The Devil In The White City

Must read: Larson has written a compelling parallel history of Daniel Burnham's World's Columbian Exposition and Dr H.H. Holmes's serial killing that took place adjacent to the Chicago World Fair. Unnerving and exhaustively researched, it is a superb contribuion to true crime 'fact fiction'.

| By: Oliver Daddow | Published: May 31, 2026

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City (London: Bantam, 2004)

“I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing” (p129). So wrote Dr H.H. Holmes, from his cell deep in Philadelphia’s Moyamensing prison, built in the imposing Gothic style, as he awaited execution in 1896. In autumn 1895, Holmes – whose given name was the rather more prosaic Herman Webster Mudgett – was tried and convicted for the murder of nine people: five women (mostly his wives, partners or their relatives); Ben Pitezel (a former criminal associate in a patent fraud business); and three of Pitezel’s five children, who Holmes first abducted and went on the run with across the US. In his prison confessions Holmes claimed to have murdered up to twenty seven people, but as with a lot of what he said and wrote, Holmes was not to be trusted: several of those he named turned out to be alive. Some commentators, however, put the figure at up to 200 victims. Whatever the number, Holmes is widely regarded as America’s first known serial killer.

In this highly readable and thoroughly well researched book, Erik Larson reconstructs the Holmes killings in the style of ‘fact fiction’ pioneered by Truman Capote in his classic In Cold Blood (reviewed elsewhere on this site). As is common in this type of true crime writing, Larson draws on copious historical material documenting the events in question, including archives, memoirs, private letters and diaries written by many of the key players, including Holmes and the detectives themselves. These are blended with fictive renderings of key episodes, including some of the most poignant murder scenes, to bring added pathos to what, in some author hands, can be rather ‘detached’, emotion-less accounts of incredibly disturbing and gruesome crimes. Unlike Capote, who was fortunate to be able to speak directly to the perpetrators of the murder he covered, Larson was unable to include witness testimony, yet he still creates a foreboding sense of ‘there-ness’ in some of the darkest scenes he retells. Larson paints pictures in our minds that otherwise would remain as mere pencil sketches on a blank canvas, making them just as vivid and troubling as any scene of violence one can see on the big or small screen. It is no mean feat to bring Victorian horrors to life in this way.

The fundamental structural trick Larson successfully pulls over the lengthy text is to interweave the crime story into an account of the actions of someone who, at the time Holmes was murdering, was a much better known figure in the US: the architect and urban designer Daniel Burnham. Now known for designing landmarks such as New York’s Flatiron building, Selfridges department store in London and Washington’s Union Station, Burnham, along with his business partner John Root, rose to prominence for being given the desperately challenging task of putting together the 1893 Columbian World Exposition, held to mark the 400-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s famous voyage to the US. Everything had to be put together from scratch in just a few years, so time was at a premium from the outset. It was also built during a major economic downturn, as, month by month, banks collapsed and thousands of workers were laid off leading to mass unemployment and intense hardship for millions across America. For a short time at least, many came to Chicago to help build the World Fair. Already with time and economic circumstance against them, Burnham and Root had the added challenge of designing to cater for the extremes of weather in Chicago weather, which could switch from gale-force winds and biting cold to dangerous levels of heat and humidity. In these conditions, it required a series of engineering innovations to keeping tall, heavy buildings standing safely on the unprepossessing grounds of the damp, desolate Jackson Park on Chicago’s south lakefront. The entire project also had to be put together under the gaze of critics inside Chicago, around the US, in rival cities such as New York, and indeed around the world. Audiences were watching and waiting for Burnham’s plans to come crashing down around his ears. 

Root – the brains behind a lot of the early design – died suddenly shortly into the design phase. To replace Root’s seemingly irreplaceable eye for design, Burnham assembled a team of the US’s most eminent architects to submit plans for most of the key buildings and streets that housed the attractions and exhibitions. They eventually cohered around the Classical Revival style, with pillars, sweeping facades, open courtyards and wide boulevards. The surrounding landscape was designed by the sickly but brilliant Frederick Law Olmsted. With everything painted to stand out from the dark city at its side, the White City, as it became known, stood out as a gleaming beacon of what could be achieved by humans in the face of huge adversity. Burnham’s aim throughout had been to put the name of Chicago, and its architects, firmly on the US and global map, for despite Chicago’s renown for being an economic and manufacturing powerhouse, they “claim that we are not cultivated and refined to the same extent” as rival conurbations such as New York or Paris (p239). 

Burnham succeeded in proving the doubters wrong. The White City was home to breakthroughs in structural engineering that would come to influence architecture globally, as well as such milestones as electric illumination at night – the fair consumed three times as much electricity as the entire city of Chicago (p286). In the Electricity Building itself, the fair’s legions of visitors could marvel at the world’s first electric chair (p300). Snacks such as Cracker Jacks and cereals such as Shredded Wheat were invented just for the fair. But perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the most popular Exposition exhibit, was the first Ferris Wheel, designed by George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr. who had been commissioned to “out-Eiffel Eiffel” of 1889 Paris tower fame. Visitors flocked from far and wide to take the picturesque 20-minute loop in one of its 36 carriages, with views over Lake Michigan, the sprawling fair’s expansive grounds, Chicago and beyond. Despite media scare stories that the Ferris wheel looked unsafe (pp321-322), it survived the very worst the Chicago weather hit it with, unlike some parts of the Exposition buildings themselves, when battered by intense rain and winds of up to 115mph. 

While Burnham and his associates were busy putting Chicago firmly on the architectural map, another man living and operating next door to the fair was doing the same for its criminal fraternity. For beside the Columbian Exposition, Dr H.H. Holmes was building something of his own: the three-storey World’s Fair Hotel at the corner of 63rd and Wallace in the Englewood neighbourhood. It lacked the beauty of the White City, visitors finding it dark, gloomy and foreboding. Yet it was also, apparently, an invisible place, right on the fair’s doorstep, where Holmes could enact his most evil desires on individuals cherry-picked from Chicago’s wave upon wave of visitors to the hotel, or who came into his employ in the pharmacy in one of its street corner’s. Criminality had been in Holmes’s blood from a young age. At medical school in the 1880s, he and a fellow student “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”. The pair never went through with their scheme, but it revealed something of Holmes’s “astigmatic soul” (p58): he would replicate this kind of fraud on multiple occasions in later life. Several of Holmes’s victims conveniently had life insurance policies to their name when they went missing. 

With an instinctive ability to ride the commercial Zeitgeist of the latest Victorian medical fad or fashion, another lucrative money-making scheme for Holmes was a mail order medicine company run out of his pharmacy, “selling sham drugs that he guaranteed would cure alcoholism and baldness” (quoted p105). His hotel was partly funded by this scam’s money, along with cash promised to creditors under a range of pseudonyms leveraged against a range of fake properties. The labour that went into the hotel also came and went very fast (unionised labour not being an established feature of economic life in the US at this time). Holmes consistently fired workmen on spurious grounds, after short stints labouring for him, to avoid having to pay their wages. The added bonus was that none of them ever got to see designs or what it actually was they were actually building, to avoid difficult questions. In this way Holmes could avoid difficult questions about kilns, vaults and gas chambers. 

Holmes therefore came to adore Chicago, “in particular how the smoke and din could envelop a woman and leave no hint that she had ever existed” (p79). He was a charmer and a fantasist, who would lure women into his orbit using his deep blue eyes and stories about his distinguished heritage or family background. For example, he told one of his wives (he was also a bigamist) that he could trace his blood to the English aristocracy, promising her a honeymoon in Europe where they would visit his father, the lord (pp190-192). Holmes would not kill his victims face to face but at one remove: through gas pumped into a room at night, where he would listen, aroused, through the wall to their strangled, asphyxiated screams. Alternatively, he might smother them (as he did one wife on the occasion of a supposed abortion) using a chloroform rag pressed to their face, or in their sleep. Holmes did not keep trophies – the life insurance pay-outs did him just fine – disposing of the corpses in the hotel’s kiln or quicklime pit. Other bodies, Holmes would sell to an acquaintance by the name of Charles Chapppell, who would trade them on to hospitals for medical teachings. Cadavers were in notoriously short supply as the Victorian interest in medical research burgeoned.

Larson shows how, at various points through Holmes’s murder spree, neighbours and family voiced suspicions, in letters and directly to him, about the various female comings, goings and disappearances. Holmes’s explanations always had just enough credibility to deflect attention and quieten the noise. There was also a growing band of creditors who alerted the authorities to various alleged frauds. But Holmes, again, smooth-talked them and the authorities into believing there was a rational explanation. Patience, he stressed, was a virtue, especially where money was concerned. Holmes took advantage of the age of excess suffusing Chicago at this time. Crime was rife there at the end of the nineteenth century, people and money went missing all the time, meaning the police were understaffed and overworked. “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” (p218). Even when the disappearances started stacking up “The police still did not become involved. Apparently there was too much else for them to do” (p289). The authorities had no answers other than that “in Chicago at the time of the fair, it was so very easy to disappear” (p375). So when they occasionally break the surface, the ripples of Holmes’s crimes would just as quickly blend back into the water as if they had never occurred.

It was only the death of his friend and associate, Ben Pitezel, that finally saw the serial killer unmasked. As is often the way with master criminals, Holmes was initially arrested for insurance fraud, for faking Pitezel’s death. Holmes confessed to the crime, no doubt feeling he would have got off lightly, and was awaiting trial in Moyamensing, when it became evident to one Detective Frank Geyer that Holmes had actually murdered Pietzel and staged the scene to make the death look accidental. On top of that, three of Pitezel’s children, Alice, Nellie and Howard, who after their father’s death had been placed in Holmes’s care, were all missing. In whose company were they last seen? Dr H.H. Holmes. The final chapters of the book are a page-turning account of Geyer’s tortuous search for the children, leading a police manhunt that criss-crossed US states, retracing Holmes’s footsteps that eventually led north into Canada. Geyer’s travails gripped the media and public in 1894-1895, making the detective something of a celebrity in his own right. 

As was his way, during Geyer’s painstaking search for the infants, Holmes used prison letters to their mother, Carrie Pitezel – which he knew the authorities would read – to deny culpability and smooth-talk his way out of things: “can you imagine me killing little and innocent children, especially without any motive?” (quoted p394). However, his victim act was finally at an end: Holmes was guilty as charged. He had killed the youngest child, Howard, in Indiana. Later, in a Toronto house he rented under another of many pseudonyms, Holmes gassed Alice and Nellie in a trunk built for purpose. He buried their bodies on top of each other in the cramped cellar, first amputating the feet of the club-footed Nellie to make her body harder to identify (p399). With the full horror of Holmes’s crimes becoming more bloodily apparent with every passing day, in July 1895 the authorities excavated the basement (50x165ft) of his Chicago hotel. What they found staggered even the most hardened police officer: vats of acid, a dissection table, bones, clothing, footwear, clumps of hair in pipes, mounds of quicklime, and the infamous Holmes kiln. In one of the horror hotel’s many gloomy rooms, there was a walk-in vault with iron walls and a gas-jet fed into it, the cut-off valve being located in Holmes’s apartment. Everything had been meticulously planned to suit Holmes’s particular taste in slaughter.  

Around this time, as rapid advances were being made in medicine and psychiatry, mental health professionals known as “alienists” were trying to come up with the best descriptive word for criminals like Holmes. They had written widely about “moral insanity” but from the mid-1880s they started to adopt the term “psychopath”. One of the first definitions of this “new malady” appeared in an 1885 in William Stead’s Pall Mall Gazette: “Beside his own person and his own interests, nothing is sacred to the psychopath”. Dr Harvey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as “a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly” (all quoted p107). Holmes was a prototypical psychopath who liked to exert control and power over others, and then kill them, simply because he could. He garnered fleeting moments of joy in those moments when his victims teetered between life and death, but these were instantly forgotten, meaning Holmes was constantly on the look-out for new prey. “The possession he craved was a transient thing… Once it was gone, only another acquisition could restore it” (p289). 

Larson’s skill in this book is to contrast the lives and “achievements” of two men who never met, but who shaped the architecture and culture of modern America in distinctive ways. Burnham’s staggering achievement in building the White City contrasts directly with Holmes’s dark, inhuman savagery on a grand scale of its own. One man focussed on building beauty upward to the stars, the other man built different forms of hell for his victims, taking sadistic pride in tearing humanity apart at the seams. I welcome your thoughts on this book via the contact section of the website.          

Images: 
1.    Author own.
2.    Author own.
3.    Court of Honor and Grand Basin, by C. D. Arnold, in H. D. Higinbotham, The Project Gutenberg EBook of Official Views Of The World’s Columbian Exposition.
4.    The Ferris Wheel, by J. Maul, in Russell L. Lewis, ‘A Wheel With a View’, for Chicago History Museum, https://www.chicagohistory.org/exhibition/wheel-with-a-view/.
5.    Holmes’s Horror Hotel, source unknown. Published in Frank P. Geyer, The Holmes-Pitezel Case (Philadelphia, 1896).
6.    Author own.