All That is Wicked: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
This month we’re looking at murder, making this week’s book All That is Wicked: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind by Kate Winkler Dawson. So let’s do this.
John Edward Howard Rulofson was born on July 9, 1819 in Saint John, Canada. His father died when Edward was five, leaving his mother to raise three sons by herself. His father had been a poor farmer but his mother instilled in him a love of education and a desire to become a proper gentleman, which was a pretty lofty goal for someone born to a poor farmer. But his mother, Priscilla, meant to see her kids educated and was able to get Edward into an academy, where he discovered a love of languages and to a lesser degree philosophy, and came to disdain religion.
And it was during his time at St John (?) academy that he started learning Greek, which would become the foundation of his own philological theory. We’ll come back to that in a bit.
Rulofson decided while in school that he wanted to spend his life as an academic, and approached his uncle, the only person he knew who might help bankroll this dream, and was roundly rejected. His uncle was not going to support Rulofson doing nothing the rest of his life. So Rulofson went and got a job, first as a law clerk, then as a store clerk. It was as a store clerk he would experience his first arrest. He would start with small burglaries, and I think arson, although I could be conflating that with the “triad” of antisocial personality disorder...bed wetting, arson, cruelty to animals.
Rulofson was fully believed to be innocent. He was intelligent and capable, and at this time in history it was generally believed that criminals LOOKED like criminals, and he did not. So he got cocky...and stole a bolt of fabric. Which he then used to have a new suit made. Then came to the store he worked and stole the bolt of fabric from wearing his new suit. The store owner called him out on it, basically just wanting an acknowledgement of the theft, which Rulofson declined to do, getting kind of snotty about it. And so he was placed under arrest, tried, and convicted of theft, and served his first jail sentence in Canada, two years for theft.
When he was released, he basically had to choice but to leave. Saint John Canada was small town and no one would hire a known thief and suspected arsonist. So he hopped on a steam boat and made his way to upper New York state, where he initially hired on as a general boat crew on a packet boat owned by Henry Schutt. The Schutt family was a well known, close knit, WEALTHY clan of farmers in upper New York state, and Rulofson, who on his relocation after prison renamed himself Edward Ruloff, at first made a good impression. He was obviously intelligent, speaking Greek and Latin and teaching himself other languages, and he presented as wanting to be a teacher.
So with that as his intro, Ruloff became a teacher in Dryden, New York, rapidly forming a bond and relationship with Harriett Schutt, who was the much beloved daughter of the clan, and I believe 16 or 17 when they met. I very much appreciated how the author pointed out this was not unusual for mid-19th century. Like today, if any teacher is getting to close and comfy with a student, it’s creepy and wrong and the teacher should be in prison. But in the 19th century, a 22/23 year old teacher having an interest in and forming a bond with his 16/17 year old student...was not uncommon. This was a natural progression and the age difference was just about right.
However, the problems began well before the couple married. Harriett’s brothers noticed that Ruloff was….a bit possessive. And argumentative. And jealous. Not just of Harriett, but of the success of her family. The family queried Harriett if this was the one, and like 17 year olds the world over, she was convinced this was the love of her life. And the couple married at the end of December 1843. That date comes from an internet site, I don’t recall a wedding date being mentioned in the book.
And almost immediately Ruloff found problem with his young wife, namely that her cousin, a medical doctor, had kissed her. On her wedding day. This same cousin would also kiss Amelia Schutt, who married Harriett’s brother William the next day. Because guess what? Close families kissed each other to congratulate each other on milestones achieved. Like marriage. But Ruloff got pissy and jealous and picked a fight with Harriett.
The couple fought all the damn time, which just made her family dislike him even more. A few months after they married, Harriett and Edward moved to Lansing, NY, a town about 10 miles away from the Schutt family heartland of Dryden, NY. And continued fighting, which the family was aware of through various members visiting and reporting as such.
Now, part of Ruloff’s problem with Dr. Henry Bull, the doctor/cousin who kissed Harriett, is that he WAS a doctor, and so much respected. I kind of wonder if Ruloff had approached his uncle and said I’d like to a doctor, would his uncle have supported that? Irrelevant, just an idle thought, but still… Ruloff, to help offset his teacher’s income, which was not much, was also learning to be an apothecary, basically, someone who would treat illness with herbal remedies, which is about what an apothecary today does. And to be fair...because I know people like to roll their eyes at “alternative” medicine, modern research has returned some very surprising results from apothecary remedies...This is not to say you should experiment yourself, I’m not advocating one way or the other for that.
It IS to say, that apothecary’s were not looked down on, and this was a respected position in the 19th century. So when William Schutt’s wife Amelia became ill with childbed fever shortly after delivering, he asked Ruloff for a remedy to save his young wife and infant daughter.
Now, from the safe remove of 180 years later and a whole lot of research and science, it is widely believed that Amelia and baby Amellie were Ruloff’s first victims. And it’s entirely possible they were. He certainly made creepy statements to Schutt family matriarch Hannah Schutt that indicates he could have deliberately poisoned mother and daughter. However, honesty compels me to say that there’s no evidence of that, that it’s equally likely both died of childbed fever, a not at all uncommon cause of death in the 19th century, and that Ruloff simply reveled in the families dismay because by this point in time, he loathed his in-laws.
There is no question though, that two months later he killed his wife, 19 year old Harriett, and possibly their infant daughter. He admitted to killing Harriett, in 1871, to his biographer, Edward Hamilton Freeman, aka Ham. The confession came while Ruloff was sitting in prison, awaiting execution for another crime, so the admittance of this past murder was not going to make a difference one way or another to Ruloff’s fate. Ruloff never admitted to killing his two month old daughter Priscilla. He only ever claimed to have given her a sleeping draught because she wouldn’t stop crying. This one’s a bit harder to say maybe he didn’t. I mean, with Amelia and Amellie, there is a very plausible alternate cause of death—child bed fever. But it’s not like two month old Priscilla would have wandered her way to a nearby neighbor to be raised as a foundling. Ruloff at one point did claim that he took the infant to one of his brothers to raise; however, Winkler-Dawson points out that the 700 mile round trip to the brother’s location would have been impossible in a time before modern cars, and not everything in the Northeastern part of the United States was connected by train just yet.
What we do know, definitively from Ruloff’s later trial for the murder of Harriett, is that around the time she went missing, he borrowed a horse and cart from a neighbor, who helped him load a trunk into the cart. And Harriett was never seen again. What he admitted to Ham was having dumped Harriett’s body into Cayuga Lake. We don’t know if that’s true, because her body was never found, even after the family dragged the lake looking. Harriett is said to haunt the shores of Cayuga Lake to this day.
Now, even with the 10 mile distance between the family heartland in Dryden and where Ruloff was living in Lansing, the family remained close. And they quickly noticed that mother and child were missing and asked Ruloff, who claimed they were traveling. He did a little traveling himself, to Ohio where and back. At one point, Harriett’s oldest brother got a warrant and authorization to drag Ruloff back to New York, and he quite doggedly ran Ruloff down and hauled him back in chains to stand trial.
And this was interesting, and a stark contrast to last weeks book. Remember I said they went from arrest to trial to execution in assembly line fashion, sometimes in as little as three days, with convictions taking as little as 8 minutes of deliberation?
Well, the judge in the Ruloff case allowed for two charges to be brought against Ruloff. Kidnapping and murder. And the simple fact was, there was not enough evidence for a murder conviction. So the jury returned a guilty verdict on the charge of kidnapping, and Ruloff was sentenced to ten years in prison. And he finally got what he wanted….not the prison, that was incidental. Time to read and study. And he spent almost all of the ten years working on his lingusitic theory. Which was very convoluted, and would eventually be roundly rebuffed and debunked, not just in his day. The author took his theory to modern day linguist, Dr. Michael Weiss at Cornell University, who, in the short short version, said there’s no THERE there. It was gibberish. But to Ruloff, it was his raison d’etre.
After 10 years, Ruloff was released, only to be immediately arrested again. They attempted to try him again for the murder of Harriett. However, Ruloff quite handily pointed out that this was a violation of law, as he had already been tried once before for her murder, and found not guilty on that charge. A second trial constituted double jeopardy. The judge reluctantly agreed with him. But then semi-advised the prosecutor that Ruloff had not yet been charged in regards to the missing Priscilla Ruloff. After which charges were quickly filed for Priscilla’s murder. Here is where Ruloff provided he had sent his daughter to his brother, which could neither be proven or disproven.
While he was waiting appeal? I think it was appeal for Priscilla’s missing, Ruloff befriended the assistant warden’s spouse and son, Jane and Albert Jarvis, who both assisted him in escaping from prison, and he made a break for Pennsylvania where he assumed a false identity, one James Nelson from England and began teaching at a college there. Around the time he received an offer of a full time teaching position in North Carolina under his assumed name, Ruloff received a letter from Al Jarvis, who had been arrested for like petty theft or burglary or something, that if Ruloff didn’t come assist him, he would tell everyone everything.
Now, Ruloff could have easily vanished to North Carolina. But for whatever reasons of his own, he declined to do so, choosing instead to return to New York and assist Jarvis. However, there was still an active warrant for his arrest in New York, for the prison escape if nothing else. And Ruloff, rather than going to North Carolina, was instead arrested in Ohio, and returned to New York. Where the court of appeals looked at his own, carefully prepared document, regarding his conviction for the murder of his daughter, where he pointed out there was no body. And if there’s no body, there’s no crime. Apparently, this was the first time this legal argument had been made, and the court of appeals agreed with Ruloff. His conviction for murder was thrown out, and the judge ordered a third trial. Which never happened because no body had been found. They even exhumed Amelia and Amellie, trying to nail down a cause of death, which was ultimately inconclusive.
And from Auburn, NY, where he had been held in the state prison, Ruloff went to New York City in 1860. And he lived there quietly for the next decade, acting as a nexus of a small band of thieves, one of which was Al Jarvis, who would commit burglaries at night, and then fence the goods. In 1861 he was convicted again of theft and served two years in SingSing. This is where he met Billy Dexter, the third wheel of the tricycle of crime he peddled around NYC for the following 8 years.
Then in August of 1870 the trio decided to rob Halbert’s Drygoods store in Binghamton, NY. Which was risky not so much for the burglary itself, but because Binghamton was less than 50 miles from Dryden, and the Schutt clan was definitely known in Binghamton, and they had neither forgiven nor forgotten Ruloff for their lost daughters.
So August of 1870, Ruloff, Jarvis, and Dexter quietly break into Halbert’s Drygoods, take off their shoes for better sneaking, and chloroform the clerks who had the night shift. Back then, night shift just meant you slept in the store, not that you had to be awake and “on duty” all night. So choloroforming them was not really risky, just a precaution. Which meant absolutely nothing when the effects of the chloroform wore off around the same time one of the burglars tripped on something, creating enough of a racket that the clerks woke up. One of the clerks, Frederick Merrick, fought viciously. However, Merrick dropped his handgun, which Ruloff picked up and shot him in the head with. The three thieves quickly bolted out the store and made for the river, which was supposed to be shallow enough to just walk across. It was not, and Jarvis and Dexter both drowned during the escape attempt.
Ruloff tried to hide out locally, but was eventually found. He did give a fake name on being found, but the entire community was on high alert. The remaining clerk, Gilbert Burrows, was alert enough to advise there had been three burglars, and with only two bodies found, all transients were rounded up. And it wasn’t too long before Ruloff was correctly identified. I believe it was by the judge who oversaw his first trial for the kidnapping and murder of Harriett. With that identification, all bets were off, and Ruloff was quickly arrested for the murder of Merrick.
And since Jarvis was a known associate, having caused his fathers disgrace and eventual relocation to California, and it didn’t take too long to tie Dexter to Ruloff, there was no question that Ruloff was the third man in the break in. Also, there was a smoking gun. Not the literal gun that killed Merrick. See, during one of Ruloff’s earlier escapes, I don’t recall if it was before his trial for Harriett’s murder or after his conviction for Priscilla’s murder, he experienced frost bite on his feet, and lost one of his big toes. This necessitated the purchase of custom footwear to offset the loss of balance created by the loss of his big toe. When the trio bolted from Halbert’s Drygoods, they left their shoes behind. And like Cinderella’s glass slipper, the custom orthotics were a perfect fit for one Edward Ruloff.
And he was found guilty of the murder of the clerk, and sentenced to hang in March 1871. He did not meet this first execution date. Because the question was being bandied about of was his mind too remarkable to execute?
And between the time of his conviction and his final date with the hangman, there was a parade of visitors to Binghamton jail, who tried to answer that very question. Starting with Ham Freeman, who would become Ruloff’s biographer and last remaining friend.
Ham was absolutely convinced of Ruloff’s brilliance. Following Ham would be another newspaperman, Oliver Dyer. He seems to have been equally bewitched and repelled by Ruloff. Greek scholar Richard Henry Mather, who taught at Amherst College, who was intrigued by Ruloff’s language theories, which he read about in Dyer’s newspaper article.
Ruloff really wanted to impress Mather, who was very much living the life Ruloff wanted, a respected academic and recognized expert in the field of languages. Ruloff had attempted to present his linguistic theories to the Philological Convention for sale for the absolutely absurd amount of $500,000...which would be about $10 million in today’s currency. The convention looked at his theory and declined to purchase. Not least of which was because his theory had no merit, but when challenged, even gently, on his ideas, Ruloff became aggressively confrontational.
Dr. Mather would conclude that while Ruloff’s ideas lacked merit, he could not be guilty of murder in the traditional sense of guilt, because he suffered from Monomania. This diagnoses no longer exists, but in the 19th century it was the belief that “a patient inflicted with monomania suffered from a form of partial insanity provoked by one pathological preoccupation…” Dr. Mather felt sympathy for Ruloff, partially buying into his “oh woe is poor pitiful me” telling of his life, but ultimately concluded “The author was a much better murderer than philologist...Here is a man of great philological pretensions, undeniably endowed with extraordinary abilities, possessed of varied acquirement...yet a being heartless, soulless, a perfect Mephistopheles, who has gone through a long and checkered career of black and unredeemed villainy….I do not believe the man has any tenderness save for language. In looking at him you would never imagine him as loving any human being, and you would be sure that his hatred would be implacable.”
George C. Sawyer, who was the Principal at Utica Free Academy, which despite it being Free was one of the premier educational facilities of the day, to which the upper classes endeavored to send their sons for teaching, also interviewed Ruloff. Their meeting was confrontational from the get go, as Ruloff knew Sawyer disliked him and was not approaching with an open mind. Sawyer was not sucked in at all, and saw Ruloff as neither brilliant tortured academic nor as a person deserving of pity. He looked at Ruloff and saw the psychopath. I daresay decades of teaching teenagers, most of whom are psychopaths until they grow out of it, taught Sawyer a thing or two about recognizing evil at face value.
An Alienist, which is what psychologists used to be called, also visited, one Dr. John Gray, from Utica Lunatic Asylum. Ruloff resented this and was openly hostile to Gray, as Ruloff was not insane, and if he was found insane, than any future hope of recognition of his lingusitic theories would be buried under the label of insanity. Fortunately for Ruloff’s legacy, Dr. Gray agreed. He was not insane. Dr. Gray based his belief on a physical examination, believing that if one was physically fit, then one must also be mentally fit. Don’t worry, this theory has LONG been debunked.
And he was right. Psychopathy is a personality disorder, not a mental disorder. But he was right for the wrong reasons. Phrenologists also wanted to examine Ruloff’s skull. Phrenology has also been debunked. The final examination would take place after Ruloff’s execution, which occurred on May 18, 1871. And he died ugly. Rather than a drop through a sprung trap door, they used a counter weight to jerk him up. The weight dislocated his neck but did not break it, so that Ruloff slowly strangled over the course of 15 minutes. Ruloff’s was the last public execution in the state of New York.
After which, since his family never claimed the body, his head was sold by Ruloff’s attorney, George Becker, to Dr. Daniel Burr, a neurologist who wanted to study Ruloff’s brain. Which was inordindately large, weighing in at 3.6 pounds (author gives the measurement in grams, but I did the conversion for us Americans who still use pounds). Average brain is about 3 pounds. Also, his skull was inordinately thick and difficult to cut through.
More importantly, post death...like almost forty years post death, Ruloff’s brain was used to show there is literally no difference in brain shape between him and literally anyone else, a concept that rocked the scientific community when it was presented by Dr. Burt Wilder at a 1909 conference, where he presented side by side pictures of brains from white, black, asian, criminal, non-criminal, man, and woman, showing they all had the same folds and grooves and were functionally the same.
The author does a masterful job intertwining the story between the interviews and conversations with the various experts who visited Ruloff in jail up until his execution. Like, I could see this quite easily being made into a Netflix special as a series of interviews and flashbacks. She includes modern day diagnostics to draw the conclusion that Ruloff may be the first documented psychopath, drawing parallels between his behavior and that of Ted Bundy, Ed Kemper, Dennis Rader and others. The only reason he wasn’t called a psychopath back in the 19th century is that psychology had not evolved to the point of having that as a diagnostic yet….basically, there was no word for what he was. Monomaniac may actually have been the closest to an accurate 19th century diagnosis.
The only stumble she had, and it was so disappointing because I had thought I found the one author who was willing to keep political bullshit out of her writing, on page 277 of a 284 page book, she talks about racism in the Trump era. I am now starting to suspect there are contractual obligations in publishing to include your political opinion, no matter how ham-fisted the introduction of said opinion may be.
She could have easily said “even today racists will advocate for eugenics….” But she didn’t. She also didn’t mention the biggest eugenicist of all, and contemporary to Dr. Wilder was Margaret Sanger. She DID Say “we can trace the history of scientific racism from Wilder’s death in 1925...to more recent trends like racist theories offered in The Bell Curve and other current scientific research that contends that racial differences are genetic and not a social construct.” First off...The Bell Curve was published in 1994. So this is not exactly cutting edge science. Second...social construct? Tell me you’re a postmodernist without using the work postmodern.
I kind of think George Sawyer’s confrontation with Ruloff was exactly that. Ruloff was spouting the 19th century linguists version of postmodernist theory, and Sawyer was having none of it.
She does mention genome mapping, which in 2003 shows that 99.9% of all genes are in common across humanity. Which is not surprising. We are all, after all HUMAN. No one is biologically superior. Which is absolutely true. But racial differences are not a social construct. There are biological reasons for people who evolved near the equator to have developed a greater capacity for melanin production, and why people further away from the equator developed lighter skin to help with Vitamin D production. I am going to point out that as of 2022, which is the year this book was published, they’ve managed to identify 65 DIFFERENT genomes. The good new is, all the genomes still confirm that we’re all still human, no one is superior to anyone else. Different does not mean better or worse. But I do say there are evolutionary reasons for differences in appearance. Not a social construct. And claiming they are a social construct is patently anti-scientific.
But overall, I quite liked this book. Despite her stumble into politics at the end of what should have been a purely apolitical book, Kate Winkler Dawson is an outstanding story teller, who weaves a fascinating narrative of a disturbed psychopathology.
