American History Hit - Edward Rulloff: The Gilded Age Hannibal Lecter

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

Edward Rulloff was described as “a monster imbued by the spirit of the devil”. In 1844, he murdered his wife, likely killing his daughter at the same time, though he never admitted it. He spent the next three decades either incarcerated or on the run, becoming a career criminal. After killing a man during a robbery in 1870, he was sentenced to death.But Rulloff was thought of at the time as no ‘ordinary killer’. A trained doctor, a lawyer and philosopher, he spoke twelve languages. As Don hears from Kate Winkler Dawson, in America’s Gilded Age, academics and journalists speculated on his criminal mind, which some claimed was too intelligent to be killed.Produced by Benjie Guy. Mixed by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's January 10th, 1871. In the jailhouse of Binghamton, New York, a journalist by the name of Edward Hamilton Freeman,

is led by the local sheriff down a cold, dark corridor of the cell block. The sheriff stops outside one cell, finds the key, and unlocks the door. Freeman comes face to face with the man who has requested him. 51-year-old Edward Roliffe, on trial for first-degree murder, was described as a monster imbued by the spirit of the devil. He will confess to Freeman, he's asked him to write his biography, the murder of his wife 30 years prior, likely killing his daughter at the same time, though he never admits it. Roloff will detail his career of crime, how he spent decades incarcerated or on the run.

But this man was no ordinary killer, if there can be such a thing. A trained doctor, lawyer, a philosopher, by his own account an accomplished academic versed in the classics. He spoke 12 languages, even today, after. attributes hardly associated with a confessed murderer. But in America's Gilded Age, Roliffe, convicted and sentenced to death eventually, would prove to be the fodder for sensationalist newspaper accounts, as academics and journalists speculated on his criminal mind, which many claimed was too intelligent to be killed.

Hi, everybody, I'm Don Wildman, and this is another episode of American History Hit. Today, we grapple with the strange and twisted tale of a serial murderer in the Gilded Age. a mysterious, enigmatic character by the name of Edward Roloff, who lived from 1819 and died, as we will soon learn, 52 years later in 1871 by public hanging in Binghamton, New York. He was, by anyone's estimation, a brilliant mind, a wannabe academic even, a scholar who spent much of his adult years devising a remarkable, if deeply flawed theory of linguistics, the origins of languages, all the while engaged in a life of criminal enterprise, which included, along the way, a series of brutal murders. He was devious, inventive, a highly determined man whose intellectual acumen was matched only by his craven ambitions. During several different incarcerations, his high-level intelligence and sophistication, spoken and written of across the land, attracted journalists, scientists, celebrities,

local officials, all seeking to comprehend the mysterious duality of this complicated crook. And here, to explore this macabre story of night. 19th century murder and mayhem is the author of a new book on the subject, All That Is Wicked, published by Putnam and based on her own hit podcast, Tenfold More Wicked. Kate Winkler-Dawson, welcome to American History Hit. Thanks for having me, and I will say that is probably one of the best summaries I've ever heard of this book. Thank you very much.

If I didn't already have the book jacket written, I would use that. Thank you. Well, I'm available for hire. Okay. Listen, your book begins and ends with a brain, namely the brain of Edward Roloff, which as I speak, still exists floating in formaldehyde on a shelf in a lab in the bowels of Cornell University. And it is extremely big, a very big brain. Very big and heavy. So what's a 151-year-old brain look like?

Not so great. It is not. It is falling apart. It's still basically there, but it's sitting in liquid that long. And I got to pick it up, which is so funny. The woman who was working there, I said, I need some photos. And she said, okay, grab it. And I thought, okay, grab the brain.

So I picked it up and put it down, and it is very heavy. And it's interesting to look at. It was a very important brain. And we'll certainly talk about that in a little bit. Why is that? Yeah, let me ask you, what does it mean that it was so big? And why was it such an important fact of your story? Well, the big part doesn't matter.

I think most people know that now the size of your brain doesn't matter. It's the quality, not the quantity, but they didn't know that in the 1800s. So as we dig into this story, we'll find out just how intelligent Rulov was. His method, his discovery, quote unquote, discovery was misguided, but his intelligence was not. He was incredibly intelligent. And with the right training, he would have been brilliant and made some discoveries, but he went awry. So his brain was unique because when neurologist's, looked at it, they decided they wanted to compare it to other brains, which is the beginning of

neuroscience in the United States. So he was the very first brain purchased in the very first brain museum in the country, which was the beginning of comparative anatomy, when they could look at one person's brain who was supposed to be inferior, a criminal like Rulov, and compare it to other inferior people, people of color, women, mental illness, and then these incredible, you know, white men who were elite. And you could look at all of them. and they weren't dissimilar. They were all very structurally the same. So it was pretty remarkable for that to begin with his brain. Your book, I have to say, is a page turner, highly readable. I devoured it in a couple of sittings. It's a tightly structured narrative that travels back and forth in time,

chronicling the itinerant life of Edward Roloff while he's being interviewed along the way over the years by various experts in various cells. Each chapter is told from the perspective of a different investigator who's come and tried to understand this man. I mean, I can look at the table of contents. The chapter headings are literally the author, the newspaper man, the Greek scholar, a phrenologist, the alienist, the neurologist. Why were these people so fascinated by this man? And what does that say about the times? In the 1800s, a man's handshake was enough to trust him and to ensure that he wasn't going to hurt you or your family. And of course, we're a little more skeptical now. But in the 19th century, a killer was supposed to look like a killer. somebody who is disheveled and wild-eyed, you should be able to spot this person from a mile away. So when someone like Edward Ruloff, who presented as this country gentleman with, you know, all sorts of skills with languages, he knew more than 12 languages, and he seemed kind, he seemed like someone you could trust, when he turned out to be a killer who killed four members of his family along with at least one other person, this was something that stunned the nation and around the world because they had never seen. seen that. They had never met a Ted Bundy type person before. So there was a group of men who I

called the original mind hunters, 100 years before the FBI created a unit where they would go in and interview serial killers to get more information about the criminal mind. There were men like that 100 years earlier when Rulov was shackled to the floor of a jail awaiting execution, who the governor sent in and said, let's figure out what we need to do with him. And also, they wanted to evaluate whether his brain and his mind were really high quality enough to save, was he too intelligent to kill? One of the first early chapters is about the author, who really creates a protagonist out of Edward Ruloff. He writes a biography. And so let's get down into the story of this man's life. Edward Roloff is born in Canada. He has an early brush with the law up there and leaves, as so many young men do, start a new life, and working himself down to New York State, where it was all happening.

Erie Canal was going on, the place was booming. And he is employed on a packet boat run by a young man named Edward Scutt. And this is how he first insinuates himself into a brand new life. Tell me about the Scut family and where they lived. Well, the Scots live and continue to live in a town in upstate New York, not far from Ithaca called Dryden. And it's a village, small village. And the Scots were really some of the founders of it. They were there from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and so many of them, they were such a prolific family. They were everywhere. They still are everywhere.

I just got to notice this morning from someone who said, yeah, I'm a descendant and I will come to your book event. So I thought, okay, that's great. I can gather a lot of them together. And the Scuts, well, many of them are still in upstate New York. They had been given lots of land after fighting in the American Revolutionary War. And so they created this sort of compound in the area where they were all connected. They were very tight-knit.

They were very, very well-respected. And the patriarch of the family was a man named John Scutt, who was a teacher and someone who seemed very well educated in the rural countryside that was unusual. So he picked the right family to marry into. And, you know, unfortunately for them, he picked the right family for him. Well, so much of this man's story is about his deception, his craftiness in sort of becoming someone he isn't and using his intelligence to do it. I mean, when he first meets Henry Scut on the Erie Canal, he's posing as a German. I suppose he's speaking with an accent and all the sort, and he speaks German. He speaks all these different languages.

And so he's not this guy from Canada right off the bat. He's posing as someone else. And this becomes the theme of his life, really. It's his way. And so much the way of all of these people who eventually you determine and define as psychopaths. This is the beginning of realizing that there is this category of neurotic behavior. Is that the right term? Psychopathy. Yeah, and what's interesting is what I do in the book, which I'm sure you noticed,

is that I draw parallels between Ruloff from the 1840s to killers we know about today, including Edmund Kemper, Ted Bundy, Dennis Rader. So I interviewed Catherine Ramsland for one of my shows who really co-wrote a book with Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer while he was in prison. And he did this interesting thing. He brought her a cube that he made out of paper. And each side of the cube, he wrote different words that defined him, you know, churchgoer, family man, deacon, father, and serial killer. And he would flip them on their sides.

And he said, it's just that easy. He said, I'm not grounded in any of these. And that's the way people with psychopathy are. They don't have an identity. They will become a chameleon based on the situation they're in. So with Rulov, one little tiny thing people I think might miss was when he was on the run, he applied for, and got a full-time faculty position while he was at Allegheny College, which is in Pennsylvania. And the president of Allegheny College, he was from England and, of course, had an English accent.

And Rulaw feigned an English accent. He said he went to Oxford, I think. And it fooled the president who was from England. So clearly this man was gifted at being, you know, like a shapeshifter. So he ingratiates himself with the Scut family. Scut's own all the property and dryden, you know, in these days. and they're a big successful aristocratic, if you will, for a small town like that, a family. So he's clearly targeted this group as a perfect vehicle for his ambitions, his social climber at the very least, how he sees this at first. The thing about psychopathy, which you point out over and over again, is they seem to stay in the present time so much. While they have this grand ambition, there's never any moment where they're reflecting on the cause and effect of their behavior. and this sort of weirdly drives this weird life.

And that's what the book sort of tracks in this case. It's as if they don't really make any big decisions about the future because they can't quite grasp with the future. It's more like, what's right in front of me? Who do I need to manipulate? How do I need to get what I need to get? What's going on here? He's different because he has another kind of ambition, which is this scholarly ambition.

Speak to that. This is a man who is well-versed in the classics, Latin, Greek, etc. he's done a lot of reading, I suppose, even from early days in his life. Because by the time you introduce him, meeting Henry on the Uri Canal, he's already a guy who can talk to talk. Yep. He is. And that's what Henry Scott was impressed with, was that this was a man clearly who went to, and he did. He went to a very nice primary school in Canada, despite the humble beginnings he had.

And so, again, in the 19th century, people were impressed with that. They took him for face value. And I do think you're right. one of the markers with psychopathy that's on Harris checklist, Robert Hare, who put together a checklist, it's really the only way to define someone and to diagnose them with psychopathy. There's a whole list. And there's a ranking from, I think, it's zero to three. And Ruloff was off the charts for basically every one of these based on his notes and, you know, things that I read and things I know about him. And you're right. One of the things is not looking very far ahead if your goal is not very far ahead.

So one of the interesting things about people with psychopathy is that they have a focus. It could be a person. It could be an ambition. And we all have that, hopefully. You know, most people have goals. The difference with somebody with psychopathy is they don't care if you're in the way and they will remove you if you stand in between them and that goal, which is why something like 2% or less of the male population has true psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder. However, around 5% of people who lead major companies have psychopathy because they make decisions without emotion. That's an effective leader, not a kind leader, but people with psychopathy have absolutely no ability to empathize with other people. They only empathize with themselves. And we can speak to many of current figures in our American landscape these days who fall roughly into that category. But let's speak historically about this time. The Gilded Age and the years before, because really the story starts in 1840-ish time period. There's a remarkable thing going on in America.

It is a growing and booming country, but much of that is happening in the cities. I mean, all of that is really happening in the cities with the Industrial Revolution taking hold and blowing up. The countryside still remains a sort of backwater world, a frontier land. And that's certainly true of the Finger Lake District, where this story really takes place. There are, for anyone who doesn't know, gigantic lakes in western New York, central western New York, called the Finger Lakes, which includes the one we're talking about here called Lake Cayuga. These are beautiful, big, sort of great lake-type bodies of water that are right next to each other, created by the glacial age and so forth. This is happening at Lake Cayuga, and at the south of Lake Cayuga is Ithaca, and nearby is Dryden, just to give you some geography here. This is an age when people are gullible to all these city folk who are coming out and taking advantage of them.

The railroad is bringing out this new world. This is the time of snake oil salesmen and conmen, the carnivals and circuses, all that Scheister world is coming out. these archetypes of a more innocent time when people were taken advantage of by people like Edward Rudolph. He was perfect for this time, as were, I suppose, many, many others. One of the things he wants to be, he tells Henry Scott, is he wants to be a teacher. And so he comes and he starts a schoolhouse because John Scott is such a respected individual in that world, he kind of gives his blessing to Edward Roloff. Yes, and Edward Ruloff came to Dryden with the intention, as you said, of being a teacher. And there was only, I think, one school, one room school in Dryden at the time that

was a formal school. And so he asked a neighbor, John Scott asked a neighbor on Edward's behalf, to let him teach in his home when he was off and the farm or off at work. And the man agreed. So as Edward was teaching, there were young girls in his class as well as, you know, young men. And actually, education was pretty important as the country grows older, and particularly with women, country families sent girls and young teenagers to school all the time. And so there were a couple of girls from the Scut family who were teenagers at the time. One was Jane Scut and then her younger sister, who was Harriet Scut. And Harriet caught Edward's eyes. She was 17 and he was about 24, which was not going to be unusual. There was nothing scandalous about that. And he essentially seduced her, and it became pretty clear that they were going to be serious and they wanted to be married. And the Scott family became more alarmed the longer they knew him because they noticed he was a bit mercurial. He would have little hissy fits sometimes. He had a little bit of a jealous streak.

He tried to keep it under wraps as much as he could. He tried to control himself because he really wanted to marry Harriet. and it was difficult because he was outnumbered on this farm. There were scuts everywhere, and he found them to be pretty annoying and frankly beneath him, despite the fact that they found him working as a laborer on the canal. And he was good at what he did. I mean, he was a very good worker on the canal. That's why Henry liked him so much.

And he presents as a very responsible, highly functional personality, which, of course, even Ted Bundy did. I mean, that's the way with so many of these people. Right. But they don't like him very much. they pressure her to reconsider. There are all kinds of this sort of intrigue within the family about this guy. And he wants to get away, understandably. Yeah.

He wants to move on to a different place. And they end up moving the couple to Lansing, which is not too far away, but another community altogether. Far enough in those days, because we're talking about horses and wagons. Right. And there things take another turn. Yeah. And what's interesting about Edward Ruloff, then I can draw on contemporary examples of more traits with people who have psychopathy is you would think that they have very high self-esteem

because they're sort of haughty. That's one of the check marks is, do they have a glibness? Do they have a grandiose sense of self? But the fact is that many people with psychopathy have very low self-esteem despite whatever errors they might put on. And Edward Ruloff was very insecure. And it really triggered. And when we talk about violence, someone with psychopathy, there's a trigger usually that sets people off. And the trigger for Ruloff is he was a jerk to begin with, but the trigger was Dr. Henry Bull, who was Harriet's cousin, and Rulov felt like they were having an affair, which, again, the affair would have been unusual, but Harriet being involved with a male cousin would not have been unusual, first cousin in the 1800s. It actually would have been encouraged had she not been

married. So when Ruloff moves her to Lansing, he thinks that all of his problems with Henry Bull, flirtatious doctor, are gone, and that's not the case. Harriet wants to visit her family a lot. Dr. Bull visits all the time. He kisses all the women in the family on the cheek, and this enrages, again, a very insecure Edward Ruloff. And a series of events that seem, frankly, innocent to me from the book, a series of events just enrages him, and as you mentioned, he becomes more and more abusive. Now, I think he was going to be abusive to begin with, but Henry Bull really flipped a switch for him where he had a level of insecurity. He had never really had a girlfriend or certainly not a wife before Harriet. He might not have even realized how insecure he really was. So Henry Bull being around

made things very stressful for Edward. So there came a few incidences that were really disturbing where he had threatened to take his own life and take her life too. They had a fight over a vial of poison that was very violent. And much like you might expect, with a woman from the 19th century, she really tried to just quell his anger and his insecurity. She wanted to keep her marriage together. She was a young bride. But something unusual happened when he was violent with her one time

and her brothers overheard it. And her brothers came in and said, if you don't, straighten up, Edward, we are taking her back, which was very unusual for the 19th century. Once you married a woman, she was almost your property. So for a family like them, especially a rural family,

family that really valued keeping a marriage together, it would have been pretty scandalous for them to divorce. And they said, we've had enough. And he promised to reform. And of course, he didn't. Eventually, they have, she gets pretty fed up with him. And she stands up for herself, which, as you point out again, throughout the book, this is what really triggers the worst of the worst in these types of people. The day she stands up, explain what happens. So Edward's dream was to be someone in academia. He wanted to teach you to university, and he was given a job opportunity in Ohio to be the headmaster of a boys academy, which would have been a great step up for him. He was a botanical doctor in Ithaca, near Ithaca and Lansing at the time, and he really wanted to get out of

that business. He had studied law. He had sort of dabbled in different things, but he really wanted to be at a university. So he had been offered this job. He went to Harriet, and he braced himself because he figured she was not going to want to leave her family because she was, you know, one of many, many children. She didn't want to leave her parents. But he thought he could convince her. And so he said, listen, I squirled away some money. I have this job. Let's you and our new child, Priscilla, who was just a baby, let's go out west and start a new life. And you can come visit your family. And she just became enraged and said, no, I'm not doing that. I don't want to be with you. And he accused her of wanting to be with Henry Bull. And she denied it sort of. think she really was trying to push his buttons a little bit. Again, this is not blaming the victim. This is just explaining triggers for him. And ultimately, he ends up killing her. And when he confesses

to Hamilton Freeman, who is the journalist writing his biography when he's in jail, it becomes very clear that he is selective. Sometimes people ask me, why did he confess to him when he confessed to no one else? And I think that he sensed in him being this incredible manipulator, he sensed in him a naivete and a vulnerability that no other journalist would have. And so the way he framed his fight with Harriet was just this impassioned break where he killed her. And then he became very vague about what happened to his daughter. But ultimately, Priscilla disappeared. And so did Harriet at the bottom of Cayuga Lake in the middle of the night. And so, you know, when you look at the Scut family, you've just got a daughter and a granddaughter who have disappeared.

Join me in just a moment for more with Kate Winkler-Dawson on American History Hit. The details of his murder come out later, as he explains it to Ham Freeman. It's a brutal murder that is, you know, kind of off the charts. Explain what happened. So, as I mentioned, he was a botanical doctor, and botanical doctors had to crush up a lot of herbs, and he had a very large mortar and pestle set, which was sort of made of marble, very heavy, very heavy stone.

And he said that he picked that pestle, which he had hit her with before, he said accidentally, a witness by her sister. But he picked up this pestle, which was very, very heavy, and he hit her with it in the head. And it immediately killed her, you know, fell to the floor. Yeah, it crushed her skull. He considers taking his own life, but then disposes of that idea and instead disposes of the bodies. He takes them out in the night, am I right? It's, you know, in the off hours, and takes a chest, a wooden chest, calls it first.

calls a friend, calls a neighbor to ask him to lift this chest, which is quite heavy because there's a human body inside it into the wagon. And then another person views him throwing what was a cotton sack, a small cotton sack into that same wagon, presumably the body of his small child. Takes them away and then, I guess, rows them out into Lake Cayuga and puts weights on them and sends them to the bottom of lake. They never find the bodies. And of course, this figures into his legal struggles later on, or successes, I should say. He is convicted of this, but not of murder. He is convicted of kidnapping and given a 10-year sentence, which was extraordinary to me that they could get a 10-year sentence out of a kidnapping charge. They never find the body so they can't convict him of murder. They can't even confirm that he killed the child, which even you mentioned may, you know, conceivably could have been sent off somewhere else. But he confesses later on to the killing of his wife. He gets 10 years. This becomes a very important 10 years of his life because another Edward Roluff begins to emerge. this wannabe academic, who has this extraordinary ability to use his incarceration to his own good end. He uses it as a study center. He sent to Auburn Prison, which was a nasty place

to go in those days. Auburn's the oldest prison, maybe the oldest prison in the country. It's certainly the oldest in New York State, and it was created. I just want to paint this picture. It's a medieval castle. I mean, it's still a functioning prison in northern New York and designed to intimidate and was not a nice place to be. However, Edward Roloff ends up beginning to work on his life's treatise about his theory on languages. Where does this come from? Well, it's an epiphany for him, and it's so interesting

because when you talk about Auburn State Prison and it's like this medieval castle and it's supposed to be a terrible place, it was perfect for him because they had a new system, which was they enforced a code of silence amongst the prisoners. So they even ate in silence. I mean, you were not allowed to talk. Everybody had their own cell. So it was perfect for somebody who was an academic. And he had all the time in the world. He was a carpet designer while he was in prison. So he actually was making money because he was just brilliant at inventing things and creating designs. But I want to go back to one thing that was important that you said, which was when he considered taking his own life and he switched, what he actually said was, I decided against it because essentially it would deprecur. the world of a brain like mine, of my inventiveness. And he had not even come up with this theory yet. And that's important because people with psychopathy, one of the things on the checklist is a grandiose sense of self. At least that's the way you present it. It is a delusion that you are much more

important than you really are. So as I go through the book, I talk about these markers and I illustrate throughout the book how he had it. And then, of course, Ted Bundy and all of these other killers, just to illustrate, things don't change. People kill for the same reason in the 1600s that they do now. It's all the same. It just repeats. So Edward Ruloff in prison has this epiphany for the origin of human language. It actually would have been a big deal. If there were really a pattern to the way that language was formed, then if he found that pattern, you would be able to teach a man from France how to speak Italian within a day or two. It would have been like this key. So he had this idea in his head. And it was, I talked to a modern day linguist at Cornell

University and he said, listen, this idea wasn't any crazier than any of the other ideas about linguistics out there. So he began working on this manuscript and that became the focus. So the focus when he was married to Harriet was, I just want to get out of New York and I want to go out west and start this new life. And when she got in the way, she was eliminated. Same thing with Priscilla, I believe, the little girl. So the flip side of this is now his focus is, of course, being in a university, but really he feels like his legacy will be cemented with this manuscript. So that becomes his focus. The book we're talking about is All That Is Wicked. It's written by Kate Winkler-Dawson, who I'm speaking with now, the subtitle, right on the cover, which incidentally is a very cool cover,

reads, A Gilded Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind. When does that race begin in this incarceration and why? How do people start hearing about this man? Well, really, it's when Harriet and Priscilla go missing because that's when the murder trial comes up. So this is in 43, 1843. And they go missing and the entire country becomes alarmed because it is not only a missing woman, but a missing child. You see notices printed all over the country about this woman and how Rulov is a suspect. When he goes on trial, there just isn't enough evidence. And part of it is, I think, his brilliant lawyering, because he says, habeas corpus, no body, no crime. And that had never been used before. In a defense, this was a

landmark case. And he was the one who came up with it. He said, there's no body. You can't prove a murder. It was very easy in that time period for someone to hop on a train. There was no nationalized identification system. And they could just disappear and start a new life. So there was no way to prove that Harriet was actually dead, and certainly not Priscilla. So, you know, we have someone who was incredibly smart, who now people really understood was a scholar. And, you know, there had been scholars in the past, of course, who had gotten into legal trouble, but this was seemingly unique. I think it was the second set of events later in his life, 30 years later, that then when the publicity came out about this other murder and he was identified, it became

such a drama that people just said we just don't understand how a man like this could exist in this time period. It also speaks to the curiosity that was growing that eventually begins to flower in psychology, these new ways of thinking about the human mind and how it's wrapped up both with, you know, the intellect and emotions and basically the exploration of the human character in new ways. This is the beginning of that in the mid-19th century. And that's what fascinates people so much as they hear about this man, because along with the story of his, the horror story of his murders and the appalling truths of these things, there's also this fact that he's an incredibly high intellect, which in those days is so idolized.

People of great intellectual achievement were put up on a pedestal because so much of American society was uneducated, even illiterate. And certainly outside of the cities, you didn't run into a lot of people who had a lot of education. So those who were educated, it was almost like, you know, high-achieved athletes. They were put up on a pedestal that it perhaps don't deserve, but nonetheless, that was the way that things happened. So during this time period, during this 10-year time period that he's in Auburn, he begins to write out this treatise, which becomes his life's work. I mean, it's an investigation into a central origin for all languages, minus Sanskrit, which I thought was interesting. Never mind that one. But as far as certainly the Western languages, they could all be traced to this single origin, which was back with the Greeks.

and you could begin to see similarities in words. I found this fascinating, that there were ways to sort of anagram words and switch words, the writing, the literally letters back and forth. And you could see how one word originates from another. And this was a sort of puzzle that he was figuring out through this thing. And he was very excited about it being not only his passage into the world of academics and scholarship, but also is going to make it rich. And he was very excited about that. So when he managed to wiggle out of another accusation of murder, when he was released from Auburn State Prison with his manuscript in hand,

the DA had decided under pressure from the Scut family to charge him with his daughter's murder. Ultimately, there wasn't enough evidence in that case. So, you know, he left after kind of a series of different things happening, encountering young men who he could create this criminal enterprise with and he moved to New York City so he could be around the world's best libraries. And ultimately, he begins to put together more about this manuscript, but he has to live, he has to pay rent. And so he creates this criminal ring with a man named Al Jarvis and a man named Billy Dexter and a couple of other criminals. And they would go rob silk merchants in upstate New York, including Binghamton.

and when they would come back, they would, you know, fence the wares, and he would be able to live in Irving Place in New York. So he goes on a robbery with them, which was always a mistake. Every time he went out with them, they would get arrested and go to jail, which, of course, you know, they went under assumed names, so he was never caught. And in this particular robbery, they end up killing one of the young male clerks, and two of the robbers drown. and Edward Ruloff is now, you know, trying to escape and on the run. So this is a 30-year span of this man's crimes. In the midst of this, I was most fascinated because, you know, I like everybody, want to be, you know, this great mind and accomplish great things. So in this one way, I related to this man, as we all do, you know, if only I could be recognized as the great mind I believe I have.

And so he has created this, I imagine, amazing. he first of all, he had incredible penmanship, another aspect of him that made him stand up from others. And he'd written out this beautiful manuscript with this very, very coherent, at least, idea of how languages were developed and this whole linguistic door that we could open up into understanding human civilization and takes it to a conference, I suppose, up in Poughkeepsie, New York, this gathering of these real scholars and real linguists, he's going to do a presentation of it. And there, this psychopathic mind meets an obstacle he cannot manipulate. He cannot change because their judgment of him is based on the work that he presents to them.

And they basically tear it down. Well, what's interesting is when I spoke to Michael Weiss, who is a linguistics professor at Cornell University, and I said, what do you think of the way that he was treated at that conference? And he repeated what I already told you, which is he said, listen, his idea wasn't even more wacky than any of the other idea. is most likely presented at the conference. But the way that he presented himself, and of course asking for a half a million dollars for this method of formation of human language, as he called it,

he said was a little outrageous. And so he said, I think that the assessment from the experts in linguistics was too hard. They would not have done that with other people if it were the same method that was offered. But the fact that he was so self-centered and haughty and everything, And when he didn't get his way, when they rejected it, he cursed at them.

And so this facade of the country gentleman just crumbled. And he was profane and offensive. And so, you know, you see, there was a moment with Ted Bundy. The same thing happened in court where he was infuriated by a victim, something a victim said, a survivor. And he became infuriated. And you see that a lot with these people who have psychopathy where they simply don't know how to respond to criticism or to being caught. They don't have that sort of human reaction or ability to even cover up at some point their true selves are revealed. And that's what happens with Rulov

at this convention is he completely falls apart when you have the people who could validate him saying, this isn't very valid. It really is the final domino tumbling in this man's life. We're talking about life of 52 years here. I mean, this goes through several different murder sequences, you know, first with his wife and his daughter, then later with these guards and who knows who's in between. There are these massive epic moments where he wanders the woods of Pennsylvania and has to take other people in on his schemes and so forth. But eventually landing in New York and eventually landing in this very petty criminality, that's what I found so interesting. Here's a man who's, you know, flying high as an IQ and sees himself in pretty rarefied

circles in terms of even the scholarship that he's interested in, the linguistics. My God, how obscure is that for most people? And yet the crimes he chooses to commit are really petty. I mean, he's basically stealing and fencing silk fabric most of all. It's not very glorious what he's doing for a living all this time, but somehow he survives. And until this crushing blow to his intellect happens, he's still living in this false reality that he may be this other kind of man. In all this research, and you've written other books, I'll cite American Sherlock as another one, where you're investigating the criminal mind. In all this thinking about this particular man, do you have a sense, a clearer sense of what made him so evil? What is the source of this?

Well, I certainly think after knowing him, you know, I've lived with Edward Ruloff for about seven years now. And everything I've read, when he was in Auburn State Prison, again, he had lots of time to write his method of formation of human language. But on top of that, he had lots of time to write his attorneys an incredible amount of letters. And I've read all of them. So I have a good sense for who he is, and I do believe that he has psychopathy. I do think that everything that defines who someone with psychopathy has, he has every quality and then some. And I remember Catherine Ramslin when I asked her about Dennis Rader, BTK killer, and I said, you know, what was his reaction like Ruloff to being caught and to being thwarted? And she said that he cried and whined.

It was the, woe is me. Everything is against me. And you see that trend with Rulov constantly. He blames everybody else. He never blames himself. This is another trait. And actually, Catherine Ramsland said that she knows Robert Hare, the man who created the checklist. And she told him, I think you need to add whining as one of the checklist because every psychopath I know whines.

That it's the poor me, poor me. And I think Ruloff had this innate ability to sabotage himself. And, you know, you talk about the petty crimes. this again comes back to the goal. And his only goal was to finish this manuscript and to offer it as his legacy. He didn't drink. He didn't smoke. He barely ate. He had clothes that were tattered. He didn't live in a luxurious apartment. I mean, nothing. He was not treating himself in any way. Every ounce of his energy was going into finishing this. And so when people were coming through his cell, they were saying that he had monomania, which was sort of, obsessive compulsive disorder and obsessive over this one particular thing. Monomania was like the inventor who couldn't stop thinking about inventing the pencil. So I do think that there's an element of that. But that comes back to psychopathy. Yet again, there's a goal if you are in my way, I will remove you. It also speaks to the brain. We began this conversation with his literal brain,

and that becomes the subject of speculation that the triggers of psychopathy, this kind of criminal mind actually comes from some particular part of the brain, and maybe some of that's missing, and they want to literally study the structure of the brain. Did they find that out when they looked at his brain? Well, no, because here's what's interesting. I would love to have seen photos, of course, which wouldn't have been possible in 1871, of his brain, because what we have discovered that research shows, recent research shows, of men who are incarcerated who have psychopathy, which, by the way, 70% of incarcerated men have antisocial personality. disorder. Two percent of the male population, general male population does, but it's 70 percent in prison,

which shows you the level of violence that someone with psychopathy can have. When researchers were able to take some of these men and scan their brains with an MRI scans, they saw a reduction in grain matter in certain areas of the brain that govern remorse and empathy, which are the things that stop us from killing. It is the ability to say, oh, boy, I'm not going to do that. I don't want to do that because it'll hurt someone else. And it's against society. They don't care. People with psychopathy generally don't care. They only care about themselves. He had an enormous impact also on the legal system of America, really. Yes. And it was the habeas corpus, which is the no body, no crime. One of the things that was really interesting about Ruloff, though, was that he was able to

manipulate every person that came into his jail who wanted to analyze. And Han Freeman, who was the journalist, who was very naive. There was another journal. who was impressed with his skills and printed very large excerpts from his theory, which gave him a lot of publicity. There was a Greek scholar who thought he was brilliant but was unsure about the method. There was another scholar who said he is wacky and a quack and just didn't know what he was talking about. But there was a psychiatrist who Rulov was determined to manipulate because the psychiatrist was there to deem whether he was insane or whether he was sane. And this is legal. This is not a medical definition.

This is a legal definition. So this was a alienist, a psychiatrist, who believed in the biological theory, which meant that if your body was sick, then you had a sick mind. If your body was healthy, you were sane. So even though Rulov was not in very good shape, he feigned that. He was a healthy man because if he were deemed to be insane, it would have saved his life. He would have gone to a mental health facility, which frankly would have been about one step above being hanged, because of that. They were miserable then. Or if he were found insane, then he would be totally discredited.

And he would rather die and be thought of as a sane scholar than, you know, live with an insanity label on him. He finally meets his end in Binghamton, as a result of the murder of this, during this robbery there, of silk fabric. And he dies, at which point one of these scientists grabs his brain and does the study that is to this day still continuing as that brain is still continuing as that brain is still in. formaldehyde. It's a story that is like the era it happens in. I mean, this is a whole emergence of a new kind of nation at this point in the late 19th century, post-Civil War, certainly, when America is beginning to invent the society that we still live in today, not to mention creating a media that is all about sensationalism, skepticism of where things come from, lots of questions that we're dealing with even today. But I think what's so interesting that might be more

subtle to most people is that there's an issue of education. And the fact is American society was not an educated society until we get to the 20th century. Public education does not become a prevalent free system. And as a result of that more common education is the emergence of the middle class that no longer celebrates this kind of individual the way you are portraying him as being. The same fascination happens, of course, with the Ted Bundys and all the rest of them, because that sells good television, but the reality of what makes us tick becomes less mysterious to the average person. And that's a really fascinating balancing agent in the story of America historically. This is all between the covers of a book called All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder

and the race to decode the criminal mind. Excellent book. I highly recommend reading the author Kate Winkler-Dawson. Thank you so much for joining me on American History Hit. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it.

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