The Real Edward Rulloff

These are the undisputed facts.

He was a lawyer, a physician, a linguist fluent in twenty-seven languages—and one of the most notorious serial killers of the nineteenth century.

He tutored children in Latin and Greek from a jail cell while his wife and infant daughter lay at the bottom of Cayuga Lake, where their bodies have never been found. He corresponded with scholars at Harvard and Yale. He spent a decade in a New York prison that forbade inmates from speaking, and emerged convinced he would recover the first language ever spoken by man. To fund his studies, he stole silk. To help him, he raised a young boy into the closest thing he ever had to a son—an accomplice.

Mark Twain begged the New-York Tribune to spare him. Elizabeth Cady Stanton could not look away. Horace Greeley argued for a pardon on the grounds of his intellect alone. A twelve-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle may have been reading the papers in Scotland.

His name was Edward Rulloff. The newspapers called him The Educated Murderer.

The Boy from St. Johns

He was born John Edward Howard Rulofson in July 1821, in the harbor town of St. Johns, New Brunswick. His father bred horses and came from a stalwart local family. His mother’s name was Priscilla—a name he would eventually give to the infant daughter he killed.

The first few years of his life were the only stable ones he would ever have.

His father died when he was six, leaving him nominally the man of a household he was in no position to run. His mother remarried. What we know of the household is fragmentary, but it was not gentle: a schoolteacher once beat one of Rulloff’s brothers into a coma, and the four boys who survived emerged with a loyalty so ferocious it would eventually cost several of them their lives.

He was, from a young age, conspicuously intelligent—and conspicuously unwilling to accept a life proportionate to his circumstances. He wanted to go to law school. His stepfather refused to pay. An uncle offered to fund a commercial school instead, and Rulloff—seventeen years old, fatherless, poor, and convinced he was destined for better—turned the offer down.

What he did next set the pattern for the rest of his life.

He took a job as a clerk at a dry-goods store. There was a fire. Then another fire. Then a series of thefts from the inventory. Rulloff, regarded as diligent and trustworthy, was above suspicion—until the morning he arrived at work wearing a new suit cut from the store’s stolen fabric.

It is almost impossible to imagine a man as observant as Rulloff making that mistake by accident. Easier to imagine a seventeen-year-old in the grip of a private war between self-loathing and self-preservation, doing the thing that would get him caught, and then being outraged at having been caught. He would do versions of this, at increasing scale and human cost, for the next thirty-three years.

He served two years in the St. Johns penitentiary. With his prospects in New Brunswick finished, he crossed into Maine, then New York, arriving in the spring of 1842 in the small college town of Ithaca.

His real name was John Edward Howard Rulofson. The name he gave to the seventeen-year-old student who would become his wife, was Edward Rulloff.

The Vanishing

Her name was Harriet Schutt. She was barely eighteen when she married him at the end of 1842, a few months after he’d taken the schoolmaster job at the small private school where she was his student. Her family was established in Ithaca; her brother William was the local postmaster. By the standards of a nineteenth-century farming town, she had options. She chose Edward Rulloff—the tall, book-clever newcomer whose past she could not have verified if she’d tried, and almost certainly did not try, because she was eighteen and because he was, by every account, magnetic.

What happened next is what happens in too many nineteenth-century stories about clever men and the young women who married them.

Rulloff was poor, ambitious, frustrated by every job the world was willing to give him—and behind closed doors, brutal. He accused Harriet of infidelities with the local doctor. He hit her in the face. He pushed her toward the stairs. He once tried to make her drink poison alongside him. Their landlady remembered him saying, almost casually, that he sometimes felt like destroying the whole family.

In April 1845, their daughter was born. They named her Priscilla, after Rulloff’s mother. On the evening of April 23, 1845, Harriet and baby Priscilla were last seen alive in the rooms they shared with Rulloff in Lansing, New York, a ninety-minute walk from Ithaca.

They have never been seen since.

Rulloff didn’t flee immediately. He stayed in town for two more days, behaving in ways that still resist explanation. He told neighbors he was taking Harriet and Priscilla to visit family in Ohio. He called on Harriet’s relatives and went about his errands. On the third day, he boarded a stagecoach and disappeared.

By the Fourth of July, nobody in Ithaca believed him anymore. Boats dragged Cayuga Lake with chains, hooks, and fishing nets. They found nothing. They have never found anything. Not then. Not since.

What the lake would not give up, the graves did. Weeks earlier, William Schutt—Harriet’s brother—had buried his own wife and infant daughter. Both had died in Rulloff’s care. Now those graves were opened. Both stomachs contained copper. The law could not prove who had put it there.

Two women. Two infants. All dead in the space of a few weeks.

Rulloff was tracked down by Harriet’s family, dragged back to Ithaca, and put on trial. Here the story takes a turn that still makes me want to throw the history books across the room.

Without a body, nineteenth-century New York could not charge a man with murder.

Everyone in Tompkins County knew what Rulloff had done. A reward for bodies sat unclaimed. A lynch mob formed. The best the State of New York could do was convict him of abducting his own wife.

For that crime, in January 1846, Edward Rulloff was sentenced to ten years in Auburn Prison.

He was never convicted of killing Harriet. He was never tried for killing Priscilla. He never confessed. Whatever happened in that house on the night of April 23, 1845, remains a matter for a novelist’s imagination.

Auburn

Auburn Prison, in 1846, was considered one of the great humanitarian experiments of the age.

This is not sarcasm. Reformers genuinely believed it was an enlightened step forward from corporal punishment, and tourists were given walking tours to admire it. Inmates were forbidden to speak. Forbidden to look at one another. They worked from dawn to dusk as nearly-free industrial labor, and slept alone in stone cells the size of a closet. The silence was considered medicinal. Men were expected to emerge reformed through the sheer corrective power of a decade unable to hear another human voice.

Edward Rulloff served ten years there.

He was remembered as a docile prisoner, with one exception: he could react to small slights with a violent temper that disturbed the guards. He read. He studied languages. He nursed a private conviction that he was a genius whose potential was being wasted, and walked out of Auburn in 1856 expecting to begin the life he had always been meant to live.

He did not walk out. When he reached the warden’s office, he found the sheriff waiting with a warrant for the murder of his wife.

They took him back to Ithaca and put him in the local jail—a small, cramped building run by a jail-keeper named Jacob Jarvis, who lived on the premises with his wife Jane and their three children. The oldest was a bright, lonely sixteen-year-old named Albert.

Rulloff, awaiting his second trial, began tutoring local children from his cell—a perfectly respectable arrangement for an educated prisoner. The parents of Ithaca, with few other options for their children’s schooling, were glad of it. He taught them Latin. He taught them Greek. He taught them mathematics, history, and the beginnings of modern science.

Young Albert Jarvis, who slept in the jail-keeper’s annex a few feet from Rulloff’s cell, became his most devoted student.

The Manuscript

Awaiting his second trial, Edward Rulloff vanished from the Ithaca jail. Suspicion eventually fell on Albert. By the time anyone thought to look for him, the boy had vanished too.

Rulloff had emerged from Auburn with his belief in his own genius not diminished but refined — sharpened by a decade of having nothing to do but think.

What he had been thinking about was a book.

Specifically, what he believed would be the single most important book ever produced on the origins of human language. His theory—as best as anyone can reconstruct it—proposed that by identifying the root sounds underlying every human tongue, he could recover the first language ever spoken by man. A linguistic Eden. A universal key.

If all human languages descended from a common ancestor, the implication—radical, incendiary, almost certainly unpublishable in his era—was that the supposed biological hierarchies between races were a fiction. God had not given different languages to different races. There was one origin. One family. One tongue.

This was not what the American public wanted to hear in the years before the Civil War.

It was, however, exactly the kind of idea a man could cling to through a decade of silence. By the time Rulloff was released, the manuscript was the organizing principle of his life—the justification for everything he had suffered, everything he had done, and everything he was about to do next.

To draft his magnum opus, Rulloff needed help in two arenas, and he returned to Albert for both. The first was research. Albert had grown into a linguistic scholar himself, and joined Rulloff in New York City’s great libraries.

The second was money. To fund the work, Rulloff turned to theft—specifically, the theft of silk, a high-value, portable, easily-fenced commodity moving through the dry-goods stores of upstate New York. He taught Albert these skills as well.

They studied by day. They stole by night. And the manuscript grew.

When Rulloff submitted a version to the American Philological Society, it was rejected outright. He decided the rejection was not intellectual but conspiratorial—that his ideas would be stolen before he could get them to press.

He just needed more money and he would publish it himself.

Binghamton

On the night of August 17, 1870, a clerk named Frederick Merrick was shot and killed during a robbery at Halbert’s dry-goods store in Binghamton, New York. He was eighteen years old. He had been sleeping upstairs, heard the intruders below, and come down to defend his employer’s inventory. He left the store in a pine box.

Edward Rulloff was arrested a few days later. As he had so many times before, he was on the verge of talking his way out of it—the sheriff wasn’t certain he had the right man, and several other suspects were being held alongside him—when a judge who had presided over one of Rulloff’s earlier appeals walked into the jail, recognized him on sight, and the case closed around him like a trap.

For the second time in his life, Edward Rulloff found himself charged with murder. For the first time in his life, the State of New York had a body.

What happened over the next ten months is difficult to describe to a modern reader without overstatement.

Edward Rulloff became more famous than the President of the United States.

The national papers ran sketches of his cell. They reproduced his handwriting. They printed full biographies of his crimes, full transcripts of his interviews, full etchings of every courtroom that had ever tried him. Editors who knew a money-making story gave it enormous, continuous coverage. Opinion pieces multiplied in the margins. Professors from Harvard and Yale came to Binghamton to test him in Greek and left arguing about what they had witnessed. His intelligence was measured. His skull was measured. His handwriting was analyzed. Horace Greeley, editor of the New-York Tribune, argued for his pardon on the grounds of intellect alone. Elizabeth Cady Stanton confessed she could not look away. Henry Ward Beecher called him the most repulsive subject he could imagine.

And Mark Twain—then living in Buffalo and writing the book that would become Roughing It—wrote letter after letter to the Tribune begging the state to spare him.

It is plain, Twain wrote, that in the person of Rulloff one of the most marvelous intellects that any age has produced is about to be sacrificed.

The country argued, in earnest, for months, about whether it was lawful to hang a genius. Whether it was ethical. Whether the death penalty itself was barbaric. Whether a man of Rulloff's intellect should instead be kept alive, in permanent confinement, to finish his work on the origins of human language.

The courts of New York State did not engage with the debate.

On June 18, 1871, they hanged him.

Thirteen thousand people came to watch. Men climbed lampposts for a better view. Women brought their children to show them what happened to the wicked. The execution had been advertised for weeks.

Rulloff was led to the gallows in borrowed clothes—he had asked to die in his own suit, like a gentleman, and he had been denied. Someone in the crowd spit far enough that it landed on his trousers.

He scanned the crowd once, slowly, over a field of thirteen thousand faces come to see him die. He slid his hands, deliberately, into his trouser pockets—a last performance of composure, meant to signal he was unafraid. Then the hood went over his head. The noose was fitted around his neck. The sheriff raised his arm. The hangman pulled the lever.

Rulloff dropped through the trap.

The rope did not break his neck.

For the next twenty-two minutes, Edward Rulloff slowly suffocated at the end of the rope. The drop had failed to do its work, and the crowd of thirteen thousand people stood in the Binghamton heat and watched him die one struggling breath at a time. As his body thrashed, his left arm was flung loose of its pocket. And through all twenty-two minutes of his asphyxiation, he fought, visibly, to put the hand back.

The crowd went quiet.

They had come for a clean death. A proud, obvious, exclamation-point of a death — the kind a crowd can cheer. What they got instead was a slow one, performed by a man who, even suffocating, was still trying to prove something. Many stopped watching. Several began to weep. Good God, one woman said. Do we need to shoot him? asked a man nearby.

At twenty-two minutes, Rulloff managed—with a final, gruesome jerk—to force his left hand firmly back into his pocket.

Despite themselves, the crowd cheered.

A few seconds later, he stopped moving.

A physician climbed the steps and held a wooden tube to his heart. Then he waved his hand. It was over.

The announcement was met with silence.

The sheriff, either to break the silence or to remind the crowd why they had come, shouted: Here is your murderer.

The word seemed to restore the crowd to itself. They cheered. Hats were thrown in the air. Men fell to their knees. Order, in the only way a public execution is designed to deliver it, was restored.

Then the sheriff kicked Rulloff’s body off the platform into the crowd, and the crowd tore his clothing off him for souvenirs.

They cut off his head.

The brain was weighed, measured, and catalogued. It was, the phrenologists announced, the third-largest human brain ever recorded—a fact that, to the men measuring it, explained everything, and to everyone else, explained nothing at all.

His Story Lives On

Fifteen years after Edward Rulloff died on the gallows at Binghamton, a young Scottish physician named Arthur Conan Doyle began writing detective stories.

We know where Sherlock Holmes came from. Doyle modeled him on a former professor at the University of Edinburgh, and has said so in interviews. What we know less about is where Holmes’s great adversary came from—Professor Moriarty, the philosopher-criminal, the mathematical genius whose moral inversion mirrored Holmes so exactly that the two went over the Reichenbach Falls locked together.

The novelist Stephen Butz has made the case, persuasively, that Moriarty is drawn directly from Edward Rulloff. Rulloff went by Professor for much of his adult life. Rulloff was a philologist—a scholar of the kind of abstruse, continental European learning that Doyle gave to Moriarty almost verbatim. Rulloff had a head so large it became a subject of national fascination on two continents. And Rulloff was the only real-life serial-killing scholar a twelve-year-old British newspaper reader could plausibly have encountered in the summer of 1871—which is exactly how old Arthur Conan Doyle was that summer, and exactly what he was reading.

Holmes, introducing Moriarty to Watson, describes him as a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.

It is, almost word for word, how the American press of 1871 described the man in the cell at Binghamton.

And there is one more place Edward Rulloff survives.

I went to Ithaca in the summer of 2012, alone, to research the novel. I had read, somewhere along the way, that Rulloff’s brain had been preserved—that the phrenologists who weighed it on the day of his hanging had kept it, and that it was somewhere at Cornell. I was not going to go hunting for it. Nobody in their right mind would let a random descendant wander up to a scientific collection and ask to see a jar. I was there to walk the streets, feel the creeks, look at the foliage my narrator would have looked at. Not that.

On the second day, I wandered into the Cornell bookstore, picked up a book on display about strange facts in Ithaca, and opened it. The page it fell open to told me that Edward Rulloff's brain was on the second floor of Uris Hall.

I did not go that day. I did not go the next day. On my last day in Ithaca, I made myself at least find out where Uris Hall was.

Most buildings at Cornell are what you would expect: ivy, brick, stone, columns. Uris Hall is a modern box. I stood outside it a long time, imagining someone in a staff uniform asking me what I was doing there, and not having any answer I could say out loud. Eventually I decided the worst case was that the second floor would be locked and then the decision would be made for me.

I stepped into the industrial elevator and the doors closed around me like a prison. It rose slowly, the way elevators rise in buildings not designed for visitors.

They finally opened on an empty lobby. It was summer. School was out. The whole floor felt abandoned.

But there, on the wall directly opposite the elevator, behind a pane of plexiglass, was a collection of six or eight human brains in glass jars.

The jars looked exactly like the ones my mother used to keep flour in.

Across the front of one of them, in masking tape, was a name written by hand:

EDWARD RULLOFF.

I don’t know what a person is supposed to do, alone in an empty hallway, when she comes face to face with the preserved brain of her great-great-granduncle.

I was unaware of the etiquette. I considered whether it should be hushed, like visiting a grave. Or whether I was supposed to say something. I considered whether I should wave, which was in the moment an entirely reasonable-feeling option and is, in retrospect, mortifying.

I’m pretty sure I said something to him, in my head. Something along the lines of: I tried to write your story the best way I knew how. I hope I made the right choices.

Then I left. Very quickly. I sat on a bench on the green hillside outside Uris Hall and hyperventilated quietly for the next twenty minutes.

He is still there. If you are ever in Ithaca and have the stomach for it, you can go see him: second floor, Uris Hall, Cornell University, in the Wilder Brain Collection. His jar is still labeled in what appears to be the same piece of masking tape.

I do not recommend going alone.

A note on the novel

The Prisoner’s Apprentice is my telling of Edward Rulloff's story—faithful to the key elements of what is known and imagined where the record goes quiet. If this page has stayed with you, perhaps the novel will too.

Too Strange for Fiction

Everything you have just read is documented historical fact. But here's what I couldn’t bring myself to put in the novel, because no reader would believe it.

The jailkeeper’s wife.

While Edward Rulloff was locked in the Ithaca jail awaiting trial for the murder of his wife and infant daughter, he was also conducting a passionate love affair with the jail-keeper’s wife. Albert’s mother. Jane Jarvis flirted openly with him in the jail. She danced with him in his cell. The historical record contains reasonable evidence that the affair was fully consummated within earshot of her husband’s children. Years later, she left her husband and followed Rulloff to New York City, where she lived with him as his partner.

A novelist cannot put this on the page. A novelist would be laughed out of the room.

The brother nobody knew about.

Edward Rulloff had a younger brother named William Rulofson, who emigrated west, adjusted the spelling of his surname just enough to obscure his past, and became one of the most successful commercial photographers in nineteenth-century America. He won a gold medal for photography in Vienna in 1873. Three years later, he was elected President of the National Photographic Association of the United States.

Seven years later, he fell from the roof of his San Francisco studio. His death was almost certainly a suicide.

When the newspapermen reached his body, they found—carefully tucked into his breast pocket, as though placed there to be discovered—a photograph of his brother Edward. The most notorious criminal of the nineteenth century. The secret he had spent his professional life hiding.

The war profiteer.

When Abraham Lincoln instituted the draft in 1863, the law allowed any man whose name was called to avoid service by paying three hundred dollars for a substitute. Rulloff immediately recognized this as an opportunity. He arranged for an associate to volunteer as a substitute, collect the bounty, march off with the Union Army—and then desert at the first available opportunity, return to New York, and do it again.

And again.

Edward Rulloff, among his many other professions, was a Civil War draft-substitute fraudster and a war profiteer.

The return.

After Harriet and Priscilla disappeared from the house in Lansing in April 1845, Rulloff fled. He made it as far as Chicago—hundreds of miles from the scene, under a flexible enough identity to have kept going.

Then, for reasons no historian has ever been able to fully explain, he turned around and came back.

He returned to Ithaca. He walked up to the home of Harriet’s parents—the parents of the wife he had just killed, the grandparents of the baby he had just killed—and he asked if he could stay with them.

They said yes.

I cut this from the novel because I could not make a reader believe it. I am still not certain I believe it myself.