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Speaker 4: Plus, you are now listening to True Murder the most
Speaker 4: shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that
Speaker 4: have written about them. Gacy Bundy Dahmer The night Stalker
Speaker 4: VTK every week another fascinating author talking about the most
Speaker 4: shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder
Speaker 4: with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 5: Good Evening. Acclaimed crime historian, podcaster and author of American
Speaker 5: Sherlock Kate Winkler Dawson tells the thrilling story of Edward Roloff,
Speaker 5: a serial murder who was called too intelligent to be killed,
Speaker 5: and the array of nineteenth century investigators who were convinced
Speaker 5: his brain held the key to finally understanding the criminal mind.
Speaker 5: Edward Roloff was a brilliant, yet utterly a moral murderer.
Speaker 5: Some have called him a Victorian era Hannibal lecter, whose
Speaker 5: crimes spanned decades, in whose victims were chosen out of revenge,
Speaker 5: out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity. From his
Speaker 5: humble beginnings in upstate New York to the dazzling salons
Speaker 5: and social life he established in New York City, at
Speaker 5: every turn, Roloff used his intelligent and regal bearing to
Speaker 5: evade detection and avoid punishment. He could talk his way
Speaker 5: out of any crime, until one day, Roloff's luck ran out.
Speaker 5: By eighteen seventy one, Rollufs sat chained in his cell,
Speaker 5: a psychopath holding court while curious nineteenth century mindhunters tried
Speaker 5: to understand what made him tick. From alienists early psychiatrists
Speaker 5: who tried to analyze the source of his madness, to
Speaker 5: neurologists who wanted to dissect his brain, to phrenologists who
Speaker 5: analyzed the bumps on his head to determine his character,
Speaker 5: each one thought he held the key to understand the
Speaker 5: essential question, is evil born or made? Eventually, Roloff's brain
Speaker 5: would be placed in a jar at Cornell University as
Speaker 5: the prize specimen of their Anatomy collection, where it still
Speaker 5: sits today, slowly moldering in a dusty jar. But his
Speaker 5: story and its implications for the emerging field of criminal
Speaker 5: psychology were just beginning. Expanded from season one of her
Speaker 5: hit podcast on the Exactly Right Network, All That Is Wicked,
Speaker 5: Kate Winkler Dawson draws on hundreds of source materials and
Speaker 5: never before shared historical documents to present one of the
Speaker 5: first glimpses into the mind of a serial killer, a
Speaker 5: century before the term was coined, through the scientists whose
Speaker 5: work would come to influence criminal justice for decades to come.
Speaker 5: The book that we're featuring this evening is All That
Speaker 5: Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the
Speaker 5: race to the code the criminal mind, with my special guests,
Speaker 5: his story and and author and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much
Speaker 5: for this interview. Kate Winkler Dawson.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Dan, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, and congratulations on this new book. Fascinating,
Speaker 5: fascinating the story and right away. I want to ask you.
Speaker 5: I guess it's obvious from the introduction somewhat, but how
Speaker 5: you came to want to cover this incredible story.
Speaker 3: Well, I have always been fascinated with why people kill,
Speaker 3: and that's what I do in my podcast and all
Speaker 3: of my books is really analyze that, and I look
Speaker 3: to history to analyze that and to figure out more
Speaker 3: answers to these questions. And why I ran across I
Speaker 3: ran across Edward Ruloff. I don't even know how long ago.
Speaker 3: I mean, I've lived with him for six or seven
Speaker 3: years at this point, and I ran across his story,
Speaker 3: and I thought that it would be interesting to tell
Speaker 3: his story because this was someone who defied everything that
Speaker 3: people thought a criminal was in the nineteenth century. They
Speaker 3: thought a killer was a killer who was disheveled and
Speaker 3: wild eyed and somebody who you could spot easily. Not
Speaker 3: your neighbor, or your teacher, or your husband or the
Speaker 3: you know, your in law. These are all things that
Speaker 3: were when it was discovered, were stunning to the people,
Speaker 3: not just an upstate New York or in America, but
Speaker 3: around the world because this was a man who looked
Speaker 3: like everyone else. Even more disturbing was he was smarter
Speaker 3: than everyone else, and he carried himself with eloquence, and
Speaker 3: he presented as this country gentleman when really, truly he
Speaker 3: was willing to remove any obstacle in his way, and
Speaker 3: he had such insecurities that he wanted to seek revenge
Speaker 3: against people who he felt wronged him. And it didn't
Speaker 3: matter if it were women and children in his wake.
Speaker 3: So it's a tremendous story for me to tell in
Speaker 3: a time period that I just love, Gilded Age New York.
Speaker 5: You take us back to January tenth, eighteen seventy one,
Speaker 5: and in a cell is someone purported to be Edward
Speaker 5: Howard Rolloff, and the person that is interviewing him is
Speaker 5: this newspaper person.
Speaker 3: His name is Hamilton Freeman.
Speaker 5: Yes, so Hamilton Freeman has this opportunity to interview who
Speaker 5: he thinks is Edward Howard Rolloff. And this is right
Speaker 5: after seeing portions of the trial. So tell us where
Speaker 5: he is at and where Edward Rolloff is at at
Speaker 5: this time in history.
Speaker 3: Well, at this point we don't know whatever Roulov had
Speaker 3: done to be in this jail. He's being held during
Speaker 3: his trial, and Hamilton Freeman was just one of the
Speaker 3: many many reporters who showed up at the courthouse in Binghamton,
Speaker 3: New York to watch this murder trial, and he just
Speaker 3: became enamored with Ruloff as a subject. He thought that
Speaker 3: because he represented himself in some instances he was eloquent. He,
Speaker 3: just as I said before, defied everything that really people
Speaker 3: defined a killer to be in the eighteen hundreds. And
Speaker 3: so Hamilton Freeman approached Ruloff and his attorney and said,
Speaker 3: I want to write your biography, and Ruloff, being someone
Speaker 3: who you know is very clearly out for his own
Speaker 3: self interests agreed because he sensed that Hamilton Freeman was
Speaker 3: not a cynical New York City reporter. He sends that
Speaker 3: he was a small town reporter who was somebody who
Speaker 3: had the ability to be manipulated very easily. And it's
Speaker 3: very clear to me and to the forensic psychiatrist I
Speaker 3: interviewed for this book that Ruloff checked just about every
Speaker 3: marker for psychopathy, for antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, and there was no way to diagnose this,
Speaker 3: of course back then. But I used this book as
Speaker 3: a way to trace his actions along with the actions
Speaker 3: of other serial killers and psychopaths throughout history to show that, unfortunately,
Speaker 3: and very uncomfortable saying it, that the reasons that people
Speaker 3: kill have not changed from the sixteen hundreds, of the
Speaker 3: fifteen hundreds until now. You know, there's jealousy and envy
Speaker 3: and insecurity and love and sex and money and greed.
Speaker 3: Those are all things that have just repeated throughout history.
Speaker 5: However, this Edward Roloff is a unique specimen. Certainly when
Speaker 5: this Freeman, Hamilton Freeman, was interviewing him, he asked along
Speaker 5: the way in that first interview where he thought that
Speaker 5: Roloff's life may have gone off course?
Speaker 3: What was his response, Well, he could pinpoint it exactly,
Speaker 3: and I'm not sure he was really right. Rulolph was
Speaker 3: born in Canada and had a heart scrabble upbringing, but
Speaker 3: from a mother who really was had a love for
Speaker 3: academia and supported him. And things fell apart for him
Speaker 3: in my eyes, when his uncle refused to fund his
Speaker 3: college education. I think that's when he thought things were
Speaker 3: going to be derailed. Ruloff told Hamilton that things really
Speaker 3: went off the rails for him when he arrived in
Speaker 3: New York and he started working as like a like
Speaker 3: a helper on the canal, on the Ear Canal, and
Speaker 3: he met a man named Henry Scutt, who eventually took
Speaker 3: him home and introduced him to his family. And Ruloff
Speaker 3: became entrenched in this family and married into it. And
Speaker 3: he blames the Scuts for everything that has gone wrong
Speaker 3: in his life. Typical psychopath, Typical of someone who has psychopathies,
Speaker 3: blaming everybody but himself.
Speaker 5: So what was the motivation? You say that you're right
Speaker 5: that Rolloff was hesitant to speak to anyone, any journalist,
Speaker 5: and yet he decided that this would be Freeman would
Speaker 5: be the person that would be able to do his biography.
Speaker 5: What was in it for Freeman other than what was
Speaker 5: in it for Freeman and what was in it for
Speaker 5: roll Off? What was their motivations?
Speaker 3: Well, since the beginning of time, since the beginning of journalism,
Speaker 3: journalists and criminals have had a very transactional relationship where
Speaker 3: you know, they need each other to a certain extent,
Speaker 3: at least people who who go into prisons and interview
Speaker 3: Ted Mundy had two journalists who wrote a book about him,
Speaker 3: who he gave extensive interviews to. And you know, the
Speaker 3: motivation for Ruloff to get his story out there was
Speaker 3: he had made a discovery, he believed in the pattern
Speaker 3: of how human language was created, and he thought, and
Speaker 3: other people thought, if you could just figure that pattern out,
Speaker 3: that it would be very easy to market human language
Speaker 3: as a way to you know, you teach a Frenchman
Speaker 3: Italian very easily, and this would have been a huge discovery.
Speaker 3: So Ruleoff's motivation to have him Hamilton Freeman write this
Speaker 3: biography was of course to get his theory out there,
Speaker 3: to get his life story out there, and Hamilton Freeman
Speaker 3: was certainly hopeful that it would put him on the
Speaker 3: map as an accomplished author, which it would have. This
Speaker 3: would have been a true crime book and a biography
Speaker 3: that would have that was very well received. And so
Speaker 3: I don't know if Hamilton Freeman quite understood the depths
Speaker 3: of the skill of manipulation that Edward had, but he
Speaker 3: found out pretty quickly.
Speaker 5: What was the You talk about the motivation, but what
Speaker 5: was Rolloff's excuse for because in this interview he was
Speaker 5: asked about the murder of his wife and his daughter,
Speaker 5: So what was his response to that, what was the
Speaker 5: reasoning for that?
Speaker 3: Well, as he told his life story to Hamilton Freeman.
Speaker 3: You know, Hamilton really was trying to get at specific
Speaker 3: details that might clue him in and the readers into
Speaker 3: why Rulof did this, because really that was the big question.
Speaker 3: How could a man who who presented himself the way
Speaker 3: he did turn around and be a killer. Because if
Speaker 3: ever Ruloff were a killer, anybody in your life could
Speaker 3: be a killer, and that was petrifying. So when Ruloff
Speaker 3: leading up to this time, when Ruloff describes the argument
Speaker 3: that he has with his wife while his wife has
Speaker 3: their essentially newborn child nearby, you know, he's describing this
Speaker 3: in a very dramatic nineteenth century manner, lots of flair,
Speaker 3: and you know, very dramatic. And he does ultimately confess
Speaker 3: to him, but he gives just enough details of this
Speaker 3: the murder that takes place, that he doesn't reveal what
Speaker 3: happens to his daughter Priscilla. So there are assumptions, and
Speaker 3: ham felt very uncomfortable talking to him about it, but
Speaker 3: there seems to be very little evidence that Edward had
Speaker 3: planned and sent her away somewhere else. The conclusion is
Speaker 3: that most people would have and I have, is that
Speaker 3: he and up killing his daughter also and dropping them
Speaker 3: both into Cayuga Lake, which is why he was never
Speaker 3: on trial for their murder. He went on trial for kidnapping.
Speaker 3: They couldn't prove murder. He was very smart in that
Speaker 3: way he covered up the evidence. But I think his
Speaker 3: motivation for confessing to that particular crime was really to
Speaker 3: keep Ham's interest. I think he knew that he had
Speaker 3: to give Ham something. And there are a couple of
Speaker 3: other murders that happened where rule Off is not so
Speaker 3: forthright with him, but with this one, the way he
Speaker 3: describes his fight with Harriet, where he is saying, I'm
Speaker 3: going to create a new life for us out west.
Speaker 3: I want to take you. I will make you have
Speaker 3: a better life and we will be happy and free
Speaker 3: with our daughter, and she reacts in such a verbally
Speaker 3: violent way to him. I think he framed it in
Speaker 3: a way that it almost seems logical that he killed her.
Speaker 3: It almost to him seemed that she was destroying their
Speaker 3: life and it was an act of passion, And I'm
Speaker 3: not quite sure it went that way in real life.
Speaker 3: I do think that they had an argument, but I
Speaker 3: think that this was not an accident. It was an
Speaker 3: intentional murder that he really maybe have thought about earlier.
Speaker 3: They had had a lot of acrimony in their marriage.
Speaker 3: He thought that she was having an affair with her
Speaker 3: male cousin, which would the affair would be surprising for me,
Speaker 3: but the male cousin part is not surprising. It was
Speaker 3: very common for people to marry who were first cousins.
Speaker 3: So you know, Rulolf was incredibly jealous of this man,
Speaker 3: doctor Bull, and it had just plagued their marriage. So
Speaker 3: this was this was a huge trigger for him when
Speaker 3: she finally said, I'm not going out west. But I
Speaker 3: do think the way it was framed in the way
Speaker 3: Hamilton responded was the way Edward wanted him to responded,
Speaker 3: which is boy, he loved her so much that he
Speaker 3: was almost left with no choice, you know, but he
Speaker 3: wouldn't confess to his daughter, And I think that's he
Speaker 3: couldn't bring himself to say I did this to an
Speaker 3: innocent child. It's all manipulation.
Speaker 5: It's incredible too to demonstrate or illustrate his psychopathic abilities
Speaker 5: in terms of being an incredible actor. Ye, you write
Speaker 5: about this right out of a horror movie where despite
Speaker 5: this family not liking this person whatsoever and suspicious of
Speaker 5: his background, completely and the maltreatment of their sister by
Speaker 5: this huge family that still he had made it an
Speaker 5: impression and had a friendship of sorts with one of
Speaker 5: the brothers named William. But despite this, they still were
Speaker 5: at odds with the entire family over this raving, over
Speaker 5: this doctor bull And yet something disastrous happened to William's
Speaker 5: wife and daughter. Tell us about this extraordinary, horrific scene
Speaker 5: in this book.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we know when I unravel this, it's something
Speaker 3: you have to keep in mind because some of the
Speaker 3: things that happen are pretty extraordinary. The thing you have
Speaker 3: to keep in mind is this time Pero, people believed
Speaker 3: that a man's handshake was enough to trust him with
Speaker 3: your life. And they were also the skets were very
Speaker 3: well used to Edward Ruloff's melodramatics. You know, he essentially
Speaker 3: had hissy fits constantly. So when I tell you what
Speaker 3: I'm going to tell you about, when he's thrown out
Speaker 3: threats and nobody follows up on it or takes it
Speaker 3: particularly seriously, it's because they have had so much experience
Speaker 3: with his threats and nothing's ever happened that they just
Speaker 3: sort of thought, well, this is just more of this
Speaker 3: blowhards reaction to not getting his way. So Edward Ruloff
Speaker 3: is completely distraught over this affair, which I don't believe
Speaker 3: actually happened between Harriet, his wife, and her cousin, doctor Bull.
Speaker 3: He's always been threatened by doctor Bull. Ruloff was a
Speaker 3: herbal doctor, you know, he would use herbs and it
Speaker 3: was a botanical doctor, and doctor Bull was a traditional doctor,
Speaker 3: and so they were already sort of at odds professionally.
Speaker 3: But boy Rulolf really disliked doctor Bullet. Doctor Bull would
Speaker 3: come in, he was very suave. He would come in
Speaker 3: and kiss all the women on the cheek, and this
Speaker 3: just incensed rule Off and he because he was very insecure.
Speaker 3: What's one thing that people don't understand about people with
Speaker 3: psychopathy is they automatically think, well, they're also narcissist. Not true,
Speaker 3: They're not always narcissist. And in fact, a lot of
Speaker 3: people with psychopathy have incredibly low self esteem, and it's
Speaker 3: masked by this grandiose sense of self, by this glibnus
Speaker 3: that's fake. So Rulolf was incredibly insecure, and he was
Speaker 3: abusive at times to Harriet, to a point where her
Speaker 3: brothers intervened and said essentially, if you don't straighten up,
Speaker 3: we're taking her back, which looking through a twenty first
Speaker 3: century lens, is like, yeah, of course, what else are
Speaker 3: they going to say in a nineteenth century lens. That's
Speaker 3: pretty extraordinary because once you marry, once a man marries
Speaker 3: a woman, she essentially becomes his property. There's a little autonomy.
Speaker 3: So this they had to have been very alarmed to
Speaker 3: say we are taking her back if you don't straighten up.
Speaker 3: And you know, rul Off felt slighted by the family constantly,
Speaker 3: particularly by her brother William, who she was very close with.
Speaker 3: And William had a wife named Amelia, and then Amelia
Speaker 3: and Priscilla, who was Ruloff's daughter, were born very close
Speaker 3: together within months, so they were both young babies. Amelia
Speaker 3: had just been had just given birth, and she and
Speaker 3: her daughter had both become very sick, which would not
Speaker 3: have been unusual at all. The childbirth's deaths were very common.
Speaker 3: Of course, these are mostly bacterial infections that happened because
Speaker 3: they didn't have the same medicines.
Speaker 6: And that we have.
Speaker 3: And William, in the meantime, as Amelia is getting ready
Speaker 3: to give birth, is interacting with Ruloff and Ruloff has said, basically,
Speaker 3: you need to get rid of doctor Bull because he
Speaker 3: is trying to seduce my wife. And I think that
Speaker 3: this needs to stop, and you need to side with me.
Speaker 3: I'm your brother in law. And William said no, he
Speaker 3: said this, I don't think this is happening. You're paranoid,
Speaker 3: you're making this up. You're causing problems in your marriage,
Speaker 3: and I am tired of hearing about it. And if
Speaker 3: you continue to complain about an affair that doesn't exist,
Speaker 3: that I will expel you from this family. So Ruloff
Speaker 3: was the most dangerous type of person with psychopathy, which
Speaker 3: was he was smart, and he knew when to shut up,
Speaker 3: and he was high functioning, and he stopped talking and
Speaker 3: just watched and waited. So when Amelia gave birth to
Speaker 3: a Meal and they both became very sick, William was
Speaker 3: desperate and he saw Edward Ruloff at his family's farm
Speaker 3: and he said, come with me, Please, your doctor help her,
Speaker 3: and within a day she if she and her daughter
Speaker 3: were dead. Now Ruloff could have actually didn't give any
Speaker 3: explanation for what happened to him. He sort of said, well,
Speaker 3: you know, I gave the medicine, and you know, you
Speaker 3: kind of crossed her fingers. But when they died and
Speaker 3: his mother in law, who was the matriarch of the family,
Speaker 3: Hannah Scut, was mourning death these two deaths, he said
Speaker 3: to her, you know I killed them. William Scutt did
Speaker 3: me wrong. Your son did me wrong. And if things
Speaker 3: don't straighten out soon, then Harriet and my child are next. Now,
Speaker 3: Hannah did nothing about this because again, no one believed
Speaker 3: he was capable of this. No one believed it. He
Speaker 3: helped plan the funeral, he went there. You would have
Speaker 3: never been able to detect that something was wrong. That's
Speaker 3: how good he was. And that's what that lack of
Speaker 3: remorse and that lack of empathy that he demonstrated that
Speaker 3: is so prevalent with people with psychopathy. Also, you know,
Speaker 3: is makes him an excellent actor.
Speaker 5: Now, he was dissatisfied with the family despite what it well,
Speaker 5: given that all the things that it happened, but he
Speaker 5: would always pine for this opportunity to be in a
Speaker 5: big city and to have his ideas heard by academic,
Speaker 5: influential people. Tell us what happened when he talks about
Speaker 5: at least a prestigious academy in Ohio offering him a position.
Speaker 3: You know, he becomes infuriated when he is given this
Speaker 3: incredible opportunity, he says, which is be the head of
Speaker 3: a boys academy in Ohio, which hopefully would lead to
Speaker 3: an opportunity to be a professor at a university. And
Speaker 3: that was his dream. And that was the dream that
Speaker 3: had been taken from him, he said, from his uncle
Speaker 3: when he was young. So this was his chance at redemption.
Speaker 3: And one thing that's so funny about people with psychopathy
Speaker 3: not funny, haha, I guess funny strange is I interviewed
Speaker 3: for a forensic psychologist whose name is Catherine Ramslin, and
Speaker 3: she spent years interviewing Dennis Raider, who was the BTK killer, right,
Speaker 3: And she said they all do the same thing. They
Speaker 3: whine it's the poor me. And she knew Robert Hare
Speaker 3: who Crank, came up with the checklist. It's called the
Speaker 3: Hairs Checklist for psychicopathy. And it's the list you go
Speaker 3: through when you check off, you know, and you on.
Speaker 3: It's in a rating scale and that's how you decide
Speaker 3: if somebody has psychopathy. There's no blood test or anything.
Speaker 3: And she said she had suggested jokingly to Robert Hare
Speaker 3: that you should add whining to your checklist because they
Speaker 3: all wine and rule off wind. And he said, I
Speaker 3: want to go to Ohio to his wife, you need
Speaker 3: to come with me. I have been thwarted at every turn.
Speaker 3: Your family has degraded me, and they joke about finding
Speaker 3: me on the canal as a as a poor canal worker.
Speaker 3: And now your wifely duty is to come with me
Speaker 3: and we're going to bring Priscilla and you're going to
Speaker 3: have a good life. And she said no, She said no,
Speaker 3: and this infuriated him. So this was the trigger for him.
Speaker 3: And we often talk about killers and any kind of
Speaker 3: predictability that we can't we're always as a society hoping
Speaker 3: to gather information to be able to, if not predict,
Speaker 3: at least protect against something that could happen. And so
Speaker 3: you're looking for those triggers, and you're looking for those
Speaker 3: qualities and the things that should be alarming. And this
Speaker 3: telling Edward Rulolph that your dream is going to go
Speaker 3: away because Harriet has the power to say no, hell no,
Speaker 3: I'm not going with you. That is what triggered him.
Speaker 3: It was not her fault, it was totally his fault,
Speaker 3: but there are usually triggers even for a serial killer
Speaker 3: to start doing something.
Speaker 5: Now, the family has already suspicious of Edward and already
Speaker 5: doesn't like him dramatically. So what happens. What does he
Speaker 5: say when they are looking for their sister, even after
Speaker 5: six weeks. I know he makes some initial statements, but
Speaker 5: some of the bizarre behavior that he exhibits tell us
Speaker 5: about that.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: This comes back to the idea of one forensic psychologist
Speaker 3: told me that psychopaths fouled their own nests eventually, and
Speaker 3: what that means is that there is only so long
Speaker 3: that you can keep this mask before it starts to slip,
Speaker 3: and you cannot emulate real human empathy and emotions for
Speaker 3: very long before people recognize that you're faking. And that's
Speaker 3: what they do. And that's what he did. So what
Speaker 3: he did was he killed his wife and his child.
Speaker 3: He took their bodies and put them into Cayuga Lake.
Speaker 3: At the deepest part, he said, and he confessed all
Speaker 3: of this, and this is what he did to cover
Speaker 3: up the crime. And it worked because the Scuts had
Speaker 3: missed Harriet and Priscilla for six weeks, but they assumed
Speaker 3: that everything was fine, and this still was an extraordinary
Speaker 3: long time to not talk to their sister. So Edward
Speaker 3: Ruloff shows up weeks later after the murders and he
Speaker 3: says hi to her two brothers, Ephraim and William Scutt,
Speaker 3: and they say where is she? And he says, she's
Speaker 3: vacationing between the Lakes, which was between the Great Lakes,
Speaker 3: and he said they'll be back at some point, but
Speaker 3: he stays the night there. He continues to be around. Now,
Speaker 3: this is a time period that loved snake oil salesman.
Speaker 3: They love frauds in the nineteenth century and shysters, and
Speaker 3: it was so easy to be a shyster in that
Speaker 3: time period. There's no driver's licenses, there's no national identification system,
Speaker 3: there's no photography really, and so he could have stepped
Speaker 3: on a train and gone to Ohio and taken that
Speaker 3: job and been just fine and disappeared and they might
Speaker 3: not have ever been able to track him down. And
Speaker 3: he could have said they ran away, you know, Harriet
Speaker 3: had enough of him and took off. But yet he returns.
Speaker 3: And it is that element of self sabotage that is
Speaker 3: so interesting about people with psychopathy, and he does it twice.
Speaker 3: And if people often ask me that why is he
Speaker 3: doing that? Why is he doing that? Well, I think
Speaker 3: that without the scuts, he didn't have a host. And
Speaker 3: people that I've spoken to experts on psychopathy often called
Speaker 3: them like they'll call them like a virus or and
Speaker 3: you know, a bacteria looking for a host. And without
Speaker 3: the scuts, he had no host. And I think he
Speaker 3: needed them, he needed a resource, and he would come
Speaker 3: home and he would get food and comfort from them.
Speaker 3: And he did such odd things like he tried to
Speaker 3: return a ring to William that William had given his sister,
Speaker 3: and he said, do you want this back? And William said, no,
Speaker 3: it's Harriet's why I don't want it back. So, just
Speaker 3: things that were very odd. He was constantly It's not
Speaker 3: that he wanted to get caught. I think he just
Speaker 3: didn't know what else to do. And there was a
Speaker 3: part of him that felt so insecure without the scuts
Speaker 3: that he continued to return.
Speaker 5: You right about Ephraim being one of the brothers that
Speaker 5: has especially always been suspicious and disliked. Edward now is
Speaker 5: hell bent on revenge and hell bent on capturing him,
Speaker 5: so he goes to extraordinary efforts to be able to
Speaker 5: do that. Tell us about those efforts.
Speaker 3: The efforts you're talking about what the family is most
Speaker 3: excited to talk to me about.
Speaker 6: Now.
Speaker 3: So you know, I found Ruloff's family. They still live
Speaker 3: on the same farm where he lived with Harriet. It's
Speaker 3: on Scut Road, which is in Dryden, and it's the
Speaker 3: same creek in the back, the same trees, the same well,
Speaker 3: you know, all of that is the same. So very
Speaker 3: almost cathartic for me to walk around that area the
Speaker 3: same dirt that that man walked on one hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty years ago. So the Scuts particularly like this part
Speaker 3: of the story because it shows a quality that they
Speaker 3: believe they still have, which is an incredible amount of
Speaker 3: loyalty for their family and perseverance. So rule Off finally,
Speaker 3: because he's returned a couple of times, they become suspicious
Speaker 3: and Ephraim and William decide they are going to do
Speaker 3: something that seems inexplicably complicated to me, which was they're
Speaker 3: going to keep rule Off at their house. They're going
Speaker 3: to force him to write a letter to Harriet, who
Speaker 3: now he says is in Ohio. They're going to snail
Speaker 3: mail this letter to Ohio. She will presumably respond, snail
Speaker 3: mail it back and everything will be okay. And so
Speaker 3: you know, you have to imagine this is going to
Speaker 3: take a This is a long process. This is not
Speaker 3: going to be something that's quick. So unfortunately they left
Speaker 3: their sister in charge of keeping an eye on him,
Speaker 3: and he simply walked off and disappeared. And this sends
Speaker 3: the family into a panic because despite everything in their
Speaker 3: bones that says there's no way this man, the way
Speaker 3: he speaks, the way he looks killed our sister and
Speaker 3: his daughter, reality is setting in and they decide they
Speaker 3: need to go and find him. So incredible series of
Speaker 3: an event of events happen where we have Ephraim rushing
Speaker 3: from renting force and carriage to race to train stations,
Speaker 3: and he hops from train station to train station, and
Speaker 3: then he gets on the steamers that that go across
Speaker 3: the Great Lakes and eventually tracks Ruloff down, which is
Speaker 3: just incredibley and finds him and he slips away again,
Speaker 3: and then there's this pivotal moment once he's recaptured one
Speaker 3: more time. They're on the steamer together and they're heading
Speaker 3: back to New York for certain justice. Ephrom is hoping,
Speaker 3: and someone finds out on the ship that this is
Speaker 3: Edward Ruloff, the man who's accused of killing his family,
Speaker 3: and they want to hang him on the boat. The
Speaker 3: captain says, let's do it. I've got rope. Let's do it.
Speaker 3: All of the passengers on the boat and Ephram Scott
Speaker 3: had such belief, such a deep belief in the justice
Speaker 3: system that he said, no, we're not going to do that.
Speaker 3: We're going to have inventional, secular justice, and we're going
Speaker 3: to do it back in New York, and I'm going
Speaker 3: to show everybody that I was able to bring him back.
Speaker 3: Edward Ruloff and Ephraim have a moment on the top
Speaker 3: deck where they're sitting next to each other, and Ephraim says,
Speaker 3: I don't understand what happened. You know, we brought you
Speaker 3: into our family, you married my sister. We gave you
Speaker 3: every opportunity, We helped you start at school in Dryden
Speaker 3: when you were very young. We kept you safe. I
Speaker 3: don't understand why you did this. And really Ruloff stayed quiet,
Speaker 3: and then he suggested that he would jump over the
Speaker 3: edge and take his own life. He would rather do
Speaker 3: that and Ephraim essentially snickered and said go ahead, but
Speaker 3: I don't think you're going to do it, and he
Speaker 3: was right. Edward didn't want to do it. So he
Speaker 3: goes back to face justice, and that's a big question
Speaker 3: mark because justice can be funny sometimes.
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Speaker 5: we're talking Kate about his undoing and finally this trial,
Speaker 5: but you said, let's not before we get ahead of
Speaker 5: ourselves realize what happens at this trial and what the
Speaker 5: prosecutor was faced with.
Speaker 3: Well, he was faced with no bodies is the issue.
Speaker 3: And we know now that no bodies can be problematic
Speaker 3: of course in a murder trial, because you simply can say, well,
Speaker 3: she ran off with our daughter and she met a man,
Speaker 3: and particularly in the nineteenth century, it would have been very,
Speaker 3: very difficult to disprove that. But nobody's for rule off
Speaker 3: was no crime, and that's what he harped on. He
Speaker 3: represented himself in this trial, and there was an unraveling
Speaker 3: of witnesses who came, and some said he was insanely jealous,
Speaker 3: some said he was abusive, but there was simply no evidence.
Speaker 3: There wasn't even evidence that she died. They examined the
Speaker 3: place where they lived, the house where they lived, and
Speaker 3: they couldn't find it. A bit of blood. He had
Speaker 3: cleaned it up, and there again was no physical evidence.
Speaker 3: Nobody heard anything, no neighbors saw anything. It would have
Speaker 3: been difficult today, I believe, to convict him, and in
Speaker 3: the nineteenth century, she, like I said, could have gotten
Speaker 3: on a train and gone anywhere. And you don't want
Speaker 3: to convict a man, and particularly convict a man of
Speaker 3: murder in the nineteenth century, where it would have been
Speaker 3: a death sentence, have that happened, and then have her
Speaker 3: walk back in a year later. So they were very
Speaker 3: careful about that. The district attorney did something interesting. He
Speaker 3: told the jury that they could have two choices. They
Speaker 3: could convictim of murder, which of course would have been
Speaker 3: his preference. He would have a convictim of murder, which
Speaker 3: would have been the death penalty, or you could convict
Speaker 3: him of a lesser crime, which was kidnapping, and that
Speaker 3: would have given him ten years at Auburn State Prison.
Speaker 3: And so when the case was done and rule Off
Speaker 3: said over and over again, no body, no crime. The
Speaker 3: conviction was for ten years for the kidnapping, it wasn't
Speaker 3: for murder, and the judge kind of cornered the jury
Speaker 3: and he talked to the jury four men and said,
Speaker 3: I don't understand. How could you convict him for kidnapping
Speaker 3: and not murder? And he said, there's not enough evidence
Speaker 3: for murder. But we knew he did something. We believe
Speaker 3: he killed her, but there wasn't enough evidence, which I
Speaker 3: thought was very interesting. So we went with the smaller
Speaker 3: time so that at least we could get him for something.
Speaker 3: So he was convicted and sent to Auburn's State prison,
Speaker 3: and which was one of the best things that had
Speaker 3: ever happened to him.
Speaker 5: What category characterized this time there? And why? And you
Speaker 5: talk about write about him thriving in prison? How was that?
Speaker 3: Well? He loved, I mean, which just sounds so interesting.
Speaker 3: Albert State Prison at that time period was implementing an
Speaker 3: interesting way of handling prisoners, which was imposed silence. So
Speaker 3: everybody had their own cell. They didn't share cells, and
Speaker 3: they were not allowed to talk. It was like being
Speaker 3: in a silent monastery. I suppose they weren't allowed to talk.
Speaker 3: They couldn't even talk when they ate together. And Edward
Speaker 3: loved it because he had become obsessed with languages at
Speaker 3: such a young age. When you're married and you have
Speaker 3: a child, and you have a job as a botanical
Speaker 3: doctor and as a teacher, and you're giving lectures on
Speaker 3: phrenology and language, you don't have time to work on
Speaker 3: really serious academic pursuits. And now he did. He had
Speaker 3: ten years of quiet, of three meals a day, and
Speaker 3: he actually became a carpet designer in prison, and he
Speaker 3: was paid a lot of money for these designs because
Speaker 3: he was so creative. He invented a few new things,
Speaker 3: including a gun. In prison. He was able to figure
Speaker 3: out how to make a gun, and he never used it,
Speaker 3: but these little inventions came became useful for him later on.
Speaker 3: So while in prison, he woke up one morning and
Speaker 3: there was like a ding ding moment where he realized
Speaker 3: that he could figure out the origin of human language,
Speaker 3: which was a really big question mark, and he believed
Speaker 3: that there was a manufactured from Europe pattern that all
Speaker 3: language was created on. So he thought that the letters
Speaker 3: R and F were very important, which I'm sure is
Speaker 3: no coincidence because those letters were in his last name.
Speaker 3: And he had really interesting idea about how language was
Speaker 3: formed and if you could figure that pattern out, then
Speaker 3: you could really leverage that in teaching languages, which would
Speaker 3: have been a million dollar idea in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3: So this was a dream for him. And now he
Speaker 3: had ten years to write on this manuscript, which he
Speaker 3: titled The Method in Formation of Human Language. And he
Speaker 3: had these ten years with making some money as a
Speaker 3: carpet maker, carpet designer, living in silence, eating well, being
Speaker 3: fairly healthy. While he was there, he worked in the kitchen.
Speaker 3: I mean, this was not a bad life. And Auburn
Speaker 3: State Prison had a terrible reputation. I mean it looked
Speaker 3: like this Gothic out of Hell type you know scenario,
Speaker 3: and he really benefited from it. He really really used
Speaker 3: his time.
Speaker 5: Well there talk about using his time well. He was
Speaker 5: respected as a very knowledgeable academic, and he also designed
Speaker 5: or offered to be able to teach people and tutor
Speaker 5: people in there. What did that lead to in terms
Speaker 5: of relationships.
Speaker 3: Well, when he got out of Auburn State Prison with
Speaker 3: his manuscript in hand, he decided he wanted to start
Speaker 3: a new life and he was going to leave upstate
Speaker 3: New York, which was a fantastic idea. He didn't need
Speaker 3: to stay around. However, the Scuts had pressured for so
Speaker 3: long the district attorney to file new charges. He had
Speaker 3: been charged with killing his wife. He was convicted of
Speaker 3: kidnapping her. Then he became charged as soon as he
Speaker 3: was released after ten years for killing his daughter. This
Speaker 3: never went anywhere. There wasn't enough evidence. They couldn't even
Speaker 3: figure out how she died, if she died at all.
Speaker 3: So eventually Ruloff had to be jailed while awaiting trial,
Speaker 3: and there was a lot of appeals and so on.
Speaker 3: So he was jailed in Ithaca. The under sheriff, which
Speaker 3: was like a deputy sheriff, had a family, a wife
Speaker 3: and a child, and rule Off had volunteered or was asked,
Speaker 3: I'm not sure which to tutor the young young people
Speaker 3: in Ithaca, because right what you said was he was
Speaker 3: this well known scholar. So these people in Ithaca who
Speaker 3: wanted to kill him. They wanted him strung up at
Speaker 3: the gallows. Were now allowing their children, their teenagers, to
Speaker 3: come and be tutored in languages by him, which I
Speaker 3: just find so bizarre. And one of the people who
Speaker 3: was tutored was the under sheriff's son, whose name was
Speaker 3: Al Jarvis. And he was a young man who, you know,
Speaker 3: I sounds like had some troubles in the past, but
Speaker 3: had a lot of potential. He's very good looking. He
Speaker 3: was enamored with Ruloff and vice versa, and he ran
Speaker 3: errands for Ruloff. And in the meantime, ever Ruloff, who's
Speaker 3: shackled in this jail, isducing the under sheriff's wife, so
Speaker 3: Al Jarvis's mother, and it all results in ever Ruloff
Speaker 3: breaking out of jail in the middle of the night
Speaker 3: with their help and going on the run.
Speaker 5: He goes on the run. And you write about the
Speaker 5: state of eighteen seventies. You had mentioned before there was
Speaker 5: no method of identification and photography was quite new. Tell
Speaker 5: us about his reinvention.
Speaker 3: Well, he was so interesting. He went on the run,
Speaker 3: and first he went to Pennsylvania where his brother was
Speaker 3: and he's tromping through the snow, and this becomes important
Speaker 3: to the story later on. He's tromping through the snow
Speaker 3: and he's not dressed well for the snow and he
Speaker 3: has frostbite and one of his toes on his foot
Speaker 3: is it comes to frostbite. He ends up with his
Speaker 3: brother and he's bored. He would have been safe, probably
Speaker 3: staying with Ruloff. His brother's name was Ruloff Ruluffsen. He
Speaker 3: would have been fine staying with his brother, but he
Speaker 3: ventures off and goes to Alleghany College under the name
Speaker 3: Professor James Nelson. Alleghany College was headed by a president
Speaker 3: who was from England. Ruloff didn't know this, and he
Speaker 3: feigned an English accent, and the president from England bought it.
Speaker 3: He said, okay, this guy's great. He had him teach
Speaker 3: language classes as kind of an adjunct, and then Rulof said, well,
Speaker 3: I really want and he's on the run the whole time.
Speaker 3: He said, I really want a full time faculty position here,
Speaker 3: and the president said, we can't give you that. We
Speaker 3: don't have an opening, but let me look around, and
Speaker 3: he poked around and eventually rule off James Nelson. Professor
Speaker 3: James Nelson was offered a full time faculty position in
Speaker 3: North Carolina at a university there. So this is a
Speaker 3: man who has escaped a murder sentence, who's awaiting trial
Speaker 3: to potentially go on trial for his daughter's murder. And
Speaker 3: he has made up a totally new name, and he
Speaker 3: is gone and now has accepted a faculty position in
Speaker 3: North Carolina.
Speaker 5: What happens in the introim.
Speaker 3: Well, he gets derailed thanks to Al Jarvis and Al's mother.
Speaker 3: So after his escape, the under sheriff puts two and
Speaker 3: two together and figures out that his wife and his
Speaker 3: son had aided in this. He's furious. He kicks him out,
Speaker 3: and Al Jarvis and the mother snail Mail of course,
Speaker 3: rule off and they know where he was. He had
Speaker 3: kept in touch with him, and Al Jarvis said, you're
Speaker 3: gonna help us, or I'm going to kill you, which
Speaker 3: is why when I read portraits of Al Jarvis as
Speaker 3: being this nice boy who's been corrupted by Edward Ruloff,
Speaker 3: not quite the case. He had some problems beforehand. So
Speaker 3: Al Jarvis says, I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna kill you.
Speaker 3: I'll slitch your throat next time I see you. If
Speaker 3: you don't help us, So instead of giving getting on
Speaker 3: the train to North Carolina, rule off essentially robs a
Speaker 3: jewelry store and eventually gets caught and eventually gets sent
Speaker 3: back to Ithaca and then gets off the Supreme The
Speaker 3: New York State Supreme Court came back and said, we
Speaker 3: cannot prosecute him for murdering his daughter and there's not
Speaker 3: enough evidence. Nobody, no crime, So he wasn't going to
Speaker 3: be charged.
Speaker 6: There.
Speaker 3: The escape was sort of blown off. The district of
Speaker 3: the deputy under the under sheriff had decided to please
Speaker 3: not press charges. It was too embarrassing. Already he was
Speaker 3: already humiliated, and then the jewelry store owner had gotten
Speaker 3: back all of his jewels, so there was no motivation
Speaker 3: for him to prosecute. So that was it. He walked out,
Speaker 3: he was released, and then he disappeared from upstate New
Speaker 3: York and reappeared in New York City.
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Speaker 5: Now, you say he disappeared, but this relationship with Al
Speaker 5: Jarvis and then a new person named Billy Dexter arises
Speaker 5: tell us about this new relationship.
Speaker 3: So Ruloff ends up in the eighteen sixties in New
Speaker 3: York and al Jarvis. Eventually they make up and he
Speaker 3: comes with him and they operate a crime ring. They
Speaker 3: start gathering other criminals because ruleof says, one simple thing.
Speaker 3: I have this manuscript. I need the time to finish it.
Speaker 3: New York is the place for me. There's libraries all
Speaker 3: over the place that I can use, but I need money.
Speaker 3: And so he creates this little crime ring with the
Speaker 3: promise that if you go out and rob silk merchants,
Speaker 3: sell their wares, help support me, and let me have
Speaker 3: this apartment in Irving Place, that I will when I
Speaker 3: make a million dollars off of this manuscript, I will
Speaker 3: repay you. Essentially, So they have a boxer whose name
Speaker 3: or they have a what they called an illiterate boxer
Speaker 3: named Billy Jarvis, who was a really interesting character. He
Speaker 3: was very rough and humble, but he had an interest
Speaker 3: in higher education, and Ruloff met him in prison. Ruloff
Speaker 3: was in and out of prison, so was al Jarvis.
Speaker 3: But they were under fictitious names. There was no records check.
Speaker 3: They couldn't figure out who was here. So Ruloff met
Speaker 3: Billy Dexter in prison, so Al Jarvis and Billy Dexter
Speaker 3: and Ruloff would go and rob silk merchants in upstate
Speaker 3: New York in the countryside. They collected a couple of
Speaker 3: other criminals to help. There was a woman who cooked
Speaker 3: for them but also fenced their silk for them. They
Speaker 3: had another guy who was helping rob stuff. And in
Speaker 3: the meantime, Ruloff is spending all night long writing his manuscript.
Speaker 3: So they've created this crime ring just to fund his
Speaker 3: academic research, which was very interesting. And then there's this
Speaker 3: fateful turn where they rob a silk merchant in Binghamton,
Speaker 3: New York, an upstate New York, and they don't understand
Speaker 3: how chloroform works, and they think that they have knocked
Speaker 3: out the two young male clerks who are babysitting the silk,
Speaker 3: and they did not, and ensues this horrific fight between
Speaker 3: these three robbers, including Ruloff and these two clerks, and
Speaker 3: it turns into total mayhem and ends fatally for three
Speaker 3: out of the five people involved.
Speaker 5: He isn't arrested immediately, but tell us about this arrest
Speaker 5: and this upcoming trial.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a dead clerk, and then Ruloff's too. You know,
Speaker 3: co robbers Billy Dexter and Al Jarvis drowned, although there
Speaker 3: are people who think that Ruloff actually cause them to
Speaker 3: drown in the river behind the clerk's the river behind
Speaker 3: the silk merchant. So he is eventually located. He was
Speaker 3: this very not a very distinguished hiding place. He was
Speaker 3: in an outhouse, and he was discovered, but nobody knew
Speaker 3: who he was. And he has asked to identify the
Speaker 3: two dead robbers from the river, and he says, I
Speaker 3: don't know who they are, even though he knew perfectly
Speaker 3: well who they were. So he is dragged in along
Speaker 3: with all the other nerd wells in town to essentially
Speaker 3: stand trial. Somebody is responsible for this dead clerk and
Speaker 3: these two robbers, and so there's not enough evidence against
Speaker 3: really anyone. And the judge tells Ruloff, who he gave
Speaker 3: a fictitious name. The judge tells Ruloff go on and go,
Speaker 3: and so he turns and there's a voice that says stopped.
Speaker 3: And he turns around and he realizes that one of
Speaker 3: the judges in his trial is standing in that courtroom,
Speaker 3: and he says, you are Edward Ruloff. I know exactly
Speaker 3: who you are. You killed your wife and your child.
Speaker 3: And Ruloff is just brilliant because he says, yeah, you're right,
Speaker 3: that's exactly who I am. Now, do you understand why
Speaker 3: I made up a name. I happened to be in
Speaker 3: this town and there's a dead clerk. No, I didn't
Speaker 3: have anything to do with that, but I lied because
Speaker 3: everybody's going to assume I was involved. So it was
Speaker 3: very This man was very quick, thinking on his feet,
Speaker 3: pretty remarkable turning. He almost got away with it, you.
Speaker 5: Say, almost tell us some of the features of this
Speaker 5: most incredible trial.
Speaker 3: Eventually, well, you know, they locate the robber who was
Speaker 3: the only surviving robber left behind a funny shoe, a
Speaker 3: leather patent shoe, and it was specially made to fit
Speaker 3: someone who was missing one toe, right, And so before
Speaker 3: Ruloff left town, they snagged him again and they looked
Speaker 3: at his foot and it matched this shoe perfectly because
Speaker 3: he was missing that one toe. And he goes on
Speaker 3: trial and it's pretty extraordinary. You know, he represents himself,
Speaker 3: which is usually not a very good idea. Bundy also
Speaker 3: represented himself for some of his trials, and this happens.
Speaker 3: This is another trait of people with psychopathy. They have
Speaker 3: this again, this false grandiose sense of self where they
Speaker 3: are much smarter than they actually are. And rule Off
Speaker 3: had some great arguments. He essentially said, this was self defense.
Speaker 3: These clerks fought with me, and you know, I eventually
Speaker 3: had to protect myself. So the trial was interesting. He
Speaker 3: eventually was convicted, and it's what happened after the trial
Speaker 3: that really is the crux of the book, which is
Speaker 3: now he's being scheduled to be executed. But you have
Speaker 3: groups of men who say, I don't think this is
Speaker 3: a good idea. He's very smart, he's promising us he
Speaker 3: has this manuscript that's life changing for languages. Let's not
Speaker 3: kill him. Let's figure out a way to harness his
Speaker 3: brain for good instead of evil.
Speaker 5: Let's talk about some of those people, what they found
Speaker 5: and what they determined, and just some of the particulars
Speaker 5: of speaking with Edward Ruloff.
Speaker 3: You know, Edward Ruloff was a master manipulator. That's a
Speaker 3: trait for people who have psychopathy, and he really was.
Speaker 3: Every time someone came in, he could read them very quickly,
Speaker 3: figured out what they wanted from him and then provide that.
Speaker 3: So they all left with different impressions. So there was
Speaker 3: the journalist Hamilton Freeman who was manipulated to a point
Speaker 3: where he went to the governor to try to save
Speaker 3: Ruloff's life, which is a big no no for a journalist.
Speaker 3: She really inserted himself in Ruloff's life. There was a
Speaker 3: reporter named Oliver Dyer who was with the New York
Speaker 3: Son and Oliver really believed in the theory and his writing,
Speaker 3: and he published incredibly large, in depth excerpts of Ruloff's
Speaker 3: theory in the newspapers, which swayed the public in his favor.
Speaker 3: There was a psychiatrist whose name was John Gray. He
Speaker 3: was very notorious. He was nation's most well known psychiatrist,
Speaker 3: and he believed in the biology theory. So the biology
Speaker 3: theory was that if your body was sick, then you
Speaker 3: had a mental illness. Most likely, if your body was healthy,
Speaker 3: then your mind was healthy. And so he came in
Speaker 3: and examined Ruloff's body, which was not in great shape.
Speaker 3: I mean, Ruloff really had some big health issues. But
Speaker 3: Ruloff understood that theory well enough to know that he
Speaker 3: did not want to be deemed insane. If he were
Speaker 3: deemed insane, he would be sent to an asylum, which
Speaker 3: was about one step above being executed. Asylums, including Gray's asylum,
Speaker 3: were not really good. But the most important thing was yes,
Speaker 3: that would save his life if he were deemed insane
Speaker 3: legally insane, but it would discredit all of his research.
Speaker 3: Nobody would believe that a quote unquote crazy man would
Speaker 3: have written anything of value. So he lied about his
Speaker 3: physical condition because he knew that Gray would call him insane.
Speaker 3: So every person he encountered he never confessed to anyone
Speaker 3: but Hamilton Freeman. He spoke eloquently about linguistics to Oliver Dyer,
Speaker 3: but he knew that Oliver Dyer was very religious, and
Speaker 3: so he never He never admitted that he was an
Speaker 3: atheist to Oliver Dyer. When people would ask to John
Speaker 3: Gray and to another psychologist he questioned the existence of God.
Speaker 3: That was safe with them because they weren't particularly religious, right,
Speaker 3: but not with Oliver Dyer, who he was hoping to
Speaker 3: leverage with the media. So with every different person he encountered,
Speaker 3: they all walked away with, you know, a different opinion.
Speaker 3: The closest that they came to of being correct about
Speaker 3: who he was was. They called it moral insanity, which
Speaker 3: means your body is healthy, right, you don't have a
Speaker 3: mental illness, but you have some pretty messed up morals,
Speaker 3: and the morals that you have been given by God
Speaker 3: have led you astray, which is again comes back to
Speaker 3: nature versus nurture, and the belief at the time that
Speaker 3: people were born bad, they were born to be killers,
Speaker 3: they were born evil. So that is the closest thing
Speaker 3: to psychopathy I think that we have in that story,
Speaker 3: because nobody knew what psychopathy was, and he fits every
Speaker 3: single marker to a t.
Speaker 5: One of those people that examined Edward was William Hammond,
Speaker 5: and he was an enemy of this John Gray, doctor Gray,
Speaker 5: and was opposed in his theories and ideas. And you
Speaker 5: also talk about this phrenology and the concept behind it.
Speaker 5: But you write a little bit later what inadvertently led
Speaker 5: to in terms of forensic psychology today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean those are both interesting. So you go
Speaker 3: back and think about a nineteenth century psychiatry. It was
Speaker 3: a big fight between the psychiatrist who run the asylums,
Speaker 3: like John Gray, who were doing really terrible things, force medicine,
Speaker 3: and you know, they were putting people in cages. Some
Speaker 3: of it was incredibly inhumane. What was happening for psychiatrists
Speaker 3: at different institutions. If you had, you know, some illness,
Speaker 3: they would cut different body parts off of you in
Speaker 3: hopes of curing it. Now on the flip side is
Speaker 3: you have the neurologists like William Hammond who studied the
Speaker 3: brain after you died. John Gray would study you while
Speaker 3: you were alive, and William Hammond would study you after
Speaker 3: you died. And what the non neurologists were saying is
Speaker 3: that we have the ability to work with people who
Speaker 3: are mentally ill better than the psychiatrists do because we're
Speaker 3: trying to learn what's actually happening with the brain. And
Speaker 3: so the neurologists were at the forefront of this. The
Speaker 3: people who were far far far behind were the precursors
Speaker 3: to psychologists, which were phrenologists. So the phrenologists were looking
Speaker 3: at people's bumps on their skulls, feeling for bumps, and
Speaker 3: then also looking at brains of people who had died,
Speaker 3: and they're assigning different qualities why we behave in which
Speaker 3: ways to different parts of the brain based on the
Speaker 3: bumps on your skull. So if you have dominant bumps
Speaker 3: on the back of your skull, that might be what
Speaker 3: I think they called it, your animalistic section, which means,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're bumpy back there, then you probably
Speaker 3: could kill someone. And there's a moral section, and there's
Speaker 3: a benevolent section. None of it makes sense, and all
Speaker 3: of it was incorrect. However, there are parts of our
Speaker 3: brain that govern different parts of and you know, really
Speaker 3: different qualities that we have, so that was correct. The
Speaker 3: problem that we have with phrenology is based on bumps.
Speaker 3: They could predict, they claimed, who a young person who
Speaker 3: would go on to be a killer and who would
Speaker 3: be a minister. And you can imagine for the people
Speaker 3: who they predicted to be killers or have a large
Speaker 3: animal brain, how uncomfortable that made them. And it was
Speaker 3: certainly part of scientific racism, using your body parts to
Speaker 3: assign intelligence to you.
Speaker 5: Right now, he was sentenced to die, and he could
Speaker 5: hear the gallows being built outside the prison. He knew
Speaker 5: the public disdain for him, and the media was whipping
Speaker 5: up stories of that ilk. What was his goal still
Speaker 5: at this time, just not long before his slated execution,
Speaker 5: what was his goal? And he had seduced journalists, and
Speaker 5: he had seduced academic influential academic people who comes in
Speaker 5: to say that he's a fraud.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a language expert who says, you know who
Speaker 3: is George Sawyer, who says that this manuscript is worthless
Speaker 3: and he's not as smart as he thinks he is.
Speaker 3: And he messed up a couple of translations I asked
Speaker 3: him to do. I mean, that's what's the most interesting
Speaker 3: thing is they're giving insanity tests based on how well
Speaker 3: he translates passages of Greek. Sure, I mean yeah, So
Speaker 3: you know, I think the bottom line is that you
Speaker 3: have someone that somebody like were real, who ultimately his
Speaker 3: theory was worthless, had some crazy ideas. Now I've had
Speaker 3: linguistics experts tell me that his ideas were no more
Speaker 3: crazy than some of the other ideas that people had
Speaker 3: about linguistics. He got several things right that other people
Speaker 3: had not had. There was still the belief in the
Speaker 3: nineteen hundreds that Homer was written that the iliad who
Speaker 3: know Homer wrote was Homer was one person. And Ruloff said, no,
Speaker 3: it was multiple people, and he was right. So there
Speaker 3: are some things that he got right about theories. The
Speaker 3: bottom line was that Edward Ruloff was incredibly smart. He
Speaker 3: was not right about this manuscript, but he was so
Speaker 3: bright that if he had had a normal brain, if
Speaker 3: he had been able to work with other people of
Speaker 3: his caliber, he probably could have made some incredible discoveries.
Speaker 3: But his hubris, his ego, or his lack of self
Speaker 3: esteem wouldn't allow him to do that.
Speaker 5: What about this person named Mather, Henry Matther.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Henry Mather, really, Richard Henry Mather real actually believed
Speaker 3: in Ruloff. He saw in him the potential, this incredible
Speaker 3: potential for languages, but he was frightened of him. At
Speaker 3: the very end of their interview together, Mathers said, this
Speaker 3: is a brilliant man who speaks so eloquently about languages,
Speaker 3: but you can also look in his eyes and see
Speaker 3: that he is imbued by the devil. That this is
Speaker 3: someone who you know, is someone you want to stay
Speaker 3: away from. He is a coldness about him. So again,
Speaker 3: that intersection incredible intelligence and coldheartedness was something that fascinated
Speaker 3: people in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 5: I want to thank you very much for coming on
Speaker 5: and talking about all that is wicked a Gilded Age
Speaker 5: story of murder and the race to the code the
Speaker 5: criminal mind. Thank you so much, Kate Winkler Dawson. Could
Speaker 5: you tell us just before you go about your podcast
Speaker 5: and when this book will be released.
Speaker 3: The book comes out on Tuesday, October fourth, and I
Speaker 3: have three podcasts. One is called Tenfold More Wicked, and
Speaker 3: it's sort of a documentary series where I take one
Speaker 3: crime from history and talk to the family and interview experts.
Speaker 3: The other podcast is called Wicked Words, where I interview
Speaker 3: journalists about their best true crime stories. And then the
Speaker 3: podcast that was just released a couple of weeks ago
Speaker 3: is with forensic investigator Paul Holes and that is called
Speaker 3: Buried Bones. And I present Paul with a case with
Speaker 3: a lot of mystery and he gives me a twenty
Speaker 3: first century investigator's opinion on what went wrong and what
Speaker 3: went right from cases over a couple hundred years ago.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much, Kate winklerd Awsin. It's been a pleasure.
Speaker 5: You have a great evening.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Dan, I appreciate it.
Speaker 5: Thank you