Marion Hedgepeth's Case

On evening of June 9th 1959 in a small town named Clinton Ontario, a couple of hundred kilometres from London, Ontario, a fourteen year old Steven Truscott gave twelve year old classmate Cheryl ‘Lynne’ Harper a ride home on the crossbars of his bicycle, the pair rode along the Country Road. What occurred after this is still unknown, and is still debated due to the wealth of questionable information from varied sources. Around 11:20pm, Lynne’s father had notified officials of his daughter’s disappearance. Just two days later, Lynne Harper’s body was found in a forested area just next to the County Road. Lynne Harper had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death.

After leaving Chicago, Holmes would appear next in Fort Worth, Texas. He had inherited the property of two railroad heiress sisters, both of whom he murdered (Murderpedia Editors n.d.). During his time in Texas, he stole two horses and shipped them to St. Louis. He sold both, making a decent sum of money; however, he was arrested for this scam and sent to jail in July of 1894. During his time in jail, he formulated a new insurance swindle with his cellmate, Marion Hedgepeth. Holmes planned to take out an insurance policy for ten-thousand dollars, fake his death, and then provide Marion with five-hundred dollars in exchange for a lawyer who could help him if there were any problems. He attempted this plan once he was released on bail, but the

In this passage, Dr. H. H. Holmes is deviously planning the blueprint for his house. Larson’s purpose in this passage is to bring out Holmes’s true evil and psychopathic impulses. The doctor wanted a chamber in the basement of his Chicago building where he could murder young women in secret and then store them under the building forever.

In the book The Devil in The White City by Erik Larson, the city of Chicago is used to show the great failures and successes of the United States. The story takes place a few years before and during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (World’s Fair) in Chicago. Larson focuses on the stories of Daniel Burnham, the director at the exposition, and Dr. H.H. Holmes, a serial killer. Daniel Burnham shows how America is a land of opportunity, and even in the face of many hardships succeeds in his goal of having a successful exposition. The Devil in The White City reflects the extremes of character in America because it shows American ingenuity, optimistic naivete, and the complete loss of morality.

The college he went to was the University of Michigan . Holmes was jealous of the rich kids and he complained about how tuition for college as not cheap. His plan to pay for college tuition was to marry a rich girl and leg her help him pay for tuition. The plan worked, he married a rich girl and his college tuition was easily payed for. He divorced her. He started selling corpses and used them to make false insurance claims. He made $20,000. He used this money to make his castle.

To clarify, Henry Howard Holmes known as H. H. Holmes was America’s first serial killer. As a child, Holmes was terrified of the doctor, however a few bullies from his school forced him to touch the real skeleton in their doctor’s office which started his obsession with human anatomy. When Holmes was a teenager he interned at his local doctor’s office and later went to Michigan State for a medical degree and became a skilled doctor. Holmes took out fake insurance policies on the bodies he used in medical school after pouring acid on their face so they were unrecognizable in order to afford college. In 1889 Holmes designed and built a hotel to assist his murders.

“They tend to share certain key characteristics. They're manipulative, cold, and lack what we might call a moral compass--they know right from wrong but are not invested in that distinction. Their only concern with their ‘wrong’ behavior is getting caught, but because they are deceitful, callous and not subject to anxiety, they easily elude capture” (Spikol, 5). These sort of criminals were ones that the Chicago Police Department had never been introduced to before, causing them to change their entire perspective on cases once Holmes’ had passed. According to John Bartlow Martin, a writer for the “Harper’s Archive”, Holmes’ murder castle was filled with trapdoors, gas chambers, secret passageways, and even pits of acid used to get rid of bodies and other pieces of evidence. These were all things that the law enforcers had never even heard of in a story, much less seen or thought of in real life. It’s safe to say that Holmes drastically affected the police’s outlook on the cases in the near, and even far, future of criminals after his mystery; or at least part of his mystery had been

His ambition was to create a game which involved the suffering of others. Killing people created him a sort of pleasure, “Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend lives of people” (Larson 355). Holmes always looked for people that he saw as weak and he used them to create his game which to him was to see how far he could go in changing a person’s life. While Geyer was investigating the disappearances of the Pitezel children he said that all criminals had a motive but no one really saw clearly what Holmes’ motive was. Later Geyer was drawn to the conclusion of Holmes wanting to have power over people’s lives. Holmes wanted to control people and produce others a suffering as he did when Carrie Pitezel was put in a hotel by Holmes in front of the hotel her children were in, without any of them knowing, that was his game. In the novel both Burnham and Holmes had ambitions but both had very different ambitions, which led their lives in different paths. Burnham by having the ambition to want Chicago to prosper became America’s best architect. Holmes’ ambition took him to jail and eventually to his death. The novel The Devil in the White City, illustrates that everything is not what it seems using the character Holmes and the creation of the World’s Fair. Holmes was known as a charming doctor that starstruck every woman that he laid an eye upon. It was said by

In her article “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice,” Sherene H. Razack explores the murder of Pamela George; the way that her murderers’ sentences were lessened because of a variety of factors pertaining to Ms. George’s life; and the fact that the murderers were young, white, and middle-class men.

Dr. H. H. Holmes has a passion for murder, and he hides his true personality behind an act of a charming man managing a hotel. Since Holmes uses his creativity to disrupt the lives of innocent people, he brings out the Black City of Chicago. As a result of Holmes’s passion for murder, he has to keep his psychotic talent secret. Only very few people know Holmes’s true lifestyle, and if they do, he kills them. Holmes weaves his way into to his victims’ lives to manipulate them for his personal benefit.. Even though the White City masks some of Chicago’s problems, evil still

Holmes had been born into a wealthy New Hampshire family and was given the name Herman Webster Mudgett (America’s Serial Killers). “If Mudgett or his brother or sister were bad, their strict Methodist parents sent them to the attic for a full day without speaking or eating,. Mudgett’s father was especially abusive after he’d been drinking - which was often” (Spikol). However, his father was a wealthy and respected citizen and had been the local postmaster for nearly twenty five years (Taylor). It is surprising an important member of the community was a child abuser. The abuse of his father may be one of the

He picked a highly intense part of the movie to perform his attack, which was filled with gun shots and explosions to blend the sound. This could only have been done by Holmes studying the film and deciding when he was going to attack. The second set of first degree charges involved murder with malice aforethought. Malice refers to acts obtained through evil or indifference towards human life. This is demonstrated by him single-handedly inflicting a massacre of innocent and defenseless spectators. The counts of second degree murders were represented in two different circumstances. The first was his attempt to murder to all of the moviegoers that he wounded in his shooting rampage. The second demonstration was in reference to his apartment, in which he lined with enough explosives to bring down the entire building. This is also where his charge of possession of illegal explosives is represented.

In some cases, the judicial process extends far beyond the initial trial or hearing. Apparent final decisions may be answered with an appeal by the defeated party - though, in rare circumstances, the victor may instigate an appeal - if he or she feels the ruling was unjust. In the event of an appeal, the decision of the lower court will be carefully examined by a higher court, which will then choose to either overturn or reaffirm a ruling.

He had two children, one son and one daughter. He went out of sight for six years after abandoning Clara and his son. He would always somehow come up with some con as to where he was and what he was doing during the time of his victims' deaths. The police had always questioned him, but had never really pinned anything on him. No one wanted to believe that Holmes was an evil master mind. He was so handsome and charismatic. His tall stature and piercing blue eyes made women often swoon at the sight of him. He could also talk anyone into anything at the sound of his voice and the medical, knowledgeable jargon he used. He even got an old lady to give him her husbands pharmacy after his death sometime after he arrived to Chicago. Other sources said that he killed her and inherited the pharmacy without anyone knowing what happened. Either way the old woman should have been happy that such a noble man was running her pharmacy. He was always the perfect assistant, making sure that her money was going towards helping the company in any way. He would even meet up with venders, creating a stable environment for her and her dying husband. He eventually killed her but when others would ask he stated that she had moved to California, but had no forwarding address (Taylor, Troy).

Holmes recorded in his journal his plan of entering the town’s large midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises armed with an assault rifle, pump action shotgun, a semi-automatic pistol, gas grenades, body armor, and ample ammunition to massacre the entire four-hundred person screening of the film. Holmes also considered an airport as his target, but with the tighter security, he selected his local Century 16 movie theater. Out of “hatred for mankind,” much like Frankenstein’s monster, Holmes entered the theater casually and unarmed, then proceeded to set his self proclaimed “mission” into effect. The movie began, and several minutes into the opening action sequence, Holmes left the screening room through an emergency exit, propping the door open so he could re-enter the densely populated room. He traveled to his car, where he stored his wide array of equipment, suited up, and made his way back into the theater. Before re-entering fully however, Holmes placed headphones in his ears playing music, to drown out the inevitable screaming that would come from his next act. He opened the exit door and threw smoke grenades into the audience to confuse and frighten them. Many believed the smoke to be special theatrical effects since it was the town’s special premiere of the film. Then