The Devil in the White City

by Erik Larson

  Mudgett gouged his initials into an old elm tree at his grandfather’s farm, where the family marked his growth with notches in a doorjamb. The first was less than three feet high. One of his favorite pastimes was to hike to a high boulder and shout to generate an echo. He ran errands for an “itinerant photographer” who stopped for a time in Gilmanton. The man had a pronounced limp and was glad for the help. One morning the photographer gave Mudgett a broken block of wood and asked him to take it to the town wagon maker for a replacement. When Mudgett returned with the new block, he found the photographer sitting beside his door, partly clothed. Without preamble, the photographer removed one of his legs.

  Mudgett was stunned. He had never seen an artificial limb before and watched keenly as the photographer inserted the new block into a portion of the leg. “Had he next proceeded to remove his head in the same mysterious way I should not have been further surprised,” Mudgett wrote.

  Something about Mudgett’s expression caught the photographer’s eye. Still on one leg, he moved to his camera and prepared to take Mudgett’s picture. Just before he opened the shutter, he held up his false leg and waved it at the boy. Several days later he gave Mudgett the finished photograph.

  “I kept it for many years,” Mudgett wrote, “and the thin terror-stricken face of that bare-footed, home-spun clad boy I can yet see.”

  At the time Mudgett described this encounter in his memoir, he was sitting in a prison cell hoping to engineer a swell of public sympathy. While it is charming to imagine the scene, the fact is the cameras that existed during Mudgett’s boyhood made candid moments almost impossible to capture, especially when the subject was a child. If the photographer saw anything in Mudgett’s eyes, it was a pale blue emptiness that he knew, to his sorrow, no existing film could ever record.

  At sixteen Mudgett graduated school and, despite his age, took a job as a teacher, first in Gilmanton and then in Alton, New Hampshire, where he met a young woman named Clara A. Lovering. She had never encountered anyone quite like Mudgett. He was young but poised and had a knack for making her feel good even when she was inclined to feel otherwise. He spoke so well and with such warmth, always touching her in small affectionate ways, even in public. His great flaw was his persistent demand that she allow him to make love to her, not as a lover in formal courtship but in that way that was supposed to come only after marriage. She held him off but could not deny that Mudgett aroused within her an intensity of desire that colored her dreams. Mudgett was eighteen when he asked her to elope. She agreed. They married on July 4, 1878, before a justice of the peace.

  At first there was passion far beyond what the dour gossip of older women had led Clara to expect, but their relationship chilled rapidly. Mudgett left the house for long periods. Soon he was gone for days at a time. Finally he was just gone. In the wedding registry of Alton, New Hampshire, they remained married, their contract a legal if desiccated thing.

  At nineteen Mudgett went to college. Initially he set his sights on Dartmouth but changed his mind and instead went directly into medical school. He enrolled first in the medicine program at the University of Vermont in Burlington but found the school too small and after only one year moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the West’s leading scientific medical schools, noted for its emphasis on the controversial art of dissection. He enrolled on September 21, 1882. During the summer of his junior year he committed what he called, in his memoir, “the first really dishonest act of my life.” He took a job as a traveler for a book publisher, assigned to sell a single book throughout northwestern Illinois. Instead of turning in the proceeds, he kept them. At the end of the summer he returned to Michigan. “I could hardly count my Western trip a failure,” he wrote, “for I had seen Chicago.”

  He graduated in June 1884 with a lackluster record and set out to find “some favorable location” in which to launch a practice. To do so he took another job as a traveler, this time with a nursery company based in Portland, Maine. His route took him through towns he might otherwise never have encountered. Eventually he came to Mooers Forks, New York, where, according to the Chicago Tribune, the trustees of the grade school, “impressed with Mudgett’s gentlemanly manners,” hired him as the school principal, a post he held until he at last opened a medical practice. “Here I stayed for one year doing good and conscientious work, for which I received plenty of gratitude but little or no money.”

  Wherever he went, troubling things seemed to occur. His professors in Michigan had little to say about his academic talents but recalled that he had distinguished himself in a different way. “Some of the professors here recollected him as being a scamp,” the university said. “He had a breach of promise with a hairdresser, a widow, who came to Ann Arbor from St. Louis, Mich.”

  In Mooers Forks there were rumors that a boy seen in his company had disappeared. Mudgett claimed the boy had returned to his own home in Massachusetts. No investigation took place. No one could imagine the charming Dr. Mudgett causing harm to anyone, let alone a child.

  At midnight, many nights, Mudgett would pace the street outside his lodging.

  Mudgett needed money. Teaching had paid a poverty wage; his medical practice yielded an income only slightly larger. “In the fall of 1885,” he wrote, “starvation was staring me in the face.”

  While in medical school he and a fellow student, a Canadian, had talked about how easy it would be for one of them to buy life insurance, make the other the beneficiary, then use a cadaver to fake the death of the one insured. In Mooers Forks the idea came back to Mudgett. He paid a visit to his former classmate and found that his financial condition was no better. Together they devised an elaborate life insurance fraud, which Mudgett described in his memoir. It was an impossibly complex and gruesome plan, likely beyond the powers of anyone to execute, but his description is noteworthy for what it revealed, without his intention, about his astigmatic soul.

  Broadly stated, the plan called for Mudgett and his friend to recruit a couple of other accomplices, who together would fake the deaths of a family of three and substitute cadavers for each person. The bodies would turn up later in an advanced state of decomposition, and the conspirators would divide the $40,000 death benefit (equivalent to more than one million dollars in twenty-first-century valuation).

  “The scheme called for a considerable amount of material,” Mudgett wrote, “no less than three bodies in fact,” meaning he and his friend somehow had to acquire three cadavers roughly resembling the husband, wife, and child.

  Mudgett foresaw no difficulty in acquiring the cadavers, although in fact a national shortage of corpses for medical education had by then driven doctors to raid graveyards for the freshly dead. Recognizing that even a doctor could not secure three bodies at once without raising suspicion, Mudgett and his accomplice agreed that each should contribute toward “the necessary supply.”

  Mudgett claimed to have gone to Chicago in November 1885 and there to have acquired his “portion” of the bodies. Unable to find a job, he placed his portion in storage and left for Minneapolis, where he found work in a drugstore. He remained in Minneapolis until May 1886, when he left for New York City, planning to take “a part of the material there,” and to leave the rest in Chicago. “This,” he said, “necessitated repacking the same.”

  He claimed to have deposited one package of dismembered cadaver in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse in Chicago. The other accompanied him to New York, where he lodged it “in a safe place.” During his train journey to New York, however, he read two newspaper articles about insurance crime, “and for the first time I realized how well organized and well prepared the leading insurance companies were to detect and punish this kind of fraud.” These articles, he claimed, caused him to abandon the plan and to jettison all hope of ever succeeding at such a scheme in the future.

  He was lying. In fact, Mudgett was convinced that the fundamentals of the approach had merit—that by faking the deaths of others, he could indeed fl
eece life insurance companies. As a physician, he knew no means existed for establishing the identities of burned, dismembered, or otherwise disfigured corpses. And he did not mind handling bodies. They were “material,” no different from firewood, although somewhat more difficult to dispose of.

  He was lying too about needing money. The owner of the house in Mooers Forks where he boarded, D. S. Hays, noticed Mudgett often displayed large sums of cash. Hays grew suspicious and watched Mudgett closely—albeit not closely enough.

  Mudgett left Mooers Fork at midnight, without paying his lodging bill to Hays. He made his way to Philadelphia, where he hoped to situate himself in a drugstore and eventually to become a partner or owner. He found nothing suitable, however, and instead took a job as a “keeper” at the Norristown Asylum. “This,” he wrote, “was my first experience with insane persons, and so terrible was it that for years afterwards, even now sometimes, I see their faces in my sleep.” Within days he quit.

  Eventually he did find a position at one of Philadelphia’s drugstores. Soon afterward a child died after taking medicine acquired at the store. Mudgett immediately left the city.

  He caught a train for Chicago but quickly found that he could not work as a druggist in Illinois until he passed a licensing examination in the state capital in Springfield. There, in July 1886, the year Sir Arthur Conan Doyle introduced his detective to the world, Mudgett registered his name as Holmes.

  Holmes understood that powerful new forces were acting upon Chicago, causing a nearly miraculous expansion. The city was growing in all available directions, and where it abutted the lake, it grew skyward, sharply increasing the value of land within the Loop. Everywhere he looked he saw evidence of the city’s prosperity. Even the smoke was proof. The city’s newspapers loved to crow about the startling increase in the number of workers employed by Chicago’s industries, especially meat-packing. Holmes knew—everyone knew—that as skyscrapers soared and the stockyards expanded their butchery, the demand for workers would remain high, and that workers and their supervisors would seek to live in the city’s suburbs, with their promise of smooth macadam, clean water, decent schools, and above all air untainted by the stench of rotting offal from the Union Yards.

  As the city’s population swelled, demand for apartments turned into “flat fever.” When people could not find or afford apartments, they sought rooms in private homes and boardinghouses, where typically the rent included meals. Speculators thrived and created eerie landscapes. In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes. Theodore Dreiser reached Chicago about when Holmes did and was struck by this landscape of anticipation. “The city had laid miles and miles of streets and sewers through regions where perhaps one solitary house stood out alone,” he wrote in Sister Carrie. “There were regions, open to the sweeping winds and rain, which were yet lighted throughout the night with long, blinking lines of gas lamps fluttering in the wind.”

  One of the fastest-growing suburbs was Englewood. Even a newcomer like Holmes could tell that Englewood was booming. Real estate advertisements were full of testimonials to its location and appreciating values. Englewood in fact had been growing quickly ever since the Great Fire of 1871. One resident recalled how immediately after the fire “there was such a rush for homes in Englewood and the population increased so rapidly that it was impossible to keep up with it.” Old railroad men still called it Chicago Junction or Junction Grove or simply the Junction, for the eight railroad lines that converged within its borders, but after the Civil War residents grew weary of the industrial resonance of the name. In 1868 a Mrs. H. B. Lewis suggested a new one, Englewood, the name of a New Jersey town in which she previously had lived and which had taken its name from a forest in Carlisle, England, legendary for having sheltered two outlaws of Robin Hood stripe. It was here, in what Chicagoans called a “streetcar” suburb, that stockyard supervisors chose to settle, as did officials of companies headquartered in the skyscrapers of the Loop. They acquired big houses on streets named Harvard and Yale that were lined with elm, ash, sycamore, and linden and posted with signs barring all but essential wagon traffic. They sent their children to school and went to church and attended meetings of the Masons and of forty-five other secret societies having lodges, kingdoms, and hives in the village. On Sundays they wandered among the velvet lawns of Washington Park and, if in the mood for solitude, the wind-blasted ridges of Jackson Park at the easternmost end of Sixty-third Street, on the lakeshore.

  They took trains and streetcars to work and congratulated themselves on living upwind of the stockyards. The developer of a large Englewood parcel touted this asset in a catalog promoting the auction of two hundred residential lots called the Bates Subdivision: “To the business men of the Union Stock Yards it is particularly convenient and accessible, and free from the odors that are wafted by the prevailing winds to the most fashionable localities of the City.”

  Dr. Holton did die. Holmes made his widow an offer: He would buy the store, and she could continue to reside in the second-floor apartment. He couched his offer in prose that made it seem as if he were proposing the purchase not to benefit himself but solely to free the grieving Mrs. Holton from the burden of work. He touched her arm as he spoke. After she signed the deed over to him, he stood and thanked her with tears in his eyes.

  He financed the purchase mainly with money he raised by mortgaging the store’s fixtures and stock, agreeing to repay the loan at a rate of one hundred dollars a month (about three thousand dollars in twenty-first-century value). “My trade was good,” he said, “and for the first time in my life I was established in a business that was satisfactory to me.”

  He put up a new sign: H. H. HOLMES PHARMACY. As word spread that a young, handsome, and apparently unmarried young doctor now stood behind the counter, an increasing number of single women in their twenties began to patronize the store. They dressed nicely and bought things they did not need. Longtime customers also liked the new proprietor, although they missed the comforting presence of Mrs. Holton. The Holtons had been there when their children were sick; had comforted them when these illnesses proved mortal. They knew Mrs. Holton had sold the place. But why had they not seen her around town?

  Holmes smiled and explained that she had decided to visit relatives in California, something she had long wanted to do but could never find the time or money to accomplish and certainly could not have done with her husband on his deathbed.

  As time wore on and the inquiries dwindled, Holmes modified the story a bit. Mrs. Holton, he explained, liked California so much she had decided to settle there permanently.

  “Becomingness”

  NOTHING. THERE HAD BEEN SO much energy, so much bravado, but now—nothing. It was July 1890, nearly six months since Congress had voted to give the World’s Columbian Exposition to Chicago, but the forty-five men on the exposition’s board of directors still had not decided where within the city the fair should be built. At the time of the vote, with the city’s pride at stake, all Chicago had sung with one voice. Its emissaries had boasted to Congress that the city could deliver a grander and more appropriate setting than anything New York, Washington, or any other city could propose. Now, however, each quarter of Chicago was insisting on a location within its own boundaries, and the squabbling had stymied the board.

  The fair’s Committee on Grounds and Buildings had asked Burnham, quietly, to evaluate a number of locations in the city. With equal discretion, the committee assured Burnham and Root that ultimately they would direct the design and construction of the fair. For Burnham, each lost moment was a theft from the already scanty fund of time allotted to build the exposition. The final fair bill signed in April by President Benjamin Harrison established a Dedication Day for October 12, 1892, to honor the moment four hundred years earlier when Columbus had first sighted the New World. The formal opening, however, would not occur until May 1, 1893, to give Chicago more time to prepare.
Even so, Burnham knew, much of the fair would have to be ready for the dedication. That left just twenty-six months.

  A friend of Burnham’s, James Ellsworth, was one of the board’s directors; he too was frustrated by the stalemate, so much so that on his own initiative, during a business trip to Maine in mid-July, he visited the Brookline, Massachusetts, office of Frederick Law Olmsted to try and persuade him to come to Chicago and evaluate the sites under consideration and perhaps take on the task of designing the fair’s landscape. Ellsworth hoped that Olmsted’s opinion, backed by his reputation as the wizard of Central Park, would help force a decision.

  That Ellsworth, of all people, should be driven to this step was significant. Initially he had been ambivalent about whether Chicago should even seek the world’s fair. He agreed to serve as a director only out of fear that the exposition was indeed at risk of fulfilling the meager expectations of the East and becoming “simply a fair as the term generally implies.” He believed it imperative that the city protect its civic honor by producing the greatest such event in the world’s history, a goal that seemed to be slipping from Chicago’s grasp with each sweep of the clock’s hands.