Greeman said. “He was a man who studied crime and planned his career. His brain might have given science valuable aid.”

  Shortly before ten A.M. on May 7, 1896, after a breakfast of boiled eggs, dry toast, and coffee, Holmes was escorted to the gallows at Moyamensing Prison. This was a difficult moment for his guards. They liked Holmes. They knew he was a killer, but he was a charming killer. The assistant superintendent, a man named Richardson, seemed nervous as he readied the noose. Holmes turned to him and smiled, and said, “Take your time, old man.” At 10:13 Richardson released the trap and hanged him.

  Using Holmes’s instructions, workmen in the employ of undertaker John J. O’Rourke filled a coffin with cement, then placed Holmes’s body inside and covered it with more cement. They hauled him south through the countryside to Holy Cross Cemetery, a Catholic burial ground in Delaware County, just south of Philadelphia. With great effort they transferred the heavy coffin to the cemetery’s central vault, where two Pinkerton detectives guarded the body overnight. They took turns sleeping in a white pine coffin. The next day workers opened a double grave and filled this too with cement, then inserted Holmes’s coffin. They placed more cement on top and closed the grave. “Holmes’ idea was evidently to guard his remains in every way from scientific enterprise, from the pickling vat and the knife,” the Public Ledger reported.

  Strange things began to happen that made Holmes’s claims about being the devil seem almost plausible. Detective Geyer became seriously ill. The warden of Moyamensing prison committed suicide. The jury foreman was electrocuted in a freak accident. The priest who delivered Hol
mes’s last rites was found dead on the grounds of his church of mysterious causes. The father of Emeline Cigrand was grotesquely burned in a boiler explosion. And a fire destroyed the office of District Attorney George Graham, leaving only a photograph of Holmes unscathed.

  No stone or tomb marks the grave of Herman Webster Mudgett, alias H. H. Holmes. His presence in Holy Cross Cemetery is something of a secret, recorded only in an ancient registry volume that lists his location as section 15, range 10, lot 41, at the center of graves 3 and 4, just off a lane that the cemetery calls Lazarus Avenue, after the biblical character who died and was restored to life. The entry also notes “ten feet of cement.” At the gravesite there is only an open lawn in the midst of other old graves. There are children and a World War I pilot.

  No one ever left flowers here for Holmes, but as it happens, he was not entirely forgotten.

  In 1997 police in Chicago arrested a physician named Michael Swango at O’Hare Airport. The initial charge was fraud, but Swango was suspected of being a serial killer who murdered hospital patients through the administration of lethal doses of drugs. Eventually Dr. Swango pled guilty to four murders, but investigators believed he had committed many more. During the airport arrest police found in Swango’s possession a notebook in which he had copied passages from certain books, either for the inspiration they provided or because of some affirming resonance. One passage was from a book about H. H. Holmes called The Torture Doctor by David Franke. The copied passage sought to put the reader into Holmes’s mind.

  “‘He could look at himself in a mirror and tell himself that he was one of the most powerful and dangerous men in the world,’” Swango’s notebook read. “‘He could feel that he was a god in disguise.’”