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

THE EXPOSITION PROVED UNABLE to hold the Black City at bay for very long. With its formal closure thousands more workers joined the swelling army of the unemployed, and homeless men took up residence among the great abandoned palaces of the fair. “The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World’s Fair,” wrote novelist Robert Herrick in The Web of Life. “In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed…. The city’s huge garment was too large for it; miles of empty stores, hotels, flat-buildings, showed its shrunken state. Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food or a right to shelter in its tenant-less buildings.” It was the contrast that was so wrenching. “What a spectacle!” wrote Ray Stannard Baker in his American Chronicle. “What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair which had so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.”

In that first, brutal winter Burnham’s photographer, Charles Arnold, took a very different series of photographs. One shows the Machinery Building soiled by smoke and litter. A dark liquid had been thrown against one wall. At the base of a column was a large box, apparently the home of an out-of-work squatter. “It is desolation,” wrote Teresa Dean, the columnist, about a visit she made to Jackson Park on January 2, 1894. “You wish you had not come. If there were not so many around, you would reach out your arms, with the prayer on your lips for it all to come back to you. It seems cruel, cruel, to give us such a vision; to let us dream and drift through heaven for six months, and then to take it out of our lives.”

Six days after her visit the first fires occurred and destroyed several structures, among them the famous Peristyle. The following morning Big Mary, chipped and soiled, stood over a landscape of twisted and blackened steel.

The winter became a crucible for American labor. To workers, Eugene Debs and Samuel Gompers came increasingly to seem like saviors, Chicago’s merchant princes like devils. George Pullman continued to cut jobs and wages without reducing rents, even though his company’s treasury was flush with over $60 million in cash. Pullman’s friends cautioned that he was being pigheaded and had underestimated the anger of his workers. He moved his family out of Chicago and hid his best china. On May 11, 1894, two thousand Pullman workers went on strike with the support of Debs’s American Railway Union. Other strikes broke out around the country, and Debs began planning a nationwide general strike to begin in July. President Cleveland ordered federal troops to Chicago and placed them under the command of General Nelson A. Miles, previously the grand marshal of the exposition. Miles was uneasy about his new command. He sensed in the spreading unrest something unprecedented, “more threatening and far-reaching than anything that had occurred before.” He followed orders, however, and the former grand marshal of the fair wound up fighting the men who had built it.

Strikers blocked trains and burned railcars. On July 5, 1894, arsonists set fire to the seven greatest palaces of the exposition—Post’s immense Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, Hunt’s dome, Sullivan’s Golden Door, all of them. In the Loop men and women gathered on rooftops and in the highest offices of the Rookery, the Masonic Temple, the Temperance Building, and every other high place to watch the distant conflagration. Flames rose a hundred feet into the night sky and cast their gleam far out onto the lake.

Belatedly, Burnham had gotten his wish. “There was no regret,” observed the Chicago Tribune, “rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbian season.”

Later, in the next year, came the wonder:

“There are hundreds of people who went to Chicago to see the Fair and were never heard from again,” said the New York World. “The list of the ‘missing’ when the Fair closed was a long one, and in the greater number foul play suspected. Did these visitors to the Fair, strangers to Chicago, find their way to Holmes’ Castle in answer to delusive advertisements sent out by him, never to return again? Did he erect his Castle close to the Fair grounds so as to gather in these victims by the wholesale … ?”

Initially the Chicago police had no answers, other than the obvious: That in Chicago in the time of the fair, it was so very easy to disappear.

The secrets of Holmes’s castle eventually did come to light, but only because of the persistence of a lone detective from a far-off city, grieving his own terrible loss.

PART IV Cruelty Revealed 1895

Dr. H. H. Holmes.

“Property of H. H. Holmes”

DETECTIVE FRANK GEYER WAS A big man with a pleasant, earnest face, a large walrus mustache, and a new gravity in his gaze and demeanor. He was one of Philadelphia’s top detectives and had been a member of the force for twenty years, during which time he had investigated some two hundred killings. He knew murder and its unchanging templates. Husbands killed wives, wives killed husbands, and the poor killed one another, always for the usual motives of money, jealousy, passion, and love. Rarely did a murder involve the mysterious elements of dime novels and mystery stories. From the start, however, Geyer’s current assignment—it was now June 1895—had veered from the ordinary. One unusual aspect was that the suspect already was in custody, arrested seven months earlier for insurance fraud and now incarcerated in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing Prison.

The suspect was a physician whose given name was Mudgett but was known more commonly by the alias H. H. Holmes. He once had lived in Chicago where he and an associate, Benjamin Pitezel, had run a hotel during the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They had moved next to Fort Worth, Texas, then to St. Louis, and on to Philadelphia, committing frauds along the way. In Philadelphia Holmes had swindled the Fidelity Mutual Life Association of nearly $10,000 by apparently faking the death of a policyholder, Ben Pitezel. Holmes had bought the insurance in 1893 from Fidelity’s Chicago office, just before the close of the exposition. As evidence of fraud accumulated, Fidelity had hired the Pinkerton National Detective Agency—“The Eye That Never Sleeps”—to search for Holmes. The agency’s operatives picked up his trail in Burlington, Vermont, and followed him to Boston, where they arranged to have him arrested by police. Holmes confessed to the fraud and agreed to be extradited to Philadelphia for trial. At that point the case appeared to be closed. But now in June 1895 it was becoming increasingly apparent that Holmes had not faked the death of Ben Pitezel, he had killed him and then arranged the scene to make the death seem accidental. Now three of Pitezel’s five children—Alice, Nellie, and Howard—were missing, last seen in Holmes’s company.

Geyer’s assignment was to find the children. He was invited to join the case by Philadelphia district attorney George S. Graham, who over the years had come to rely on Geyer for the city’s most sensitive investigations. Graham had thought twice this time, however, for he knew that just a few months earlier Geyer had lost his wife, Martha, and his twelve-year-old daughter, Esther, in a house fire.

Geyer interviewed Holmes in his cell but learned nothing new. Holmes insisted that when he had last seen the Pitezel children, they were alive and traveling with a woman named Minnie Williams, en route to the place where their father was hiding out.

Geyer found Holmes to be smooth and glib, a social chameleon. “Holmes is greatly given to lying with a sort of florid ornamentation,” Geyer wrote, “and all of his stories are decorated with flamboyant draperies, intended by him to strengthen the plausibility of his statements. In talking, he has the appearance of candor, becomes pathetic at times when pathos will serve him best, uttering his words with a quaver in his voice, often accompanied by a moistened eye, then turning quickly with a determined and forceful method of speech, as if indignation or resolution had sprung out of tender memories that had touched his heart.”