throughout the building. There would be a large basement with hidden chambers and a sub-basement for the permanent storage of sensitive material.
As Holmes dreamed and sketched, the features of his building became more elaborate and satisfying. But this was only the dream phase. He could hardly imagine the pleasure that would fill his days when the building was finished and flesh-and-blood women moved among its features. As always, the thought aroused him.
Constructing the building, he knew, would be no small challenge. He devised a strategy that he believed would not only allay suspicions but also reduce the costs of construction.
He placed newspaper advertisements for carpenters and laborers, and soon workers with teams of horses began excavating the land. The resulting hole evoked a giant grave and exuded the same musty chill, but this was not unwelcome for it provided workers with relief from the intensifying summer heat. The men had difficulty with the soil. The top few feet were easy to manage, but lower down the earth became sandy and wet. The sides of the pit had to be shored with timber. The walls bled water. A later report by a Chicago building inspector noted, “There is an uneven settlement of foundations, in some places as much as four inches in a span of 20 feet.” Bricklayers set the foundation and laid the exterior walls, while carpenters erected the interior frame. The street resonated with the wheeze of handsaws.
Holmes cast himself as a demanding contractor. As workers came to him for their wages, he berated them for doing shoddy work and refused to pay them, even if the work was perfect. They quit, or he fired them. He recruited others to replace them and treated these workers the same way. Construction proceeded slowly, but at a fraction of the proper cost. The high rate of turnover had the corollary benefit of keeping to a minimum the number of individuals who understood the building’s secrets. A worker might be ordered to perform a certain task—for example, to install the gas nozzle inside the big walk-in vault—but in the narrow context within which the worker functioned, the assignment could seem reasonable or at worst merely eccentric.
Even so, a bricklayer named George Bowman found the experience of working for Holmes somewhat chilling. “I don’t know what to make of Holmes,” Bowman said. “I hadn’t been working for him but two days before he came around and asked me if I didn’t think it pretty hard work, this bricklaying. He asked me if I wouldn’t like to make money easier than that, and of course I told him yes. A few days after, he came over to me and, pointing down to the basement, said, ‘You see that man down there? Well, that’s my brother-in-law, and he has got no love for me, neither have I for him. Now, it would be the easiest matter for you to drop a stone on that fellow’s head while you’re at work and I’ll give you fifty dollars if you do.’”
What made the incident particularly frightening was Holmes’s manner as he made the offer—“about the same manner one would expect from a friend who was asking you the most trivial question,” Bowman said.
Whether Holmes truly meant for Bowman to kill the man cannot be known. It would have been wholly within character for Holmes to have first persuaded the “brother-in-law” to take out a life insurance policy with Holmes as beneficiary. It was possible, too, that Holmes was merely testing Bowman to determine how useful he might be in the future. If so, it was a test that Bowman failed. “I was so badly scared I didn’t know what to say or do,” Bowman said, “but I didn’t drop the stone and got out of the place soon after.”
Three men did meet Holmes’s standard of trustworthiness. Each worked for him throughout the period of construction and continued to associate with him after the building was completed. One was Charles Chappell, a machinist who lived near Cook County Hospital. He first worked for Holmes as a common laborer but soon proved to possess a talent that Holmes found particularly valuable. Another was Patrick Quinlan, who lived at Forty-seventh and Morgan in Englewood until he moved into Holmes’s building as its caretaker. He was a small, twitchy man in his late thirties, with light curly hair and a sandy mustache.
The third and most important was Benjamin Pitezel, a carpenter, who joined Holmes in November 1889. He replaced a worker named Robert Latimer, who had quit to take over as gatekeeper at the rail intersection in front of Holmes’s drugstore. At first, Latimer said, Pitezel took care of the horses involved in the construction of Holmes’s building, but later he became his all-round assistant. Holmes and Pitezel seemed to have a close relationship, close enough at least for Holmes to do Pitezel a costly favor. Pitezel was arrested in Indiana for attempting to pass forged checks. Holmes posted bail and forfeited the amount when Pitezel, as planned, failed to return for trial.
Pitezel had smooth features and a sharp well-defined chin. He might have been handsome if not for a certain hungry gauntness and the way the lids of his eyes cloaked the top of each iris. “In a general way,” Holmes said, “I should describe him as a man nearly six feet high (at least five feet ten inches), always thin in flesh and weighing from one hundred and forty-five to one hundred and fifty-five lbs., having very black and somewhat coarse hair, very thick, with no tendency to baldness; his mustache was a much lighter color and I think of a red tinge, though I have seen him have it colored black at times, which gave him quite a different appearance.”
Pitezel was plagued with various maladies: sore knees from the installation of one too many floors, a wart on his neck that kept him from wearing a stiff collar, and teeth so painful that at one point he had to suspend his work for Holmes. Despite being a chronic alcoholic, he was, in the appraisal of one doctor, a man of “fine physique.”
Pitezel was married to Carrie Canning of Galva, Illinois, and the father of a fast-increasing number of children. Photographs of the children show a sweet if sober bunch who seem ready at a moment’s notice to swing into action with brooms and dishcloths. The couple’s first daughter, Dessie, had been born out of wedlock, an event entirely within the realm of what Pitezel’s parents had come to expect of their son. In a last plea for Pitezel to take a more righteous path, his father wrote: “Come with me and I will do the good is the Savior’s command. Will you go? I will take that wicked nature out of you, and I will wash from you all stains, and I will be a father to you and you shall be a son and an heir.” The pain in his father’s words was palpable. “I love you,” he wrote, “although you have gone far astray.”
Alice, the second child, was born soon after the marriage. Another daughter and three sons followed, although one boy died of diphtheria shortly after birth. Three of the children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—would become so well known throughout America that headline writers would refer to them by their first names alone, confident that even the most remote reader understood exactly who they were.
Pitezel too would achieve a certain fame because of Holmes. “Pitezel was his tool,” a district attorney said, “his creature.”
Construction of Holmes’s building occurred in ragged stages and more or less halted each winter at the close of what workers called the “building season,” although Holmes had read how architects in the Loop were using techniques that allowed construction year-round. Eventually, much would be made of the fact that Holmes had erected his building during the same period in which Jack the Ripper, thousands of miles away, began his killings.
The first of Jack’s murders occurred on August 31, 1888, the last on the night of November 9, 1888 when he met a prostitute named Mary Kelly and accompanied her back to her rooms. He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine. Over the next few hours, secure within walls, he carved off her breasts and placed these on a table along with her nose. He slashed her from throat to pubis, skinned her thighs, removed her internal organs, and arranged them in a pile between her feet. He cut off a hand, which he then thrust into her bisected abdomen. Kelly had been three months’ pregnant at the time.
Abruptly the murders stopped, as if that tryst with Mary Kelly had sated the killer’s need at last. Five confirmed victims, only five, and Jack the Ripper became the embodiment, forever, of pure evil.
Every Chicago resident who could read devoured these reports from abroad, but none with quite so much intensity as Dr. H. H. Holmes.
On June 29, 1889, when Holmes’s building was half completed, Chicago annexed Englewood and soon afterward established a new police precinct, the Tenth, Second Division, at Sixty-third and Wentworth, seven blocks from Holmes’s pharmacy. Soon patrolmen under the command of Captain Horace Elliott began making regular walks past the store, where in accord with custom they stopped to chat with the young and personable owner. Periodically the officers ambled across the street to watch construction of the new building. Englewood already had a number of substantial structures, including the YMCA, the Cook County Normal School, which trained teachers, and the lavish Timmerman Opera House, now nearing completion at Sixty-third and Stewart, but the village still had a lot of open terrain, and any building destined to occupy an entire block was a topic of conversation.
Construction took another year, with the usual hiatus for winter. By May 1890 the building was largely finished. The second floor had six corridors, thirty-five rooms, and fifty-one doors, the third another three dozen rooms. The building’s first floor had space for five retail stores, the best of which was a large and inviting corner
