Episode Information

A documentary chronicling Chicago’s 1893 World Fair – the Columbian Expositions, and America’s first serial killer H.H. Holmes, who murdered as many as 100 people during the fair. Chicago was known as ‘White City’ because of its majestic white buildings; jewels of the fair designed by top architects. The fair would go down in history as the world looked on at the first Ferris wheel, the first modern radio and the first motion pictures. 27 million people attended the largest crowd of Americans ever in one place. But, due to a perimeter fence, along with the advent of the modern city came modern city crime, with which the fair was rife. People gambled, drank, poverty and violent strike took hold and the police were afraid to walk the streets. No one knew that there was a new kind of urban criminal hatching a plan four miles away, H.H Holmes unleashed his violence at the fair.