The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  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 traincars. 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 Holmes’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.’ ”

  Aboard the Olympic

  ABOARD THE OLYMPIC BURNHAM waited for more news of Frank Millet and his ship. Just before sailing he had written, in longhand, a nineteen-page letter to Millet urging him to attend the next meeting of the Lincoln Commission, which was then on the verge of picking a designer for the Lincoln Memorial. Burnham and Millet had lobbied strongly for Henry Bacon of New York, and Burnham believed that his earlier talk to the Lincoln Commission had been persuasive. “But—I know and you know, dear Frank, that . . . the rats swarm back and begin to gnaw at the same old spot, the moment the dog’s back is turned.” He stressed how important it was for Millet to attend. “Be there and reiterate the real argument, which is that they should select a man in whom we have confidence. I leave this thing confidently in your hands.” He addressed the envelope himself, certain that the United States Post Office would know exactly what to do:

  Hon. F. D. Millet

  To arrive on

  Steamship Titanic.

  New York

  Burnham hoped that once the Olympic reached the site of the Titanic’s sinking, he would find Millet alive and hear him tell some outrageous story about the voyage, but during the night the Olympic returned to its original course for England. Another vessel already had reached the Titanic.

  But there was a second reason for the Olympic’s return to course. The builder of both ships, J. Bruce Ismay, himself a Titanic passenger but one of the few male passengers to survive, was adamant that none of the other survivors see this duplicate of their own lost liner coming to their aid. The shock, he feared, would be too great, and too humiliating to the White Star Line.

  The magnitude of the Titanic disaster quickly became apparent. Burnham lost his friend. The steward lost his son. William Stead had also been aboard and was drowned. In 1886 in the Pall Mall Gazette Stead had warned of the disasters likely to occur if shipping companies continued operating liners with too few lifeboats. A Titanic survivor reported hearing him say, “I think it is nothing serious so I shall turn in again.”

  That night, in the silence of Burnham’s stateroom, as somewhere to the north the body of his last good friend drifted frozen in the strangely peaceful seas of the North Atlantic, Burnham opened his diary and began to write. He felt an acute loneliness. He wrote, “Frank Millet, whom I loved, was aboard her . . . thus cutting off my
connection with one of the best fellows of the Fair.”

  Burnham lived only forty-seven more days. As he and his family traveled through Heidelberg, he slipped into a coma, the result apparently of a combined assault of diabetes, colitis, and his foot infection, all worsened by a bout of food poisoning. He died June 1, 1912. Margaret eventually moved to Pasadena, California, where she lived through time of war and epidemic and crushing financial depression, and then war again. She died December 23, 1945. Both are buried in Chicago, in Graceland, on a tiny island in the cemetery’s only pond. John Root lies nearby, as do the Palmers, Louis Sullivan, Mayor Harrison, Marshall Field, Philip Armour, and so many others, in vaults and tombs that vary from the simple to the grand. Potter and Bertha still dominate things, as if stature mattered even in death. They occupy a massive acropolis with fifteen giant columns atop the only high ground, overlooking the pond. The others cluster around. On a crystalline fall day you can almost hear the tinkle of fine crystal, the rustle of silk and wool, almost smell the expensive cigars.

  NOTES AND SOURCES

  The White City, viewed from Lake Michigan.

  THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension.