Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (25 page)

L
OCKED 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.”

R
ULLOFF 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.

W
ITH 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.”

F
OR 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.

C
ONVICTED 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”: