The Devil in the White City

“Don’t Be Afraid”

AS ENGLEWOOD GAINED POPULATION, Holmes’s sales of tonics and lotions increased. By the end of 1886 the pharmacy was running smoothly and profitably. His thoughts turned now to a woman he had met earlier in the year during his brief stay in Minneapolis, Myrta Z. Belknap. She was young and blond, with blue eyes and a lush figure, but what elevated her above mere beauty was the aura of vulnerability and need that surrounded her. She became an immediate obsession, her image and need locked in his brain. He traveled to Minneapolis, ostensibly on business. He had no doubt he would succeed. It amused him that women as a class were so wonderfully vulnerable, as if they believed that the codes of conduct that applied in their safe little hometowns, like Alva, Clinton, and Percy, might actually still apply once they had left behind their dusty, kerosene-scented parlors and set out on their own.

The city toughened them quickly, however. Best to catch them at the start of their ascent toward freedom, in transit from small places, when they were anonymous, lost, their presence recorded nowhere. Every day he saw them stepping from trains and grip-cars and hansom cabs, inevitably frowning at some piece of paper that was supposed to tell them where they belonged. The city’s madams understood this and were known to meet inbound trains with promises of warmth and friendship, saving the important news for later. Holmes adored Chicago, adored in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she ever had existed, save perhaps a blade-thin track of perfume amid the stench of dung, anthracite, and putrefaction.

To Myrta, Holmes seemed to have stepped from a world far more exciting than her own. She lived with her parents and clerked in a music store. Minneapolis was small, somnolent, and full of Swedish and Norwegian farmers as charming as cornstalks. Holmes was handsome, warm, and obviously wealthy, and he lived in Chicago, the most feared and magnetic of cities. Even during their first meeting he touched her; his eyes deposited a bright blue hope. When he left the store that first day, as motes of dust filled the space he left behind, her own life seemed drab beyond endurance. A clock ticked. Something had to change.

When his first letter arrived, asking sweetly if he might court her, she felt as if a coarse blanket had been lifted from her life. Every few weeks he returned to Minneapolis. He told her about Chicago. He described its skyscrapers and explained how each year the buildings grew taller and taller. He told her pleasantly shocking stories of the stockyards, how the hogs climbed the Bridge of Sighs to an elevated platform where chains were attached to their hind legs and they were swept away, shrieking, along an overhead track down into the bloody core of the slaughterhouse. And romantic stories: how Potter Palmer had been so in love with his wife, Bertha, that he had given her a luxurious hotel, the Palmer House, as a wedding present.

There were rules about courtship. Although no one set them down on paper, every young woman knew them and knew instantly when they were being broken. Holmes broke them all—and with such forthright lack of shame that it became clear to Myrta that the rules must be different in Chicago. At first it frightened her, but she found quickly that she liked the heat and risk. When Holmes asked her to be his wife, she accepted immediately. They married on January 28, 1887.

Holmes neglected to tell Myrta that he already had a wife, Clara Lovering, the original Mrs. Herman Webster Mudgett. Two weeks after marrying Myrta, he filed a petition in the Supreme Court of Cook County, Illinois, to divorce Lovering. This was no fine-spirited gesture to clear the record: He charged Lovering with infidelity, a ruinous accusation. He allowed the petition to lapse, however, and eventually the court dismissed it for “failure to prosecute.”

In Chicago Myrta saw at once that the stories Holmes had told of the city had only barely captured its glamour and dangerous energy. It was like a cauldron of steaming iron, trains everywhere—jarring, but also a reminder that life had opened to her at last. In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That Holmes lived in Englewood, not the heart of Chicago, was at first a disappointment, but here too there was a vibrancy far beyond what she had experienced at home. She and Holmes settled into the second-floor apartment previously occupied by Mrs. Holton. By the spring of 1888 Myrta was pregnant.

At first she helped run the drugstore. She liked working with her husband and often watched him when he was engaged with a customer. She savored his looks and blue calm and craved the moments when, in the course of routine tasks, their bodies would touch. She admired, too, the charm with which he managed each transaction and how he won the business even of elderly customers loyal to the absent Mrs. Holton. And she smiled, at least initially, as a seemingly endless train of young women entered the store, each insisting that only direct consultation with Dr. Holmes himself would suffice.

Myrta came to see that underneath her husband’s warm and charming exterior there flowed a deep current of ambition. He seemed a druggist in name only; he more closely fit the prevailing ideal of the self-made man who through hard work and invention pulled himself rung by rung into the upper strata of society. “Ambition has been the curse of my husband’s life,” Myrta said later. “He wanted to attain a position where he would be honored and respected. He wanted wealth.”

She insisted, however, that his ambition never impaired his character and never distracted him from his role as husband and eventually father. Holmes, she swore, had a gentle heart. He adored children and animals. “He was a lover of pets and always had a dog or cat and usually a horse, and he would play with them by the hour, teaching them little tricks or romping with them.” He neither drank nor smoked and did not gamble. He was affectionate and impossible to ruffle. “In his home life I do not think there was ever a better man than my husband,” Myrta said. “He never spoke an unkind word to me or our little girl, or my mother. He was never vexed or irritable but was always happy and free from care.”

Yet from the start tension suffused their marriage. Holmes expressed no hostility; the heat came from Myrta, who quickly tired of all those young female customers and the way Holmes would smile at them and touch them and channel his blue gaze into their eyes. At first she had found it appealing; then it made her uneasy; finally it made her jealous and watchful.

Her increasing possessiveness did not anger Holmes. Rather he came to see her as an obstacle, just as a sea captain might view an iceberg—something to monitor and avoid. Business was so good, he told Myrta, that he needed her help managing the store’s books. She found herself spending more and more time in an office upstairs, writing correspondence and preparing invoices for the drugstore. She wrote to her parents of her sorrow. In the summer of 1888 her parents moved to Wilmette, Illinois, where they occupied a pretty two-story house on John Street, opposite a church. Lonely, sad, and pregnant, Myrta joined them at the house and there bore a daughter, Lucy.

Suddenly Holmes began acting like a dutiful husband. Myrta’s parents were cool at first, but he courted their approval with moist-eyed declarations of regret and displays of adoration for his wife and child. He succeeded. “His presence,” Myrta said, “was like oil on troubled waters, as mother often said to him. He was so kind, so gentle and thoughtful that we forgot our cares and worries.”

He begged their forbearance for his lengthy absences from the Wilmette house. There was so much to do in Chicago. From the way he dressed and the money he gave Myrta, he certainly seemed like a man on the rise, and this perception went a long way to ease the concerns of Myrta’s parents. They and Myrta settled into a life marked by increasingly sparse visits from Dr. Holmes, but when he did appear, he brought warmth and gifts and entombed little Lucy in his arms.

“It is said that babies are better judges of people than grown-up persons,” Myrta said, “and I never saw a baby that would not go to Mr. Holmes and stay with him contentedly. They would go to him when they wouldn’t come to me. He was remarkably fond of children. Often when we were traveling and there happened to be a baby in the car he would say, ‘Go and see if they won’t lend you that baby a little while,’ and when I brought it to him he would play with it, forgetting everything else, until its mother called for it or I could see that she wanted it. He has often taken babies that were crying from their mothers, and it would hardly be any time until he had them sound asleep or playing as happily as little ones can.”

With Englewood booming, Holmes saw an opportunity. Ever since acquiring Holton’s drugstore, he had been interested in the undeveloped land across the street. After a few inquiries he learned that it was owned by a woman in New York. In the summer of 1888 he bought the land and, thinking ahead, registered the deed under a false name, H. S. Campbell. Soon afterward he began jotting notes and sketching features for a building he planned to erect on the lot. He did not consult an architect, although a fine one, a Scotsman named A. A. Frazier, had an office in the building that housed Holton’s store. To hire an architect would have meant revealing the true character of the structure that suddenly had lodged itself in his imagination.

The building’s broad design and its function had come to him all at once, like a blueprint pulled from a drawer. He wanted retail shops on the first floor, to generate income and allow him to employ as many women as possible; apartments would fill the second and third. His personal flat and a large office would occupy the second-floor corner overlooking the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace. These were the basics. It was the details of the building that gave him the most pleasure. He sketched a wooden chute that would descend from a secret location on the second floor all the way to the basement. He planned to coat the chute with axle grease. He envisioned a room next to his office fitted with a large walk-in vault, with airtight seams and asbestos-coated iron walls. A gas jet embedded in one wall would be controlled from his closet, as would other gas jets installed in apartments 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 shop on the intersection of Sixty-third and Wallace.

One month after moving into his building, Holmes sold the former Holton drugstore and assured the buyer that he would face little competition.

To the buyer’s chagrin, Holmes promptly opened a new drugstore just across the street, in his own corner shop.

Holmes installed a variety of other businesses in his remaining first-floor stores, including a barbershop and restaurant. City directories also listed at Holmes’s address the office of a doctor named Henry D. Mann, possibly a Holmes alias, and the headquarters of the Warner Glass Bending Company, which Holmes formed ostensibly to enter the booming new business of making and shaping the large sheets of plate glass suddenly in so much demand.

Holmes equipped his shops with furniture and fixtures that he bought on credit. He had no intention of paying his debts and was confident he could evade prosecution through guile and charm. When creditors came by demanding to see the owner of the building, Holmes referred them happily to the fictive H. S. Campbell.

“He was the smoothest man I ever saw,” said C. E. Davis, whom Holmes had hired to manage the drugstore’s jewelry counter. Creditors, Davis said, would “come here raging and calling him all the names imaginable, and he would smile and talk to them and set up the cigars and drinks and send them away seemingly his friends for life. I never saw him angry. You couldn’t have trouble with him if you tried.”

Davis gestured toward the store. “If all the writs of mechanic’s lien that have been levied on this structure were pasted on these three walls, the block would look like a mammoth circus billboard. But I never heard of a lien being collected. Holmes used to tell me he had a lawyer paid to keep him out of trouble, but it always seemed to me that it was the courteous, audacious rascality of the fellow that pulled him through. One day he bought some furniture for his restaurant and moved it in, and that very evening the dealer came around to collect his bill or remove his goods. Holmes set up the drinks, took him to supper, bought him a cigar and sent the man off laughing at a joke, with a promise to call the next week for his money. In thirty minutes after he took his car Holmes had wagons in front loading up that furniture and the dealer never got a cent. Holmes didn’t go to jail, either. He was the only man in the United States that could do what he did.”

Holmes had the money to pay his debts. Davis estimated that Holmes made $200,000 through his drugstore and other business ventures, most of which were fraudulent. Holmes attempted, for example, to sell investors a machine that turned water into natural gas. He secretly connected his prototype to city gas lines.

He was always charming and cordial, but there were times when even these traits failed to put his business associates at ease. A druggist named Erickson recalled how Holmes used to come into his store to buy chloroform, a potent but unpredictable anesthetic in use since the Civil War. “I sometimes sold him the drug nine or ten times a week and each time it was in large quantities. I asked him what he used it for on several occasions, but he gave me very unsatisfactory answers. At last I refused to let him have any more unless he told me, as I pretended that I was afraid that he was not using it for any proper purpose.”

Holmes told Erickson he was using the chloroform for scientific experiments. Later, when Holmes returned for more chloroform, Erickson asked him how his experiments were coming.

Holmes gave him a blank look and said he was not conducting any experiments.

“I could never make him out,” Erickson said.

A woman named Strowers occasionally did Holmes’s laundry. One day he offered to pay her $6,000 if she would acquire a $10,000 life insurance policy and name him beneficiary. When she asked why he would do such a thing, he explained that upon her death he’d make a profit of $4,000, but in the meantime she’d be able to spend her $6,000 in whatever manner she chose.

To Mrs. Strowers, this was a fortune, and all she had to do was sign a few documents. Holmes assured her it was all perfectly legal.

She was healthy and expected to live a good long while. She was on the verge of accepting the offer when Holmes said to her, softly, “Don’t be afraid of me.”

Which terrified her.

In November 1890 Holmes learned along with the rest of Chicago that the directors of the World’s Columbian Exposition had at last reached a decision as to where to build the fair. To his delight, he read that the main site was to be Jackson Park, due east of his building at the lake end of Sixty-third, with exhibits also in downtown Chicago and Washington Park and along the full length of Midway Boulevard.

Holmes knew the parks from his bicycle journeys. Like most Americans, he had become caught up in the bicycle craze that was ignited by the advent of the “safety” bicycle, with its same-sized wheels and chain-and-sprocket drive. Unlike most Americans, however, Holmes sought also to capitalize on the craze by buying bicycles on credit, then reselling them without ever paying off the initial purchase. He himself rode a Pope.

The Exposition Company’s decision raised a groundswell of greed throughout Chicago’s South Side. An advertisement in the Tribune offered a six-room house for sale at Forty-first and Ellis, a mile or so north of Jackson Park, and boasted that during the fair the new owner could expect to let four of the six rooms for nearly a thousand dollars a month (about $30,000 in twenty-first-century currency). Holmes’s building and land were valuable to begin with, given Englewood’s continued growth, but now his property seemed the equivalent of a seam of gold ore.

An idea came to him for a way to mine that ore and also satisfy his other needs. He placed a new advertisement seeking more construction workers and once again called for the help of his loyal associates, Chappell, Quinlan, and Pitezel.