Larson - The Devil in the White City
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In a burgeoning but pre-automobile America, a "White City" rose in the midst of Chicago as the backdrop for the 1893 World Fair. Nearby Herman Mudgett, better known as Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, constructed a hotel/retail space nicknamed "the Castle," which housed torture devices and chambers of horror as wondrous, if revolting, as anything offered at the World's Fair (Larson 123). In Eric Larson's The Devil and the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America, the author chronicles the exploits of the architect of the World's Fair, Daniel Hudson Burnham, juxtaposed with those of America's first serial killer, H.H. Holmes. A physician who appeared to be a man of significant means, ingratiatingly charming, and able to exploit the massive droves of young and innocent visitors to the World's Fair; Holmes exerted enormous power over his victims. This analysis will explore the tactics and methods that gave Holmes such power over his victims, as well as showing why his capture took so long and what his story tells us about crime and urban life in late nineteenth century America. Dr. H.H. Holmes used a variety of tactics to exert power over his victims. One of these was his method of exploiting young female employees, who he forced to take out life insurance policies he paid for but also received the benefit from. He told the woman who did his laundry, Strowers, that if she took out a $10,000 life insurance policy naming him as benefi
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es and kilns to dispose of bodies efficiently and without detection, plus his aid in doing so from Charles Chappell were reasons he was able to avoid being caught. Holmes' deception and faculty for lying also helped him escape capture. At a time when law enforcement did not have the sophisticated technologies and databases available today, Holmes' deceptions and relocations made him more difficult to capture. As Larson (102) explains,
For the police there were warnings of a different sort-letters from parents, visits from detectives hired by parents-but these were lost in the chaos...There were too many disappearances, in all parts of the city, to investigate properly, and too many forces impeding the detection of patterns.
Pinkerton detectives would finally apprehend him, but only after years of having to travel lengthy distances and piece together bits of information about minor crimes that would ultimately lead them to his house of horrors. Slow modes of travel compared to today, lack of information databases where details in different jurisdictions could be compared, and other factors like barely competent patrolmen and few detectives made it more difficult for a serial killer who moved about a goo
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Approximate Word count = 1368
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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