The Devil in the White City

The Angel from Dwight

IN THE SPRING OF 1892 Holmes’s assistant Benjamin Pitezel found himself in the city of Dwight, Illinois, about seventy-five miles southwest of Chicago, taking the famous Keeley cure for alcoholism. Patients stayed in the three-story Livingston Hotel, a red-brick building of simple appealing design, with arched windows and a veranda along the full length of its façade, a fine place to rest between injections of Dr. Leslie Enraught Keeley’s “gold cure.” Gold was the most famous ingredient in a red, white, and blue solution nicknamed the “barber pole” that employees of the Keeley Institute injected into patients’ arms three times a day. The needle, one of large nineteenth-century bore—like having a garden hose shoved into a bicep—invariably deposited a yellow aureole on the skin surrounding the injection site, a badge for some, an unsightly blemish for others. The rest of the formula was kept secret, but as best doctors and chemists could tell, the solution included substances that imparted a pleasant state of euphoria and sedation trimmed with amnesia—an effect the Chicago post office found problematic, for each year it wound up holding hundreds of letters sent from Dwight that lacked important elements of their destination addresses. The senders simply forgot that things like names and street numbers were necessary for the successful delivery of mail.

Pitezel had long been a heavy drinker, but his drinking must have become debilitating, for it was Holmes who sent him to Keeley and paid for his treatment. He explained it to Pitezel as a gesture born of kindness, a return for Pitezel’s loyalty. As always, he had other motives. He recognized that Pitezel’s drinking impaired his usefulness and threatened to disrupt schemes already in play. Holmes later said of Pitezel, “he was too valuable a man, even with his failings taken into consideration, for me to dispense with.” It’s likely Holmes also wanted Pitezel to gather whatever intelligence he could about the cure and its labeling, so that he could mimic the product and sell it through his own mail-order drug company. Later, indeed, Holmes would establish his own curative spa on the second floor of his Englewood building and call it the Silver Ash Institute. The Keeley cure was amazingly popular. Thousands of people came to Dwight to shed their intemperate ways; many thousands more bought Dr. Keeley’s oral version of the cure, which he marketed in bottles so distinctive that he urged purchasers to destroy the empties, to keep unscrupulous companies from filling them with their own concoctions.

Every day Pitezel joined three dozen other men in the daily ritual of “passing through the line” to receive his injections. Women received theirs in their own rooms and were kept separated from the men to protect their reputations. In Chicago hostesses always knew when guests had taken the cure, because upon being offered a drink, those guests invariably answered, “No, thank you. I’ve been to Dwight.”

Pitezel returned to Englewood in April. The psychotropic powers of Keeley’s injections may account for the story Pitezel now told Holmes, of how at Keeley he had met a young woman of great beauty—to hear him tell it, preternatural beauty—named Emeline Cigrand. She was blond, twenty-four years old, and since 1891 had worked as a stenographer in Dr. Keeley’s office. Pitezel’s almost hallucinatory description must have tantalized Holmes, for he wrote to Cigrand and offered her a job as his personal secretary, at twice the salary she was making in Keeley. “A flattering offer,” as a member of the Cigrand family later described it.

Emeline accepted without hesitation. The institute had a certain cachet, but the village of Dwight was no Chicago. To be able to earn twice her salary and live in that city of legendary glamour and excitement, with the world’s fair set to open in a year, made the offer irresistible. She left Keeley in May, bringing along her $800 in savings. Upon arriving in Englewood, she rented rooms in a boardinghouse near Holmes’s building.

Pitezel had exaggerated Emeline’s beauty, Holmes saw, but not by much. She was indeed lovely, with luminous blond hair. Immediately Holmes deployed his tools of seduction, his soothing voice and touch and frank blue gaze.

He bought her flowers and took her to the Timmerman Opera House down the block. He gave her a bicycle. They spent evenings riding together on the smooth macadam of Yale and Harvard streets, the picture of a happy young couple blessed with looks and money. (“White pique hats with black watered-ribbon bands and a couple of knife feathers set at the side are the latest novelty for women cyclists,” the Tribune’s society column observed.) As Emeline became more accustomed to her “wheel,” a term everyone still used even though the old and deadly huge-wheeled bicycles of the past had become thoroughly obsolete, she and Holmes took longer and longer rides and often rode along the willowed Midway to Jackson Park to watch the construction of the world’s fair, where inevitably they found themselves among thousands of other people, many of them also bicyclists.

On a few Sundays Emeline and Holmes rode into the park itself, where they saw that construction was still in its early phase—a surprise, given the rapid onset of the fair’s two most important deadlines, Dedication Day and Opening Day. Much of the park was still barren land, and the biggest building, Manufactures and Liberal Arts, was barely under way. A few buildings had advanced at a far greater pace and appeared to be more or less complete, in particular the Mines Building and the Woman’s Building. There were so many distinguished-looking men in the park these days—statesmen, princes, architects, and the city’s industrial barons. Society matrons came as well, to attend meetings of the Board of Lady Managers. Mrs. Palmer’s great black carriage often came roaring through the fair’s gate, as did the carriage of her social opposite, Carrie Watson, the madam, her coach distinctive for its gleaming white enamel body and yellow wheels and its black driver in scarlet silk.

Emeline found that riding her bicycle was best in the days after a good downpour. Otherwise the dust billowed like sand over Khartoum and sifted deep into her scalp, where even a good brushing failed to dislodge it.

One afternoon as Emeline sat before her typewriter in Holmes’s office, a man entered looking for Holmes. He was tall, with a clean jaw and modest mustache, and wore a cheap suit; in his thirties; good looking, in a way, but at the same time self-effacing and plain—though at the moment he appeared to be angry. He introduced himself as Ned Conner and said he had once run the jewelry counter in the pharmacy downstairs. He had come to discuss a problem with a mortgage.

She knew the name—had heard it somewhere, or seen it in Holmes’s papers. She smiled and told Ned that Holmes was out of the building. She had no idea when he would return. Could she help?

Ned’s anger cooled. He and Emeline “got to talking about Holmes,” as Ned later recalled.

Ned watched her. She was young and pretty—a “handsome blonde,” as he later described her. She wore a white shirtwaist and black skirt that accentuated her trim figure, and she was seated beside a window, her hair candescent with sunlight. She sat before a black Remington, new and doubtless never paid for. From his own hard experience and from the look of adoration that entered Emeline’s eyes when she spoke of Holmes, Ned guessed her relationship involved a good deal more than typewriting. Later he recalled, “I told her I thought he was a bad lot and that she had better have little to do with him and get away from him as soon as possible.”

For the time being, at least, she ignored his advice.

On May 1, 1892, a doctor named M. B. Lawrence and his wife moved into a five-room apartment in Holmes’s building, where they often encountered Emeline, although Emeline herself did not yet live in the building. She still occupied rooms in a nearby boardinghouse.

“She was one of the prettiest and most pleasant young women I ever met,” said Dr. Lawrence, “and my wife and I learned to think a great deal of her. We saw her every day and she often came in for a few minutes’ chat with Mrs. Lawrence.” The Lawrences often saw Emeline in Holmes’s company. “It was not long,” Dr. Lawrence said, “before I became aware that the relations between Miss Cigrand and Mr. Holmes were not strictly those of an employer and employee, but we felt that she was to be more pitied than blamed.”

Emeline was infatuated with Holmes. She loved him for his warmth, his caresses, his imperturbable calm, and his glamour. Never had she met a man quite like him. He was even the son of an English lord, a fact he had confided in strictest secrecy. She was to tell no one, which dampened the fun quite a bit but added to the mystery. She did reveal the secret to friends, of course, but only after first securing their oaths that they absolutely would tell no one else. To Emeline, Holmes’s claim of lordly heritage had credibility. An English heritage would explain his extraordinary charm and smooth manner, so unusual in brutish, clangorous Chicago.

Emeline was a warm and outgoing woman. She wrote often to her family in Lafayette, Indiana, and to the friends she had made in Dwight. She acquired friends easily. She still dined at regular intervals with the woman who ran the first boardinghouse in which she had stayed after her arrival in Chicago and considered the woman an intimate friend.

In October two of her second cousins, Dr. and Mrs. B. J. Cigrand, paid her a visit. Dr. Cigrand, a dentist with an office at North and Milwaukee Avenues on Chicago’s North Side, had contacted Emeline because he was working on a history of the Cigrand family. They had not previously met. “I was charmed by her pleasing manners and keen wit,” Dr. Cigrand said. “She was a splendid woman physically, being tall, well formed, and with a wealth of flaxen hair.” Dr. Cigrand and his wife did not encounter Holmes on this visit and in fact never did meet him face to face, but they heard glowing stories from Emeline about his charm, generosity, and business prowess. Emeline took her cousins on a tour of Holmes’s building and told them of his effort to transform it into a hotel for exposition guests. She explained, too, how the elevated railroad being erected over Sixty-third Street would carry guests directly to Jackson Park. No one doubted that by the summer of 1893 armies of visitors would be advancing on Englewood. To Emeline, success seemed inevitable.

Emeline’s enthusiasm was part of her charm. She was headlong in love with her young physician and thus in love with all that he did. But Dr. Cigrand did not share her glowing assessment of the building and its prospects. To him, the building was gloomy and imposing, out of spirit with its surrounding structures. Every other building of substance in Englewood seemed to be charged with the energy of anticipation, not just of the world’s fair but of a grand future expanding far beyond the fair’s end. Within just a couple of blocks of Sixty-third rose huge, elaborate houses of many colors and textures, and down the street stood the Timmerman Opera House and the adjacent New Julien Hotel, whose owners had spent heavily on fine materials and expert craftsmen. In contrast, Holmes’s building was dead space, like the corner of a room where the gaslight could not reach. Clearly Holmes had not consulted an architect, at least not a competent one. The building’s corridors were dark and pocked with too many doors. The lumber was low grade, the carpentry slipshod. Passages veered at odd angles.

Still, Emeline seemed entranced. Dr. Cigrand would have been a cold man indeed to have dashed that sweet, naïve adoration. Later, no doubt, he wished he had been more candid and had listened more closely to the whisper in his head about the wrongness of that building and the discontinuity between its true appearance and Emeline’s perception of it. But again, Emeline was in love. It was not his place to wound her. She was young and enraptured, her joy infectious, especially to Dr. Cigrand, the dentist, who saw so little joy from day to day as he reduced grown men of proven courage to tears.

Soon after the Cigrands’ visit, Holmes asked Emeline to marry him, and she accepted. He promised her a honeymoon in Europe during which, of course, they would pay a visit to his father, the lord.