The Devil in the White City

Chappell Redux

ONE DAY IN THE FIRST week of December 1892 Emeline Cigrand set out for Holmes’s building in Englewood bearing a small neatly wrapped parcel. Initially her mood was bright, for the parcel contained an early Christmas present she planned to give to her friends the Lawrences, but as she neared the corner of Sixty-third and Wallace, her spirits dimmed. Where once the building had seemed almost a palace—not for its architectural nobility but for what it promised—now it looked drab and worn. She climbed the stairs to the second floor and went directly to the Lawrences’ apartment. The warmth and welcome resurrected her good spirits. She handed the parcel to Mrs. Lawrence, who opened it immediately and pulled from the wrapping a tin plate upon which Emeline had painted a lovely forest.

The gift delighted Mrs. Lawrence but also perplexed her. Christmas was only three weeks off, she said kindly: Why hadn’t Emeline simply waited and given the plate then, when Mrs. Lawrence could have offered a gift in return?

Her face brightening, Emeline explained that she was going home to Indiana to spend Christmas with her family.

“She seemed delighted with the anticipation of a visit to them,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “She spoke in most affectionate terms of them and seemed as happy as a child.” But Mrs. Lawrence also sensed a note of finality in Emeline’s voice that suggested Emeline’s journey might have another purpose. She said, “You are not going away from us?”

“Well,” Emeline said. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

Mrs. Lawrence laughed. “Why, Mr. Holmes could never get along without you.”

Emeline’s expression changed. “He could if he had to.”

The remark confirmed something for the Lawrences. “It had seemed to me for some time that Miss Cigrand was changing in her feelings toward Holmes,” said Dr. Lawrence. “In the light of what has happened since, I believe now that she had found out to a certain extent the real character of Holmes and determined to leave him.”

She may have begun to believe the stories she heard in the neighborhood of Holmes’s penchant for acquiring things on credit and then not paying for them—stories she had heard all along, for they were rife, but that she at first had dismissed as the gossip of envious hearts. Later there was speculation that Emeline herself had trusted Holmes with her $800 savings, only to have it disappear in a fog of promises of lavish future returns. Ned Conner’s warning echoed in her mind. Lately she had begun talking of returning one day to Dwight to resume her work for Dr. Keeley.

Emeline never told the Lawrences good-bye. Her visits simply stopped. That she would leave without a parting word struck Mrs. Lawrence as being very much out of character. She wasn’t sure whether to feel wounded or worried. She asked Holmes what he knew about Emeline’s absence.

Ordinarily Holmes looked at Mrs. Lawrence with a directness that was unsettling, but now he avoided her gaze. “Oh, she’s gone away to get married,” Holmes said, as if nothing could have interested him less.

The news shocked Mrs. Lawrence. “I don’t see why she didn’t mention something to me about getting married.”

It was a secret, Holmes explained: Emeline and her betrothed had revealed their wedding plans only to him.

But for Mrs. Lawrence this explanation only raised more questions. Why would the couple want such privacy? Why had Emeline said nothing to Mrs. Lawrence, when together they had shared so many other confidences?

Mrs. Lawrence missed Emeline and the way her effervescence and physical brightness—her prettiness and sunflower hair—lit the sullen halls of Holmes’s building. She remained perplexed and a few days later again asked Holmes about Emeline.

He pulled a square envelope from his pocket. “This will tell you,” he said.

The envelope contained a wedding announcement. Not engraved, as was customary, merely typeset. This too surprised Mrs. Lawrence. Emeline never would have accepted so mundane a means of communicating news of such magnitude.

The announcement read:

Mr. Robert E. Phelps.

Miss Emeline G. Cigrand.

Married

Wednesday, December 7th

1892

CHICAGO

Holmes told Mrs. Lawrence he had received his copy from Emeline herself. “Some days after going away she returned for her mail,” he explained in his memoir, “and at this time gave me one of her wedding cards, and also two or three others for tenants in the building who were not then in their rooms; and in response to inquiries lately made I have learned that at least five persons in and about Lafayette, Ind., received such cards, the post mark and her handwriting upon the envelope in which they were enclosed showing that she must have sent them herself after leaving my employ.”

Emeline’s family and friends did receive copies of the announcement through the mail, and indeed these appeared to have been addressed by Emeline herself. Most likely Holmes forged the envelopes or else duped Emeline into preparing them by persuading her they would be used for a legitimate purpose, perhaps for Christmas cards.

For Mrs. Lawrence the announcement explained nothing. Emeline had never mentioned a Robert Phelps. And if Emeline had come to the building bearing marriage announcements, she surely would have presented one in person.

The next day Mrs. Lawrence stopped Holmes yet again, and this time asked what he knew about Phelps. In the same dismissive manner Holmes said, “Oh, he is a fellow Miss Cigrand met somewhere. I do not know anything about him except that he is a traveling man.”

News of Emeline’s marriage reached her hometown newspaper, which reported it on December 8, 1892, in a small chatty bulletin. The item called Emeline a “lady of refinement” who “possesses a character that is strong and pure. Her many friends feel that she has exercised good judgment in selecting a husband and will heartily congratulate her.” The item offered a few biographical details, among them the fact that Emeline once had been employed as a stenographer in the county recorder’s office. “From there,” the item continued, “she went to Dwight, and from there to Chicago, where she met her fate.”

“Fate” being the writer’s coy allusion to marriage.

In the days that followed Mrs. Lawrence asked Holmes additional questions about Emeline, but he responded only in monosyllables. She began to think of Emeline’s departure as a disappearance and recalled that soon after Emeline’s last visit a curious change in routine had occurred within Holmes’s building.

“The day after Miss Cigrand disappeared, or the day we last saw her, the door of Holmes’ office was kept locked and nobody went into it except Holmes and Patrick Quinlan,” Mrs. Lawrence said. “About 7 o’clock in the evening Holmes came out of his office and asked two men who were living in the building if they would not help him carry a trunk downstairs.” The trunk was new and large, about four feet long. Its contents clearly were heavy and made the big trunk difficult to manage. Holmes repeatedly cautioned his helpers to be careful with it. An express wagon arrived and took it away.

Mrs. Lawrence later claimed that at this point she became convinced Holmes had killed Emeline. Yet she and her husband made no effort to move from the building, nor did they go to the police. No one did. Not Mrs. Lawrence, not Mr. and Mrs. Peter Cigrand, not Ned Conner, and not Julia’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Smythe. It was as if no one expected the police would be interested in yet another disappearance or, if they were, that they would be competent enough to conduct an effective investigation.

Soon afterward Emeline’s own trunk, filled with her belongings and all the clothing she had brought with her when she left home in 1891 to work for Keeley, arrived at a freight depot near her hometown. Her parents at first believed—hoped—she had sent the trunk home because now that she was marrying a wealthy man, she no longer needed such old and worn things. The Cigrands received no further mail from Emeline, not even at Christmas. “This,” said Dr. B. J. Cigrand, Emeline’s second cousin, the North Side dentist, “in spite of the fact that she was in the habit of writing to her parents two or three times a week.”

Emeline’s parents still did not imagine murder, however. Peter Cigrand said, “I had at last come to the belief she must have died in Europe and her husband either did not know our address or neglected to notify us.”

The Cigrands and Lawrences would have found their anxiety intensified manyfold had they known a few other facts:

That the name Phelps was an alias that Holmes’s assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, had used when he first met Emeline at the Keeley Institute;

That on January 2, 1893, Holmes again had enlisted the help of Charles Chappell, the articulator, and sent him a trunk containing the corpse of a woman, her upper body stripped nearly bare of flesh;

That a few weeks later the LaSalle Medical College of Chicago had taken delivery of a nicely articulated skeleton;

And that something peculiar had occurred in the room-sized vault in Holmes’s building, a phenomenon that when finally discovered by police three years later would defy scientific explanation.

Somehow a footprint had become etched into the smooth enameled finish on the inside of the vault door at a point roughly two feet above the floor. The toes, the ball, and the heel were so clearly outlined as to leave no doubt that a woman had left the print. The degree of detail mystified the police, as did the print’s resilience. They tried rubbing it off by hand, then with a cloth and soap and water, but it remained as clear as ever.

No one could explain it with any certainty. The best guess posited that Holmes had lured a woman into the vault; that the woman was shoeless at the time, perhaps nude; and that Holmes then had closed the airtight door to lock her inside. She had left the print in a last hopeless effort to force the door open. To explain the print’s permanence, detectives theorized that Holmes, known to have an avid interest in chemistry, had first poured a sheen of acid onto the floor to hasten by chemical reaction the consumption of oxygen in the vault. The theory held that Emeline had stepped in the acid, then placed her feet against the door, thus literally etching the print into the enamel.

But again, this revelation came much later. As of the start of 1893, the year of the fair, no one, including Holmes, had noticed the footprint on the door.