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  The dedication itself took place inside the Exposition’s most awesome structure, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, whose interior (as fair promoters never tired of pointing out) could have comfortably contained the United States Capitol, Winchester Cathedral, Saint Paul’s Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and the Great Pyramid of Gizeh—with plenty of room to spare.

  Following a rousing rendition of “The Columbian March”—composed by Harvard Professor John Knowles Paine and performed by the two-hundred-forty piece Chicago Orchestra—the spectators were treated to several hours of highflown orations, interspersed with other musical selections, including Mendelssohn’s “To the Sons of Arts” and the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. Other highlights included an awards presentation by Harlow N. Higinbotham, head of the World’s Columbian Exposition Corporation, and a “light luncheon” for the assembled crowd of 140,000 (only half of whom actually managed to get something to eat in the mad scramble for the food). Not even the absence of President Harrison—who was forced to cancel his appearance when his wife fell gravely ill—detracted from the unparalleled pageantry of the event.

  Another six months passed before the World’s Columbian Exposition—or Chicago World’s Fair, as it was otherwise known—finally opened to the public. Two hundred thousand people braved a heavy downpour to show up for the occasion. By midmorning, the rain had stopped, and the vista that stretched before the surging crowd seemed—even in the dreariness of that overcast day—overwhelming in its splendor.

  Like millions of others who poured into the Exposition during the few months of its fleeting existence, the first-day visitors—even those who used language for a living—experienced a common sense of inadequacy, an inability to find words or comparisons that did justice to the grandeur of the fair. Some likened it to classical Rome, others to Venice, still others to the “New Jerusalem.” The Exposition was a fairy realm, an Aladdin’s wonderland, a “scene of inexpressible splendor reminding one of the gorgeous descriptions in the Arabian nights when Haroun Al Raschid was Caliph.” But one particular phrase—suggestive of the celestial glories of the heavenly kingdom itself—became the most popular title by which the fair was known: the White City.

  At the heart of the White City lay the Court of Honor. Standing within its awesome precincts, fairgoers beheld a breathtaking vista of glittering palaces, snowy colonnades, soaring arches, and gleaming domes—all flanking a formal basin 2,500 feet long. Colossal statues rose from the water at either end of the basin. To the east stood Daniel Chester French’s “The Republic”—a towering, toga-garbed figure, holding aloft an eagle and a victory cap. The opposite end was dominated by Frederick MacMonnies’s “Columbia Fountain”—a monumental sculpture depicting the figure of Columbia, sailing triumphantly over the waters in a great barge manned by allegorical representations of Science, Industry, Agriculture, Commerce, and the Arts.

  But these splendors of the Court were by no means the only such wonders the fair had to offer. Every acre of the White City was filled with similarly stunning examples of architectural and sculptural opulence—from Louis Henri Sullivan’s Transportation Building, with its magnificent Golden Door, to Henry Ives Cobb’s “Spanish-Romanesque” Fisheries Building, to Charles B. Atwood’s Palace of the Fine Arts, which writer Julian Hawthorne (Nathaniel’s son) unequivocally declared “the most beautiful piece of architecture in the world.”

  For those who craved less enriching fare, the Exposition offered the garish pleasures of the Midway Plaisance, a mile-long sideshow featuring such exotic attractions as a South Sea islands village, a Japanese bazaar, an encampment of Dahomey cannibals, the World Congress of Beauties (“40 Ladies from 40 Nations”), and the Street of Cairo, where an Arabian lovely called Little Egypt performed her notorious danse du ventre—more commonly known as the hootchy-kootchy.

  Even those moralists most scandalized by Little Egypt’s “lascivious contorting,” however, would not have missed a visit to the Midway’s other main attraction, the giant circle of rotating steel that carried riders 250 feet into the air for a view of the entire White City. An awesome engineering achievement, the colossal wheel would become a staple of amusement parks, where it continues to be known by the name of its inventor, George W. Ferris.

  A pilgrimage to the White City became an overriding dream for countless Americans. On some days, as many as three-quarters of a million visitors attended, at fifty cents apiece. People mortgaged their farms and dipped into their life savings for a trip to Chicago. “Well, Susan,” one old man reportedly remarked to his wife, “it paid even if it did take all the burial money.” After viewing the sights, the novelist Hamlin Garland dashed off an urgent letter to his elderly parents back home in Dakota: “Sell the cook stove and come. You must see the Fair.” Altogether, more than 27 million people attended the World’s Columbian Exposition in the six months of its existence, from May 1 through October 30, 1893.

  For the tourists who flocked to the fair from every corner of the nation—and, indeed, from countries throughout the world—Chicago offered all kinds of accommodations. Visitors on a spree could treat themselves to a stay at a luxury hotel such as the Great Northern, the Leland, or the Richelieu. Others, more restricted by their budgets, were happy to settle for a well-kept boardinghouse.

  Such was the demand for decent lodgings that anyone with a clean room to spare could pick up a few extra dollars by renting a bed to a desperate out-of-towner. A landlord with even a few empty flats at his disposal could realize a tidy profit in a hurry.

  H. H. Holmes had two entire floors of vacant rooms just perfect for transients.

  And he meant to make a killing.

  For several years—virtually from the moment that Congress selected Chicago as the Exposition site—Holmes had been laying his plans. The third floor of the Castle had undergone extensive renovations in preparation for the big event. As soon as opening day arrived, he began running newspaper advertisements for his “World’s Fair Hotel.”

  No one can say exactly how many fairgoers Holmes lured to the Castle between May and October 1893, though he appears to have filled the place to capacity on most nights. It is also unclear how many of these travelers—slumbering soundly in their rooms after a long day at the fair, perhaps dreaming of its endless enchantments—never awoke again.

  We do, however, know something about the likely manner of their deaths.

  By means of the control valves hidden in his private quarters, Holmes could fill any of the second- or third-floor bed-chambers with asphyxiating gas. Submerged in sleep, the occupants would never have heard the quiet hissing from the wall jets as the deadly vapor suffused the darkness of their rooms.

  Chloroform was another important part of Holmes’s murder repertoire. To unlock a door with his master key, steal silently across the floor, and extinguish a life with a saturated rag was a skill that Holmes had perfected through long years of practice.

  Disposing of the evidence was an equally simple matter of dumping the limp bodies down the greased chute to his basement laboratory. Though some of the corpses ended up as medical specimens, the majority were obliterated in his private crematorium or acid vat, along with whatever personal effects Holmes had no use for. The more profitable items—cash, jewelry, watches, and so on—became part of Holmes’s assets.

  A few of the corpses—all of them female, none older than twenty-five—served to satisfy those hungers that, for beings like Holmes, the flesh of living women cannot ever allay.

  Holmes would eventually confess to only a single slaying of a fairgoer. Others have claimed that the number was significantly higher. According to certain accounts, as many as fifty tourists who took rooms at the Castle never returned home from their trip to the Chicago World’s Fair.

  The World’s Columbian Exposition came to an end at sunset, October 31, 1893, closing to the somber strains of Beethoven’s “Funeral March.” Gala ceremonies—equivalent to those that had marked Dedication Day—had be
en planned for the occasion but were canceled at the last moment. Two days earlier, Chicago’s sixty-nine-year-old, five-term mayor, Carter Harrison, had delivered a speech foreseeing a glorious future for the city. “Chicago has chosen a star,” he proclaimed. “I intend to live for more than half a century still, and at the end of that time, London will be trembling lest Chicago shall surpass her, and New York shall say, ‘Let us go to the metropolis of America!’ ”

  That evening, while the weary mayor rested at home in his housecoat and slippers, the doorbell rang. When Harrison answered, he was shot dead by an embittered office-seeker who had failed to receive a political appointment. The killing cast a heavy pall over the fair’s official closing.

  Just a few months later, on January 8, 1894, a fire destroyed three major Exposition buildings, the Casino, the Peristyle, and the Music Hall. Six months later, an even more devastating blaze reduced its most glorious structures—including the awesome Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building—to ashes.

  At the height of the fair, few visitors would have believed just how flimsy the White City really was. Dazzled by its beauty, they would have found it hard to credit that its white-marble wonders—its palaces and pavilions, monuments and museums—were actually made of staff, a compound of plaster and fibrous material laid over a temporary wood-and-metal framework. Among the many lessons that the World’s Columbian Exposition taught, one—completely unintended by its creators—had to do with the duplicity of appearances.

  But, of course, this was a bitter truth that a number of fair visitors—perhaps as many as fifty—had already discovered in the dark heart of Dr. Holmes’s murder castle.

  12

  Deceit is in the heart of them that imagine evil.

  —Proverbs 12:20

  Deception was so deeply ingrained in H. H. Holmes’s character that he was incapable of telling the truth about the simplest matter. Lies were not merely the tools of his trade, as they are for every con man and swindler. They were the reflection of his profoundly psychopathic nature. Nothing he said could be trusted or taken at face value. Even when it suited his purpose to stick close to the facts, his words were infected with falsehood.

  As a result, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to establish some of the most basic facts about Holmes’s life—such as the precise circumstances under which he first met Minnie Williams.

  According to his own testimony, they had been introduced either in New York City in 1888, where he was engaged in some unspecified dealings under the alias Edward Hatch, or in Boston one year later, where he was traveling under the pseudonym Harry Gordon. On other occasions, he claimed that they had gotten to know each other even earlier, during a business trip that had taken him through Mississippi sometime around 1886.

  At still another point, he insisted that he had never laid eyes on her until the day a local employment agency dispatched her to his office in response to his request for a stenographer.

  One fact, however, is unquestionable. In March 1893, Minnie Williams showed up in Chicago, where she became Holmes’s private secretary and, within a matter of weeks, his mistress.

  Minnie’s readiness to enter into such a relationship with Holmes was not, as some detractors later alleged, a mark of her moral laxity or worldiness. Quite the contrary. Everyone who knew her testified to her extreme naïveté. “She didn’t seem to know a great deal,” was the way one acquaintance put it. This guilelessness was in keeping with her physical appearance. Short-legged and plump, with light brown ringlets framing her smooth, chubby face, she resembled nothing so much as an overgrown baby.

  Minnie’s air of simple sweetness was, perhaps, her most appealing feature. Meeting her for the first time, Holmes’s confederates—not only Ben Pitezel but also Pat Quinlan, the Castle’s janitor and jack-of-all-trades—were struck by her comparative plainness. As far as looks went, they agreed, she simply couldn’t hold a candle to Holmes’s previous lovers—particularly the splendid Julia Conner and the stunning Emeline Cigrand.

  Minnie Williams did, however, possess one attribute that more than compensated for her physical limitations as far as Holmes was concerned.

  She was the heiress to a considerable fortune.

  Tragedy had struck Minnie’s life when she was still a child. Just six years after her birth in 1866, her father had been killed in a train wreck and her heartbroken mother had died shortly thereafter. The orphan had been taken into the household of a kindly uncle in Dallas, Texas, who raised Minnie as though she were his own child. Another uncle living in Jackson, Mississippi—the Reverend C. W. Black, editor of the Methodist Christian Advocate—had adopted Minnie’s younger sister, Nannie.

  When Minnie was twenty, her uncle sent her to study at the Boston Conservatory of Music and Elocution. She graduated three years later, but the occasion was marred by misfortune. Just days before she was to receive her degree, her uncle succumbed to a lingering illness.

  Even in death, however, he continued to serve as her benefactor, bequeathing her some property he owned in Fort Worth, valued at over $40,000.

  By May 1893—when Minnie and Holmes were already sharing a furnished flat a 1220 Wrightwood Avenue—even that impressive sum would not have been sufficient to relieve Holmes of his debts. To his Englewood neighbors, he continued to seem like a man of means—a dedicated businessman whose hard work and enterprise had brought him all the trappings of success. They had no way of knowing what corruptions those trappings concealed. Or that the trappings themselves had been acquired through the most devious and underhanded means. Holmes’s Castle and all its furnishings, the fixtures in his stores, the very clothing on his back—all were the fruits not, as his neighbors believed, of Holmes’s tireless industry, but of his frenzied double-dealings.

  Ironically, Holmes possessed the sort of boldness, savvy, and boundless ambition that might well have earned him the financial success he so frantically craved. But the perversions of his nature made it impossible for him to employ his powers for legitimate ends. His colossal energies (when they weren’t being misspent on his countless frauds, scams, and far more sinister pursuits) were devoted to outwitting his creditors.

  By 1893, however—when hard times hit the country in the wake of a major financial panic—a small army of those creditors had closed ranks and was moving in on him. It would require desperate measures to elude them.

  Persuading Minnie to sign over her property to him posed no problem for the smooth-tongued Dr. Holmes. Indeed, the young woman’s simple-heartedness was so extreme that even he seemed touched by it, offering tribute on a later occasion to her “innocent and childlike nature.” Of course, having title to the Fort Worth real estate still left Holmes with the problem of converting it into cash. More than eight hundred miles of country separated him from his new acquisition.

  And another obstacle, too, stood between him and the money he so urgently needed—Minnie’s younger sister, Nannie.

  Though the two had been raised in different parts of the country, they had renewed their relationship in the years preceding Minnie’s move to Chicago. In 1889, shortly after her graduation from the Boston Conservatory, Minnie had been invited to spend the summer at the home of her surviving uncle, Rev. C. W. Black. There, she and Nannie had become reacquainted, each discovering in the other not only an affectionate sister but a sympathetic friend.

  When Minnie was required to return to Dallas to sign some documents relating to her departed uncle’s estate, Nannie had traveled with her. Nannie was so taken with Texas that she decided to remain there, while Minnie returned to Boston and later moved to Chicago. That had been in 1890. Since that time, they had visited each other periodically and maintained a steady correspondence.

  As a result, Nannie knew all about Holmes. In one of Minnie’s very first letters from Chicago, she had rhapsodized over the “handsome, wealthy, and intelligent” gentleman who had hired her as his personal secretary. Within a matter of weeks, she had communicated the remarkable news that she
and her employer, Dr. Henry Howard Holmes—or “Harry” as she invariably referred to him—had become engaged.

  During their trip together to Dallas, Nannie had been made privy to all the details of Minnie’s inheritance. She had also discovered just how unsophisticated a person her sister was. As the ward of a Methodist minister, Nannie had received an upbringing even more sheltered than Minnie’s, but she had been blessed with a much shrewder sense of the world. She was keenly aware that her guileless—and suddenly wealthy—older sibling would make an exceptionally easy target for an unscrupulous suitor.

  In the evenings—seated across from each other at a restaurant table or sharing some quiet moments alone in their flat—Holmes questioned Minnie closely about her relatives. Minnie was touched by her lover’s curiosity about her life and told him all about her family—especially her dear younger sister.

  Holmes was quick to realize that Nannie posed a serious threat to his intentions. Should an unfortunate accident befall Minnie Williams, Nannie’s suspicions were sure to be aroused.

  And so, in May 1893, Holmes suggested to Minnie that she write her younger sister and invite her to come see the fair.

  During the second week of June, Nannie made the long trip from Midlothian, Texas, to Chicago, where she was met at the train station by her beaming, moon-faced sister and the dapper Dr. Holmes, who greeted her with a brotherly warmth that immediately disarmed her.

  Nannie was so excited by her first glimpse of the great metropolis that she insisted on doing some sightseeing right away. She and her hosts spent several hours taking in the sights of downtown Chicago before Holmes and Minnie escorted her back to Englewood and helped her settle in. To maintain appearances, Holmes had previously moved his personal belongings back to the Castle, so that Minnie could share the Wrightwood Avenue flat with her sister for the duration of the latter’s stay.