Depraved

by Harold Schechter

  When midnight came and the fire swept eastward into the downtown business district, the result was catastrophic.

  One by one, the proudest buildings of the city fell—the Palmer House and the Grand Pacific Hotel, McVicker’s Theater and Crosby’s Opera House, Field and Lieter’s dazzling emporium and the supposedly fireproof stone building of the Chicago Tribune. “Everywhere,” wrote one reporter describing the calamitous scene, “dust, smoke, flame, heat, thunder of falling walls, crackle of fire, hissing of water, panting of engines, shouts, braying of trumpets, wind, tumult, and uproar.” By the time the nightmare ended, every hotel, theater, newspaper office, factory, store, public building, and bank in the business district was gone—reduced to ashes or a blackened shell.

  The most devastating loss of all, however, was the destruction of the million-dollar Courthouse, the city’s showpiece, where Abraham Lincoln’s body had lain in state. Its five-ton bell had rung for countless civic ceremonies and tolled the warning when the conflagration began. At two-fifteen A.M., with the cupola blazing, the great bell crashed into the basement, and its thunderous fall seemed to sound the knell for the city itself.

  By then, the flames had already raced across the State Street Bridge and gained a foothold in the North Side, the most prosperous residential district in the city, home to the stately mansions of Chicago’s elite—the McCormicks, Trees, Kinzies, Arnolds, Rumseys, and Ogdens. Long before sunrise, their splendid homes lay in smoldering ruins. Also consumed was the neoclassic building of the Chicago Historical Society, which housed, among other treasures, President Lincoln’s walking stick and the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

  Pandemonium reigned. With tidal waves of flame bearing down on them, frenzied hordes—at least 75,000 of the city’s 335,000 residents—took to the streets in desperate flight. The situation was made even more nightmarish by the utter breakdown of social order, as packs of thieves and hoodlums rampaged through the city, looting homes, office buildings, and stores, and preying on the panic-stricken citizenry.

  A desperate population turned to Allan Pinkerton and a special force of men from his famous detective agency to combat this rampant lawlessness. But neither Pinkerton’s “Preventive Police” nor the U.S. Army troops brought in under the command of Gen. Philip Sheridan could do much to stop the looting.

  Sheridan had more success fighting the fire itself. Under his direction, several blocks of houses were blown up with gunpowder, halting the spread of the conflagration on the South Side.

  It wasn’t until late Monday, however, that the tide finally turned, thanks to a sudden shift in the weather that seemed, to the beleaguered residents, like an act of Providence. At around eleven that night, the wind died down and a cold drizzle began to fall. By early Tuesday, the rain was pouring steadily, dowsing the last of the flames.

  The scenes of devastation that greeted the survivors when sunrise came were almost too vast to comprehend. The vital hub of their metropolis had been transformed into a charred and smoking wasteland. In an area roughly one mile wide and four miles long, over seventeen thousand buildings had been obliterated entirely or reduced to charred walls and rubble.

  The incineration of the downtown section was so complete that (as one historian has recorded) when some sight-seers clambered onto the roof of their omnibus for a better view of the ruins, they “gazed across the main streets of the South Division—across what had been the heart of the business district—and saw men standing on the ground three miles away.”

  The Chicago Fire—“The Greatest Calamity of the Age,” as the papers quickly dubbed it—made news around the world and inspired an international outpouring of sympathy and support. Twenty-nine foreign countries contributed close to $1 million in aid. In the United States, money and material flowed in from every part of the nation. New York City donated $600,000, President Grant sent a personal gift of $1,000, the newsboys of Cincinnati volunteered two days’ of their earnings. The staff of the Ohio Female College donated sixty suits of ladies’ undergarments, while the citizens of Curlew, Nebraska, offered free parcels of land to any Chicagoan who wished to resettle in their town.

  New Hampshirites pitched in, too. With the bulk of Chicago’s fire equipment disabled or destroyed, the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company of Manchester, N.H., immediately shipped off a brand-new engine to help protect the stricken city.

  Of course, not everyone in New Hampshire learned of the disaster right away. While the residents of the big Northeastern cities—New York, Boston, Philadelphia—received word of the fire even as it was blazing, the news took longer to reach the countryside.

  Chicago’s ruins had already cooled before the tidings hit Gilmanton Academy, a tiny hamlet whose character had changed little since the founding, in 1794, of the venerable institution in whose honor the village was named. Nestled among the Suncook hills at the southern end of New Hampshire’s Lake District, Gilmanton Academy was (in the words of the man who would become its most infamous native) “so remote from the outside world that … daily newspapers were rare and almost unknown.” Even big news, like the burning of Chicago, filtered slowly into the little fanning community, largely through the medium of “weekly papers and a few periodicals.”

  Yet once the villagers got word of the catastrophe, they naturally were as hungry for details as the rest of the country. To the schoolchildren especially, the immolation of the great, faraway city seemed like one of the fabled cataclysms of ancient times—the burning of Rome or the burying of Pompeii.

  One eleven-year-old Gilmanton boy was even more spellbound by tales of Chicago’s destruction than his schoolmates. His name was Herman, a slightly built boy with blue eyes and brown hair and a glib, peculiarly grown-up manner that revealed nothing of his profound emotional disorder. From earliest childhood, he had been subjected to the regular brutalities of his father, a fierce disciplinarian who wielded the rod with an unsparing hand. His mother was a pious, submissive woman, incapable of shielding the boy from her husband’s cruelties. Though Herman had learned to profess his filial devotion, he detested both his parents and dreamed longingly of their deaths. Hearing of the Great Fire, he imagined them trapped by the hellish flames, their flesh consumed, their bones reduced to ashes. He yearned to be delivered from them, if not by their deaths then by his eventual escape.

  Even at eleven, he knew that his will and intelligence required an infinitely larger sphere of operation than New Hampshire could possibly afford. Everyone remarked on his sharpness. “A boy with a head on him,” the neighbors would say. “A lad with a future.”

  Partly because of his delicate stature but also because of his success at school, Herman had often been persecuted by the bigger boys in town, especially during his younger years.

  One episode in particular remained with him for the rest of his life. It happened when Herman was five, the year he began school.

  The way to the schoolhouse ran past the village doctor’s front door, which was rarely closed. Emanating from the gloomy ulterior were sharp medicinal odors, associated in little Herman’s mind with the vile nostrums he was forced to imbibe whenever he was ill. Partly for this reason, and partly because of certain dark stories he had heard from his schoolmates (according to rumor, the doctor’s cabinets housed a collection of preserved human heads and amputated limbs), the office had assumed a terrifying dimension in young Herman’s imagination.

  One day, having learned of Herman’s horror of the place, two of his older schoolmates waylaid him while the doctor was out on an errand and dragged him, struggling and weeping, over the terrible threshold.

  Through his tears, Herman could make out a ghastly specter—a leering skeleton hovering in the shadows like a demon risen from the grave. Herman’s cries turned into terror-crazed shrieks, which only spurred on his tormentors. They wrestled him closer and closer to the looming skeleton, which seemed to reach out its bony hands, as if to seize the boy in a fatal embrace.

  At that moment, the doctor
came hurrying back to his office and—sizing up the situation at a glance—began shouting at the two bullies, who let go of Herman and raced out the doorway, leaving the hysterical boy gagging and sobbing at the foot of the mounted specimen.

  Ironically, it was to this traumatic experience that Herman later attributed his interest in anatomy. By the time he was eleven, he was already conducting his secret medical experiments—first on salamanders and frogs, then on rabbits, cats, and stray dogs. He preferred to perform his operations on living creatures and became skilled at disabling his subjects without killing them. Sometimes, he retained a special part—a rabbit skull or cat’s paw—storing his treasure in a metal box, which he kept hidden in the cellar of his house.

  Herman never showed his treasures to anyone. There was no one he cared to share them with. For a brief period during his childhood, he did have one close friend—an older boy named Tom, who died under tragic circumstances, falling to his death from an upstairs landing while he and Herman were exploring an abandoned house.

  Herman never missed Tom. He much preferred his solitude, which gave him time to plan, scheme, and dream of the day when he would finally leave New Hampshire forever.

  Given his great drive and ambition, it was only a matter of time before Herman realized his goal. Eventually, he would put his past behind him and make his way by a circuitous route to the resurrected metropolis of Chicago where he would become a permanent part of the city’s lore.

  In a booming South Side neighborhood, he would construct a legendary residence. Allan Pinkerton’s agents, who had tried so tenaciously to maintain civic order at the height of the Great Conflageration, would come to regard him as one of their most memorable foes. And thanks to him, Chicago would once again find itself on the front pages of newspapers throughout the nation—not, this time, as the site of the “Greatest Calamity of the Age” but as the home of the “Greatest Criminal of the Century.”

  2

  Located twelve feet above the level of the lake, with a perfect water, sewerage and gas system, and an excellent police and fire department, Englewood combines all of the conveniences of the city, with the fresh, healthful air of the country…. We have more enterprising men and less “dead-beats” than any other suburb in the country.

  —Englewood Directory, 1882

  Dr. E. S. Holton’s drugstore stood at the corner of Wallace and Sixty-third in the burgeoning business district of Englewood, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb just south of Chicago’s city limits. On a murderously hot day in July 1886, the proprietor himself, racked with prostate cancer, lay moaning in the swelter of his second-floor bedroom, while his sixty-year-old, soon-to-be-widowed wife toiled downstairs.

  Business was booming. Normally, the constant flow of customers would have been a welcome circumstance. As it was—with a desperately sick husband to tend and no one to assist her in the store—Mrs. Holton was overworked to the point of collapse.

  The recent surge in business was due partly to the weather. The wilting midsummer heat had caused a run on such revitalizing elixirs as Parker’s Ginger Tonic and Ayer’s Sarsaparilla. But the main reason for the Holtons’ thriving trade was the dramatic growth of Englewood itself.

  Three years before the Great Fire, Englewood’s entire population had consisted of fewer than twenty families. By 1882, nearly two thousand Chicagoans had resettled in the lush, outlying suburb. By the time the decade ended, the Englewood Directory listed over forty-five thousand inhabitants, most of them urban refugees seeking the same advantages that would lure city dwellers to the suburbs throughout the coming century—fresh air, country quiet, and easy access to the metropolitan center.

  As the Chamber of Commerce boasted, Englewood was “the best locality for suburban residence in the vicinity of Chicago…. Seven leading lines of railway furnish forty-five trains each way daily. All of these trains must stop at Englewood. These magnificent facilities give us advantages possessed by no other suburb of Chicago, the majority of which are mere flag stations, dependent upon one or two dummy trains a day, while the regular trains whizz through the town unmindful of its interests.”

  It was the proximity of Sixty-third and Wallace to the Western Indiana Railway Station (located less than a block away from the Holton’s store) that made that intersection a hub of thriving commerce. Eventually—after the suburb was officially annexed by the city in 1889—the Holton’s neighborhood would become known as “the most prosperous and best-developed cross street in the great city of Chicago” (according to one local historian).

  On that broiling afternoon in 1886, however, there was still a fair amount of undeveloped land along Sixty-third Street. Indeed, looking out through the store’s big, pane-glass display window—over the neatly arranged packages of Paine’s Celery Compound, the amber bottles of Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, and the advertising placards for Dr. Moore’s Indian Root Pills and Henderson’s Digestive Tablets—the druggist’s wife would have seen, across the street and catercorner to the store, a large, grassy plot, studded with luxuriant oak trees.

  Had Mrs. Holton glanced out the window at a certain point late in the afternoon, she would have seen something else, too—a nattily attired gentleman peering intently at the patent medicines on display and then, after giving his suit vest a small, fastidious tug, striding determinedly through her wide-flung front door.

  Mrs. Holton—who knew all of her customers by sight if not by name—did not recognize the strikingly attractive young man who stepped into the store. Weighing a shade under 150 pounds and standing five feet seven niches tall, he had an erect, manly carriage and moved with a quiet grace. His eyes were slate blue, his hair—which showed itself at the temples beneath the brim of his handsome fedora—was a silky chestnut brown. He wore a walrus mustache in the style of the day but kept it carefully trimmed and slightly upcurled at the corners. Beneath the mustache, his lower lip seemed almost feminine in its fullness.

  His brown suit was spotlessly clean, his cravat neatly tied, and the linen shut-cuffs that protruded from his coat sleeves were affixed with gold buttons. A solid-gold watch chain, adorned with a charm of rich design, was strung across his vest-front. All in all, the new customer would have struck any observer—especially, perhaps, one of the opposite sex—as a fine figure of a man.

  As it happened, the young man was not a customer at all. Politely doffing his hat and favoring Mrs. Holton with a slight bow, he introduced himself as Dr. H. H. Holmes, a graduate of the University of Michigan, with training and experience as a druggist. He had recently moved to the area, he explained, and was seeking employment in a store such as Mrs. Holton’s. He had come to inquire if she might be in need of an assistant.

  To the beleaguered, overburdened Mrs. Holton, the young man, appearing at such a difficult moment in her life, must have seemed heaven-sent.

  She hired him on the spot.

  The wall shelves and display cases of the Holtons’ cavernous store were packed with the countless commercial cure-alls—the liver pills and stomach bitters, neuralgia remedies and regulator teas, catarrh ointments and consumption syrups—that flooded the American marketplace in the decades following the Civil War. But a druggist was more than a nostrum peddler. His job required the compounding of medicinal powders and potions, and at that delicate task Dr. Holmes clearly excelled. His long, delicate fingers moved with marvelous dexterity, and Mrs. Holton—herself not a licensed druggist—was delighted to place the job of filling prescriptions entirely in his deft hands.

  Beyond ascertaining that he had worked in a drugstore on Columbia Avenue in Philadelphia, Mrs. Holton never saw the need to inquire very closely into the history of Holmes’s employment. His manifest skill was proof enough of his experience. And Holmes himself saw no need to discuss the details of his previous job, particularly its unfortunate denouement. It still pained him to think about the accident that had necessitated his hasty departure from Philadelphia—the sudden, inexplicable poisoning of a woman customer who had died aft
er ingesting a medicine Holmes had prepared for her that morning. Holmes did not hold himself responsible for that tragedy and, understandably enough, was not eager for news of it to get around.

  Besides medicine, Holmes was adept at dispensing another commodity, too—a suave, smooth-tongued charm, which he proffered freely to his female customers, many of whom began to patronize the store with surprising frequency. The Holtons’ business, already vigorous, prospered as never before.

  Unhappily, prosperity was of no avail to the elderly owner, who did not outlive the summer. By the time of the old man’s death, Holmes’s duties had extended beyond the pharmacological to include handling the store’s account books, as the grieving Mrs. Holton grew increasingly remote from the day-to-day operations of the business.

  Sometime during the latter part of August, not long after the druggist’s death, Holmes approached the widow with a proposal to purchase the store. After giving the matter some thought, the old lady accepted on the condition that she be permitted to remain in her apartment upstairs.

  She had nowhere else to go, she explained to Holmes. She had no living relations, and in any case she preferred to spend her declining years in the rooms she had occupied so happily with her late husband.

  Holmes agreed to the terms, and the deal was consummated. The deed was signed, the down payment rendered, and the familiar sign above the entranceway replaced with the gold-lettered name of the drugstore’s new proprietor, H. H. HOLMES.

  Holmes was soon to become a familiar figure in Englewood. When he had first gone to work at the drugstore, he had commuted from his lodgings at some distance from the suburb. Even Mrs. Holton had never been able to ascertain precisely where Holmes made his home, receiving vague and elusive answers on the few occasions she had inquired.