Bonus Monday Question

Is Holmes a natural or necessary part of the White City?


From watching this video, I would have to say that Holmes was a natural outgrowth of the White City. The White City and the Chicago World Fair had to be built in twenty-seven months, therefore, most of the people in the town were being overlooked. Because millions of people were going to be traveling to one city in over two years, it gave Holmes time and motive to plan his killings. In those twenty-seven months, he was able to kill a business man and his wife in order to take over their pharmacy, and build a hotel that looked normal from the outside, but was a torture chamber on the inside. He was able to lure young women who were new to the town into his hotel, and make them fall in love with him. After he proposed to these women, who normally had an estate waiting for them back home, he would put them in a room where they would run out of air, or be gassed or even go as far as to dissect them while they are still alive. He would then take their bodies down into the cellar to dispose of them. With the World Fair being such a big hit in Chicago, Holmes never thought that he would be caught. He was confident in himself and his ability to kill and get away with it that he killed his business partner in order to get a $100,000 insurance claim. He was then jailed for insurance fraud where he began to write his autobiography. He admitted to killing three children whose bodies were eventually found and that is when he was caught. Police went to check out his hotel and were horrified by what they found. They discovered dozens of rooms designed to kill, trap doors, gas lines, and the cellar where he kept the women's clothes, hair, and bones. Before Holmes was to be hanged, he admitted to killing twenty-seven women and children and asked to be buried in cement, ten-feet under ground. Holmes may have been a serial killer anywhere he inhabited, but because the World Fair brought in millions of people in a short amount of time, he was able to conjure up a genius plan that would make him rich and nobody would be the wiser.