EDWARD H. RULLOFF,“THE MAN OF TWO LIVES”
FED BY HOLLYWOOD FANTASY, THE popular imagination tends to conceive of serial killers as evil geniuses: Hannibal Lecter delivering lectures on Renaissance art when he isn’t dining on human liver and fava beans, or the diabolical John Doe of David Fincher’s Seven who arranges his victims in elaborate tableaux based on medieval conceptions of the seven deadly sins. The truth, however, is far less colorful. Far from being criminal masterminds, real-life serial killers tend to possess perfectly average IQs. Many don’t rise to even that middling level.
Every so often, however, a serial killer comes along who, if not quite a Lecter-like mastermind, is notably smarter than the common run of humanity. Such exceptional psychos—men with superior brains but profoundly disturbed personalities—tend to exert a deep fascination on the public. One such figure was Edward H. Rulloff, a man whose “marvelous character” (in the view of an early biographer) would have led him to “become a great benefactor and honor to his race” had his mind not “been warped in the other direction.”
BORN EDWARD HOWARD RULOFSON in 1819, he came from distinguished stock. His grandfather, an émigré to New Brunswick, Canada, was a wealthy landowner, the first school superintendent of the province, and a justice of the peace. His father was likewise “a most reputable and highly respected citizen”—a prosperous “farmer, horse breeder, and importer of blooded horses from Europe.” Edward’s two younger brothers would grow up to be highly accomplished men in their respective fields, one an internationally celebrated photographer, the other a lumber magnate.
Edward, of course, would distinguish himself in his own way, earning nationwide notoriety as the most remarkable criminal of his day, “famous and infamous throughout the world,” in the words of one contemporary, “at once the wonder and execration of mankind.”
As to his earliest intellectual achievements, the opinions of his nineteenth-century chroniclers differ. According to a journalist named E. H. Freeman—whose 1871 biography was endorsed by the subject himself—Rulloff was a genuine child prodigy, with an “insatiate thirst for learning.” Shunning “the usual pleasures and pastimes of the boys of his age,” he spent his leisure hours immersed in books, acquiring a “general knowledge of science and literature” and a precocious mastery of ancient and modern languages.
Other biographers, however, dismiss this claim, insisting that Rulloff’s childhood studies were both haphazard and superficial. Though possessed of a youthful “passion for desultory reading,” writes one commentator, “it does not appear that at this time of life he acquired any special branches of knowledge, or that any were taught him.” Even the skeptics, however, concede that Rulloff was a remarkably quick study who, while hardly the great scholar he claimed to be, had an unusually nimble and “sponge-like” mind.
After a few years at the academy in the nearby city of St. John—where, according to Freeman, he “exhibited the same assiduity, the same devotion to study that had distinguished his earlier days”—Rulloff began clerking for James Keator and E. L. Thorne, partners in a local dry-goods firm. Not long after he took the job, however, Keator and Thorne’s establishment burned to the ground. A few months later, they reopened their business in a different part of the city, but another “fire shortly followed and the store was again swept from the earth.” The two conflagrations, following so close together—and so soon after Rulloff came to work for the merchants—were taken as acts of God. Given what we now know about the psychological development of serial killers—who commonly display a bent for juvenile pyromania—it seems entirely possible that the fires were no accident.
With his nascent mercantile career up in smoke, Rulloff turned his attention to the law, becoming a clerk in the office of an eminent St. John barrister, Duncan Robertson. Within a remarkably short time, he had acquired enough legal expertise to pass as a credible lawyer—an ability he would have ample opportunity to exercise in the coming years.
Nowadays, we take it as a matter of course that a man might lead a profoundly bifurcated existence: that a successful law student, say, might have a hidden life as a homicidal maniac (like Ted Bundy). In the early nineteenth century, however—long before the term “psychopath” was coined—such a phenomenon seemed incomprehensible. It was this duality—this paradoxical combination of scholarly diligence and compulsive criminality—that would make Edward Rulloff such an object of fascination to his contemporaries: “The Man of Two Lives,” as he came to be known. And it was during his years as a young law clerk that his bizarre double nature first came to the attention of the world.
Sometime after he went to work for Duncan Robertson—exactly when is impossible to determine—Rulloff’s previous employer, E. L. Thorne, opened a new dry-goods store in the same building as the law office. Not long afterward, someone broke into the place and stole a bolt of expensive fabric. Inquiries instituted by Thorne led him to believe that the culprit was none other than his former clerk—a suspicion confirmed when Rulloff, with the brazenness he would display throughout his life, appeared in a new suit made from the stolen cloth.
Thorne, “who had a lingering regard for the lad,” offered not to press charges if Rulloff “made an open confession of the matter.” When Rulloff haughtily refused, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years in the St. John Penitentiary. He entered the prison in the fall of 1839. He was twenty years old.
UPON HIS RELEASE in late 1841, Rulloff made his way to New York City, where he briefly studied bookkeeping and penmanship. Failing to find employment in the metropolis, he headed north by steamboat, ending up in the village of Dryden, a few miles east of Ithaca. Taking a job as a drug clerk, he quickly impressed the locals with his apparently great erudition, particularly after he began delivering regular lectures on the supposed science of phrenology, one of the many subjects he had read up on during his stint in the penitentiary. To the untutored residents of the rural hamlet, he “seemed a marvel”—“a druggist, an excellent penman, a classical scholar, a lawyer, and an earnest, fluent speaker.” Before long, they had made him headmaster of their high school.
Among his pupils was a vivacious seventeen-year-old named Harriet Schutt, daughter of a respectable local family and, by all accounts, a young woman “of most exemplary character and conduct.” Despite (or perhaps because of) the great disparity in their “mental acquirements,” Rulloff began paying court to the “tender, pleasant girl,” who reciprocated his attentions. When Rulloff proposed marriage in late 1843, she eagerly accepted. Though somewhat leery of their prospective son-in-law, about whom they knew almost nothing, Harriet’s parents raised no strong objections. The wedding took place on the last day of December 1843.
“The marriage feast was scarcely cold,” writes one early chronicler, when trouble began. By then, Rulloff had quit his teaching job and established himself as a practitioner of “botanical medicine,” a then-popular system founded by a self-taught herbalist named Samuel Thomson who believed in restoring the body’s “natural heat” by the administration of such stuff as cayenne pepper and Lobelia inflata, an emetic plant commonly known as “puke weed.” One of Rulloff’s local rivals was Dr. Henry W. Bull, “a respectable physician of the old school” and a cousin of Rulloff’s young wife, Harriet.
A few months after the marriage, Bull paid a visit to Harriet and—as was his custom—greeted her with a peck on the cheek. Spotting this innocent salutation, Rulloff flew into a rage. Soon he was “charging her with having criminal intercourse” with her cousin. Harriet laughed off the accusation, a reaction that only drove Rulloff to new heights of jealous fury. One night soon afterward, while Harriet was crushing peppercorns with a heavy iron pestle, Rulloff snatched the implement from her hands and knocked her out with a blow to the forehead. When she regained consciousness, he was sufficiently contrite “to say that he did not intend to strike her so hard.” But his treatment of her “was no kinder after this outrage than before.”
In the summer of 1844, partly to put some distance between his wife and her ostensible lover, Rulloff insisted that they relocate to Ithaca. The move did nothing to allay his suspicions. Just weeks after they settled into their new home, several neighbors heard Harriet shrieking for help from her bedroom. Rushing to investigate, they found Rulloff grappling with his wife while brandishing a small amber bottle.
“Quick!” Harriet screamed. “Edward is going to make me take poison and take it himself!”
“By the living God,” cried Rulloff, as the neighbors tried to pull them apart, “this poison will kill us both in five minutes and that will put an end to these troubles!”
As the neighbors wrested Harriet from his clutches, Rulloff hurled the bottle through the window, then began to berate his wife about her infidelity.
“Oh, Edward,” she said, dropping to her knees and reaching out to him, “I am innocent as an unborn child.”
He struck her in the face, knocking her over. “Get away from me, goddamn you,” he cried. As she lay there sobbing, he told her “she could go and live with Bull and seek all the pleasure she wished to, for he didn’t want to live with her anymore.”
Though Harriet’s neighbors advised her to leave him, the couple reconciled. A few months later, they moved again, this time to the nearby village of Lansing, where, on the night of April 25, 1845, Harriet gave birth to a daughter, Priscilla. The infant’s arrival seemed to have a calming effect on Rulloff, who was, to all appearances, “unusually kind and attentive to his wife. He had by this time acquired quite a library of books which, in that place at that time, seemed the embodiment of all human wisdom. He had gained the confidence of a large portion of the community as a skilled botanical physician, and man of temperate and industrious habits.”
He had also—though no one suspected it at the time—embarked on his career as a serial murderer.
His first victims were two relatives by marriage, the wife and infant child of his brother-in-law, William Schutt. During the first week of June 1845, the baby was stricken with “a simple ailment of infancy.” Summoned by Schutt, Rulloff administered one of his homemade concoctions. “The next day,” reports one chronicler, “the babe died of convulsions.” Two days later, the grieving mother, Amelia, who had been given a supposed botanical sedative by Rulloff, “suddenly sickened and died the same way.” Thirteen years after the sudden deaths of Amelia Schutt and her newborn, their corpses would be exhumed and distinct traces of copper poison discovered in their organs, confirming what the world had long since learned about Edward Rulloff’s monstrous nature. At the time, however, William Schutt and his neighbors—“simple and unsuspecting country-folk who had never been brought into contact with flagrant crime”—attributed the double tragedy to “the inscrutable ways of Divine Providence.”
THREE WEEKS LATER, on the evening of June 23, 1845, a young neighbor of the Rulloffs, fifteen-year-old Olive Robertson, dropped by their home. She found Harriet “sitting in a low rocking chair and fondly holding her cooing babe.” Rulloff himself was stirring one of his herbal “compounds” in a teacup, which he then carried over and tried to feed to his child. When Harriet objected, “saying the babe was in perfect health,” Rulloff replied that he had “detected the seeds of disease in his offspring, and insisted that the dose be given.” The normally compliant Harriet stood firm. “Perhaps you need the medicine more than the baby,” Rulloff replied with a tight smile, holding out the cup to her. Harriet pushed it away. After a tense moment, “Rulloff desisted, saying he had only been joking.” Olive Robertson left shortly afterward. No one except their killer would ever set eyes on Harriet Rulloff and her infant daughter again.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, at around ten o’clock, Olive Robertson’s father, Thomas, heard a knock on the front door. The caller was Edward Rulloff, who had a favor to ask. The previous night—so Rulloff explained—a cousin of Harriet’s named Emory Boyce had come to fetch her and the baby for a visit to his home in Mottville, about ten miles away. The uncle’s wagon was so small, however, that, to accommodate his passenger and her infant, he had been obliged to leave behind a large chest. Rulloff now wished to borrow Robertson’s horse and wagon so that he could return the chest to Boyce.
Though somewhat reluctant because (as he later testified) “it was an extreme hot day,” Robertson agreed. After inviting Rulloff to take dinner with his family, he and his son helped their neighbor load the heavy chest onto the buckboard. It was about 3:00 p.m. when Rulloff set off down the dusty turnpike to Mottville, “whistling softly as the horse moved along.” At one point, encountering a group of children on the road, he invited them to ride on the wagon and entertained them with “funny songs and quaint whistling.” Later, rumors abounded that Rulloff had found it deliciously amusing to see several of the children perched atop the chest that contained the bodies of his murdered wife and infant daughter.
Precisely how he killed them would never be established. According to his own later confession, he and Harriett had gotten into yet another altercation about Henry Bull. As the argument escalated, Rulloff, in a “passion,” reached for the thirty-pound iron pestle of the mortar in which he “pounded medicines, and struck her over the left temple. The pestle broke the skull and sunk into her brain.” He then took the child, placed it on the bed, and “gave it a narcotic to stop its crying.” Another account, given by one of Rulloff’s lawyers on his deathbed, claimed that “he suffocated the babe with a pillow and that he gave chloroform to his wife, opened an artery, and then bled her to death, taking up a board in the floor and allowing the blood to drip into the cellar.”
How he disposed of the corpses is also a matter of dispute. One wild rumor had it that he sold them to Geneva Medical College for dissection, though his more reliable chroniclers dismiss this “hypothesis” as “too horrible for belief.” Far likelier is the explanation Rulloff himself offered his lawyers. After driving the chest to a secluded spot on the shore of Cayuga Lake, he waited until “the dead and middle waste of night.” He then removed the bodies from the chest, wrapped them tightly in untempered wire “that could never become unfastened and, attaching the heavy iron mortar to the body of his wife and a flat iron to that of the child,” rowed them out “over the silent waters” and threw them overboard, “down into unfathomable depths to remain forever concealed from the eyes of men.”
BACK HOME THE NEXT morning, Rulloff unloaded the now empty chest, returned the wagon and horse to Thomas Robertson, and, after throwing a few possessions into a bundle, headed down the road, telling his neighbors that he was off to join his wife. As the weeks passed with no word from Harriet, her family and friends grew increasingly concerned. Entering the abandoned house, her brothers William and Ephraim found it in a state of wild disorder. The bed wasn’t made, the kitchen table was piled with dirty dishes, shoes and stockings were strewn around the bedroom floor along with articles of Harriet’s clothing, and her traveling basket, which she “always carried with her when she went away,” sat on her bureau.
By the time Rulloff reappeared six weeks later, rumors had spread that his wife and infant daughter had met with foul play. Feigning shock and indignation, Rulloff insisted that mother and child were safe and sound, though he offered contradictory accounts of their whereabouts, telling some people that they were staying in a cottage “between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes,” others that they were visiting family in Erie, Pennsylvania, and still others that they were settled in Madison, Ohio.
Confronted with the threat of arrest, Rulloff offered to write a letter to his wife, “asking her to dispel the painful rumors in circulation” by dropping him a line to affirm that she was alive and well. After penning the note, he handed it to Ephraim Schutt, who immediately left for the post office.
No sooner had he gone than Rulloff took off by foot, hurrying north toward the railroad depot at Auburn.
WHAT FOLLOWED WAS a real-life version of the kind of interstate chase sequence, featuring a devilishly slippery fugitive and a grimly determined pursuer, that has long been a cliché of Hollywood suspense thrillers.
The moment he heard that his brother-in-law had fled in the direction of Auburn, Ephraim Schutt mounted his buckboard and made for the railway station. Finding no trace of his quarry, he proceeded to Rochester, where he caught sight of Rulloff on the platform, about to board a departing train. Spotting Schutt, Rulloff vanished in the milling crowd. Schutt leapt aboard the train and, after making a thorough search, found him hiding in the rearmost car.
Insisting that he was on his way to rejoin Harriet and the baby in Ohio, Rulloff proposed that his brother-in-law come along “and see for himself how false had been all the suspicions of his conduct.” The pair proceeded to Buffalo, where they spent the night at a hotel before heading down to the docks the next morning to catch an early steamboat for Cleveland. It wasn’t until Schutt had pushed his way onto the packed upper deck that he realized that Rulloff was no longer with him. Schutt was still searching the vessel when it pulled away from the wharf.
After a brief stopover at Erie, Pennsylvania, where he called on some relatives to see if anyone had heard from Harriet, Schutt made his way to Madison, Ohio, but could turn up no trace of his missing sister. Still convinced that Rulloff was heading that way, Schutt hurried back to Cleveland, arriving at the steamboat landing just as a pair of vessels were discharging their passengers. Sure enough, he spotted Rulloff among the crowd. Realizing he needed help, he enlisted the aid of a local constable named Hayes. Searching the dives near the wharf, “they soon found Rulloff in a low eating saloon,” attempting to make himself as inconspicuous as possible by seating himself “behind a large dry goods box.”
Though Rulloff did his best to talk his way out of the situation—nearly convincing Hayes of his innocence—Schutt managed to get him aboard a steamer headed back east, keeping him locked up in a “strong room” until the boat docked in Buffalo. Rulloff was then handcuffed and transferred to a train to Ithaca, where he was led through a howling mob to the city jail.
Despite a determined effort to drag Cayuga Lake with “the most approved apparatus”—an undertaking that cost the county an estimated $10,000—the bodies of Harriet Rulloff and her infant would never be found. With not enough evidence to establish the corpus delicti, the District Attorney decided to forgo a murder indictment and charge Rulloff with the abduction of his wife, “of which the proof was incontrovertible.” At the climax of his trial in January 1846, he was convicted and sentenced to ten years in the state prison at Auburn.
LOCKED UP IN “that great living tomb of culprits,” Rulloff quickly impressed his keepers as “a prisoner of remarkable ability and great versatility.” Assigned to various workshops, he exhibited “such wonderful skill and knowledge that he soon came to be regarded as a prodigy, a very paragon.” Nowhere were his talents more strikingly on display than in the rug-making department, where his original designs resulted in “some of the most beautiful ingrain carpets ever produced in the United States.”
During his leisure hours, he immersed himself in books, pursuing “with a tireless zeal all the volumes of science and art that the kindness of his jailers would allow him and his own limited means could procure.” He discovered a particular passion for the subject of philology and eventually mastered a number of languages, including ancient Greek.
At some point during this period he hit upon a grand project that, he believed, would earn him a place in the scholarly pantheon: a monumental work that would explain the common origin of all the world’s languages. From that moment on, Rulloff confided in his journal, “no man ever lived with a nobler or higher ambition than I.”
RULLOFF MAY HAVE been a model prisoner, but the practice of early parole for good behavior had not yet been established, so he was compelled to serve every day of his sentence. Even his full ten-year term, however, seemed excessively lenient to the still-outraged citizens of Tompkins County. No sooner was Rulloff discharged from Auburn prison in January 1856 than he was rearrested for Harriet’s murder and transported in manacles to the jailhouse in Ithaca.
Rulloff, familiar with “the fundamental principles and rules of legal practice” from his days as a law clerk, was unfazed. Representing himself in court, he successfully argued that his trial and conviction for abduction precluded his prosecution for murder. Determined to exact full justice, the district attorney immediately indicted him on a completely different charge: the murder of his infant daughter, Priscilla.
Because the manner of the child’s death was and would forever be unknown, the indictment needed to cover every possible scenario. It therefore alleged that Rulloff “did stab her in and upon the left side between the short ribs” with “a certain knife of the value of six cents”; “strike, beat, and kick” her “in and upon the head, stomach, back, and sides” with “both the hands and feet of him”; “choke, suffocate, and strangle” her with “a certain silk handkerchief of the value of one dollar”; “put, mix, and mingle” a “large quantity of a certain deadly poison called arsenic” into “half a pint of milk,” which the infant did “take, drink, and swallow”; and “strike and thrust” upon “the left side of her head” with “a certain weapon of the value of six cents.” In short, this “most curious legal document” (as one contemporary described the indictment) charged Rulloff with having stabbed, strangled, suffocated, poisoned, bludgeoned, beaten, and kicked to death his baby daughter.
He was brought to trial in October 1856. Despite the fact that the child’s body had never been found, he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, a judgment upheld when the court of appeals ruled that “direct evidence is not, in all cases, indispensable for the purpose of proving the corpus delicti on a trial for murder.”
Confined to the Ithaca jail while awaiting the outcome of his appeal, Rulloff ingratiated himself with the keeper, Jacob Jarvis, who was so taken with the prisoner’s sweeping erudition that he permitted his eighteen-year-old son, Albert, to spend entire “days in the cell of the prisoner, taking lessons from him in Latin, French, stenography, and other branches of learning.” It wasn’t long before the impressionable youth had fallen under the spell of the charismatic psychopath. Sometime after dark on Monday, May 5, 1857, while his parents were asleep, young Albert undid the bolts of Rulloff’s cell, and the two disappeared into the night.
WITH REWARDS TOTALING more than $1,000 posted for his capture and the entire countryside on the lookout for him, Rulloff made his way to Meadville, Pennsylvania. Presenting himself as a scholar named James Nelson, he applied for a professorship at Alleghany College. Though none was available, he “so won the admiration and confidence” of the college president, the Rev. Dr. Barker, that, through the good offices of that estimable gentleman, he was “received among the most refined and distinguished society of Meadville.”
For the next few months, he resided in Meadville, constructing a patent model for a part-time inventor named A. B. Richmond and impressing his new acquaintances as “a gentleman of the most brilliant intellect and profound education,” who could speak learnedly about a dizzying range of subjects, from medicine to mineralogy, law to linguistics, conchology to classical Greek poetry.
With his funds running low, Rulloff left Meadville in January 1858 and headed back east toward New York. Along the way, he burglarized a string of stores, including a jewelry shop in Warren, Pennsylvania, which he “robbed of every article of value it contained, including all kinds of watches, gold pens, rings, and breast-pins.”
It was while fleeing from this burglary that his feet, clad only in moccasins, became frostbitten in the snow. Arriving in Jamestown, New York, he entered the drugstore of Dr. G. W. Hazeltine, who—impressed with Rulloff’s obvious medical expertise—permitted him to compound his own frostbite remedy. Unfortunately, it failed to work, and soon afterward, Rulloff was compelled to have the big toe of his left foot removed, an amputation that would eventually have dire consequences for him.
With pursuers hot on his trail, Rulloff turned westward again, ending up in a small Ohio town not far from Columbus where he took a job as a writing teacher in a country school. Tracked down by a posse of locals, Rulloff tried to hold them off with a “three-barreled pistol of his own invention and manufacture” but was overpowered, taken into custody, and extradited back to New York.
Wisely deciding not to represent himself, Rulloff retained an extremely capable young attorney named Francis Miles Finch, later a distinguished judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and an accomplished amateur poet. Much to the outrage of the citizens of Ithaca—who openly threatened to take justice into their own hands—Finch eventually succeeded in getting his client released on a series of legal technicalities.
Like all compulsive criminals, however, Rulloff was incapable of staying out of trouble for long. In November 1861—just eighteen months after Finch managed to set him free—he was back behind bars, having been sentenced to two and a half years in Sing Sing for third-degree burglary. During this stint, he forged an intimate bond with a poor, illiterate petty thief named William Dexter, twenty years his junior. Immediately upon their release, the two teamed up with Rulloff’s former protégé, Al Jarvis, himself now a small-time burglar. From that point on, the older man and his two young disciples would constitute an inseparable partnership, an intensely close-knit “triumvirate of crime” that would “remain thenceforward unbroken” until its dramatic end in the incident that came to be known as “The Halbert Horror.”
FOR THE NEXT six years—when one or another of them wasn’t doing a brief stretch in jail—they lived together in and around New York City, subsisting on the proceeds from countless thefts and break-ins. Though Rulloff participated in some of these crimes, he increasingly left the dirty work to his young confederates while he remained at home, working obsessively on his magnum opus, Method in the Formation of Languages.
By 1869, he was ready to make his “grand theory” public. Under the name of Professor Euri Leurio—a coded translation of “Edward Rulloff” based on his ingenious (if totally crackpot) linguistic system—he announced his “tremendous discovery” at the annual convention of the American Philological Association in Poughkeepsie, New York, offering to sell his still-uncompleted manuscript for the price of $500,000. There were no takers.
“Disheartened, but with no intention of abandoning his purpose,” Rulloff returned home and resumed his labors on the project he believed would earn him immortality. In the meantime, his two devoted disciples—in awe of his brilliance and convinced that his scholarly masterwork would one day make them all rich—continued to provide for their household needs with the income from various rural burglaries, some committed as far away as New England and Western New York.
During one of these “lawless expeditions,” Al Jarvis learned that the Halbert brothers, a pair of Binghamton dry-goods merchants, had recently received a big shipment of expensive silks. Their store, he reported to Rulloff, was “very near the river bank, and it was easy to enter it and get away.” Though Rulloff expressed some qualms, Jarvis assured him that “there was no danger.” He and Dexter “had everything fixed” and “expected to make a good haul.” Rulloff “reluctantly consented” to the scheme and agreed to “go along with them, not to take an active part but as a lookout, and to help bring back the goods.” With that understanding, the trio boarded a train to Binghamton, arriving at around 5:00 p.m. on Monday, August 13, 1870.
Two nights later, at around one in the morning, the three broke into the rear of the store. Down in the basement, they put on masks and slipped out of their shoes. They then stole noiselessly upstairs, where two young clerks, Frederick Merrick and Gilbert Burrows, who slept on the premises, were occupying adjoining cots. Prepared for such a contingency, Dexter took a bottle of chloroform from his coat pocket, doused a rag with the liquid, and applied it to the faces of the slumbering men. Having “thus secured the continuing unconsciousness” of the clerks, the thieves got busy gathering up the most expensive bolts of silk.
They were just finishing up their operation when Jarvis stumbled over something and crashed to the floor. At the noise, the two clerks—who clearly had not been chloroformed enough—sat up with a start. Seeing the masked men, they sprang from their beds and began to grapple with the intruders. The brawny young clerks quickly overpowered their opponents, Burroughs knocking Dexter down with an iron chisel while Merrick throttled Jarvis. Merrick was tightening his chokehold when Rulloff came up behind him, placed the muzzle of a pistol against the back of his skull, and put a bullet through his brain. Rulloff then gathered up his two companions, and the three of them fled the store through the basement, while Burroughs ran out into the street shouting, “Murder!”
Two days later, with police squads patrolling the city and posses scouring the countryside, Rulloff was found hiding in an outhouse. Authorities had no trouble linking him to the crime scene, since he had fled Halbert’s without his shoes. There was no doubt that they belonged to Rulloff: stuffed inside the left one were bits of cloth to fill the void made by his missing big toe. Further evidence was provided on the following day when the corpses of Jarvis and Dexter were fished out of the Chenango River and their pockets found to contain a bunch of items connecting them to Rulloff.
Exactly how the two young burglars had died would remain a matter of dispute. Rulloff claimed that they had drowned while attempting to wade across the river during the getaway, though there would always be those who believed that he himself had disposed of them “as impediments to his escape” by beating them to death before dumping them into the water.
His trial in January 1871 was a legal landmark. Because the corpses of Jarvis and Dexter were badly decomposed when they were fished from the river, they had been immediately photographed “before all hopes of recognition were gone.” During the trial, the photographs were introduced as evidence over the objections of Rulloff’s lawyer, George Becker, who eventually appealed the ruling. Ultimately, a higher court dismissed the appeal, setting a legal precedent for the admissibility of photographic evidence in criminal trials.
In the meantime, reporters digging into Rulloff’s past discovered that in February 1865, a silk factory he was known to have patronized had been broken into by three masked burglars, and that its night watchman, Philip Kraemer, had been fatally bludgeoned during the crime. If, as many believed, the perpetrator was Rulloff, then the “learned monster” was responsible for as many as eight homicides: the murder of his wife, Harriet, and their infant daughter; Amelia Schutt and her newborn; Al Jarvis; William Dexter; Fred Merrick; and Philip Kraemer.
CONVICTED AT THE end of the six-day proceedings, Rulloff was sentenced to die in March, though his attorney managed to delay the inevitable for a few months. While awaiting his execution, Rulloff continued to work frantically on his philological treatise, desperate to complete the “great work which,” as he proclaimed to all listeners, “will make this epoch illustrious to future generations.” Impressed with his seemingly vast mental powers and obsessive devotion to his studies, various luminaries argued publicly for a commutation. In the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley described Rulloff “as one of the most industrious and devoted scholars our busy generation has give birth to,” an intellectual phenomenon “too curious to be wasted on the gallows.” In the same paper, Mark Twain regretted that Rulloff’s “vast capabilities for usefulness should be lost to the world”:
For it is plain that in the person of Rulloff one of the most marvelous intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed, and that, too, while half the mystery of its strange powers is yet a secret. Here is a man who has never entered the doors of a college or a university, and yet, by the sheer might of his innate gifts has made himself such a colossus of abstruse learning that the ablest of our scholars are but pigmies in his presence.… Every learned man who enters Rulloff’s presence leaves it amazed and confounded by his prodigious capabilities and attainments. One scholar said he did not believe that in matters of subtle analysis, vast knowledge in his peculiar field of research, comprehensive grasp of subject and serene kingship over its limitless and bewildering details, any land or any era of modern times had given birth to Rulloff’s intellectual equal.
All efforts on his behalf, however, failed. His public hanging on May 18, 1871, generated the usual holiday atmosphere as thousands of spectators swarmed into Binghamton, “hungry for the feast of horror that was promised.” They did not go away disappointed. The hanging provided a particularly macabre moment. “With characteristic bravado,” one eyewitness reported, “Rulloff put his right hand in his pocket before the trap was sprung. The fall jerked the hand free, but Rulloff, still apparently conscious, put it back in his pocket.”
Following the execution, Rulloff’s corpse was transported to Geneva Medical College, where his head was sawed off, his skull opened, and his brain weighed and measured. He would undoubtedly have been gratified with the findings. His brain was found to be massive, “ten ounces heavier than the average for a man of Rulloff’s age” and nearly as weighty as that of Daniel Webster, one of the intellectual titans of his age.