The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

years. The creditors now hired an attorney named George B. Chamberlin, counsel for Chicago’s Lafayette Collection Agency, who had been pestering Holmes ever since he failed to pay the furnace company for improving his kiln. Later Chamberlin would claim to be the first man in Chicago to suspect Holmes of being a criminal.

In the fall of 1893 Chamberlin contacted Holmes and requested he come to a meeting at his office. Holmes believed he and Chamberlin would be meeting alone, one on one, but when Holmes arrived at the office, he found it occupied by two dozen creditors and their attorneys and one police detective.

This surprised Holmes but did not faze him. He shook hands and met the angry gazes of his creditors head on. Tempers immediately cooled a few degrees. He had that effect.

Chamberlin had planned the meeting as a trap to try to shatter Holmes’s imperturbable facade, and was impressed with Holmes’s ability to maintain his insouciance despite the rancor in the room. Chamberlin told Holmes that all together he owed the creditors at least $50,000.

Holmes adopted his most sober expression. He understood their concerns. He explained his lapses. His ambition had gotten ahead of his ability to pay his debts. Things would have been fine, all the debts resolved, if not for the Panic of 1893, which had ruined him and destroyed his hopes, just as it had for countless others in Chicago and the nation at large.

Incredibly, Chamberlin saw, some of the creditors nodded in sympathy.

Tears filled Holmes’s eyes. He offered his deepest, most heartfelt apologies. And he suggested a solution. He proposed to settle his debts by giving the group a mortgage secured by his various properties.

This nearly made Chamberlin laugh, yet one of the attorneys present in the room actually advised the group to accept Holmes’s offer. Chamberlin was startled to see that Holmes’s false warmth seemed to be mollifying the creditors. A few moments earlier the group had wanted the detective to arrest Holmes the moment he entered the room. Now they wanted to talk about what to do next.

Chamberlin told Holmes to wait in an adjacent room.

Holmes did so. He waited peacefully.

As the meeting progressed—and grew heated—the attorney who previously had wanted to accept Holmes’s mortgage stepped out of Chamberlin’s office and entered the room where Holmes waited, ostensibly for a drink of water. He and Holmes talked. Exactly what happened next is unclear. Chamberlin claimed later that this attorney had been so angry at having his recommendation rebuffed that he tipped Holmes to the fact the creditors were again leaning toward arrest. It is possible, too, that Holmes simply offered the attorney cash for the information, or deployed his false warmth and teary regret to seduce the attorney into revealing the group’s mounting consensus.

The attorney returned to the meeting.

Holmes fled.

Soon afterward Holmes set out for Fort Worth, Texas, to take better advantage of Minnie Williams’s land. He had plans for the property. He would sell some of it and on the rest build a three-story structure exactly like the one in Englewood. Meanwhile he would use the land to secure loans and to float notes. He expected to lead a very prosperous and satisfying life, at least until the time came to move on to the next city. He brought along his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, and his new fiancee, the small and pretty Miss Georgiana Yoke. Just before leaving Chicago Holmes acquired a life insurance policy, from the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of Philadelphia, to insure Pitezel’s life for $10,000.

Nightfall

THROUGHOUT OCTOBER ATTENDANCE AT the fair rose sharply as more and more people realized that the time left to see the White City was running short. On October 22 paid attendance totaled 138,011. Just two days later it reached 244,127. Twenty thousand people a day now rode the Ferris Wheel, 80 percent more than at the start of the month. Everyone hoped attendance would continue rising and that the number of people drawn to the closing ceremony of October 30 would break the record set on Chicago Day.

To attract visitors for the close, Frank Millet planned a day-long celebration with music, speeches, fireworks, and a landing by “Columbus” himself from the exposition’s full-sized replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, built in Spain for the fair. Millet hired actors to play Columbus and his captains; the crew would consist of the men who had sailed the ships to Chicago. Millet arranged to borrow tropical plants and trees from the Horticulture Building and have them moved to the lakeshore. He planned also to coat the beach with fallen oak and maple leaves to signify the fact that Columbus landed in autumn, even though live palms and dead deciduous leaves were not precisely compatible. Upon landing, Columbus was to thrust his sword into the ground and claim the New World for Spain, while his men assumed positions that mimicked those depicted on a two-cent postage stamp commemorating Columbus’s discovery. Meanwhile, according to the Tribune, Indians recruited from Buffalo Bill’s show and from various fair exhibits would “peer cautiously” at the landing party while shouting incoherently and running “to and fro.” With this enactment Millet hoped to carry visitors “back 400 years”—despite the steam tugboats that would nudge the Spanish ships toward shore.

First, however, came Mayor Harrison’s big day, American Cities Day, on Saturday, October 28. Five thousand mayors and city councilmen had accepted Harrison’s invitation to the fair, among them the mayors of San Francisco, New Orleans and Philadelphia. The record is silent as to whether New York’s mayor attended or not.

That morning Harrison delighted reporters by announcing that yes, the rumors about him and the very young Miss Annie Howard were true, and not only that, the two planned to marry on November 16.

The glory time came in the afternoon, when he rose to speak to the assembled mayors. Friends said he had never looked so handsome, so full of life.

He praised the remarkable transformation of Jackson Park. “Look at it now!” he said. “These buildings, this hall, this dream of poets of centuries is the wild aspiration of crazy architects alone.” He told his audience, “I myself have taken a new lease of life”—an allusion perhaps to Miss Howard—“and I believe I shall see the day when Chicago will be the biggest city in America, and the third city on the face of the globe.” He was sixty-eight years old but announced, “I intend to live for more than half a century, and at the end of that half-century London will be trembling lest Chicago shall surpass it…”

With a glance at the mayor of Omaha, he graciously offered to accept Omaha as a suburb.

He changed course. “It sickens me when I look at this great Exposition to think that it will be allowed to crumble to dust,” he said. He hoped the demolition would be quick, and he quoted a recent remark by Burnham: “‘Let it go; it has to go, so let it go. Let us put the torch to it and burn it down.’ I believe with him. If we cannot preserve it for another year I would be in favor of putting a torch to it and burning it down and let it go up into the bright sky to eternal heaven.”

Prendergast could stand it no longer. His visit to the corporation counsel’s office—by rights his office—had been humiliating. They had humored him. Smirked. Yet Harrison had promised him the job. What did he have to do to get the mayor’s attention? All his postcards had achieved nothing. No one wrote to him, no one took him seriously.

At two o’clock on American Cities Day Prendergast left his mother’s house and walked to a shoe dealer on Milwaukee Avenue. He paid the dealer four dollars for a used six-chamber revolver. He knew that revolvers of this particular model had a penchant for accidental discharge when bumped or dropped, so he loaded it with only five cartridges and kept the empty chamber under the hammer.

Later, much would be made of this precaution.

At three o’clock, about the time Harrison was giving his speech, Prendergast walked into the Unity Building in central Chicago where Governor John P. Altgeld had an office.

Prendergast looked pale and strangely excited. An official of the building found his demeanor troubling and told him he could not enter.

Prendergast returned to the street.