Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (23 page)
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Authors: Harold Schechter
I
NCARCERATION AGREED WITH
Probst. He slept soundly each night and ate so heartily that, in the five-week span between his sentencing and execution, he gained twelve pounds. Visitors to his cell noted that he had “changed greatly in spirit since giving his full confession. He seemed to realize the enormity of the crime he had committed and often expressed himself as not only willing but anxious to undergo any punishment which the law required.”
That opportunity arrived on Friday, June 8, 1866. After a solid night’s sleep, he awoke at 5:00 a.m. and breakfasted on two soft-boiled eggs, three slices of bread, and a large cup of coffee. Father Gunther then administered Holy Communion and led him in “prayer and exhortation.”
Shortly before ten-thirty, Sheriff Howell and Warden Perkins appeared at his cell. Dressed in simple prison wear—coarse gray pants and muslin shirt, brogans and blue socks—and clutching a crucifix to his breast, Probst was escorted to the gallows, which had been erected at the extreme western end of the prison yard, out of sight of the convicts’ cell windows. After ascending the scaffold, he knelt in prayer with Father Gunther, who administered the rite of absolution. Then, “pliant as a child” and displaying “not the least fear,” he rose to his feet and bent his head so that the “noose could be properly adjusted to his neck.” The white cowl was then slipped over his head. Father Gunther recited a few final words of prayer, then signaled to the sheriff, who immediately released the drop.
Probst plunged, then convulsed for two or three minutes. His body was then allowed to dangle for twenty-five minutes before being cut down and carried to the paint room of the prison.
So universally detested was Probst that the newspapers abandoned any pretense of journalistic objectivity in reporting on his death. “Anton Probst—the greatest criminal of the nineteenth century—shuffled off his mortal and disreputable coil this
morning at 10:46 o’clock,” wrote the correspondent for the
New York Times
. “For such a thing it was difficult to feel sympathy or pity. His death was easy, and his ugly carcass swung in the breeze.”
I
N ACCORDANCE WITH
the custom of the time—when, as a form of postmortem punishment, the bodies of executed murderers were handed over to anatomists for dissection—Probst’s corpse was immediately delivered to Drs. Pancoast, Rand, and McCrea of Jefferson Medical College. Seated upright in a chair in the prison paint room, the naked body was first subjected to a series of bizarre electrical experiments, designed to test “the force of galvanism to induce post-mortem muscular action.” One pole of a powerful battery was inserted into the dead man’s mouth and the other into an incision made in his face, causing it to “assume various expressions.” The battery was then applied to various muscles of his arms and legs, making them “move wildly about.”
Afterward, the corpse was transported to the medical college where, at 4:00 p.m. on Saturday, it “was dissected before a crowded audience, composed of men of all professions and vocations.” Probst’s brain turned out to be of “remarkably small size”—a mere two pounds four ounces, far below the average weight of three pounds two ounces—confirming the view of the reporter for the
New York Times
, who had earlier opined that the brutish killer of the Deering family “was as destitute of brain as he was of heart.”
In addition to the electrical experiments conducted on his still-warm corpse, Anton Probst was treated to a thorough eye examination immediately following his execution. The purpose of this procedure was to test a belief that had gained widespread currency by the middle of the nineteenth century. This was the notion that the last image seen by a person at the moment of death remains imprinted on his retina “as on a daguerreotype plate”—a phenomenon variously known as an “eye-photograph,” “death picture,” or “optogram.”
Based on the common analogy between the eye and a camera, the theory held that “since the retina functioned like the photographic plate of a camera,” the “final image viewed before death should remained fixed forever, like a photo, on the dead person’s eyes.” A “logical extension of this hypothesis” (in the words of scholar Arthur B. Evans) was “that if death were to occur at a moment when the pupils of the eyes were hugely dilated—e.g., because of fear, surprise, anger, or some other strong emotion—the retinal optograms of the deceased would be even clearer and more detailed.”
Since there are few, if any, stronger emotions than the terror experienced by someone about to be killed, the theory raised an exciting possibility for police. As one nineteenth-century medical journal put it, “if the last object seen by a murdered person was his murderer, the portrait drawn upon the eye would remain a fearful witness in death to detect the guilty and lead to conviction.” This possibility seemed confirmed in 1857 when a physician named Sandford of Auburn, New York—after dilating the pupil of a murder victim named J. H. Beardsley and examining the retina closely with a “powerful lens”—claimed to see “the figure of a man in a light coat, beside whom there was a round stone suspended in the air.”
People, of course, see what they expect to see (as the famous French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon put it, “One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind”). Whatever Sandford perceived was certainly not the image of Mr. Beardsley’s killer. Nevertheless, over the course of the next half century—indeed, well into the first decades of the twentieth—police continued to examine and in some cases photograph the eyes of murder victims in the hope that a picture of the perpetrator was preserved on the retina. Perhaps the most famous such instance occurred during the Jack the Ripper investigation, when police pried open and photographed the eyes of his victim Annie Chapman in a desperate effort to identify her killer.
The postmortem examination of Probst’s eyeballs revealed no recognizable images from his final moments, no portrait of the hangman’s face or any other “optogram.” “The popular
idea, lately promulgated, that the impression of the object last seen remained on the retina was entirely disproved,” wrote E. R. Hutchins, one of the physicians present at the autopsy. Still, the doctors did discover an ocular phenomenon of such “remarkable interest” that, within weeks of Probst’s execution, a paper on the subject was presented at a meeting of the American Ophthalmological Society.
In the paper—titled “Fracture of the Lens of One Eye and of the Anterior Capsules of Both Eyes from Death by Violent Hanging”—Dr. Ezra Dyer of Jefferson Medical College recounts how, upon shining a “powerful electric light” into the right eye of the freshly killed Probst, he was startled to see “a line transversely across the lens” that “had an iridescent or opalescent appearance.” An examination of the left eye revealed “the same transverse line,” resembling “a crack in a cake of clear ice.” Dyer, as he reports, was “so much interested in the subject” that, to study it further, he immediately “procured three very large dogs and hanged them.” Dog no. 1, which “died without a struggle,” showed the same fracture of the lens. So did dog no. 2, which “died with convulsions lasting a short time.” Only in the case of dog no. 3, which “died with prolonged convulsions,” could “no lesion be observed.”
In the end, Dyer concedes that he does not know what conclusion to draw from his fascinating discovery, though he permits himself to wonder if Probst, as a result of the fracture, saw “the beautiful changes of scene and color which people experience when hanged, as so often described.” How someone who has been hanged could possibly describe what he saw while plunging to his death, the good doctor never explains.
[
Sources: William B. Mann, Official Report of the Trial of Anton Probst, for the Murder of Christopher Deering, at Philadelphia, April 25, 1866, as Well as His Two Confessions, One Made on May 6th, to His Spiritual Adviser, the Other on May 7th to His Counsel, Wherein He Acknowledges to Have Killed the Entire Family of Eight Persons, and the Manner in Which He Done It. To Which Is Added a History of His Previous Life, as Well as an Account of His Last Hours and Execution (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson & Brothers, 1866); Ron Avery, City of Brotherly Mayhem: Philadelphia Crimes and Criminals (Philadelphia: Otis Books, 2003); Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997).
]
“THE MAN OF TWO LIVES”
F
ED BY
H
OLLYWOOD FANTASY, THE
popular imagination tends to conceive of serial killers as evil geniuses: Hannibal Lecter delivering lectures on Renaissance art when he isn’t dining on human liver and fava beans, or the diabolical John Doe of David Fincher’s Seven who arranges his victims in elaborate tableaux based on medieval conceptions of the seven deadly sins. The truth, however, is far less colorful. Far from being criminal masterminds, real-life serial killers tend to possess perfectly average IQs. Many don’t rise to even that middling level.
Rulloff assaults his wife with an iron pestle.
Every so often, however, a serial killer comes along who, if not quite a Lecter-like mastermind, is notably smarter than the common run of humanity. Such exceptional psychos—
men with superior brains but profoundly disturbed personalities—tend to exert a deep fascination on the public. One such figure was Edward H. Rulloff, a man whose “marvelous character” (in the view of an early biographer) would have led him to “become a great benefactor and honor to his race” had his mind not “been warped in the other direction.”
B
ORN
E
DWARD
H
OWARD
R
ULOFSON
in 1819, he came from distinguished stock. His grandfather, an émigré to New Brunswick, Canada, was a wealthy landowner, the first school superintendent of the province, and a justice of the peace. His father was likewise “a most reputable and highly respected citizen”—a prosperous “farmer, horse breeder, and importer of blooded horses from Europe.” Edward’s two younger brothers would grow up to be highly accomplished men in their respective fields, one an internationally celebrated photographer, the other a lumber magnate.
Edward, of course, would distinguish himself in his own way, earning nationwide notoriety as the most remarkable criminal of his day, “famous and infamous throughout the world,” in the words of one contemporary, “at once the wonder and execration of mankind.”
As to his earliest intellectual achievements, the opinions of his nineteenth-century chroniclers differ. According to a journalist named E. H. Freeman—whose 1871 biography was endorsed by the subject himself—Rulloff was a genuine child prodigy, with an “insatiate thirst for learning.” Shunning “the usual pleasures and pastimes of the boys of his age,” he spent his leisure hours immersed in books, acquiring a “general knowledge of science and literature” and a precocious mastery of ancient and modern languages.
Other biographers, however, dismiss this claim, insisting that Rulloff’s childhood studies were both haphazard and superficial. Though possessed of a youthful “passion for desultory reading,” writes one commentator, “it does not appear that at this time of life he acquired any special branches of knowledge, or that any were taught him.” Even the skeptics, however, concede that Rulloff was a remarkably quick study who, while hardly the great scholar he claimed to be, had an unusually nimble and “sponge-like” mind.
After a few years at the academy in the nearby city of St. John—where, according
to Freeman, he “exhibited the same assiduity, the same devotion to study that had distinguished his earlier days”—Rulloff began clerking for James Keator and E. L. Thorne, partners in a local dry-goods firm. Not long after he took the job, however, Keator and Thorne’s establishment burned to the ground. A few months later, they reopened their business in a different part of the city, but another “fire shortly followed and the store was again swept from the earth.” The two conflagrations, following so close together—and so soon after Rulloff came to work for the merchants—were taken as acts of God. Given what we now know about the psychological development of serial killers—who commonly display a bent for juvenile pyromania—it seems entirely possible that the fires were no accident.
With his nascent mercantile career up in smoke, Rulloff turned his attention to the law, becoming a clerk in the office of an eminent St. John barrister, Duncan Robertson. Within a remarkably short time, he had acquired enough legal expertise to pass as a credible lawyer—an ability he would have ample opportunity to exercise in the coming years.
Nowadays, we take it as a matter of course that a man might lead a profoundly bifurcated existence: that a successful law student, say, might have a hidden life as a homicidal maniac (like Ted Bundy). In the early nineteenth century, however—long before the term “psychopath” was coined—such a phenomenon seemed incomprehensible. It was this duality—this paradoxical combination of scholarly diligence and compulsive criminality—that would make Edward Rulloff such an object of fascination to his contemporaries: “The Man of Two Lives,” as he came to be known. And it was during his years as a young law clerk that his bizarre double nature first came to the attention of the world.