The Devil in the White City (50 page)

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

A
BOARD THE
O
LYMPIC
B
URNHAM
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.

N
OTES AND
S
OURCES

The White City, viewed from Lake Michigan.

T
HE 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.

A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting.

I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s
Burnham of Chicago
(1974); Laura Wood Roper’s
FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted
(1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s
A Clearing in the Distance
(1999). One book in particular,
City of the Century
by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s
AIA Guide to Chicago
(1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s
Graveyards of Chicago
(1999); John Flinn’s
Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition
(1893); and
Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition
(1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

Holmes proved an elusive character, owing in large part to the Philadelphia judge’s unfortunate decision to bar District Attorney Graham’s three dozen witnesses from giving testimony. Several books have been written about Holmes, but none tells quite the same story. Two of them, Harold Schechter’s
Depraved
and David Franke’s
The Torture Doctor
(the work quoted by the modern serial killer Dr. Swango), seem the most trustworthy. Two other works exist that provide a concrete foundation of facts. One is Detective Frank Geyer’s memoir,
The Holmes-Pitezel Case
, a detailed account of events from the time of Holmes’s arrest onward, in which Geyer presents excerpts of primary documents that no longer exist. I was lucky enough to acquire a copy from an online seller of antique books. The second is
The Trial of Herman W. Mudgett, Alias, H. H. Holmes
, published in 1897, a complete transcript of the trial. I found a copy in the law library of the University of Washington.

Holmes left a memoir,
Holmes’ Own Story
, which I found in the Library of Congress’s rare book collection. He also made at least three confessions. The first two appear in Geyer’s book. The third and most sensational appeared in the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, which paid him a rich fee to write it. Though mostly untrue, his memoir and confessions were nuggeted with details that jibed with facts established in court or unearthed by Geyer and by the legions of reporters who covered Holmes’s story after his arrest in Boston. I relied heavily on newspaper articles published in the
Chicago Tribune
and in two Philadelphia newspapers, the
Inquirer
and the
Public Ledger
. Many of these articles were full of inaccuracies and, I suspect, embellishments. I mined them for bits of apparent fact and for reproductions of original documents, such as letters, telegrams, interviews, and other primary materials uncovered by police or produced by witnesses who stepped forward once the nature of Holmes’s “Castle of Horrors” became front-page news. One of the most striking, and rather charming, aspects of criminal investigation in the 1890s is the extent to which the police gave reporters direct access to crime scenes, even while investigations were in progress. At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago’s chief of police told a
Tribune
reporter he’d just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.

Exactly what motivated Holmes may never be known. In focusing on his quest for possession and dominance, I present only one possibility, though I recognize that any number of other motives might well be posited. I base my account on known details of his history and behavior and on what forensic psychiatrists have come to understand about psychopathic serial killers and the forces that drive them. Dr. James O. Raney, a Seattle psychiatrist who now and then provides forensic evaluations, read the manuscript and gave me his observations about the nature of psychopaths, known more tediously in today’s psychiatric handbooks as people afflicted with “antisocial personality disorder.” It is a good thing Alfred Hitchcock died before the change was made.

Clearly no one other than Holmes was present during his murders—no one, that is, who survived—yet in my book I re-create two of his killings. I agonized over exactly how to do this and spent a good deal of time rereading Truman Capote’s
In Cold Blood
for insights into how Capote achieved his dark and still deeply troubling account. Sadly, Capote left no footnotes. To build my murder scenes, I used threads of known detail to weave a plausible account, as would a prosecutor in his closing arguments to a jury. My description of Julia Conner’s death by chloroform is based on expert testimony presented at Holmes’s trial about the character of chloroform and what was known at the time about its effect on the human body.