Greek and Latin scholar George Sawyer sought to disprove Rulloff’s work as a philologist and reveal the killer as nothing more than a clever phony. “After his past was unmasked,” writes the author, “Rulloff was tantalizing fodder for journalists-a murderer cloaked as an intellectual savant anonymously roaming the streets of 1800s Manhattan.” Journalist Ham Freeman empathized with Rulloff’s hardscrabble past and approached the killer with hopes of gaining “a career-making opportunity” for himself. Writers, scholars, and alienists (psychiatrists) fascinated with the murderer’s story came to visit him, each for different reasons.
After an introductory section, the author begins in 1871, a few weeks before Rulloff’s death, which found him in jail awaiting final word on his proposed execution. In her latest page-turning book of historical true crime, Dawson, the author of American Sherlock and Death Is in the Air, examines the life of this “once-lauded scholar, a nineteenth-century polymath who charmed his way to the upper echelons of intellectual society,” all while living the secret, violent life of a serial murderer. When he died, his enormous brain-which scientists preserved for study-earned notoriety as belonging to a killer whose gruesome exploits put him in the same league as Jack the Ripper. A crime historian’s account of a Jekyll-and-Hyde savant who stunned 19th-century America with a series of murders.īy all outward appearances, Edward Rulloff (1819-1871) was highly intelligent and cultured.
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