Frederica Post came back into the picture. In October 1842, one of her sons accidentally shot her. She lingered long enough to make a deathbed confession. She had known the man she’d seen with Mary Rogers. He was a physician and he’d assisted the girl with an abortion. He’d botched it and she’d died. They’d dumped the body in the river. This failed to match the autopsy, so the police discounted the tale. However, newspaper readers thought it made sense of Payne’s ambiguous note.
Officially, the murder of the Beautiful Cigar Girl remains unsolved.
The Learned Murderer of Binghamton
A MAN WALKING TO WORK in Binghamton early in the morning of July 6, 1870, crossed the bridge that spanned the Chenango River. He saw something bobbing in the current, snagged on a rock. With another resident, he went to investigate. It was the body of a man. They dragged it to shore.
Not far away, in the same river, another lumpy object was seen in the water. It was a second body!
By this time, everyone in town knew that several men had broken into the Halbert brothers’ dry goods store and shot the night guard. Fortunately, there were several useful witnesses.
The bodies were delivered to the undertaker for photographs, and then moved to the courthouse for viewing. Reporters Edward Crapsey and Edward “Ham” Hamilton Freeman arrived to cover the case for the New York Times.
At the moment, there was a third body to deal with. In Halberts’ store, young Frederick Merrick had given his life to protect the merchandise. The surviving guard, Gilbert Burrows, said he’d seen three men. Two had broken in and the guards had warned them off. But a third man had emerged and threw a chisel at Burrows, stunning him nearly senseless. Merrick had grabbed one man, and for this he was shot and killed.
Other witnesses emerged. A girl saw two men leave the store by the back door and go toward the river. Another woman saw three men go into the river. The sheriff knew that either they’d find another body or someone who had committed this crime was still alive.
In the excitement, several men rushed into town, passing a stranger with stains on his shirt who was leaving. They turned and followed him, finally cornering him and forcing him to accompany them back to town. The sheriff placed him in jail with two other suspects who were town residents. The stains on the stranger’s shirtfront looked like dried blood.
Each suspect was forced to view the two drowned men, to see their reaction. All claimed not to know them, and nothing in their behavior suggested they were lying. The stranger, too, was composed, and gave the name Charles Augustus, then changed it to George Williams. He said he was 52. A resident recognized him as Edward Rulloff, who was suspected of having killed his wife and child. The stranger admitted he was Rulloff. Yet, he was not detained.
One of the deceased burglars had a booklet in his pocket called Napoleon’s Oraculum, or Book of Fate. It reputedly was a prognosticator. Supposedly, Napoleon had relied on his own copy to predict the success or failure of his future ventures.
Another item left behind in Halberts’ store was a pair of custom-made men’s Oxfords. The left shoe had been fitted to a deformed foot. The drowned men’s feet were normal. The store owners did not recognize the shoes as part of their stock.
Then someone recalled that Rulloff was missing his big toe and had odd protuberances on his feet. These shoes looked like a good fit for a person like this. He hadn’t been gone long, so a deputy took off to find him. Rulloff was walking down the road at a rather hasty pace.
He was brought back to town and made to try on the shoe. The pair fit him. Still, this in itself did not support a murder charge, so once again they let him go.
The burglars were identified, thanks to a letter. One was Billy Dexter, who had an associate, Edward Howard. This turned out to be an alias for Rulloff. In Rulloff’s home, investigators found plenty of evidence that he’d planned and participated in the botched burglary. They learned the name of the other dead burglar, Albert Jarvis. He’d been the son of a jailer where Rulloff had once been incarcerated.
DA Peter Hopkins, now certain he’d turned loose a killer—perhaps a multiple killer—looked into Rulloff’s background. He learned a lot, because John Edward Howard Rulloff had long sought to be famous. He liked to brag about his achievements as a philologist. He’d spent many hours writing what he believed would be the most important book for humankind, Method in the Formation of Language. He told people that he’d taught himself a number of different languages in order to arrive at the origin of all thinking and communication. Rulloff believed that knowledge of the way language had begun offered primal information about human beings.
When financial success eluded him, he became a thief. This earned him some prison time. He became craftier. In 1843, he married a woman named Harriet and they had a daughter. He seemed to find family a burden. One day, both disappeared. Rulloff gave out a story that Harriett had left him. He didn’t know where she’d gone. He then took his manuscript and left.
A month later, curious parties decided to enter the home, and they found evidence of an unprepared departure, uncharacteristic of Harriet. The skirt she’d worn on the last day anyone had seen her lay on the floor.
Although Rulloff was eventually arrested and tried for murder, the bodies were never found. His trial began early in 1846 for a lesser charge: abduction. He was convicted and sentenced to ten years in Auburn Prison. He used the time to more fully educate himself and think about his future.
Yet people were still angry. The search for the bodies of Harriet and Priscilla continued. On the day Rulloff expected to be released in 1856, another warrant was issued for him on suspicion of the murder of his wife. He claimed double jeopardy, so he was charged with his daughter’s murder. A trial was set to start in Tioga County.
RULLOFF WAS CONVICTED AGAIN. This time, he knew more about the law. He appealed and a panel of judges examined the matter of whether someone could be convicted of murder when there was no body. The prosecutor presented a load of circumstantial evidence, convincing the judges that Rulloff should remain in prison to await sentencing.
During this time, he met Albert Jarvis, a 16-year-old. He tutored the boy in Latin and Greek, as well as drawing him into a web. Jarvis came to regard Rulloff as a father figure. There were rumors that Jarvis’ mother fell in love with the prisoner. When Rulloff escaped in the spring of 1857, it seemed fairly clear from the difficulty of getting past eight locks and a chain around his ankle that he’d had inside help.
A $500 reward was posted. A reporter from a local newspaper stated that a visitor to the jail had given Rulloff a large sum of money. Al Jarvis affirmed the story about a stranger coming there who’d asked a lot of questions about Rulloff.
The reward was increased. Al was indicted for assisting Rulloff to escape. Rulloff himself found a way to remain free with several quick robberies, but his narcissism undermined him. Under a false name, he had his photograph taken. People who’d seen the “Wanted” poster identified him. This image was shown to the people who’d been robbed, which helped officials to map Rulloff’s movements.
He went into Ohio, and word of the reward followed. A constable and several men ambushed him and took him back to Ithaca, where he went into a jail with new locks. Jarvis had been fired as the guard.
Due to the difficulty of trying a murder case with no body, the prosecutor focused on suspicions about his “medical attention” to his sister-in-law, Amelia Schutt, and her baby. They had both died just before Rulloff’s wife and daughter disappeared. Rulloff had held a known grudge against his brother-in-law. Many suspect that he’d poisoned the victims. And for this trial, there were bodies and witnesses.
The prosecutor looked to a precedent-setting case out of New York City: A man accused of poisoning his wife a year earlier was tried for it after she was exhumed and her body tested positive for arsenic. The man was convicted and executed.
So Amelia Schutt’s remains were exhumed and examined. Copper deposits were found in the tissues, and it was d
etermined that this foreign substance had been introduced into her system. Yet the investigation failed to connect Rulloff.
Attorney Francis M. Finch took up his case.
IT WAS THE AGE OF CRIMONOLOGY, and scientists were trying to learn how to identify killers before they could act. Cesare Lombroso, a professor at Turin in Italy, was at work on the cases he would present in 1876 in L’uomo delinquente. He’d made numerous measurements and studied many photographs of criminal offenders, and theorized that certain people were born criminals and could be identified by specific physical traits. Lombroso’s ideas spread across Europe and America, supported by the new evolutionary thinking.
The phrenologists who studied Rulloff’s head from afar, as they liked to do in those days of “armchair phrenology,” believed that a head of the size of his harbored significant intelligence. His “winning” manner made him seem even less likely to be a killer.
Finch went before the justices to argue that circumstantial evidence was indeed legally sufficient to convict someone, even if there was no body, but said that the mere absence of a person did not prove a crime has been committed. The justice conceded that in order to hang someone, there should be unequivocal proof. Rulloff got a new trial.
The townspeople were restless. All these legal twists and turns seemed only to delay justice. A lynch mob formed, so Rulloff was moved to Auburn. With Finch’s legal assistance, he was free again. Al Jarvis approached him with the need for money to support himself and his mother, since Rulloff’s escape had left his father unemployed.
But this would have to wait. Under another name, Rulloff spent another two years in jail for burglary. There he met an incarcerated burglar, Billy Dexter. When they emerged from prison, they joined with Jarvis. When they targeted Halbert brothers’ store in Binghamton, their end was near.
District Attorney Peter Hopkins figured that Rulloff was the mastermind and also killed his accomplices. Hopkins prepared for what would be viewed by many as the trial of the century.
Rulloff’s wealthy brother hired George Becker to take up his defense, and Becker teamed up with Charles L. Beale. The strategy was to first question whether Rulloff had even been in town during the incident, and second, to indicate that any shooting he might have done was to save Jarvis from Merrick’s vicious attack. To fund his defense, Rulloff proposed to write an autobiography. He was sure it would be a bestseller. (No one seems to know why Becker never stepped in before with this assistance.)
The trial began on January 4, 1871. Crowds turned up to watch the “Learned Murderer,” as some papers had dubbed him. Rulloff had been charged with burglary and first-degree murder. The press made much of his “crafty” eyes. Because of Rulloff’s apparent genius, he defied the criminal stereotype and thus inspired curiosity. Many people believed that a genius could not also be a murderer.
The prosecutor had reconstructed the case as such: Dexter, Jarvis, and Rulloff had entered the store, and one of them had shot Merrick, killing him. Jarvis and Dexter then drowned while trying to escape. Hopkins used Rulloff’s shoe to prove his presence. In addition, he had a clipped newspaper found in a bag cast aside during the escape that matched a newsprint clipping found in Rulloff’s rooms. Items from the pockets of the two deceased burglars also tied them to Rulloff, as did witnesses. Burrows made a clear and confident identification of Rulloff as the third burglar. Rulloff’s own tome worked against him, as his handwriting was compared to that on notes found in the other burglars’ pockets.
The judge ruled that there was sufficient evidence of complicity among the three men to accept that Rulloff had been part of the fatal incident. But was he Merrick’s killer?
Rulloff’s defense was that he had warned Merrick they would not hurt him, but the young clerk had attacked so ferociously that he’d had to do something. It was self-defense.
The jury took less than five hours to convict Rulloff. He was sentenced to hang on March 3, 1981.
In his cell, Rulloff received letters from many scholars. It was a foregone conclusion that he’d killed his wife and daughter, and many suspected that he’d also killed his sister-in-law and her child. In addition, there was talk that the dead burglars were among his victim toll, although his only official victim was Merrick. Rulloff exploited his celebrity status to discuss the idea he believed would change the world. If he had to die, he could at least become renowned for his genius, he thought. But when put to the test, he turned out to be more of a con man who knew a few erudite phrases.
In a New York Times commentary, the author said one of Rulloff’s letters was “a most unique mixture of acuteness, erudition, pure nonsense, and pretentious impudence” which ignored the fundamental principles of science.
Rulloff submitted to interviews. In one, he offered what would become both a signature phrase and a mystery: “…you cannot kill an unquiet spirit.” He swore that people would still sense his presence, because he’d come as a “chill in the night” to remind them of his wrongful conviction.
On May 18, 1871, Rulloff was taken to the gallows. Several sources say he urged the hangman to “hurry it up. I want to be in Hell in time for dinner.”
The hangman pulled a cap over Rulloff’s head. Then Rulloff was raised off his feet with a quick snap. He struggled for several minutes. His neck did not break as it was supposed to. Reportedly, his heart beat for twenty minutes before he finally expired.
Many people tried to claim Rulloff’s body. One man made a death mask to display at his art gallery before the body went on public display. Dr. George Burr received it for the Geneva Medical College. His hope was that, with a scientific analysis of the brain, he and his colleagues might learn something profound about Rulloff’s criminal disposition.
Burr interred the rest of the remains, but medical students dug them up again (they were later found in a potter’s field). Then Burr went on a lecture circuit to discuss Rulloff as a Lombrosian “criminal type,” stretching facts to fit his theory. Rulloff’s rather heavy brain weighed nearly 60 ounces.
It came into the hands of Burt Green Wilder, a former Civil War surgeon who became an animal biologist at Cornell. He developed a collection of human brains which, at its peak, had 600 specimens. Today, Rulloff’s brain remains part of the much-reduced collection.
Crimes of the Century
I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT historical forensics, and during the turn of the 19th century into the early twentieth century, we had some interesting cases in New York. I once saw an episode of Law and Order that cited the Molineux Rule, which was a direct result of the next case.
Just before Christmas in 1898, Harry Seymour Cornish received an anonymous gift where he worked as director of the Knickerbocker Athletic Club. He unwrapped a silver container full of a substance that was labeled Emerson’s Bromo-seltzer. He thought it was a joke, but he took it to where he lived with his sixty-two-year-old cousin, Katherine Adams. On December 28, she complained of a headache, so her daughter asked Cornish to give the substance to her. He prepared a spoonful of the powder in a glass of water. After Katherine drank it, she felt awful. Soon she was in agony. Then she collapsed and died before the doctor could get to her.
Cornish was aghast. When the autopsy confirmed that Katherine had ingested cyanide of mercury, not bromo-seltzer, he realized he had an enemy intent on killing him. He thought he knew who it was.
The likeliest suspect was Roland Burnham Molineux, a thirty-one-year-old chemist and the superintendent of Morris Herrmann & Company. He and Cornish did not get along, and Molineux had been a serious suspect just the year before when Henry Barnet, a rival for the affection of Blanche Chesebrough, died from a toxic substance that had been sent to him in the mail as Kutnow’s Improved Effervescent Powder. It was cyanide of mercury.
In addition to this incident, the plant where Molineux worked had a laboratory that contained chemicals from which cyanide of mercury could be produced.
It was no surprise that Molineux was arrested, but he insisted he was innocent
. At his expensive three-month trial, starting in November 1899, the prosecutor used eighteen expert witnesses on handwriting analysis, including two eminent analysts, John F. Tyrrell and Albert S. Osborn. They were the celebrity experts of their day. They stated that Molineux’s handwriting matched handwriting on the package, including the recurrence of certain misspelled words. They even noted efforts to disguise it. Molineux’s attorney countered with only one expert. The judge allowed testimony about the earlier suspicions in the prior death of a rival, so the jury was quick to convict. On February 10, 1900, they announced their verdict. Six days later, Molineux received a death sentence.
Yellow journalism was at its height during this trial, with the New York Journal battling it out for circulation with the New York World newspaper. Every stage of the proceedings was duly printed out, including all the gossip.
Molineux appealed. In October 1901, the New York appellate court decided that information about a murder for which Molineux had never been arrested or convicted should not have been allowed. In other words, a man cannot be tried with past innuendo. It was a constitutional safeguard that ensured that no defendant would be assumed guilty of the relevant charge just because of past circumstances. Molineux was granted a new trial.
This time, his attorney hired experts who insisted that the prosecution’s authorities had made claims about what they recognized that couldn’t possibly have been true. This time, Molineux was acquitted. Quickly thereafter, his wife, Blanche, divorced him.
The Molineux Rule was notable in its impact on evidence admissibility. It became a landmark case, requiring that someone be tried on facts alone rather than on the defendant’s “propensity” to commit the crime in question, based on unproven allegations.
IT WASN’T LONG BEFORE ANOTHER sensational case grabbed the headlines, and this one was even more twisted. As a teenager, pretty Florence Nesbitt, with a head full of thick, dark hair, drew the attention of an artist who wanted her to pose for him. This led to more such offers and eventually she became a model in Manhattan (including “the Gibson Girl”), and then a chorus girl. She took her middle name, Evelyn, and became a celebrity. Her face appeared everywhere, from ads to women’s magazines to souvenir items.
Shadows of Death (True Crime Box Set) Page 9
