Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio.
Herman Webster Mudget of New Hampshire, better known by the alias H. H. Holmes, was responsible for anywhere from twenty to two hundred killings before he was apprehended in eighteen ninety four. He admitted to twenty seven while in custody, and is known as one of America's first serial killers, but not the first. Welcome to Criminalia, I'm Maria Tremarky.
And I'm Holly Frye. That title of first serial killer, at least on record, belongs to a duo, the Harps. Sometimes you'll see them listed as the Harp Brothers, but that's a little complicated. Joshua Harper, known as Macaiah or Big Harp, and William Harper, known as Wiley or Little Harp, were born probably in seventeen sixty eight and seventeen seventy, respectively. Big Harp was described as quote bony and muscular. He's been called the brown to the smaller, red haired Little
Harps brains. But make no mistake, both of these men shared a proclivity for carrying out unspeakable horrors. We know that they're killing spree in the late seventeen hundreds spanned a handful of states. We know they killed dozens and dozens of people. Historian John Musgrave has said of them, quote, the Harps were able to strike fear while they were living, and then became the boogeyman for generations to come. This may be be warned the most violent episode we have ever yet had.
First, though, let's talk briefly about what experts know about serial killers before we start talking about the story of this pair. Researchers believe serial killers are most often driven by a psychological thrill or or pleasure they get from their actions. They often lack empathy and guilt, and many are egocentric individuals, or at least become that way during their killing spree. Big and Little Harp murdered for the thrill, sometimes set off by minors lights, but there was really
no rhyme or reason to it. They didn't consider monetary gain when choosing victims. It was just bloodlust. Dating back to ancient times, serial murderers have been chronicled around the world. The Harps are not considered the world's first serial killers, not even close, but they are the first documented American
serial killers. The two committed murder and other crimes indiscriminately, mainly around the frontier town of Knoxville, but also in other parts of East Tennessee, Illinois, and Kentucky.
Though there is documentation about this pair of serial killers, historians have noted that there are still some difficut culties differentiating between fact and legend when it comes to the Harps. This happens often when you're relying on documents that are hundreds of years old. Sometimes it happens with documents that are even just years old, and sometimes recollections written down
from oral history can be embellished. This problem is only exacerbated when a person goes by more than one name. We do know they were highwaymen and river pirates and of course murderers who operated in the late seventeen hundreds. Those are facts, and we will not get into all of their exploits. We really can't. They were very, very busy. But regardless, their story is a list of atrocities that are frightful, inhumane, and truly the things of nightmares.
Not a lot that's fact is known about their childhood, or family or background. Many consider them to have been cousins, although they may have been brothers. It's believed that their family were Scottish immigrants who had settled in Orange County, North Carolina, around seventeen sixty, and that the family changed its name from Harper to Harp. Though there's no definitive explanation for that, a common explanation is the American Revolution
was about to spark. This was a time when the United States was still the Thirteen Colonies, and the Harpers, new to the Colonies, were Scots loyal to the British Crown, but wanted to fit in with their patriot neighbors, so Harper became Harp.
Another fuzzy fact from their childhood is that the Harps may have watched as their parents were brutally tortured and hanged for their loyalist affiliations. If that's true, that kind of devastating personal tragedy could have helped put the orphaned Harps on track for a haphazard life of butchery and depravity. But to be clear, this isn't a fact that appears in all of the documentation about them, so consider that particular element of the story with a grain of salt.
The two left North Carolina, hoping to find work as slave overseers. They didn't because the American Revolution interrupted their plans. Like their parents did, the duo sided with the British, but if we're being honest, they didn't really care about sides. They were much more interested in violence than patriotic duty.
It said.
They spent most of their time raping, pillaging, and killing during the War for American Independence, and they may have spent some of that time actually fighting in a few battles.
Upon leaving the military, they joined with the Cherokee Chickamauga village of Nikajack, located southwest of modern day Chattanooga, Tennessee. During that time, the men raided settlements with the tribe and also became good with and very fond of the Tomahawk. After the British surrendered at Yorktown, the Cherokee continued to
war with those who identified as patriots. Big and Little Harp had already left for East Tennessee, where they settled alongside Beaver Creek, only about eight miles west of Knoxville. At first, they farmed and slaughtered hogs for a living, actually peacefully, which you'll soon come to find a little bit hard to believe, but even so, it didn't last. They began plundering hogs, sheep, horses, whatever they could grab
from their neighbors. Barnes mysteriously started to burn down after a man named Edward Teal's horses were stolen from his stable and angry posse of locals captured the Harps, but the pair escaped while the captors tried to bring them to the Knoxville jail. Here we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors, and when we're back, we're going to start doing a deeper dive into their killings, which frankly reads like a demon's to do list.
Welcome back to Criminalia. The Harps killing spree lasted for roughly eighteen months. Let's talk about the hellish atrocities they raised.
The tale of horrors the Harps engaged in is really just beginning in this story. Sometime before seventeen ninety four, while living in Tennessee, they kidnapped two women, Maria Davidson and Susan Wood. Susan was the daughter of Captain James Wood of the United States Continental Army. Here's an aside. During the American Revolution, the Harps took part in a lawless Tory gang, and little Harp had been shot and wounded by the captain for the attempted rape of a
young girl. Some accounts call these kidnappings of Maria and Susan marriages, and that needs air quotes because there is absolutely no evidence that these relationships were legally bound or at all consented to you by the women. Let's be very clear, they were captives. The men were violent and abusive to Maria and Susan, and when any children were born from these unions, those children were murdered.
It was in seventeen ninety eight when the Harps rampage officially took off. The beginning of that eighteen month killing spree. They became one of the most violent serial killing pairs known to America still to this day. When they began career murdering. It began in Knox County, and the community was, as you may imagine, alarmed. One victim, maybe not their first, but definitely an early victim who stood out was a man named Johnson, who the Harps believed was trying to
force them out of town. In reality, everyone wanted them out of town. The Harps killed Johnson carved his body open, disemboweled him, and filled him with stones before they tossed him into the nearby Holston River. Johnson was not the only victim who met that fate.
John Musgrave has also stated of the pair, quote, I think they realized early in they were not part of the elect and decided if they were going to Hell, they might as well make a grand entrance. The viciousness of the all but civil war in the Carolinas during the American Revolution didn't help, and certainly led them away to the wilderness and the less than civilized norms they lived over the next couple of decades.
After killing two more men, they trekked through Tennessee and traveled north to Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap, the point in the Cumberland Mountains where Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia all meet. There they killed two more men from Maryland who were traveling in the opposite direction. Graphic accounts of these killings suggest Big Harp used his tomahawk skills to split open
the head of one of the victims. Another of the murders involved a young man named John Langford, who was traveling alone in the wilderness with a purse full of silver. His body was discovered as Johnson's was disemboweled and filled with stones, a manner that would become kind of a favorite technique for the pair. On April twenty second, seventeen ninety nine, the Kentucky governor issued a three hundred dollars reward on each of the Harps.
In December that year, the men and the women that they had kidnapped as their wives were captured for those murders after a local innkeeper fingered them, and they were jailed in Danville, Kentucky. Two months into their incarceration, the men escaped and in doing so left the women behind, each of whom was pregnant. The women were acquitted of the Harp's crimes. The son of the innkeeper who identified them was found dead.
The men kept moving into less populated areas. Little Harp married a minister's daughter named Sarah Rice, Well maybe married. Big Harp kidnapped two sisters for himself, Susan and Betsy Roberts, as his own to abuse, terrorize, and impregnate, Similar to Davidson and Wood before them, The women were beaten and forced to remain with Big against their will. It's unclear if Little's wife, Sarah knew what she was getting into, or if this had actually been a kidnapping and not
a marriage. And also, like in Davidson and Wood's situation, most if not all, of the newborns produced through these relationships were killed. For instance, at a camp a few miles northeast of Russellville, Kentucky, it's well reported that Big Harp smashed his infant daughter's head into a tree because she was crying. Some later accounts suggest it was the only time he admitted he regretted a murder, but most
do not believe that is a fact. When a man named Moses DAWs, who may or may not have traveled with them, showed concern for the brutalized women, he too was murdered.
Historian John Musgrave, who we mentioned earlier, theorized that quote the Harp wives were brutalized, battered women trying to survive and protect whatever children they could. During the early part of seventeen ninety nine, when the Harps were barely midway into their killing spree, all three were pregnant or had just given birth. They had no way to survive apart from the men not in the wilderness when caring for
infant children. That's even if they thought they could get away without being tracked down and killed by their husbands.
Here we're going to take a break for a word from our sponsors. The Harps terrorized the American frontier, killing aimlessly as they traveled. We have more atrocities to talk about when we return.
Welcome back to Criminalia, where we sadly have many more bodies to talk about. The light at the end of the tunnel will also talk about the deaths of the Harps.
Big and Little Harp still each had a three hundred dollars bounty on each of his head. Next, they made their way to a river pirate gang. Samuel Mason's gang's notorious Caven Rock stronghold was in Illinois, and while en route to it, the Harps, to no one's surprise, continued their killing spree. Numerous people died, including women and children. Once they met up with Mason's River Pirates, a gang in the lucrative business of raiding merchant flatboats on the
Ohio River, they were welcomed, but not for long. Even those who chose a pirate's life, which could often be violent, couldn't handle the bloodlust of the Harps. The end came when the men got into the habit of stripping victims naked, tying them to a blindfolded horse, and then running that
horse off the top of a nearby bluff. In May of seventeen ninety nine, not long after they had arrived, the Harps, including their captive women, were forced to leave the pirate stronghold because of their horrific behavior.
The Harps, as we see, never put but then would you if you were driven to kill all humans? They and their captive women walked hundreds of miles through rural Kentucky and Tennessee on the way of course, adding to their kill list. In their wake. They left William Ballard's disemboweled corpse drifting in the Holston River. James Brassel was discovered with his throat violently hacked open. In south central Kentucky, John Graves and his teenage son were found dead. Their
heads had been axed. While passing through Logan County, Kentucky. The pair murdered a young enslaved girl and a family while they slept at their camp. They killed a farmer named Bradbury. They killed a man named Hardin, and they killed a boy named Coffee. Another man named John Tully was also found murdered of.
The Harp's travels. Musgrave has also noted quote the near wilderness front tier west of the Appalachians and the sparsity of settlements allowed the Harps maximum freedom to commit their deprivations. Kentucky and Tennessee were states young but at least formally organized, but when they crossed north of the Ohio River at Cavan Rock, they were in the old Northwest Territory, where the nearest law man was more than one hundred miles away.
Seeking shelter, that August, the Harps stayed overnight at a farmstead in Webster County, Kentucky, at the invitation of a Missus Stegall, who was being kind to those passing through, and for her kindness, the men slit the throat of her four month old baby boy when he cried, and when she discovered the baby's body, they killed her too.
They killed another overnight guest named Major William Love. Missus Stegall's husband, Moses, who had been away during the murder of his wife and infant son, set out to kill the Harps as soon as he returned.
They were preparing to kill another local Kentucky settler, George Smith, when they were found by a local posse on August twenty fourth, seventeen ninety nine. The men called for their surrender, but that did not happen. The Harps fled on horseback. Big Harp was shot in the leg and the back, making it easier for those hunting him to catch up
with him. As he lay dying on the ground, he confessed to twenty murders, and then Moses Stegau, looking for vengeance and part of the posse searching for him, took his blade and slowly sawed off BIG's head, described with very gory detail that he started at the back of the neck while Big was still conscious. Later, Big was hanged on a pole near Henderson, Kentucky, at a crossroads where for years the remaining pole was called Harp's Head.
And Little Harp. He escaped and rejoined Samuel Mason's gang of pirates at Cavan Rock and for four years used the alias of John Sutton. During this time, a sizeable reward was placed on Mason's head, and Harp, with a pirate named James May, killed him for the money. But as they presented the head to authorities, they were arrested. If Harp thought that he wouldn't be recognized, he was gravely mistaken. Both men actually escaped, but their luck had
run out. They were recaptured, tried, and then sentenced to be executed by hanging. In January of eighteen oh four, Little Harp was executed. His head was cut off and placed on a stake along the Natchez Road a warning to other outlaws. Big Harp may have confessed to twenty murders as he was dying, but historians believe the Harps killed at least forty men, women and children, and very likely more than that.
In hindsight, for many historians, the Harp's capture was inevitable, and that's because they never had a motive just to desire or impulse to kill any other person who they happened to come across. John Musgrave has stated he never quote thought the Harps had an endgame other than to stay alive as long as they could. According to judge James Hall, who was one of the first to write about the Harps in the eighteen twenties, there were two
types of men on the frontier. The first was the noble pioneer seeking to do right by his family and God. The second wasn't looking to advance civilization. He was trying to escape it. They were men, as Haul put it, with a blunt perception of virtue, which is a very polite way to put that.
Yeah, the thought of the word virtue in a sentence anywhere near the Harps feels a little bit weird, feels wrong. It's wrong. This is not as st with a lot of things that inspire me to be creative. However, we have rules, so I tried to pick out things that seemed like they might be a good fit. And this is another one where I turned to a popular spirit of the seventeen hundreds, which is brandy. So that's going to be in it, mm hmm. But then we have
some other things. So this one starts out with an ounce of brandy, an ounce of London dry gin, and we're including that as a reference to the Harper family alliance to the royal crown. Yes, and then you're going to add an ounce of crem Denia, which we've used I think once before on this show, I believe, but it's been a minute. It's a liqueur it has kind of a sweet almondy flavor.
I feel it's been a few minutes.
It has that. So if you bought it a couple of seasons ago, bring out that bottle. Let's start, and then you're going to do two dashes of grapefruit bitters and you're gonna combine all of this and you're shaking tin with ice, give it a good shake, and then you will strain it into your cocktail glass. This is a weird one because it's like booze on booze on booze, and yet it does not taste all that boozy, and
I don't know why, but it doesn't. Sometimes that happens, and it's dangerous because since it doesn't taste all that boozy, you can really throw it back and then you're like, wow, I just had a lot of alcohol. So yes, as always drink responsibly, but particularly if you make one of these,
like don't chug a bunch. To make the mocktail version of this instead of brandy, you are going to steep some low sugar white grape juice with Earl Gray tea for a little while, and then I would do that like a four ounce with one tea bag and then you're obviously gonna have leftovers, so you can either make more or you can use that in something else. Actually, I like infused white grape juice that has a tea flavor,
just with like a little bit of ginger ell or clips. Like, it's just a nice quick way to make a little bevy. So you're gonna use an ounce of that infused white grape juice, You're gonna use an ounce of flat tonic, and then in lieu of the kremdon noio. I would only do a half ounce of almonds syrup because otherwise I think it gets too sweet. So you might want to up the the grape juice and the gin a
little bit, but not too much. If you do absolutely zero alcoholic content to the point that bitters are not cool. Just a few drops of grapefruit juice and like maybe a little saline or just throw some salt in. We'll do you just fine here, So same deal, Shake it with ice, pour it over, pour it into a chilled
cocktail glass, and you have a mocktail. And we're calling this one discordant harp because I kept thinking out the idea of harp as an instrument that would normally make beautiful music instead of all of this murder.
It's a horrible nightmare music.
That's the discordant part. I hope if you try this you love it. I really really like this drink. Actually, it surprised me how much I liked it.
I really like when grapefruit shows up in drinks, even in small amounts. You know, I'm a big fan.
Here's the oddity. I don't love a grapefruit to eat, but I will drink grapefruit soda. You all use the bitterers. I have a grapefruit liqueur that I love. I don't know what that's about, but there you go. I have like regular grapefruit juice. I'm like hard pass, but somehow in other forms totally down.
It was friends.
It has to it needs friends, for sure. You're one hundred percent accurate there. So that is the discordant harp. And if you make it, I hope you love it. We sure love that you spend this time with us listening to stories that are in this case not all that delightful in terms of their content, but hopefully you learn something. And now you know that there have been terrible people around as long as we've had a country
and way before that as well, forever. But we will be right back here next week with another story and some more drinks, and we hope you will join us for that. Criminalia is a production of Shondaland Audio in partnership with iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.