Did the world’s first serial killer stalk Minneapolis? Caroline Woods’ historical novel explores.

Few diners at the recently closed Eli’s Food & Cocktails knew the building where they were wolfing down crabcakes once housed the world’s first serial killer.

He’s Harry Hayward, who was hanged for the 1894 murder of Catherine “Kitty” Ging — who, like Hayward, lived in that Minneapolis building (now the Bellevue, but known as Ozark Flats in Hayward’s day).

Before he was executed, Hayward confessed to killing several others in the 1880s, which would put him a few years ahead of H.H. Holmes, whose brutal slayings are documented in the bestseller “The Devil in the White City,” and before Jack the Ripper.

Novelist Caroline Woods, whose book “The Mesmerist” is partly inspired by Hayward, put together what she learned about him with her interest in the Gilded Age and research into Minneapolis’ Bethany Home. At the Hennepin History Museum she learned about the home, a progressive organization that temporarily housed unwed mothers (some of them sex workers) and taught them skills to help them rejoin society.

“It was these women who really took pity on these unwed mothers and said, ‘We have to take care of them,’ ” said Hennepin History Museum archivist Michele Pollard, who met with Woods at the museum last year. “They were just doing something that needed to be done and that’s really incredible. And kudos to Caroline for giving these women dimension.”

History and imagination merge in “The Mesmerist,” which is about what happens after a mute woman arrives at Bethany, where she’s called Faith and where Hayward tries to exploit her reputation for otherworldly powers. We asked Woods, a Chicagoan, how the pieces came together.

Q: What was it about Bethany Home that intrigued you?

A: I was blown away by the kind and accepting nature of the Bethany Home, taking in unwed mothers without judgment, with this notion that they deserved to be treated with dignity. My editor liked that idea, but she was like, “Where’s the conflict?” I thought, “Well, what else was happening in Minneapolis in the 1890s?” That very quickly led me to Harry Hayward.

Q: You had your villain?

A: That he was operating around the same time as H.H. Holmes in Chicago but hadn’t gotten the same notoriety was really fascinating. I thought, “This is ripe for a novel,” and I had to unite the two, Bethany Home with Hayward.

Q: You weren’t interested in writing nonfiction?

A: No, my intention was more to take his story and explore the shadowy elements of it that didn’t make the papers. I found an obscure tidbit in, I think, Shawn Francis Peters’ “The Infamous Harry Hayward,” about how he hired a trance medium [the Faith character] to convince Kitty Ging to go into business with him and I was like, “What role did she play? What was her story?”

Q: I know you peeked into the windows of the Bellevue, but how did you do such a good job of capturing it and the Bethany Home, which is no longer standing?

A: I had to look through the archives at the Hennepin History Museum for the Bethany Home. I could see the architect’s original blueprints, believe it or not, so I knew where the kitchens were, how many bedrooms there were, the shapes of the corridors. You can find ledgers with the handwriting of the women who ran the Bethany Home and transcripts of the Hayward trial. And things like standing on the bridge over the Mississippi and feeling the spray of the water — there are details like that that you can only experience in person.

Q: Although the language and manners of “The Mesmerist” feel very much of the period, it seems like you wanted to depict the women who ran Bethany as ahead of their time?

A: The adage of the time was usually a “ruined” mother would create ruined children. The fact that they saw past that and said everyone is worthy of redemption and a second chance was what made me feel connected to them. Also, what my book tries to explore is that they were limited in what they could accomplish for women coming out of the Bethany Home. They couldn’t change things like the going wage for domestic work, the price of houses, the sexism and classism they would have faced.

Q: Is it almost like they were feminists before that was a thing in this country?

A: Charlotte Van Cleve [the first woman elected to the Minneapolis school board and a character in “The Mesmerist”] made a really outspoken statement about the men of the city creating these unwed mothers, to the effect that everyone was criticizing these women for having children out of wedlock but where are the men who made them what they are? She said the quiet part out loud.

Q: One compelling theme is that Bethany offered women, as you write, “a holiday from a world that included men.” Where did that notion come from?

A: One of my friends from grad school read [an early version of “Mesmerist”] and said, “I want to know a little more, like what do their bodies feel like? How do they look to each other? What would it have felt like to be a woman with all these other women?”

Q: So that detail came later?

A: Yes. Sometimes the better lines in a book are the ones you add later. I don’t remember if I read it in a journal — no, I don’t think so — but it occurred to me, “Oh, they wouldn’t have been wearing their corsets, they wouldn’t be wearing rouge. They wouldn’t care.” It would be this intimate, casual reprieve from needing to look good to make a living. They all could take that as a chance to breathe and let their hair down.

Q: There’s still a green space that some have unofficially named after Ging near the northern edge of Bde Maka Ska, where her body was dumped. Do you expect readers who are familiar with sites in the Twin Cities to be tough to please?

A: I know that people who live in Minneapolis will have high standards for a book set in your town and I hope it meets those. I hope everybody who loves both historical fiction and suspense or thrillers will want to keep turning the pages. I’m always looking for stories that haven’t necessarily been told or can be told in a new way. I hope readers are, too.

The Mesmerist

By: Caroline Woods.

Publisher: Doubleday, 320 pages, $28.