The Devil in the White City

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension.

A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting.

I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

Holmes proved an elusive character, owing in large part to the Philadelphia judge’s unfortunate decision to bar District Attorney Graham’s three dozen witnesses from giving testimony. Several books have been written about Holmes, but none tells quite the same story. Two of them, Harold Schechter’s Depraved and David Franke’s The Torture Doctor (the work quoted by the modern serial killer Dr. Swango), seem the most trustworthy. Two other works exist that provide a concrete foundation of facts. One is Detective Frank Geyer’s memoir, The Holmes-Pitezel Case, a detailed account of events from the time of Holmes’s arrest onward, in which Geyer presents excerpts of primary documents that no longer exist. I was lucky enough to acquire a copy from an online seller of antique books. The second is The Trial of Herman W. Mudgett, Alias, H. H. Holmes, published in 1897, a complete transcript of the trial. I found a copy in the law library of the University of Washington.

Holmes left a memoir, Holmes’ Own Story, which I found in the Library of Congress’s rare book collection. He also made at least three confessions. The first two appear in Geyer’s book. The third and most sensational appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which paid him a rich fee to write it. Though mostly untrue, his memoir and confessions were nuggeted with details that jibed with facts established in court or unearthed by Geyer and by the legions of reporters who covered Holmes’s story after his arrest in Boston. I relied heavily on newspaper articles published in the Chicago Tribune and in two Philadelphia newspapers, the Inquirer and the Public Ledger. Many of these articles were full of inaccuracies and, I suspect, embellishments. I mined them for bits of apparent fact and for reproductions of original documents, such as letters, telegrams, interviews, and other primary materials uncovered by police or produced by witnesses who stepped forward once the nature of Holmes’s “Castle of Horrors” became front-page news. One of the most striking, and rather charming, aspects of criminal investigation in the 1890s is the extent to which the police gave reporters direct access to crime scenes, even while investigations were in progress. At one point during the Holmes investigation Chicago’s chief of police told a Tribune reporter he’d just as soon have a squad of reporters under his command as detectives.

Exactly what motivated Holmes may never be known. In focusing on his quest for possession and dominance, I present only one possibility, though I recognize that any number of other motives might well be posited. I base my account on known details of his history and behavior and on what forensic psychiatrists have come to understand about psychopathic serial killers and the forces that drive them. Dr. James O. Raney, a Seattle psychiatrist who now and then provides forensic evaluations, read the manuscript and gave me his observations about the nature of psychopaths, known more tediously in today’s psychiatric handbooks as people afflicted with “antisocial personality disorder.” It is a good thing Alfred Hitchcock died before the change was made.

Clearly no one other than Holmes was present during his murders—no one, that is, who survived—yet in my book I re-create two of his killings. I agonized over exactly how to do this and spent a good deal of time rereading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for insights into how Capote achieved his dark and still deeply troubling account. Sadly, Capote left no footnotes. To build my murder scenes, I used threads of known detail to weave a plausible account, as would a prosecutor in his closing arguments to a jury. My description of Julia Conner’s death by chloroform is based on expert testimony presented at Holmes’s trial about the character of chloroform and what was known at the time about its effect on the human body.

I do not employ researchers, nor did I conduct any primary research using the Internet. I need physical contact with my sources, and there’s only one way to get it. To me every trip to a library or archive is like a small detective story. There are always little moments on such trips when the past flares to life, like a match in the darkness. On one visit to the Chicago Historical Society, I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

I have tried to keep my citations as concise as possible. I cite all quoted or controversial material but omit citations for facts that are widely known and accepted. For the two murder scenes I document my reasoning and my approach and cite the facts upon which I relied. The citations that follow constitute a map. Anyone retracing my steps ought to reach the same conclusions as I.