The Devil in the White City pg. 35-57

So this next section that I read was another biography however it was about Dr. H.H. Holmes, the serial killer, rather than the architect. This may sound creepy and twisted, but I find the story of serial killers to be quite fascinating, therefore I favored this biography over the other. 


It is so interesting to me how investigators look back into the past of a serial killer and find obvious red flags that that person is not normal. For example, Holmes as a child was fearful of the doctor's office (which is ironic seeing as he later becomes a doctor). Two older boys discovered his fear and trapped him in the office and left him there "until [he] had been brought face to face with one of  its grinning skeletons, which, with arms outstretched, seemed ready in its turn to seize [him]." As innocent as the story is, it takes a disturbing turn as Holmes insists that "when his eyes settled back upon his captors, it was they who fled." Holmes' response to the raillery of his classmates is the first glimpse of his dark nature.


Twenty years later, Holmes was in desperate need of money for he was staring starvation in the face. He recalled a scam one of his classmates back in medical school had thought of: for one of them to buy life insurance, make the other the beneficiary, and then use a cadaver to fake the one insured. Holmes expanded on this plan by using a "family" of cadavers in order to rake in a higher profit. He and his conspirators would then divide their $40,000 (or more than $1,000,000 in today's society). Holmes takes this plan to a whole other level of creepy when he stores his "portion" of the cadaver family in the Fidelity Storage Warehouse in Chicago and takes the other with him to New York City and stores it "in a safe place." EW. That's disgusting. 


Sorry. It gets even weirder. Holmes backed out of the plan because he finally realized how well organized and well prepared the leading insurance companies were to detect and punish this kind of fraud. Actually, he was lying. Because he was a doctor, Holmes knew that (at the time) there was no method that existed for establishing the identities of burned, dismembered corpses. This line out of this section shook me up the most:

"And he did not mind handling bodies. They were 'material' no different from firewood, although somewhat more difficult to dispose of."

On that note I would like to leave you wondering how much creepier this guy can get. I'll have an update in an hour or two seeing as I still need one more post by tomorrow. It's a good thing I'm not a procrastinator or anything.....