The Devil in the White City (6 page)

Holmes entered the store and there found an elderly woman named Mrs. Holton. He sensed vulnerability, sensed it the way another man might capture the trace of a woman’s perfume. He identified himself as a doctor and licensed pharmacist and asked the woman if she needed assistance in her store. He spoke softly, smiled often, and held her in his frank blue gaze.

He was good with conversation, and soon she revealed to him her deepest sorrow. Her husband, upstairs in their apartment, was dying of cancer. She confessed that managing the store while caring for him had become a great burden.

Holmes listened with moist eyes. He touched her arm. He could ease her burden, he said. Not only that, he could turn the drugstore into a thriving establishment and conquer the competition up the block.

His gaze was so clear and blue. She told him she would have to talk to her husband.

She walked upstairs. The day was hot. Flies rested on the window sill. Outside yet another train rumbled through the intersection. Cinder and smoke drifted like soiled gauze past the window. She would talk to her husband, yes, but he was dying, and she was the one who now managed the store and bore its responsibilities, and she had come to a decision.

Just thinking about the young doctor gave her a feeling of contentment she had not experienced in a long while.

Holmes had been to Chicago before, but only for brief visits. The city impressed him, he said later, which was surprising because as a rule nothing impressed him, nothing moved him. Events and people captured his attention the way moving objects caught the notice of an amphibian: first a machinelike registration of proximity, next a calculation of worth, and last a decision to act or remain motionless. When he resolved at last to move to Chicago, he was still using his given name, Herman Webster Mudgett.

As for most people, his initial sensory contact with Chicago had been the fantastic stink that lingered always in the vicinity of the Union Stock Yards, a Chinook of putrefaction and incinerated hair, “an elemental odor,” wrote Upton Sinclair, “raw and crude; it was rich, almost rancid, sensual and strong.” Most people found it repulsive. The few who found it invigorating tended to be men who had waded in its “river of death,” Sinclair’s phrase, and panned from it great fortunes. It is tempting to imagine that all that death and blood made Mudgett feel welcome but more realistic to suppose it conveyed a sense that here at last was a city that allowed a broader range of behavior than was tolerated in Gilmanton Academy, New Hampshire, the town in which he was born and where he drifted through childhood as a small, odd, and exceptionally bright boy—and where, as a consequence, in the cruel imaginations of his peers, he became prey.

The memory of one episode stayed with him throughout his life. He was five, wearing his first boy’s suit, when his parents sent him off to begin his education at the village schoolhouse. “I had daily to pass the office of one village doctor, the door of which was seldom if ever barred,” he wrote in a later memoir. “Partly from its being associated in my mind as the source of all the nauseous mixtures that had been my childish terror (for this was before the day of children’s medicines), and partly because of vague rumors I had heard regarding its contents, this place was one of peculiar abhorrence to me.”

In those days a doctor’s office could indeed be a fearsome place. All doctors were in a sense amateurs. The best of them bought cadavers for study. They paid cash, no questions asked, and preserved particularly interesting bits of diseased viscera in large clear bottles. Skeletons hung in offices for easy anatomical reference; some transcended function to become works of art so detailed, so precisely articulated—every bleached bone hitched to its neighbor with brass, under a skull grinning with slap-shoulder bonhomie—that they appeared ready to race chattering down the street to catch the next grip-car.

Two older children discovered Mudgett’s fear and one day captured him and dragged him “struggling and shrieking” into the doctor’s office. “Nor did they desist,” Mudgett wrote, “until I had been brought face to face with one of its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize me.

“It was a wicked and dangerous thing to do to a child of tender years and health,” he wrote, “but it proved an heroic method of treatment, destined ultimately to cure me of my fears, and to inculcate in me, first, a strong feeling of curiosity, and, later, a desire to learn, which resulted years afterwards in my adopting medicine as a profession.”

The incident probably did occur, but with a different choreography. More likely the two older boys discovered that their five-year-old victim did not mind the excursion; that far from struggling and shrieking, he merely gazed at the skeleton with cool appreciation.

When his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled.

Gilmanton was a small farming village in New Hampshire’s lake country, sufficiently remote that its residents did not have access to a daily newspaper and rarely heard the shriek of train whistles. Mudgett had two siblings, a brother and sister. His father, Levi, was a farmer, as was Levi’s own father. Mudgett’s parents were devout Methodists whose response to even routine misbehavior relied heavily on the rod and prayer, followed by banishment to the attic and a day with neither speech nor food. His mother often insisted he pray with her in her room, then filled the air around him with trembly passion.

By his own assessment, he was a “mother’s boy.” He spent a good deal of time alone in his room reading Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe and inventing things. He built a wind-powered mechanism that generated noise to scare birds from the family fields and set out to create a perpetual motion machine. He hid his most favored treasures in small boxes, among them his first extracted tooth and a photograph of his “twelve-year-old sweetheart,” although later observers speculated these boxes also contained treasures of a more macabre sort, such as the skulls of small animals that he disabled and then dissected, alive, in the woods around Gilmanton. They based this speculation on the hard lessons learned during the twentieth century about the behavior of children of similar character. Mudgett’s only close friend was an older child named Tom, who was killed in a fall while the boys were playing in an abandoned house.

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.