Can anyone proofread my AP English essay?
This is my first AP class ever and I’m really nervous about it. I wrote this essay last night hastily due to the fact that it was due tomorrow (today) but it turns out I have an extra day to finish it so I thought I would use that time to have it proofreaded by a third party.
The Killers Folly
Erik Larson’s “Devil in the White City” is primarily focused on the building of the Chicago World Fair and its connection to the psychopathic murderer, H. H. Holmes. Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” is focused on the murder of Herbert Clutter’s family by Perry Smith and **** Hickcock who initially did not mean to murder but circumstances forced them otherwise. Both Perry Smith and H.H. Holmes childhood experience, which in the end leads them to murder, is notably similar. Both were raised in a abusive environment; Holmes being bullied as a child and Smith with an abusive father. However, while Smith chose to simply cling onto Hickcock for support in later life without any motive, Holmes was motivated by power and his needs which allowed him to independently carry out his deeds. Despite the differences in the two stories, both characters had similar experiences that led up to the murders, which revolved around the fundamental differences in the characters coping abilities and responses.
Holmes path towards psychopathy occurred during an event in his past when the neighborhood bullies found his fears for skeletons and dragged him to the local pharmacy to touch one. Ironically enough, it sparked a new interest in Holmes and left the bullies fearing him. Erik Larson’s description of Holmes included a quote from The Mask Of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. The prototypical psychopath is ” a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly…. So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and normal man that no one who examines him in a clinical setting can point out in scientific or objective terms why, or, how, he is not real. “ H.H. Holmes was motivated by his own needs. He was driven by narcissism using the lives and deaths of others solely for his own benefit and was also driven by having power over the women he tortured and killed, the businesses he swindled, and the officials he swayed. He was a man with an absence of compassion, empathy, and lacked the capacity to do anything but use people and discard them.
Capote’s Smith and Hickcock’s motive is altogether different compared to Holmes. Whereas Holmes was completely infused in his own blind narcissistic needs, Smith and Hickcock’s motives were driven by their past deeds and events. Because Smith was raised by an abusive father, he was forced to move to San Francisco with his mother and siblings. There his mother started to fall apart by becoming an alcoholic. Afterwards he lived in a Catholic Orphanage where he was physically abused. He eventually returned to live with his father temporarily which also fell apart. Later he joined the Marines but was also discharged. While Hickcock’s past is considerably less bleak then Smith’s, his inevitable fall came when he wrote multiple bad checks causing him to go to prison.
For both characters, their life changing experience was identical; they were both involved in an automobile accident which left them unemployed and injured. They met each other in prison and continued to remain in touch after they got out of prison. Floyd Wells, a fellow inmate with **** Hickcock, told him about a safe at the ranch where Herbert Clutter kept large amounts of cash. He and Smith initially decided to commit robbery, not murder. However, after finding out that there was no such vault in the Clutter’s home, they proceeded to kill the family on behalf of Hickcock’s suggestion and fled.
Ultimately, all three murderers are caught and is hanged for their heinous crimes. Smith and Hickcock continues to runaway from the police and is eventually caught in Las Vegas, Nevada by a policeman who recognized the license plate of the car. They are questioned on the misdeeds they have committed and is put on a death row for five years. Holmes, on the other hand, managed to stay discreet from the police for a long period of time. After killing his assistant, Benjamin Pitezel, he took his children and ran away, eventually killing them and burying them in the process. In the end, he is caught in Boston by the Pinkertons and was put on trial for the murder Pitezel. Towards the end both Smith and Holmes remained calmed. Regardless of the fundamental differences both characters expressed throughout the novel, both handled past experiences in the wrong way which led them to their demise.
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