"Bluebeard" was once included in the first version of "Grimm's Fairy Tales", and stood out for its "horror" in many fairy tales, becoming a childhood shadow for many people.
The fairy tale Bluebeard is a rich local aristocrat, but with a peculiar appearance. Because he has a blue beard, everyone calls him Bluebeard. He took several wives, but their whereabouts were unknown. It wasn't until his seventh wife discovered Bluebeard's secret: in the forbidden room in the castle, the bodies of Bluebeard's former wives were hanging.
It's scary enough as a fairy tale, but apart from a few rumors of the original Bluebeard, there's something similar to the story that happens in real life—the White City Devil: Harry Howard Helms.
Born in New Hampshire, Harry Howard Hormes was fascinated by surgery at a very young age, and he often caught small animals for anatomical experiments, and it wasn't long before he became obsessed with death because he found it "more interesting" than dissecting animals, and perhaps it was this interest that led him to study medicine.
Growing up, he was admitted to the University of Michigan School of Medicine and moved to Chicago in 1885. He found a job at a pharmacy in the Englewood neighborhood around the corner of 63rd and Wallace Street and took over the drugstore by killing the shopkeeper. He told people that the owner had gone to California to visit his family, and when people asked when the owner would come back, Hems told them that the owner liked California so much that he decided to live there.
In this way, Hormus obtained the drugstore by despicable means and began his long-planned plan, like the fairy tale Of Bluebeard, to build a murder castle.
Holmes bought a vacant lot across the street and designed and built a soundproof, three-story, three-story hotel-style building with more than 100 rooms.
During construction, Helms constantly replaced workers, claiming they were not able to work enough.
In fact, Hormus was afraid that the workers would discover his secret—the hotel had special structures such as a padded prison cell (to prevent the captives from committing suicide), a gas chamber, an incineration room, a lime well, and various traps such as movable walls (almost all of which were controlled in his own bedroom) – the slaughterhouse that Hems had dreamed of.
In 1893, Chicago was honored to host the World's Fair to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World. Helms thinks the opportunity he's been waiting for has finally arrived, and like Bluebeard lures his wife with a key, he lures many young women in with low rents, starting his career as a serial killer.
Reality is often more terrifying than fairy tales, Hormus frequently kills tenants and tourists who live in his hotel and continues to use their corpses to defraud them of insurance money; he often tricks women into coming here in the name of marriage, and after forcing them to sign a document handing over all their property, he will throw them out of the elevator shaft or put them in the gas chamber; and some people who cannot exchange it for insurance money are taken to the basement with many torture devices and tortured and killed, and he will peel off the skin of these corpses. Or use these corpses for dissection experiments, and finally bleach the victim's bones and sell them to medical schools.
He enjoyed watching his "prey" being gas-smoked, burned or struggling in a sulfuric acid barrel, which made him feel the presence of the "art of death".
Since the end of the fair, Helms has ended the business of the hotel, but has not ended his crimes. He eventually made a mistake: he killed a pair of sisters in Texas and burned down their house, and when he used these two lives and a house to try to defraud him of insurance money as usual, the police began to suspect and investigate him, and soon Hems found that it was greed for money that forced him to start fleeing, and his face began to enter the public eye.
He continued to defraud on a small scale during his escape, even stealing a horse. In 1895, Pinkerton police caught him.
Interrogations and investigations into Helms began, and police found more than 200 complete and incomplete bodies in the burning rubble of his hotel, and they immediately realized that Hems in custody was a heinous serial killer.
On May 7 of the following year, harry Howard Helms was hanged. His story has also been written by the famous novelist Eric. Erik Larson, adapted in 2003 into the novel The Devil in White City: An Exposition of Wonders and Murder.