The Devil in the White City

A Hotel for the Fair

HOLMES’S NEW IDEA WAS TO turn his building into a hotel for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition—no Palmer House or Richelieu, certainly, but just comfortable enough and cheap enough to lure a certain kind of clientele and convincing enough to justify a large fire insurance policy. After the fair he intended to burn the building to collect the insurance and, as a happy dividend, destroy whatever surplus “material” might remain in its hidden storage chambers, although ideally, given other disposal measures available to him, the building by then would contain nothing of an incriminating nature. The thing was, one never knew. In the most transcendent moment, it was easy to make a mistake and forget some little thing that a clever detective might eventually use to propel him to the gallows. Whether the Chicago police even possessed that kind of talent was open to question. The Pinkerton National Detective Agency was the more dangerous entity, but its operatives of late seemed to be spending most of their energy battling strikers at coalfields and steel mills around the country.

Again acting as his own architect, Holmes early in 1891 began planning the necessary modifications, and soon carpenters were at work on the second and third floors. Once again Holmes’s method of segregating tasks and firing workers was proving successful. Clearly none of the workers had gone to the police. Patrolmen from the new Chicago police precinct house on Wentworth walked past Holmes’s building each day. Far from being suspicious, the officers had become friendly, even protective. Holmes knew each man by name. A cup of coffee, a free meal in his restaurant, a fine black cigar—policemen valued these gestures of affinity and grace.

Holmes was, however, beginning to feel mounting pressure from creditors, in particular from several furniture and bicycle dealers. He could still charm them and commiserate over their inability to locate the elusive deedholder, H. S. Campbell, but Holmes knew they soon would lose patience and in fact was a bit surprised they had not pursued him more forcefully than had been the case thus far. His techniques were too new, his skills too great, the men around him too naïve, as if they had never before experienced a falsehood. For every business that now refused to sell him goods, there were a dozen more that fawned over him and accepted his notes endorsed by H. S. Campbell or secured by the assets of the Warner Glass Bending Company. When pressed, sensing that a particular creditor was on the verge of legal action, even violence, Holmes paid his bills in cash using money harvested from his own ventures, such as lease income from his apartments and stores, sales from his pharmacy, and the proceeds from his newest venture, a mail-order medicine company. In a parody of Aaron Montgomery Ward’s fast-growing empire in central Chicago, Holmes had begun selling sham drugs that he guaranteed would cure alcoholism and baldness.

He was always open to new financial opportunities but was especially so now, since he knew that no matter how deftly he kept labor costs down, he still would have to pay for at least some of the transformation of his building. When Myrta’s great-uncle, Jonathan Belknap of Big Foot Prairie, Illinois, came to Wilmette for a visit, that challenge suddenly seemed likely to resolve itself. Belknap was not a rich man, but he was well off.

Holmes began appearing more frequently at the Wilmette house. He brought toys for Lucy, jewelry for Myrta and her mother. He filled the house with love.

Belknap had never met Holmes but knew all about his troubled marriage to Myrta and was prepared to dislike the young doctor. On first meeting he found Holmes far too smooth and self-assured for a man of so few years. He was struck, however, by how enthralled Myrta seemed to be whenever Holmes was around and by how even Myrta’s mother—Belknap’s niece by marriage—appeared to glow in Holmes’s presence. After several more encounters Belknap began to appreciate why Myrta had fallen so thoroughly for the man. He was handsome and clean and dressed well and spoke in fine sentences. His gaze was blue and forthright. In conversation he listened with an intensity that was almost alarming, as if Belknap were the most fascinating man in the world, not just an elderly uncle visiting from Big Foot Prairie.

Belknap still did not like Holmes, but he found his candor sufficiently disarming that when Holmes asked him to endorse a note for $2,500 to help cover the cost of a new house in Wilmette for himself and Myrta, Belknap agreed. Holmes thanked him warmly. A new house, away from Myrta’s parents, might be all the couple needed to end their growing estrangement. Holmes promised to pay the money back as soon as his business affairs allowed.

Holmes returned to Englewood and promptly forged Belknap’s signature to a second note for the same amount, intending to use the proceeds for his hotel.

On Holmes’s next visit to Wilmette, he invited Belknap to visit Englewood for a tour of his building and of the newly chosen site for the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Although Belknap had read much about the world’s fair and did want to see its future home, he did not relish the idea of spending a full day with Holmes. Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing. At first alienists described this condition as “moral insanity” and those who exhibited the disorder as “moral imbeciles.” They later adopted the term “psychopath,” used in the lay press as early as 1885 in William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette, which described it as a “new malady” and stated, “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath.” Half a century later, in his path-breaking book The Mask of Sanity, Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or how, he is not real.” People exhibiting this purest form of the disorder would become known, in the jargon of psychiatry, as “Cleckley” psychopaths.

When Belknap refused Holmes’s offer, Holmes seemed to crumble with hurt and disappointment. A tour was necessary, Holmes pleaded, if only to bolster his own sense of honor and to demonstrate to Belknap that he really was a man of means and that Belknap’s note was as secure an investment as any man could make. Myrta too looked crestfallen.

Belknap gave in. During the train journey to Englewood, Holmes pointed out landmarks: the skyscrapers of the city, the Chicago River, the stockyards. Belknap found the stench overpowering, but Holmes seemed not to notice it. The men exited the train at Englewood station.

The town was alive with movement. Trains rumbled past every few minutes. Horse-drawn streetcars moved east and west along Sixty-third, amid a dense traffic of carriages and drays. Everywhere Belknap looked some building was under construction. Soon the level of construction would increase even more, as entrepreneurs prepared to cash in on the expected crush of exposition visitors. Holmes described his own plans. He took Belknap on a tour of his pharmacy, with its marble countertops and glass containers filled with wildly colored solutions, then took him up to the second floor, where he introduced him to the building’s caretaker, Patrick Quinlan. Holmes walked Belknap through the building’s many corridors and described how the place would look as a hotel. Belknap found it bleak and strange, with passages that struck off in unexpected directions.

Holmes asked Belknap if he would like to see the roof and the construction already under way. Belknap declined, claiming falsely that he was too old a man to climb that many steps.

Holmes promised stirring views of Englewood, perhaps even a glimpse of Jackson Park off to the east, where the buildings of the fair soon would begin to rise. Again Belknap resisted, this time with more force.

Holmes tried a different approach. He invited Belknap to spend the night in his building. At first Belknap declined this offer as well, but feeling perhaps that he had been overly rude in avoiding the roof, he relented.

After nightfall Holmes led Belknap to a room on the second floor. Gas lamps had been installed at haphazard intervals along the corridor, leaving pockets of gloom whose borders shivered as Belknap and Holmes moved past. The room was furnished and comfortable enough and overlooked the street, which was still reassuringly busy. As far as Belknap could tell, he and Holmes were by now the only occupants of the building. “When I went to bed,” Belknap said, “I carefully locked the door.”

Soon the street sounds receded, leaving only the rumble of trains and the hollow clip-clop of an occasional horse. Belknap had difficulty sleeping. He stared at the ceiling, which was bathed in the shifting light of the streetlamps below his window. Hours passed. “Presently,” Belknap said, “I heard my door tried and then a key was slipped into the lock.”

Belknap called out, asking who was at the door. The noise stopped. He held his breath and listened and heard the sound of feet moving down the hall. He was certain that initially two men had been outside his door, but now one of them had left. He called again. This time a voice answered. Belknap recognized it as belonging to Patrick Quinlan, the caretaker.

Quinlan wanted to come in.

“I refused to open the door,” Belknap said. “He insisted for a time and then went away.”

Belknap lay awake the rest of the night.

Soon afterward he discovered Holmes’s forgery. Holmes apologized, claiming a dire need for money, and was so persuasive and abject that even Belknap felt mollified, although his distrust of Holmes persisted. Much later Belknap realized why Holmes had wanted so badly to show him the building’s roof. “If I’d gone,” Belknap said, “the forgery probably wouldn’t have been discovered, because I wouldn’t have been around to discover it.

“But I didn’t go,” he said. “I’m afraid of heights.”

As carpenters and plasterers worked on his building, Holmes turned his attention to the creation of an important accessory. He sketched a number of possible designs, relying perhaps on past observations of similar equipment, then settled on a configuration that seemed likely to work: a large rectangular box of fireproof brick about eight feet deep, three feet high, and three feet wide, encased within a second box of the same material, with the space between them heated by flames from an oil burner. The inner box would serve as an elongated kiln. Although he had never built a kiln before, he believed his design would generate temperatures extreme enough to incinerate anything within. That the kiln would also be able to destroy any odors emanating from the interior box was singularly important.

He planned to install the kiln in the basement and hired a bricklayer named Joseph E. Berkler to do the job. He told him he intended to use the kiln to produce and bend plate glass for his Warner Glass Bending Company. At Holmes’s instructions Berkler added a number of components made of iron. He worked quickly, and soon the kiln was ready for its first test.

Holmes ignited the burner. There was a satisfying whoosh. A wave of warmth rolled from the chamber to the far walls of the basement. The scent of partially combusted oil suffused the air.

But the test was disappointing. The box did not generate as much heat as Holmes had hoped. He adjusted the burner and tried again but achieved little improvement.

He used the city directory to locate a furnace company and requested an appointment with an experienced man. He identified himself as the founder of Warner Glass. If for some reason officials of the furnace company felt moved to verify that Warner Glass existed, all they had to do was check the 1890 Englewood directory to find the company’s listing, with Holmes named as proprietor.

The manager of the furnace company—his name was never made public—decided to attend to the matter personally and met Holmes at his building. He found a young good-looking man, almost delicate, who conveyed an air of confidence and prosperity. He had striking blue eyes. His building was on the gloomy side, the construction obviously below the standards of structures rising elsewhere on Sixty-third, but it was well located in a community that clearly was booming. For so young a man to own most of a city block was itself an accomplishment.

The manager followed Holmes to his second-floor office and there in the pleasant cross breeze from the corner windows studied Holmes’s drawings of his kiln. Holmes explained that he could not obtain “the necessary amount of heat.” The manager asked to see the apparatus.

That wasn’t necessary, Holmes said. He did not wish to trouble the manager, only to seek his advice, for which he would pay an appropriate fee.

The furnace man insisted he could do nothing without actually examining the kiln.

Holmes smiled. Of course. If the manager did not mind spending the extra time, he would be glad to show it to him.

Holmes led his visitor down the stairs to the first floor and from there down another, darker flight to the basement.

They entered a large rectangular cavern that ran the entire length of the block, interrupted only by beams and posts. In the shadows stood vats and barrels and mounds of dark matter, possibly soil. A long narrow table with a steel top stood under a series of unlit lamps and two worn leather cases rested nearby. The cellar had the look of a mine, the smell of a surgeon’s suite.

The furnace man examined the kiln. He saw that it contained an inner chamber of firebrick constructed in a manner that kept flames from reaching the interior, and he noted the clever addition of two openings in the top of the inner box that would allow gases from the box to flow into the surrounding flames, where they would then be consumed. It was an interesting design and seemed likely to work, although he did observe to himself that the shape of the kiln seemed unsuited to the task of bending glass. The inner box was too small to admit the broad panes now appearing in storefronts throughout the city. Otherwise, he noticed nothing unusual and foresaw no difficulty in improving the kiln’s operation.

He returned with a work crew. The men installed a more powerful burner that, once ignited, heated the kiln to three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Holmes seemed pleased.

Only later did the furnace man recognize that the kiln’s peculiar shape and extreme heat made it ideal for another, very different application. “In fact,” he said, “the general plan of the furnace was not unlike that of a crematory for dead bodies, and with the provision already described there would be absolutely no odor from the furnace.”

But again, that was later.

Holmes’s absences from Wilmette lengthened once again, although at regular intervals he sent Myrta and his daughter enough money to keep them comfortable. He even insured the girl’s life, since children after all were such fragile things and could be taken from the world in a heartbeat.

His businesses were doing well. His mail-order company brought in a surprising amount of cash, and he began trying to find a way to capitalize on the latest medical rage, a cure for alcoholism invented by a physician named Keeley in Dwight, Illinois. The corner drugstore ran smoothly and profitably, although one woman in the neighborhood observed that he seemed to have difficulty retaining the young and typically attractive women he often hired as clerks. These clerks, as far as she could tell, had an unfortunate habit of departing without warning, sometimes even leaving their personal belongings in their rooms on the second floor. She saw such behavior as a troubling sign of the rising shiftlessness of the age.

The work of turning Holmes’s building into a hotel proceeded slowly, with the usual bouts of rancor and delay. Holmes left the task of finding replacement workers to his three helpers, Quinlan, Chappell, and Pitezel. They seemed to have little difficulty finding new men for each new opening. Thousands of workers laid off elsewhere had come to Chicago hoping for jobs building the fair, only to find that too many workers had gotten the same idea, thus leaving a large pool of men available for work—any work, at any price.

Holmes turned his attention to other, more pleasant distractions. Sheer fate had brought two new women into his life, one of them nearly six feet tall and possessed of a rapturous body, the other, her sister-in-law, a lovely young woman with black hair and exquisite dark eyes.

That the tall one came equipped with a husband and daughter made the situation infinitely more appealing.