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I am sure many Casebook members are already familiar with this book, but I thought if there were some who had not read it they would enjoy this excerpt regarding Jack the Ripper.
It is from The Devil in the White City, a historical novel by Erik Larson; on the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and the American serial killer H. H. Holmes.
The excerpt below takes place just as the city has received the news that Chicago had ‘beat out’ New York for the right to host the fair.
Anthony
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.” Mark Twain
It is from The Devil in the White City, a historical novel by Erik Larson; on the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition and the American serial killer H. H. Holmes.
The excerpt below takes place just as the city has received the news that Chicago had ‘beat out’ New York for the right to host the fair.
One telegraph boy made his way through the dark to an unlit alley that smelled of rotted fruit and was silent save for the receding hiss of gaslight on the street he had left behind. He found a door, knocked, and entered a room full of men, some young, some old, all seeming to speak at once, a few quite drunk. A coffin at the center of the room served as a bar. The light was dim and came from gas jets hidden behind the skulls mounted on the walls. Other skulls lay scattered about the room. A hangman’s noose dangled from the wall, as did assorted weapons and a blanket caked in blood.
These artifacts marked the room as headquarters of the Whitechapel Club, named for the London slum in which two years earlier Jack the Ripper had done his killing. The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists, who brought to the club’s meetings stories of murder harvested from the city’s streets. The weapons on the walls had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum; the blanket by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux.
Upon learning that Chicago had won the fair, the men of the Whitechapel Club composed a telegram to Chauncey Depew, who more than any other man symbolized New York and its campaign to win the fair. Previously Depew had promised the members of the Whitechapel Club that if Chicago prevailed he would present himself at the clubs next meeting, to be hacked apart by the Ripper himself - metaphorically, he presumed, although at the Whitechapel Club could one ever be certain? The club’s coffin, for example, had once been used to transport the body of a member who had committed suicide. After claiming his body, the club had hauled it to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, where members erected an immense pyre. They placed the body on top, and set it alight. Carrying torches and wearing black hooded robes, they circled the fire singing hymns to the dead, between sips of whiskey. The club also had a custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.
Anyone interested in starting a Whitechapel Club?These artifacts marked the room as headquarters of the Whitechapel Club, named for the London slum in which two years earlier Jack the Ripper had done his killing. The club’s president held the official title of the Ripper; its members were mainly journalists, who brought to the club’s meetings stories of murder harvested from the city’s streets. The weapons on the walls had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum; the blanket by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux.
Upon learning that Chicago had won the fair, the men of the Whitechapel Club composed a telegram to Chauncey Depew, who more than any other man symbolized New York and its campaign to win the fair. Previously Depew had promised the members of the Whitechapel Club that if Chicago prevailed he would present himself at the clubs next meeting, to be hacked apart by the Ripper himself - metaphorically, he presumed, although at the Whitechapel Club could one ever be certain? The club’s coffin, for example, had once been used to transport the body of a member who had committed suicide. After claiming his body, the club had hauled it to the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, where members erected an immense pyre. They placed the body on top, and set it alight. Carrying torches and wearing black hooded robes, they circled the fire singing hymns to the dead, between sips of whiskey. The club also had a custom of sending robed members to kidnap visiting celebrities and steal them away in a black coach with covered windows, all without saying a word.
Anthony
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.” Mark Twain