Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (26 page)

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.

J
UST SEVEN YEARS AFTER
A
NTON
P
ROBST HACKED THE
D
EERING FAMILY TO DEATH
, America was rocked by another appalling axe murder, committed, like the earlier one, by an immigrant from the German Empire. His name was Louis Wagner and—until Lizzie Borden dispatched her father and stepmother on a sweltering afternoon in August 1892—he ranked as the most notorious axe murderer in the annals of New England crime.

A
BOUT TEN MILES
out at sea off the coast of New Hampshire lie the Isles of Shoals, a rugged archipelago of nine tiny islands, a few little more than barren ledges that vanish periodically when the water is high. Most of the isles are utterly inhospitable—desolate chunks of rock visited only by the gulls. Even those most fit for human habitation have never been home to more than a handful of exceptionally hardy souls. In the mid-1800s, between forty and sixty people constituted the entire population of the isles.

The second largest of the isles is Smutty Nose, whose unlovely name, as novelist Anita Shreve explains, originally “derived from a clump of seaweed on the nose of a rock extending into the ocean.” It was there that the “monstrous tragedy” occurred on March 5, 1873.

I
N HER
1997 bestseller, The Weight of Water, Shreve invents a photojournalist named Jean Janes who, while researching a magazine piece on the Smutty Nose case, discovers a lost manuscript composed by its lone survivor, Maren Hontvet. Shreve’s imaginative reconstruction of the crime is undeniably gripping—a steamy brew of incest, adultery, and a soupçon of lesbian sex. Dramatic as it is, however, her version is not nearly as compelling—or as sheerly appalling—as the truth.

At the time of the murders, Maren Hontvet was twenty-six years old, a petite woman with a “gentle and courteous” demeanor who had emigrated from a small fishing village in Norway five years earlier with her husband, John. They shared their small cottage with four other family members: Maren’s older sister Karen, described as a “rather sad-looking woman” in perpetual mourning for a lost lover in Norway; the two women’s adored brother, Ivan, “tall, light-haired, and rather grave”; Ivan’s new bride, Anethe, a radiant twenty-four-year-old much doted on by her husband; and John’s brother, Matthew. The six members of this close-knit clan were the only residents of the wild and lonely island, though they occasionally took in a boarder who assisted the three men with their fishing business. His name was Louis Wagner.

A native of Prussia, Wagner was a ruggedly built twenty-eight-year-old who had struggled to support himself as a fisherman since his arrival in America seven years earlier. Possessed of a dark, brooding manner and the bottomless self-pity typical of psychopaths, he owed money to various acquaintances and had grown increasingly embittered over his hard-luck existence. A few weeks before the Smutty Nose horror, he had displayed his worn-out shoes to a shipmate and declared, “This won’t do any longer. I am bound to have money in three months if I have to murder for it.”

Wagner was intimately familiar with the Hontvets, their financial circumstances, and the layout of their little home, having boarded with them for several months. By his own later admission, they had always treated him “like a brother.” During one of his recurrent bouts of illness, he had been nursed back to health by the women, who, in his words, “were most kind to him.” He would repay that kindness with the sort of atrocious cruelty that defies easy psychological explanation and tempts even rationalists to speak of pure evil.

O
N
M
ARCH
5, 1873, the men of the Hontvet household—Maren’s husband, John; her brother, Ivan; and her brother-in-law, Matthew—set sail at daybreak, leaving the women alone on the island. The three fishermen intended to draw their trawls, take their catch into Portsmouth, and be back home in time for dinner. Owing to a combination of circumstances, however, they were delayed in Portsmouth.

While there, they ran into Louis Wagner, who asked if they planned to return to Smutty Nose that night. By then, the three fishermen had decided to remain in Portsmouth until morning. Shortly after Wagner learned this fact, he repaired to a bar and fortified himself with a drink. He then headed down to a wharf where a dory belonging to one of his acquaintances, a fisherman named James Burke, was tied up. When Burke came to fetch his boat an hour later, it was gone.

It had been taken by Wagner, who by that time was rowing steadily through the calm moonlit waters toward Smutty Nose Island, where the three women of the Hontvet household waited alone in their unprotected cottage, wondering what had become of their men. At around ten o’clock, the women retired for the night, Karen sleeping on a makeshift cot in the kitchen, Maren and Anethe sharing a bed in the adjacent room. Though it was the first time in all the years they had lived there that—as one writer puts it—“the house was without a man to protect it,” the women felt secure enough to leave the curtains undrawn and the doors unlatched.

Sometime around midnight, Louis Wagner arrived at Smutty Nose. Tying up his boat, he moved stealthily over the rocks, silently reconnoitering to make sure that he was alone with his helpless prey. He then made his way to the cottage, quietly opened the door, and stepped inside.

Tiptoeing across the darkened kitchen, he fastened the door leading to the adjacent bedroom by pushing a length of wood through the latch. At that moment, the Hontvets’ little dog, Ringe, began to bark sharply. Startled awake, Karen—assuming that the three men had returned—exclaimed, “John? Is that you?” Her cry roused Maren in the next room, who called out, “What’s the matter?”

Karen—still groggy and unable to make out the looming figure in the night-shrouded room—answered: “John scared me!”

She had barely gotten the words out of her mouth when Wagner picked up a wooden chair and delivered a savage blow to her head. “John kills me! John kills me!” she shrieked as Wagner continued to bludgeon her.

Hearing the sounds, the bewildered Maren sprang to her bedchamber door, only to find it inexplicably latched. She shook it frantically, trying in vain to come to her sister’s
aid. Just then, on the other side, the badly injured Karen staggered from her bed and fell heavily against the door, dislodging the wooden bar. Throwing the door open, Maren burst out, seized her semiconscious sister, and dragged her toward the bedroom while Wagner rushed at the two women and rained maddened blows on them with his makeshift weapon.