Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of (24 page)

Sometime after he went to work for Duncan Robertson—exactly when is impossible to determine—Rulloff’s previous employer, E. L. Thorne, opened a new dry-goods store in the same building as the law office. Not long afterward, someone broke into the place and stole a bolt of expensive fabric. Inquiries instituted by Thorne led him to believe that the culprit was none other than his former clerk—a suspicion confirmed when Rulloff, with the brazenness he would display throughout his life, appeared in a new suit made from the stolen cloth.

Thorne, “who had a lingering regard for the lad,” offered not to press charges if Rulloff “made an open confession of the matter.” When Rulloff haughtily refused,
he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to two years in the St. John Penitentiary. He entered the prison in the fall of 1839. He was twenty years old.

U
PON HIS RELEASE
in late 1841, Rulloff made his way to New York City, where he briefly studied bookkeeping and penmanship. Failing to find employment in the metropolis, he headed north by steamboat, ending up in the village of Dryden, a few miles east of Ithaca. Taking a job as a drug clerk, he quickly impressed the locals with his apparently great erudition, particularly after he began delivering regular lectures on the supposed science of phrenology, one of the many subjects he had read up on during his stint in the penitentiary. To the untutored residents of the rural hamlet, he “seemed a marvel”—“a druggist, an excellent penman, a classical scholar, a lawyer, and an earnest, fluent speaker.” Before long, they had made him headmaster of their high school.

Among his pupils was a vivacious seventeen-year-old named Harriet Schutt, daughter of a respectable local family and, by all accounts, a young woman “of most exemplary character and conduct.” Despite (or perhaps because of) the great disparity in their “mental acquirements,” Rulloff began paying court to the “tender, pleasant girl,” who reciprocated his attentions. When Rulloff proposed marriage in late 1843, she eagerly accepted. Though somewhat leery of their prospective son-in-law, about whom they knew almost nothing, Harriet’s parents raised no strong objections. The wedding took place on the last day of December 1843.

“The marriage feast was scarcely cold,” writes one early chronicler, when trouble began. By then, Rulloff had quit his teaching job and established himself as a practitioner of “botanical medicine,” a then-popular system founded by a self-taught herbalist named Samuel Thomson who believed in restoring the body’s “natural heat” by the administration of such stuff as cayenne pepper and Lobelia inflata, an emetic plant commonly known as “puke weed.” One of Rulloff’s local rivals was Dr. Henry W. Bull, “a respectable physician of the old school” and a cousin of Rulloff’s young wife, Harriet.

A few months after the marriage, Bull paid a visit to Harriet and—as was his custom—greeted her with a peck on the cheek. Spotting this innocent salutation, Rulloff flew into a rage. Soon he was “charging her with having criminal intercourse” with her cousin. Harriet laughed off the accusation, a reaction that only drove Rulloff
to new heights of jealous fury. One night soon afterward, while Harriet was crushing peppercorns with a heavy iron pestle, Rulloff snatched the implement from her hands and knocked her out with a blow to the forehead. When she regained consciousness, he was sufficiently contrite “to say that he did not intend to strike her so hard.” But his treatment of her “was no kinder after this outrage than before.”

In the summer of 1844, partly to put some distance between his wife and her ostensible lover, Rulloff insisted that they relocate to Ithaca. The move did nothing to allay his suspicions. Just weeks after they settled into their new home, several neighbors heard Harriet shrieking for help from her bedroom. Rushing to investigate, they found Rulloff grappling with his wife while brandishing a small amber bottle.

“Quick!” Harriet screamed. “Edward is going to make me take poison and take it himself!”

“By the living God,” cried Rulloff, as the neighbors tried to pull them apart, “this poison will kill us both in five minutes and that will put an end to these troubles!”

As the neighbors wrested Harriet from his clutches, Rulloff hurled the bottle through the window, then began to berate his wife about her infidelity.

“Oh, Edward,” she said, dropping to her knees and reaching out to him, “I am innocent as an unborn child.”

He struck her in the face, knocking her over. “Get away from me, goddamn you,” he cried. As she lay there sobbing, he told her “she could go and live with Bull and seek all the pleasure she wished to, for he didn’t want to live with her anymore.”

Though Harriet’s neighbors advised her to leave him, the couple reconciled. A few months later, they moved again, this time to the nearby village of Lansing, where, on the night of April 25, 1845, Harriet gave birth to a daughter, Priscilla. The infant’s arrival seemed to have a calming effect on Rulloff, who was, to all appearances, “unusually kind and attentive to his wife. He had by this time acquired quite a library of books which, in that place at that time, seemed the embodiment of all human wisdom. He had gained the confidence of a large portion of the community as a skilled botanical physician, and man of temperate and industrious habits.”

He had also—though no one suspected it at the time—embarked on his career as a serial murderer.

His first victims were two relatives by marriage, the wife and infant child of his brother-in-law, William Schutt. During the first week of June 1845, the baby was stricken with “a simple ailment of infancy.” Summoned by Schutt, Rulloff administered
one of his homemade concoctions. “The next day,” reports one chronicler, “the babe died of convulsions.” Two days later, the grieving mother, Amelia, who had been given a supposed botanical sedative by Rulloff, “suddenly sickened and died the same way.” Thirteen years after the sudden deaths of Amelia Schutt and her newborn, their corpses would be exhumed and distinct traces of copper poison discovered in their organs, confirming what the world had long since learned about Edward Rulloff’s monstrous nature. At the time, however, William Schutt and his neighbors—“simple and unsuspecting country-folk who had never been brought into contact with flagrant crime”—attributed the double tragedy to “the inscrutable ways of Divine Providence.”

T
HREE WEEKS LATER,
on the evening of June 23, 1845, a young neighbor of the Rulloffs, fifteen-year-old Olive Robertson, dropped by their home. She found Harriet “sitting in a low rocking chair and fondly holding her cooing babe.” Rulloff himself was stirring one of his herbal “compounds” in a teacup, which he then carried over and tried to feed to his child. When Harriet objected, “saying the babe was in perfect health,” Rulloff replied that he had “detected the seeds of disease in his offspring, and insisted that the dose be given.” The normally compliant Harriet stood firm. “Perhaps you need the medicine more than the baby,” Rulloff replied with a tight smile, holding out the cup to her. Harriet pushed it away. After a tense moment, “Rulloff desisted, saying he had only been joking.” Olive Robertson left shortly afterward. No one except their killer would ever set eyes on Harriet Rulloff and her infant daughter again.

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING
, at around ten o’clock, Olive Robertson’s father, Thomas, heard a knock on the front door. The caller was Edward Rulloff, who had a favor to ask. The previous night—so Rulloff explained—a cousin of Harriet’s named Emory Boyce had come to fetch her and the baby for a visit to his home in Mottville, about ten miles away. The uncle’s wagon was so small, however, that, to accommodate his passenger and her infant, he had been obliged to leave behind a large chest. Rulloff now wished to borrow Robertson’s horse and wagon so that he could return the chest to Boyce.

Though somewhat reluctant because (as he later testified) “it was an extreme hot day,” Robertson agreed. After inviting Rulloff to take dinner with his family, he and his son helped their neighbor load the heavy chest onto the buckboard. It was about 3:00 p.m. when Rulloff set off down the dusty turnpike to Mottville, “whistling softly as the horse moved along.” At one point, encountering a group of children on the road, he invited them to ride on the wagon and entertained them with “funny songs and quaint whistling.” Later, rumors abounded that Rulloff had found it deliciously amusing to see several of the children perched atop the chest that contained the bodies of his murdered wife and infant daughter.

Precisely how he killed them would never be established. According to his own later confession, he and Harriett had gotten into yet another altercation about Henry Bull. As the argument escalated, Rulloff, in a “passion,” reached for the thirty-pound iron pestle of the mortar in which he “pounded medicines, and struck her over the left temple. The pestle broke the skull and sunk into her brain.” He then took the child, placed it on the bed, and “gave it a narcotic to stop its crying.” Another account, given by one of Rulloff’s lawyers on his deathbed, claimed that “he suffocated the babe with a pillow and that he gave chloroform to his wife, opened an artery, and then bled her to death, taking up a board in the floor and allowing the blood to drip into the cellar.”

How he disposed of the corpses is also a matter of dispute. One wild rumor had it that he sold them to Geneva Medical College for dissection, though his more reliable chroniclers dismiss this “hypothesis” as “too horrible for belief.” Far likelier is the explanation Rulloff himself offered his lawyers. After driving the chest to a secluded spot on the shore of Cayuga Lake, he waited until “the dead and middle waste of night.” He then removed the bodies from the chest, wrapped them tightly in untempered wire “that could never become unfastened and, attaching the heavy iron mortar to the body of his wife and a flat iron to that of the child,” rowed them out “over the silent waters” and threw them overboard, “down into unfathomable depths to remain forever concealed from the eyes of men.”

B
ACK HOME THE NEXT
morning, Rulloff unloaded the now empty chest, returned the wagon and horse to Thomas Robertson, and, after throwing a few possessions into a bundle, headed down the road, telling his neighbors that he was off to join his wife. As the weeks passed with no word from Harriet, her family and friends grew increasingly
concerned. Entering the abandoned house, her brothers William and Ephraim found it in a state of wild disorder. The bed wasn’t made, the kitchen table was piled with dirty dishes, shoes and stockings were strewn around the bedroom floor along with articles of Harriet’s clothing, and her traveling basket, which she “always carried with her when she went away,” sat on her bureau.

By the time Rulloff reappeared six weeks later, rumors had spread that his wife and infant daughter had met with foul play. Feigning shock and indignation, Rulloff insisted that mother and child were safe and sound, though he offered contradictory accounts of their whereabouts, telling some people that they were staying in a cottage “between Cayuga and Seneca Lakes,” others that they were visiting family in Erie, Pennsylvania, and still others that they were settled in Madison, Ohio.

Confronted with the threat of arrest, Rulloff offered to write a letter to his wife, “asking her to dispel the painful rumors in circulation” by dropping him a line to affirm that she was alive and well. After penning the note, he handed it to Ephraim Schutt, who immediately left for the post office.

No sooner had he gone than Rulloff took off by foot, hurrying north toward the railroad depot at Auburn.

W
HAT FOLLOWED WAS
a real-life version of the kind of interstate chase sequence, featuring a devilishly slippery fugitive and a grimly determined pursuer, that has long been a cliché of Hollywood suspense thrillers.

The moment he heard that his brother-in-law had fled in the direction of Auburn, Ephraim Schutt mounted his buckboard and made for the railway station. Finding no trace of his quarry, he proceeded to Rochester, where he caught sight of Rulloff on the platform, about to board a departing train. Spotting Schutt, Rulloff vanished in the milling crowd. Schutt leapt aboard the train and, after making a thorough search, found him hiding in the rearmost car.

Insisting that he was on his way to rejoin Harriet and the baby in Ohio, Rulloff proposed that his brother-in-law come along “and see for himself how false had been all the suspicions of his conduct.” The pair proceeded to Buffalo, where they spent the night at a hotel before heading down to the docks the next morning to catch an early steamboat for Cleveland. It wasn’t until Schutt had pushed his way onto the packed upper deck that he realized that Rulloff was no longer with him. Schutt was still searching the vessel when it pulled away from the wharf.

After a brief stopover at Erie, Pennsylvania, where he called on some relatives to see if anyone had heard from Harriet, Schutt made his way to Madison, Ohio, but could turn up no trace of his missing sister. Still convinced that Rulloff was heading that way, Schutt hurried back to Cleveland, arriving at the steamboat landing just as a pair of vessels were discharging their passengers. Sure enough, he spotted Rulloff among the crowd. Realizing he needed help, he enlisted the aid of a local constable named Hayes. Searching the dives near the wharf, “they soon found Rulloff in a low eating saloon,” attempting to make himself as inconspicuous as possible by seating himself “behind a large dry goods box.”

Though Rulloff did his best to talk his way out of the situation—nearly convincing Hayes of his innocence—Schutt managed to get him aboard a steamer headed back east, keeping him locked up in a “strong room” until the boat docked in Buffalo. Rulloff was then handcuffed and transferred to a train to Ithaca, where he was led through a howling mob to the city jail.

Despite a determined effort to drag Cayuga Lake with “the most approved apparatus”—an undertaking that cost the county an estimated $10,000—the bodies of Harriet Rulloff and her infant would never be found. With not enough evidence to establish the corpus delicti, the District Attorney decided to forgo a murder indictment and charge Rulloff with the abduction of his wife, “of which the proof was incontrovertible.” At the climax of his trial in January 1846, he was convicted and sentenced to ten years in the state prison at Auburn.