The Devil in the White City

Vanishing Point

AFTER YEARS SPENT DRIFTING from town to town and job to job, a young jeweler named Icilius Conner—he preferred the nickname “Ned”—moved to Chicago with his wife Julia and their eight-year-old daughter Pearl and quickly found that Chicago was indeed a city of opportunity. At the start of 1891 Ned found himself managing a jewelry counter that occupied one wall of a thriving drugstore on the city’s South Side, at Sixty-third and Wallace. For once in Ned’s adult life, the future gleamed.

The owner of the drugstore, though very young, was prosperous and dynamic, truly a man of the age, and seemed destined for even greater success given that the World’s Columbian Exposition was to be built just a short streetcar ride east, at the end of Sixty-third. There was talk too that a new elevated rail line, nicknamed the Alley L for the way its trestles roofed city alleys, would be extended eastward along Sixty-third directly to Jackson Park, thus providing visitors with another means of reaching the future fair. Already traffic on the street had increased sharply, as each day hundreds of citizens drove their carriages to the park to see the chosen site. Not that there was much to see. Ned and Julia had found the park an ugly, desolate place of sandy ridges and half-dead oaks, although Pearl had enjoyed trying to catch tadpoles in its pools of stagnant water. That anything wonderful could rise on that ground seemed beyond possibility, although Ned, like most new visitors to Chicago, was willing to concede that the city was a place unlike any he had encountered. If any city could make good on the elaborate boasts circulated thus far, Chicago was the one. Ned’s new employer, Dr. H. H. Holmes, seemed a perfect example of what everyone called the “Chicago spirit.” To be so young, yet own a block-long building, would be incredible in any other place of Ned’s experience. Here it seemed an ordinary accomplishment.

The Conners lived in a flat on the second floor of the building, near Dr. Holmes’s own suite of rooms. It was not the brightest, most cheerful apartment, but it was warm and close to work. Moreover, Holmes offered to employ Julia as a clerk in the drugstore and to train her to keep his books. Later, when Ned’s eighteen-year-old sister, Gertrude, moved to Chicago, Holmes asked to hire her as well, to manage his new mail-order medicine company. With three incomes, the family might soon be able to afford a house of their own, perhaps on one of the wide macadam streets of Englewood. Certainly they’d be able to afford bicycles and trips to Timmerman’s theater down the street.

One thing did make Ned uneasy, however. Holmes seemed inordinately attentive to Gertie and Julia. On one level this was natural and something to which Ned had become accustomed, for both women were great beauties, Gertie slim and dark, Julia tall and felicitously proportioned. It was clear to Ned, clear in fact from the first moment, that Holmes was a man who liked women and whom women liked in return. Lovely young women seemed drawn to the drugstore. When Ned tried to help them, they were remote and uninterested. Their manner changed markedly if Holmes happened then to enter the store.

Always a plain man, Ned now seemed to become part of the background, a bystander to his own life. Only his daughter Pearl was as attentive to him as always. Ned watched with alarm as Holmes flattered Gertie and Julia with smiles and gifts and treacly praise—especially Gertie—and how the women glowed in response. When Holmes left them, they appeared crestfallen, their demeanor suddenly brittle and snappish.

Even more disconcerting was the change in how customers responded to Ned himself. It was not what they said but what they carried in their eyes, something like sympathy, even pity.

One night during this period Holmes asked Ned a favor. He led him to the big vault and stepped inside, then told Ned to close the door and listen for the sound of his shouting. “I shut the door and put my ear to the crack,” Ned recalled, “but could hear only a faint sound.” Ned opened the door, and Holmes stepped out. Now Holmes asked Ned if he would go inside and try shouting, so that Holmes could hear for himself how little sound escaped. Ned did so but got back out the instant Holmes reopened the door. “I didn’t like that kind of business,” he said.

Why anyone would even want a soundproof vault was a question that apparently did not occur to him.

For the police there were warnings of a different sort—letters from parents, visits from detectives hired by parents—but these were lost in the chaos. Vanishment seemed a Chicago pastime. There were too many disappearances, in all parts of the city, to investigate properly, and too many forces impeding the detection of patterns. Patrolmen, many of them, were barely competent, appointed solely at the direction of ward bosses. Detectives were few, their resources and skills minimal. Class obscured their vision. Ordinary vanishings—Polish girls, stockyard boys, Italian laborers, Negro women—merited little effort. Only the disappearance of moneyed souls drew a forceful response, and even then there was little that detectives could do other than send telegrams to other cities and periodically check the morgue for each day’s collection of unidentified men, women, and children. At one point half the city’s detective force was involved in investigating disappearances, prompting the chief of the city’s central detective unit to announce he was considering the formation of a separate bureau, “a mysterious disappearances department.”

Women and men vanished in equal proportion. Fannie Moore, a young visitor from Memphis, failed to return to the home where she was boarding and was never seen again. J. W. Highleyman left work one day, caught a suburban train, and vanished, the Tribune said, “as completely as though swallowed by the earth.” The women were presumed to have been ravished, the men robbed, their corpses plunged into the turgid waters of the Chicago River or the alleys of Halsted and the Levee and that hard stretch of Clark between Polk and Taylor known to veteran officers as Cheyenne. Found bodies went to the morgue; if unclaimed, they traveled next to the dissection amphitheater at Rush Medical College or perhaps Cook County Hospital and from there to the articulation laboratory for the delicate task of picking flesh and connective tissue from the bones and skull, washing all with bleach, and remounting same for the subsequent use of doctors, anatomy museums, and the occasional private collector of scientific novelties. The hair was sold for wigs, the clothing given to settlement houses.

Like the Union Stock Yards, Chicago wasted nothing.