In The Devil in the White City Erik Larson told the stories of two brilliant men at the same time. One man was a nice, caring, hard-working, and a family man; the other was a deceitful, cheater, with a twisted appetite to murder young women and children. Burnham’s father wanted him to go to Harvard or Yale so bad had forced Burnham to study with a multitude of private tutors. Burnham had a severe anxiety disorder which made him so anxious he did not perform well on tests...therefore he never passed. This angered his father, but Burnham excelled at drawing and sketching.When Burnham was just twenty-one he moved back to Chicago to become a draftsman for the architectural firm of Loring and Jenney. Just a year later he joined a firm called LG …show more content…
Holmes. Unlike most serial killers, Holmes did not have a rough childhood aside from being bullied. The bullies would make him touch skeletons in the local doctors office -at this time these were mainly made from the skeleton of a cadaver(in Holmes' case people he murdered). Instead of being scared when being forced to touch the skeleton he was fascinated. Later, he graduated from Michigan Medical School around 1884. From early on he would commit petty crimes of fraud and would scam insurance companies. (One thing I found while reading was that it seemed he would always talk people into making a life insurance plan before murdering them to collect the money.) He later moved to Chicago and scammed a woman, whose husband was malignant and dying soon, to sell her the pharmacy; after the deal had been made she ‘mysteriously’ disappeared. Holmes would soon marry many different women and lie about relationships left and right- I guess he did not really have to worry about crazy ex-girlfriends- and they always seemed to move away ‘unexpectedly’ and were then never heard from again. (I wonder how many children he had..) Anyway, Holmes was the kind of guy who women fell head-over-heels for; he was charming, sweet, apparently handsome, seemed wealthy, and over-affectionate. Who just so happened to be one of America’s first serial