begun showing up at his door. Independently of each other, the Cigrand and Conner families had hired “eyes” to search for their missing daughters. Although at first these inquiries troubled Holmes, he realized quickly that neither family believed he had anything to do with the disappearances. The detectives made no mention of suspecting foul play. They wanted information—the names of friends, forwarding addresses, suggestions on where to look next.
He was, of course, happy to oblige. Holmes told his visitors how much it grieved him, truly deeply grieved him, that he was unable to provide any new information to ease the worry of the parents. If he heard from the women, he of course would notify the detectives at once. Upon parting, he shook each detective’s hand and told him that if his work should happen to bring him back to Englewood anytime in the future, by all means stop in. Holmes and the detectives parted as cheerily as if they had known each other all their lives.
At the moment—March 1893—the greatest inconvenience confronting Holmes was his lack of help. He needed a new secretary. There was no shortage of women seeking work, for the fair had drawn legions of them to Chicago. At the nearby Normal School, for example, the number of women applying to become teacher trainees was said to be many times the usual. Rather, the trick lay in choosing a woman of the correct sensibility. Candidates would need a degree of stenographic and typewriting skill, but what he most looked for and was so very adept at sensing was that alluring amalgam of isolation, weakness, and need. Jack the Ripper had found it in the impoverished whores of Whitechapel; Holmes saw it in transitional women, fresh clean young things free for the first time in history but unsure of what that freedom meant and of the risks it entailed. What he craved was possession and the power it gave him; what he adored was anticipation—the slow acquisition of love, then life, and finally the secrets within. The ultimate disposition of the material was irrelevant, a recreation. That he happened to have found a way to make disposal both efficient and profitable was simply a testament to his power.
In March fortune brought him the perfect acquisition. Her name was Minnie R. Williams. He had met her several years earlier during a stay in Boston and had considered acquiring her even then, but the distance was too great, the timing awkward. Now she had moved to Chicago. Holmes guessed that he himself might be part of the reason.
She would be twenty-five years old by now. Unlike his usual selections, she was plain, short, and plump, her weight somewhere between 140 and 150. She had a masculine nose, thick dark eyebrows, and virtually no neck. Her expression was bland, her cheeks full—“a baby face,” as one witness put it. “She didn’t seem to know a great deal.”
In Boston, however, Holmes had discovered that she possessed other winning attributes.
Born in Mississippi, Minnie Williams and her younger sister, Anna, were orphaned at an early age and sent to live with different uncles. Anna’s new guardian was the Reverend Dr. W. C. Black, of Jackson, Mississippi, editor of the Methodist
Anna, meanwhile, became a schoolteacher. She taught in Midlothian, Texas, at the Midlothian Academy.
When Holmes met Minnie, he was traveling on business under the alias Henry Gordon and found himself invited to a gathering at the home of one of Boston’s leading families. Through various inquiries Holmes learned of Minnie’s inheritance and of the fact that it consisted largely of a parcel of property in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas.
Holmes extended his Boston stay. Minnie called him Harry. He took her to plays and concerts and bought her flowers and books and sweets. Wooing her was pathetically easy. Each time he told her he had to return to Chicago, she seemed crushed, delightfully so. Throughout 1889 he traveled regularly to Boston and always swept Minnie into a whirl of shows and dinners, although what he looked forward to most were the days before his departure when her need flared like fire in a dry forest.
After a time, however, he tired of the game. The distance was too great, Minnie’s reticence too profound. His visits to Boston became fewer, though he still responded to her letters with the ardor of a lover.
Holmes’s absence broke Minnie’s heart. She had fallen in love. His visits had thrilled her, his departures destroyed her. She was perplexed—he had seemed to be conducting a courtship and even urged her to abandon her studies and run with him to Chicago, but now he was gone and his letters came only rarely. She gladly would have left Boston under the flag of marriage, but not under the reckless terms he proposed. He would have made an excellent husband. He was affectionate in ways she rarely encountered in men, and he was adept at business. She missed his warmth and touch.
Soon there were no letters at all.
Upon graduation from the Academy of Elocution, Minnie moved to Denver, where she tried to establish her own theatrical company, and in the process lost $15,000. She still dreamed about Harry Gordon. As her theater company collapsed, she thought of him more and more. She dreamed also of Chicago, a city everyone seemed to be talking about and to which everyone seemed to be moving. Between Harry and the soon-to-begin World’s Columbian Exposition, the city became irresistible to her.
She moved to Chicago in February 1893 and took a job as a stenographer for a law firm. She wrote to Harry to tell him of her arrival.
Harry Gordon called on her almost immediately and greeted her with tears in his eyes. He was so warm and affectionate. It was as if they had never parted. He suggested she come work for him as his personal stenographer. They could see each other every day, without having to worry about the interventions of Minnie’s landlady, who watched them as if she were Minnie’s own mother.
The prospect thrilled her. He still said nothing about marriage, but she could tell he loved her. And this was Chicago. Things were different here, less rigid and formal. Everywhere she went she found women her own age, unescorted, holding jobs, living their own lives. She accepted Harry’s offer. He seemed delighted.
But he imposed a curious stipulation. Minnie was to refer to him in public as Henry Howard Holmes, an alias, he explained, that he had adopted for business reasons. She was never to call him Gordon, nor act surprised when people referred to him as Dr. Holmes. She could call him “Harry” at any time, however.
She managed his correspondence and kept his books, while he concentrated on getting his building ready for the world’s fair. They dined together in his office, on meals brought in from the restaurant below. Minnie showed “a remarkable aptitude for the work,” Holmes wrote in his memoir. “During the first weeks she boarded at a distance, but later, from about the 1st of March until the 15th of May, 1893, she occupied rooms in the same building and adjoining my offices.”
Harry touched her and caressed her and let his eyes fill with tears of adoration. At last he asked her to marry him. She felt very lucky. Her Harry was so handsome and dynamic, she knew that once married they would share a wonderful life full of travel and fine possessions. She wrote of her hopes to her sister Anna.
In recent years the sisters had become very close, overcoming an earlier estrangement. They wrote to each other often. Minnie filled her letters with news of her fast-intensifying romance and expressed wonder that such a handsome man had chosen her to be his wife.
Anna was skeptical. The romance was advancing too quickly and with a degree of intimacy that violated all the intricate rules of courtship. Minnie was sweet, Anna knew, but certainly no beauty.
If Harry Gordon was such a paragon of looks and enterprise, why had he selected her?
In mid-March Holmes received a letter from Peter Cigrand, Emeline’s father, asking yet again for help in finding his daughter. The letter was dated March 16. Holmes responded promptly, on March 18, with a typed letter in which he told Cigrand that Emeline had left his employ on December 1, 1892. It is possible that Minnie in her role as Holmes’s personal secretary did the typing.
“I received her wedding cards about Dec. 10,” he wrote. She had come to see him twice since her marriage, the last time being January 1, 1893, “at which point she was disappointed at not finding any mail here for her, and my impression is that she spoke of having written to you previous to that time. Before going away in December she told me personally that the intention was that she and her husband should go to England on business with which he was connected, but when she called here the last time she spoke as though the trip had been given up. Please let me know within a few days if you did not hear from her and give me her uncle’s address here in the city and I will
