All That Is Wicked: A Gilded-Age Story of Murder and the Race to Decode the Criminal Mind
By Kate Winkler Dawson

The crime:

A drifter named Edward Rulloff landed in Upstate New York in the early 1840s, where he married into the prominent Schutt family. He didn’t get along with his wife or her family, and may have been responsible for killing his sister-in-law and her child. He then killed his own wife and child, though their bodies were never found. He was convicted only of kidnapping his wife and sent to prison, from which he escaped. In 1870 he shot and killed a guard when he robbed a dry goods store with a couple of other men (both of whom drowned while trying to escape). In 1871 he was hanged.

The book:

A nice bit of work, making a case for why Edward Rulloff, whose crimes were as ordinary as they were callous and cruel, is worth attending to. In short, Winkler Dawson sees him as “the first high-profile killer to inspire neuroscientists to dig deeper into the criminal mind.”

Rulloff’s brain is currently part of the Widler Brain Collection at Cornell University, not for being a prime example of a criminal type (since there doesn’t seem to be such a type) but for its immense size, which apparently puts it in the largest 1% on record, and possibly one of the largest ever. This in turn leads not only to a discussion of early debates on the physiology of a criminal mind, but also into the matter of criminal, or evil, “genius.” As the book kicks off we’re told that many of his contemporaries considered Rulloff to be “perhaps, the most intelligent killer in American history.” As we keep reading, however, that’s a judgment that gets qualified.

Was Rulloff a criminal genius? Not because of the size of his brain. I don’t think Einstein’s brain was found to be particularly large. As Winkler Dawson concludes, “we now know that brain size is no indication of intellect or morality, or of belonging to a privileged group with claims of superior intelligence – it’s the quality of the brain, not the quantity.”

Was Rulloff a genius only by reputation? He was at least in some ways an impressive autodidact with a thing for languages. I’m not sure that being able to understand a lot of different languages is any great sign of intelligence though, any more than being good at math is (as I’ve argued elsewhere). Furthermore, his claim to have discovered a key to understanding the origin of all human language was investigated by authorities at the time and found to be nonsense. Horace Greeley would call him “too curious an intellectual problem to be wasted on the gallows” and “one of the most industrious and devoted scholars our busy generation has given birth to.” But that doesn’t mean he was smart. The same goes for Mark Twain calling him (with tongue in cheek) “one of the most marvellous intellects that any age has produced.” Being a curious and marvellous intellect, as well as an industrious and devoted scholar, carefully avoids comment on his actual intelligence.

A criminal genius? Hardly. Our best guess is that he killed his wife in a fit of rage. He would be sent to the hangman for killing a night watchman during a miserably planned and badly bungled break-in. I don’t see any evidence for thinking him a mastermind. Winkler Dawson argues for his being a psychopath, but even here I think he’d have to be considered a low-functioning one. He certainly tried to charm people, for example, but few people seem to have been fooled. In fact, most anyone who got to know him seems to have been repelled by him. He did fool some people, some of the time, but mainly those who were weak and vulnerable.

We want so badly to believe there’s some link between intelligence, however eccentric, and crime – what’s apparently known in the academic literature as the Hannibal Lecter myth (I’ve included a cover image where the alternative title points to this). Rulloff was an early example of this sort of thinking, but he’s also someone who should have made experts question the connection. Rulloff certainly considered himself to be a genius, but in this he was only a typical narcissist (or, less professionally, an asshole). Ramp up one’s delusions of grandeur and sense of entitlement far enough and you get someone whose brakes are off.

This is a good read, with Winkler Dawson structuring the story around Rulloff sitting in his cell awaiting execution and being visited by various people (journalists, academics, medical men) while his story is teased out through flashbacks much like you’d imagine being done in a docudrama. The parallel to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, however, with chapter headings taken from that work, left me scratching my head. I really didn’t see Rulloff as being anything like that kind of a divided personality.

In other ways too I found Rulloff himself to be a lot less compelling a figure than he was made out to be, but as an origin story for today’s “mindhunters” his case does have a lot of historical interest. In 1871 investigators didn’t have the same tools we do today – our big data, for example, and ability to look inside the brain – but they still made a lot of very perceptive observations of criminal behaviour, like the district attorney here who noted how “It is a well understood fact that there is a kind of indescribable fascination to a criminal about the place where he has committed a crime, and however far he may go away still he wants to come back.” They were doing the best they could just working from the general, observable facts of the cases they were working on, and for the most part they seem to have done pretty well.

Noted in passing:

Was this the Gilded Age? I think the Gilded Age is usually seen as starting sometime in the late 1870s with the end of Reconstruction, or in 1880 to take a convenient round date. I tend to be inclined towards giving it a later starting-off point, but some historians place its beginnings as early as the end of the Civil War in 1865. For what it may be worth, the label is taken from a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner titled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which was published in 1873. Given that Rulloff killed his wife and child in 1844 and was executed in 1871, I don’t think this really counts as a “Gilded-Age Story.” But it’s interesting that publishers seem to think that adding “Gilded Age” to a title is a real selling point. This is not the first time I’ve seen it invoked when I didn’t think it was appropriate.

At Rulloff’s final trial it was observed that among the many people attending “a great portion of them [were] women.” This leads Winkler Dawson to make the following observation:

For generations, women have been the dominant consumers of true crime; in current times, most readers, listeners, or viewers of these crime stories are female. Experts say many women hope to learn from the mistakes of victims, to absorb themselves in a world they never hope to enter. In some cases, they change their behavior based on that knowledge – they’re more skeptical of male suitors and more cautious about venturing out alone. This was certainly the case of mostly proper ladies in Binghamton in 1871.

A footnote expands on this further, linking it to the pathology of hybristophilia, where women develop a sexual interest in serial killers and other “bad boys.” Leaving that aside, what Winkler Dawson says about today’s audience for true crime, whether in the form of books or podcasts, is certainly true and I’m not aware of any full explanation for it.

Takeaways:

If your whole family is against you marrying someone, best give the matter further consideration. If they become even more insistent that you leave your spouse when the marriage goes south, you should admit you made a mistake and get out before things get any worse. Because they will.

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