Flynn and the ‘Murder Castle’
Or,
Once Again Flynn is Not a Villain (He’s Just Trash)
So, I was ranting at a friend the other night, as one does, and in the middle of this I suddenly remembered something about H.H. Holmes.
Yes, that H.H. Holmes.
See, I was actually going to be a historian once upon a time (le gasp) and one of the things that I did was I was a morbid little fucker and I just about devoured any biography or info on historical psychos that I could get my hands on.
I’d like to note, for the sake of people worrying for my sanity, that I also studied Ancient Egypt, the Vikings, and the American Revolution, just to name a few interests so I wasn’t entirely a budding psychopath but anyway. Blame my aunt and uncle for gifting me Horrible Histories when I was eight.
So when I was eleven (yes you read that right) I got my hands on my grandmother’s copy of Devil in the White City and proceeded to do a fuck ton of research on H.H. Holmes. And in my idiocy, something I completely forgot about all my research until just the other day was that H.H. Holmes wasn’t known as an indiscriminate murderer.
Later reports have greatly exaggerated how many people he murdered, saying he killed up to 200 people, but the original body count and the one that we can for certain verify is about 20 some-odd people. And of his many victims, the overwhelming majority of them were young women.
Holmes did in fact construct his hotel, that has come to be known as the Murder Castle, and he did murder a few guests in there. Easy enough during the shockingly busy Chicago World’s Fair. However, Holmes did not prefer to kill people this way.
What Holmes did was he was a real charmer (described as handsome with bright blue eyes) who would seduce lonely women who came to stay at the hotel for the fair, convince them to marry him (he was married to multiple women at once) and then have them sign huge life insurance policies over to him... then kill them.
This was really easy to do at the time because a) the state of police investigations at the time, don’t think I need to get further into that, b) these women had no relatives nearby and so letters took forever to reach their relatives which meant it took forever to realize they’d stopped writing and c) tons of people went missing during the fair. It was a madhouse in Chicago. Holmes easily and smoothly lied to anyone who came looking for a missing girl, saying she’d gone out to the fair and hadn’t returned, and a lot of the time the victim’s relatives didn’t even know about the marriage until much later. A lot of the women also signed their life insurance policies over not to Holmes but to one of Holmes’ aliases, which sent police chasing after a man who didn’t exist, some other fellow who’d done the vile deed.
The only confirmed male victim of Holmes was his partner in crime Benjamin Pitezel, a man who assisted Holmes in many of his schemes and who Holmes later murdered for the life insurance policy they’d taken out of his life (Holmes also murdered three of the man’s children).
The majority of the people who stayed in the ‘Murder Castle’ stayed without incident and left just fine. In fact the people from whom Holmes bought the property lived long and happy lives. Holmes was a vicious serial killer and I’m not denying that, but unlike how he’s portrayed in 1x11 on Timeless, he didn’t just gas and capture every single guest or even random guests. He specifically preyed upon helpless women, got them to their rooms at the hotel, gassed them, and took them downstairs from there once they’d signed their lives away to him for large sums fo money.
So, where does Flynn come in with that?
Flynn obviously knows about Holmes and is the kind of man who does his research. He knows who the members of Rittenhouse are in Chicago and where and when they’re meeting, for example. The journal can’t tell him everything, so you can bet he uses that as a springboard for his own research. He’s a team leader, an expert at a guerrilla warfare, and a strategist. He’s not going to do anything half-assed even if his plans have a habit of blowing up in his face.
That means Flynn knows what Holmes targets vulnerable young women, usually homely ones who will be easily swayed by flattery (historical fact, Holmes targeted quote ‘plain’ girls). He doesn’t target two men who can fight him back a lot more easily. And he’s not going to just gas two guys for no reason when he has women he can get tens of thousands of dollars of insurance money from. Wyatt and Rufus do not fit Holmes’ profile and are, therefore, presumably safe.
So why does Flynn send Wyatt and Rufus to the Murder Castle?
Because Wyatt and Rufus are going to get there and who are they going to run into?
Family members looking for missing women.
Wyatt and Rufus are good men, and they’re smart enough to smell a rat when there’s a dead one rotting around under the floorboards. Flynn’s plan wasn’t to straight up murder Wyatt and Rufus, it was to distract them by giving them a clear case of Something Rotten and have their hero mode kick in.
In fact, I posit that Flynn wanted Wyatt and Rufus to think that Holmes had Lucy.
Wyatt and Rufus go into the Murder Castle knowing Flynn’s been there. They hear about young women going missing. The name of the hotel pings something in their minds but they don’t know what. They interview family members and learn the women were last seen here.
And it clicks for them--there’s a serial killer in this hotel, and Flynn’s left Lucy there to be his prey!
Cue frantic detective work from our two heroes while Flynn and Lucy have their trash date.
Timeless annoyed the heck of me this episode (and annoyed the heck out of @captainofthefallen when she rewatched it with me because I would not Shut the Fuck Up about the historical inaccuracies and guessed every single plot twist) with Holmes because it’s wildly historically inaccurate. Holmes never pretended to be a victim along with the people he’d trapped, he didn’t hold them in a dungeon and allow them the chance to escape, and he didn’t target men.
Also he had a huge mustache but anyway.
Holmes’ capture of Lucy at the end of the episode and the box he puts her in are the historically accurate part. That’s what he did to victims. Lucy fits his victim profile (although I doubt anyone would be stupid enough to call her ‘plain’ or ‘homely’). Flynn had every reason to believe that Wyatt and Rufus would be relatively safe given Holmes’ M.O. and would instead be wasting their time chasing him down thinking he had Lucy.
And, y’know, ridding the world of a serial killer while they were at it.
This isn’t an example of Flynn setting Wyatt and Rufus up to die horribly. He’s setting them up on a wild goose chase and to get rid of an awful man and it backfires on Flynn when Holmes breaks with his M.O. and decides to gas Wyatt and Rufus and kill them instead. Flynn had no way of knowing Holmes would do that--that’s the downfall of serial killers, they always stick to their pattern even when they should change it up to avoid being caught--and so once again he’s tried to put out a fire with a bucket of water and ends up throwing gasoline on it instead.
Flynn probably figured Wyatt and Rufus would investigate, realize what was going on, go on a frantic chase for Lucy, find Holmes’ lair under the hotel, overpower Holmes, kill or turn him into the police, and search for Lucy only to find she wasn’t there. Risk of danger still but a minimal one, and certainly not the ‘mwahaha they’ve walked right into a trap’ scenario that actually played out.
“But what if Holmes thought Wyatt and Rufus were private investigators or police when they started asking questions!” you cry. Good question. Holmes was in fact questioned by family, private investigators, and police about the missing women. He never killed any of them and instead sent them on their way with false information about where the women had gone next. It was simply too risky to kill a member of law enforcement or someone who had connections with law enforcement, or to kill the family member of a previous victim.
Now, I get that maybe the Timeless writers didn’t care about any of this and wrote the episode the way they did because HIGH STAKES DRAMA, le gasp, but you can’t avoid history in a show about time travel, buckos. And history isn’t going to change to fit your dramatic 50 minute TV episode.
Wyatt and Rufus do not fit the profile for Holmes’ victims, and Holmes did not trap his victims in the way shown in the show. Flynn was a good researcher who would have known this. Ergo, Flynn did not actually set Wyatt and Rufus up to be quickly and horribly murdered, he set them up to go on a wild goose chase after Lucy when she was really safe with Flynn the whole time and he could get on with his business without interruption.
Because Flynn consistently, throughout the show, tries to inconvenience the time team. He ties them up in 1x06, he strands them in 1x07, etc. But he doesn’t actually ever make plans to kill them. It’s the same thing here: his goal is to inconvenience, not kill. It’s just that he put a bit too much faith in the behavior of a literal psychopath and Flynn, honey, really? Peak trash.
One more thing. You might be wondering why Holmes didn’t actually kill every guest who stayed in his hotel.
...because nothing is more obvious than having every or almost every guest in your hotel die and also that’s bad for business. Duh. Holmes was a psycho, not a dumbass.
Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.