ALL THAT IS WICKED-Kate Winkler Dawson

business running. With stamps dot com, seamlessly connect with every major marketplace and shopping card if you sell online, schedule package pickups through the dashboard, and automatically see your cheapest and fastest shipping options from different carriers with rates up to eighty nine percent off USPS and UPS rates. And with the stamps dot Com mobile app, you can take care of mailing and shipping wherever you are, even on

the go. Make the same no brainer decision as over one million other business decision makers with stamps dot Com. Sign up at stamps dot com with Code Program for a special offer that includes a four week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale, no long term commitments or contracts. That's Stamps dot Com Code Program.

sign up now at Chumbuck Casino dot com. That's Chumbuck Casino dot com.

Some have called him a Victorian era Hannibal lecter, whose crimes spanned decades, in whose victims were chosen out of revenge, out of envy, and sometimes out of necessity. From his humble beginnings in upstate New York to the dazzling salons and social life he established in New York City, at every turn, Roloff used his intelligent and regal bearing to evade detection and avoid punishment. He could talk his way out of any crime, until one day, Roloff's luck ran out.

By eighteen seventy one, Rollufs sat chained in his cell, a psychopath holding court while curious nineteenth century mindhunters tried to understand what made him tick. From alienists early psychiatrists who tried to analyze the source of his madness, to neurologists who wanted to dissect his brain, to phrenologists who analyzed the bumps on his head to determine his character, each one thought he held the key to understand the

essential question, is evil born or made? Eventually, Roloff's brain would be placed in a jar at Cornell University as the prize specimen of their Anatomy collection, where it still sits today, slowly moldering in a dusty jar. But his story and its implications for the emerging field of criminal

psychology were just beginning. Expanded from season one of her hit podcast on the Exactly Right Network, All That Is Wicked, Kate Winkler Dawson draws on hundreds of source materials and never before shared historical documents to present one of the first glimpses into the mind of a serial killer, a century before the term was coined, through the scientists whose work would come to influence criminal justice for decades to come.

The book that we're featuring this evening is All That Is Wicked, a Gilded Age story of murder and the race to the code the criminal mind, with my special guests, his story and and author and podcaster Kate Winkler Dawson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Kate Winkler Dawson.

I mean, I've lived with him for six or seven years at this point, and I ran across his story, and I thought that it would be interesting to tell his story because this was someone who defied everything that people thought a criminal was in the nineteenth century. They thought a killer was a killer who was disheveled and wild eyed and somebody who you could spot easily. Not your neighbor, or your teacher, or your husband or the

you know, your in law. These are all things that were when it was discovered, were stunning to the people, not just an upstate New York or in America, but around the world because this was a man who looked like everyone else. Even more disturbing was he was smarter than everyone else, and he carried himself with eloquence, and he presented as this country gentleman when really, truly he was willing to remove any obstacle in his way, and he had such insecurities that he wanted to seek revenge

against people who he felt wronged him. And it didn't matter if it were women and children in his wake. So it's a tremendous story for me to tell in a time period that I just love, Gilded Age New York.

defined a killer to be in the eighteen hundreds. And so Hamilton Freeman approached Ruloff and his attorney and said, I want to write your biography, and Ruloff, being someone who you know is very clearly out for his own self interests agreed because he sensed that Hamilton Freeman was not a cynical New York City reporter. He sends that he was a small town reporter who was somebody who

had the ability to be manipulated very easily. And it's very clear to me and to the forensic psychiatrist I interviewed for this book that Ruloff checked just about every marker for psychopathy, for antisocial personality disorder and psychopathy in the nineteenth century, and there was no way to diagnose this,

of course back then. But I used this book as a way to trace his actions along with the actions of other serial killers and psychopaths throughout history to show that, unfortunately, and very uncomfortable saying it, that the reasons that people kill have not changed from the sixteen hundreds, of the fifteen hundreds until now. You know, there's jealousy and envy and insecurity and love and sex and money and greed. Those are all things that have just repeated throughout history.

going to be derailed. Ruloff told Hamilton that things really went off the rails for him when he arrived in New York and he started working as like a like a helper on the canal, on the Ear Canal, and he met a man named Henry Scutt, who eventually took him home and introduced him to his family. And Ruloff became entrenched in this family and married into it. And he blames the Scuts for everything that has gone wrong

in his life. Typical psychopath, Typical of someone who has psychopathies, blaming everybody but himself.

who he gave extensive interviews to. And you know, the motivation for Ruloff to get his story out there was he had made a discovery, he believed in the pattern of how human language was created, and he thought, and other people thought, if you could just figure that pattern out, that it would be very easy to market human language as a way to you know, you teach a Frenchman Italian very easily, and this would have been a huge discovery.

So Ruleoff's motivation to have him Hamilton Freeman write this biography was of course to get his theory out there, to get his life story out there, and Hamilton Freeman was certainly hopeful that it would put him on the map as an accomplished author, which it would have. This would have been a true crime book and a biography

that would have that was very well received. And so I don't know if Hamilton Freeman quite understood the depths of the skill of manipulation that Edward had, but he found out pretty quickly.

be a killer, and that was petrifying. So when Ruloff leading up to this time, when Ruloff describes the argument that he has with his wife while his wife has their essentially newborn child nearby, you know, he's describing this in a very dramatic nineteenth century manner, lots of flair, and you know, very dramatic. And he does ultimately confess to him, but he gives just enough details of this the murder that takes place, that he doesn't reveal what

happens to his daughter Priscilla. So there are assumptions, and ham felt very uncomfortable talking to him about it, but there seems to be very little evidence that Edward had planned and sent her away somewhere else. The conclusion is that most people would have and I have, is that he and up killing his daughter also and dropping them both into Cayuga Lake, which is why he was never on trial for their murder. He went on trial for kidnapping.

They couldn't prove murder. He was very smart in that way he covered up the evidence. But I think his motivation for confessing to that particular crime was really to keep Ham's interest. I think he knew that he had to give Ham something. And there are a couple of other murders that happened where rule Off is not so forthright with him, but with this one, the way he describes his fight with Harriet, where he is saying, I'm going to create a new life for us out west.

I want to take you. I will make you have a better life and we will be happy and free with our daughter, and she reacts in such a verbally violent way to him. I think he framed it in a way that it almost seems logical that he killed her. It almost to him seemed that she was destroying their life and it was an act of passion, And I'm not quite sure it went that way in real life. I do think that they had an argument, but I

think that this was not an accident. It was an intentional murder that he really maybe have thought about earlier. They had had a lot of acrimony in their marriage. He thought that she was having an affair with her male cousin, which would the affair would be surprising for me, but the male cousin part is not surprising. It was very common for people to marry who were first cousins. So you know, Rulolf was incredibly jealous of this man,

doctor Bull, and it had just plagued their marriage. So this was this was a huge trigger for him when she finally said, I'm not going out west. But I do think the way it was framed in the way Hamilton responded was the way Edward wanted him to responded, which is boy, he loved her so much that he was almost left with no choice, you know, but he wouldn't confess to his daughter, And I think that's he couldn't bring himself to say I did this to an innocent child. It's all manipulation.

the brothers named William. But despite this, they still were at odds with the entire family over this raving, over this doctor bull And yet something disastrous happened to William's wife and daughter. Tell us about this extraordinary, horrific scene in this book.

had hissy fits constantly. So when I tell you what I'm going to tell you about, when he's thrown out threats and nobody follows up on it or takes it particularly seriously, it's because they have had so much experience with his threats and nothing's ever happened that they just sort of thought, well, this is just more of this

blowhards reaction to not getting his way. So Edward Ruloff is completely distraught over this affair, which I don't believe actually happened between Harriet, his wife, and her cousin, doctor Bull. He's always been threatened by doctor Bull. Ruloff was a herbal doctor, you know, he would use herbs and it was a botanical doctor, and doctor Bull was a traditional doctor, and so they were already sort of at odds professionally. But boy Rulolf really disliked doctor Bullet. Doctor Bull would

come in, he was very suave. He would come in and kiss all the women on the cheek, and this just incensed rule Off and he because he was very insecure. What's one thing that people don't understand about people with psychopathy is they automatically think, well, they're also narcissist. Not true, They're not always narcissist. And in fact, a lot of people with psychopathy have incredibly low self esteem, and it's masked by this grandiose sense of self, by this glibnus

that's fake. So Rulolf was incredibly insecure, and he was abusive at times to Harriet, to a point where her brothers intervened and said essentially, if you don't straighten up, we're taking her back, which looking through a twenty first century lens, is like, yeah, of course, what else are they going to say in a nineteenth century lens. That's pretty extraordinary because once you marry, once a man marries a woman, she essentially becomes his property. There's a little autonomy.

So this they had to have been very alarmed to say we are taking her back if you don't straighten up. And you know, rul Off felt slighted by the family constantly, particularly by her brother William, who she was very close with. And William had a wife named Amelia, and then Amelia and Priscilla, who was Ruloff's daughter, were born very close

together within months, so they were both young babies. Amelia had just been had just given birth, and she and her daughter had both become very sick, which would not have been unusual at all. The childbirth's deaths were very common. Of course, these are mostly bacterial infections that happened because they didn't have the same medicines.

and I am tired of hearing about it. And if you continue to complain about an affair that doesn't exist, that I will expel you from this family. So Ruloff was the most dangerous type of person with psychopathy, which was he was smart, and he knew when to shut up, and he was high functioning, and he stopped talking and

just watched and waited. So when Amelia gave birth to a Meal and they both became very sick, William was desperate and he saw Edward Ruloff at his family's farm and he said, come with me, Please, your doctor help her, and within a day she if she and her daughter were dead. Now Ruloff could have actually didn't give any explanation for what happened to him. He sort of said, well, you know, I gave the medicine, and you know, you

kind of crossed her fingers. But when they died and his mother in law, who was the matriarch of the family, Hannah Scut, was mourning death these two deaths, he said to her, you know I killed them. William Scutt did me wrong. Your son did me wrong. And if things don't straighten out soon, then Harriet and my child are next. Now, Hannah did nothing about this because again, no one believed he was capable of this. No one believed it. He helped plan the funeral, he went there. You would have

never been able to detect that something was wrong. That's how good he was. And that's what that lack of remorse and that lack of empathy that he demonstrated that is so prevalent with people with psychopathy. Also, you know, is makes him an excellent actor.

And one thing that's so funny about people with psychopathy not funny, haha, I guess funny strange is I interviewed for a forensic psychologist whose name is Catherine Ramslin, and she spent years interviewing Dennis Raider, who was the BTK killer, right, And she said they all do the same thing. They whine it's the poor me. And she knew Robert Hare who Crank, came up with the checklist. It's called the

Hairs Checklist for psychicopathy. And it's the list you go through when you check off, you know, and you on. It's in a rating scale and that's how you decide if somebody has psychopathy. There's no blood test or anything. And she said she had suggested jokingly to Robert Hare that you should add whining to your checklist because they all wine and rule off wind. And he said, I want to go to Ohio to his wife, you need to come with me. I have been thwarted at every turn.

Your family has degraded me, and they joke about finding me on the canal as a as a poor canal worker. And now your wifely duty is to come with me and we're going to bring Priscilla and you're going to have a good life. And she said no, She said no, and this infuriated him. So this was the trigger for him. And we often talk about killers and any kind of predictability that we can't we're always as a society hoping to gather information to be able to, if not predict,

at least protect against something that could happen. And so you're looking for those triggers, and you're looking for those qualities and the things that should be alarming. And this telling Edward Rulolph that your dream is going to go away because Harriet has the power to say no, hell no, I'm not going with you. That is what triggered him. It was not her fault, it was totally his fault, but there are usually triggers even for a serial killer to start doing something.

At the deepest part, he said, and he confessed all of this, and this is what he did to cover up the crime. And it worked because the Scuts had missed Harriet and Priscilla for six weeks, but they assumed that everything was fine, and this still was an extraordinary long time to not talk to their sister. So Edward Ruloff shows up weeks later after the murders and he says hi to her two brothers, Ephraim and William Scutt,

and they say where is she? And he says, she's vacationing between the Lakes, which was between the Great Lakes, and he said they'll be back at some point, but he stays the night there. He continues to be around. Now, this is a time period that loved snake oil salesman. They love frauds in the nineteenth century and shysters, and it was so easy to be a shyster in that

time period. There's no driver's licenses, there's no national identification system, there's no photography really, and so he could have stepped on a train and gone to Ohio and taken that job and been just fine and disappeared and they might not have ever been able to track him down. And he could have said they ran away, you know, Harriet had enough of him and took off. But yet he returns.

And it is that element of self sabotage that is so interesting about people with psychopathy, and he does it twice. And if people often ask me that why is he doing that? Why is he doing that? Well, I think that without the scuts, he didn't have a host. And people that I've spoken to experts on psychopathy often called them like they'll call them like a virus or and you know, a bacteria looking for a host. And without

the scuts, he had no host. And I think he needed them, he needed a resource, and he would come home and he would get food and comfort from them. And he did such odd things like he tried to return a ring to William that William had given his sister, and he said, do you want this back? And William said, no, it's Harriet's why I don't want it back. So, just things that were very odd. He was constantly It's not that he wanted to get caught. I think he just

didn't know what else to do. And there was a part of him that felt so insecure without the scuts that he continued to return.

fifty years ago. So the Scuts particularly like this part of the story because it shows a quality that they believe they still have, which is an incredible amount of loyalty for their family and perseverance. So rule Off finally, because he's returned a couple of times, they become suspicious and Ephraim and William decide they are going to do something that seems inexplicably complicated to me, which was they're

going to keep rule Off at their house. They're going to force him to write a letter to Harriet, who now he says is in Ohio. They're going to snail mail this letter to Ohio. She will presumably respond, snail mail it back and everything will be okay. And so you know, you have to imagine this is going to take a This is a long process. This is not going to be something that's quick. So unfortunately they left their sister in charge of keeping an eye on him,

and he simply walked off and disappeared. And this sends the family into a panic because despite everything in their bones that says there's no way this man, the way he speaks, the way he looks killed our sister and his daughter, reality is setting in and they decide they

need to go and find him. So incredible series of an event of events happen where we have Ephraim rushing from renting force and carriage to race to train stations, and he hops from train station to train station, and then he gets on the steamers that that go across the Great Lakes and eventually tracks Ruloff down, which is just incredibley and finds him and he slips away again, and then there's this pivotal moment once he's recaptured one

more time. They're on the steamer together and they're heading back to New York for certain justice. Ephrom is hoping, and someone finds out on the ship that this is Edward Ruloff, the man who's accused of killing his family, and they want to hang him on the boat. The captain says, let's do it. I've got rope. Let's do it. All of the passengers on the boat and Ephram Scott had such belief, such a deep belief in the justice system that he said, no, we're not going to do that.

We're going to have inventional, secular justice, and we're going to do it back in New York, and I'm going to show everybody that I was able to bring him back. Edward Ruloff and Ephraim have a moment on the top deck where they're sitting next to each other, and Ephraim says, I don't understand what happened. You know, we brought you into our family, you married my sister. We gave you every opportunity, We helped you start at school in Dryden when you were very young. We kept you safe. I

don't understand why you did this. And really Ruloff stayed quiet, and then he suggested that he would jump over the edge and take his own life. He would rather do that and Ephraim essentially snickered and said go ahead, but I don't think you're going to do it, and he was right. Edward didn't want to do it. So he goes back to face justice, and that's a big question mark because justice can be funny sometimes.

Essential for Women eighteen plus. Multivitamin Essential for Women eighteen plus was shown to increase vitamin D levels by forty three percent and omega three DHA levels by forty one percent in twelve weeks. Now, Ritual has just released Synbiotic Plus, a gut health supplement with clinically studied prebiotics, probiotics, and a post biotic all in one minti capsule My wife Lisa, and I have been taking Ritual daily for a few

years now. Lisa started with a ritual eighteen plus for women, and when Ritual for men and fifteen plus became available, I started. We were impressed with Ritual successful clinical trials initially, then impressed with Rituals overall results, and now impressed taking Symbiotic Plus. Right now, Ritual is offering my listeners ten percent off your first three months. Visit ritual dot com slash murder and turn healthy habits into a ritual that's

ten percent off at ritual dot com slash murder. Now we're talking Kate about his undoing and finally this trial, but you said, let's not before we get ahead of ourselves realize what happens at this trial and what the prosecutor was faced with.

was no crime, and that's what he harped on. He represented himself in this trial, and there was an unraveling of witnesses who came, and some said he was insanely jealous, some said he was abusive, but there was simply no evidence. There wasn't even evidence that she died. They examined the place where they lived, the house where they lived, and they couldn't find it. A bit of blood. He had cleaned it up, and there again was no physical evidence.

Nobody heard anything, no neighbors saw anything. It would have been difficult today, I believe, to convict him, and in the nineteenth century, she, like I said, could have gotten on a train and gone anywhere. And you don't want to convict a man, and particularly convict a man of murder in the nineteenth century, where it would have been a death sentence, have that happened, and then have her walk back in a year later. So they were very

careful about that. The district attorney did something interesting. He told the jury that they could have two choices. They could convictim of murder, which of course would have been his preference. He would have a convictim of murder, which would have been the death penalty, or you could convict him of a lesser crime, which was kidnapping, and that would have given him ten years at Auburn State Prison. And so when the case was done and rule Off

said over and over again, no body, no crime. The conviction was for ten years for the kidnapping, it wasn't for murder, and the judge kind of cornered the jury and he talked to the jury four men and said, I don't understand. How could you convict him for kidnapping and not murder? And he said, there's not enough evidence for murder. But we knew he did something. We believe he killed her, but there wasn't enough evidence, which I

thought was very interesting. So we went with the smaller time so that at least we could get him for something. So he was convicted and sent to Auburn's State prison, and which was one of the best things that had ever happened to him.

such a young age. When you're married and you have a child, and you have a job as a botanical doctor and as a teacher, and you're giving lectures on phrenology and language, you don't have time to work on really serious academic pursuits. And now he did. He had ten years of quiet, of three meals a day, and he actually became a carpet designer in prison, and he was paid a lot of money for these designs because he was so creative. He invented a few new things,

including a gun. In prison. He was able to figure out how to make a gun, and he never used it, but these little inventions came became useful for him later on. So while in prison, he woke up one morning and there was like a ding ding moment where he realized that he could figure out the origin of human language, which was a really big question mark, and he believed that there was a manufactured from Europe pattern that all

language was created on. So he thought that the letters R and F were very important, which I'm sure is no coincidence because those letters were in his last name. And he had really interesting idea about how language was formed and if you could figure that pattern out, then you could really leverage that in teaching languages, which would have been a million dollar idea in the eighteen hundreds. So this was a dream for him. And now he had ten years to write on this manuscript, which he

titled The Method in Formation of Human Language. And he had these ten years with making some money as a carpet maker, carpet designer, living in silence, eating well, being fairly healthy. While he was there, he worked in the kitchen. I mean, this was not a bad life. And Auburn State Prison had a terrible reputation. I mean it looked like this Gothic out of Hell type you know scenario, and he really benefited from it. He really really used his time.

never went anywhere. There wasn't enough evidence. They couldn't even figure out how she died, if she died at all. So eventually Ruloff had to be jailed while awaiting trial, and there was a lot of appeals and so on. So he was jailed in Ithaca. The under sheriff, which was like a deputy sheriff, had a family, a wife and a child, and rule Off had volunteered or was asked, I'm not sure which to tutor the young young people in Ithaca, because right what you said was he was

this well known scholar. So these people in Ithaca who wanted to kill him. They wanted him strung up at the gallows. Were now allowing their children, their teenagers, to come and be tutored in languages by him, which I just find so bizarre. And one of the people who was tutored was the under sheriff's son, whose name was Al Jarvis. And he was a young man who, you know, I sounds like had some troubles in the past, but

had a lot of potential. He's very good looking. He was enamored with Ruloff and vice versa, and he ran errands for Ruloff. And in the meantime, ever Ruloff, who's shackled in this jail, isducing the under sheriff's wife, so Al Jarvis's mother, and it all results in ever Ruloff breaking out of jail in the middle of the night with their help and going on the run.

staying with Ruloff. His brother's name was Ruloff Ruluffsen. He would have been fine staying with his brother, but he ventures off and goes to Alleghany College under the name Professor James Nelson. Alleghany College was headed by a president who was from England. Ruloff didn't know this, and he feigned an English accent, and the president from England bought it.

He said, okay, this guy's great. He had him teach language classes as kind of an adjunct, and then Rulof said, well, I really want and he's on the run the whole time. He said, I really want a full time faculty position here, and the president said, we can't give you that. We don't have an opening, but let me look around, and he poked around and eventually rule off James Nelson. Professor James Nelson was offered a full time faculty position in

North Carolina at a university there. So this is a man who has escaped a murder sentence, who's awaiting trial to potentially go on trial for his daughter's murder. And he has made up a totally new name, and he is gone and now has accepted a faculty position in North Carolina.

rule off and they know where he was. He had kept in touch with him, and Al Jarvis said, you're gonna help us, or I'm going to kill you, which is why when I read portraits of Al Jarvis as being this nice boy who's been corrupted by Edward Ruloff, not quite the case. He had some problems beforehand. So Al Jarvis says, I'm gonna you know, I'm gonna kill you.

I'll slitch your throat next time I see you. If you don't help us, So instead of giving getting on the train to North Carolina, rule off essentially robs a jewelry store and eventually gets caught and eventually gets sent back to Ithaca and then gets off the Supreme The New York State Supreme Court came back and said, we cannot prosecute him for murdering his daughter and there's not enough evidence. Nobody, no crime, So he wasn't going to be charged.

And so he creates this little crime ring with the promise that if you go out and rob silk merchants, sell their wares, help support me, and let me have this apartment in Irving Place, that I will when I make a million dollars off of this manuscript, I will repay you. Essentially, So they have a boxer whose name or they have a what they called an illiterate boxer named Billy Jarvis, who was a really interesting character. He was very rough and humble, but he had an interest

in higher education, and Ruloff met him in prison. Ruloff was in and out of prison, so was al Jarvis. But they were under fictitious names. There was no records check. They couldn't figure out who was here. So Ruloff met Billy Dexter in prison, so Al Jarvis and Billy Dexter and Ruloff would go and rob silk merchants in upstate New York in the countryside. They collected a couple of other criminals to help. There was a woman who cooked for them but also fenced their silk for them. They

had another guy who was helping rob stuff. And in the meantime, Ruloff is spending all night long writing his manuscript. So they've created this crime ring just to fund his

academic research, which was very interesting. And then there's this fateful turn where they rob a silk merchant in Binghamton, New York, an upstate New York, and they don't understand how chloroform works, and they think that they have knocked out the two young male clerks who are babysitting the silk, and they did not, and ensues this horrific fight between these three robbers, including Ruloff and these two clerks, and it turns into total mayhem and ends fatally for three

out of the five people involved.

who he was. And he has asked to identify the two dead robbers from the river, and he says, I don't know who they are, even though he knew perfectly well who they were. So he is dragged in along with all the other nerd wells in town to essentially stand trial. Somebody is responsible for this dead clerk and these two robbers, and so there's not enough evidence against really anyone. And the judge tells Ruloff, who he gave

a fictitious name. The judge tells Ruloff go on and go, and so he turns and there's a voice that says stopped. And he turns around and he realizes that one of the judges in his trial is standing in that courtroom, and he says, you are Edward Ruloff. I know exactly who you are. You killed your wife and your child. And Ruloff is just brilliant because he says, yeah, you're right, that's exactly who I am. Now, do you understand why I made up a name. I happened to be in

this town and there's a dead clerk. No, I didn't have anything to do with that, but I lied because everybody's going to assume I was involved. So it was very This man was very quick, thinking on his feet, pretty remarkable turning. He almost got away with it, you.

which is usually not a very good idea. Bundy also represented himself for some of his trials, and this happens. This is another trait of people with psychopathy. They have this again, this false grandiose sense of self where they are much smarter than they actually are. And rule Off had some great arguments. He essentially said, this was self defense. These clerks fought with me, and you know, I eventually

had to protect myself. So the trial was interesting. He eventually was convicted, and it's what happened after the trial that really is the crux of the book, which is now he's being scheduled to be executed. But you have groups of men who say, I don't think this is a good idea. He's very smart, he's promising us he has this manuscript that's life changing for languages. Let's not kill him. Let's figure out a way to harness his brain for good instead of evil.

She really inserted himself in Ruloff's life. There was a reporter named Oliver Dyer who was with the New York Son and Oliver really believed in the theory and his writing, and he published incredibly large, in depth excerpts of Ruloff's theory in the newspapers, which swayed the public in his favor. There was a psychiatrist whose name was John Gray. He was very notorious. He was nation's most well known psychiatrist,

and he believed in the biology theory. So the biology theory was that if your body was sick, then you had a mental illness. Most likely, if your body was healthy, then your mind was healthy. And so he came in and examined Ruloff's body, which was not in great shape. I mean, Ruloff really had some big health issues. But Ruloff understood that theory well enough to know that he did not want to be deemed insane. If he were deemed insane, he would be sent to an asylum, which

was about one step above being executed. Asylums, including Gray's asylum, were not really good. But the most important thing was yes, that would save his life if he were deemed insane legally insane, but it would discredit all of his research. Nobody would believe that a quote unquote crazy man would have written anything of value. So he lied about his physical condition because he knew that Gray would call him insane. So every person he encountered he never confessed to anyone

but Hamilton Freeman. He spoke eloquently about linguistics to Oliver Dyer, but he knew that Oliver Dyer was very religious, and so he never He never admitted that he was an atheist to Oliver Dyer. When people would ask to John Gray and to another psychologist he questioned the existence of God. That was safe with them because they weren't particularly religious, right, but not with Oliver Dyer, who he was hoping to

leverage with the media. So with every different person he encountered, they all walked away with, you know, a different opinion. The closest that they came to of being correct about

who he was was. They called it moral insanity, which means your body is healthy, right, you don't have a mental illness, but you have some pretty messed up morals, and the morals that you have been given by God have led you astray, which is again comes back to nature versus nurture, and the belief at the time that people were born bad, they were born to be killers,

they were born evil. So that is the closest thing to psychopathy I think that we have in that story, because nobody knew what psychopathy was, and he fits every single marker to a t.

hopes of curing it. Now on the flip side is you have the neurologists like William Hammond who studied the brain after you died. John Gray would study you while you were alive, and William Hammond would study you after you died. And what the non neurologists were saying is that we have the ability to work with people who are mentally ill better than the psychiatrists do because we're trying to learn what's actually happening with the brain. And

so the neurologists were at the forefront of this. The people who were far far far behind were the precursors to psychologists, which were phrenologists. So the phrenologists were looking at people's bumps on their skulls, feeling for bumps, and then also looking at brains of people who had died, and they're assigning different qualities why we behave in which ways to different parts of the brain based on the

bumps on your skull. So if you have dominant bumps on the back of your skull, that might be what I think they called it, your animalistic section, which means, you know, if you're bumpy back there, then you probably could kill someone. And there's a moral section, and there's a benevolent section. None of it makes sense, and all of it was incorrect. However, there are parts of our brain that govern different parts of and you know, really

different qualities that we have, so that was correct. The problem that we have with phrenology is based on bumps. They could predict, they claimed, who a young person who would go on to be a killer and who would be a minister. And you can imagine for the people who they predicted to be killers or have a large animal brain, how uncomfortable that made them. And it was certainly part of scientific racism, using your body parts to assign intelligence to you.

theory was worthless, had some crazy ideas. Now I've had linguistics experts tell me that his ideas were no more crazy than some of the other ideas that people had about linguistics. He got several things right that other people had not had. There was still the belief in the nineteen hundreds that Homer was written that the iliad who know Homer wrote was Homer was one person. And Ruloff said, no, it was multiple people, and he was right. So there

are some things that he got right about theories. The bottom line was that Edward Ruloff was incredibly smart. He was not right about this manuscript, but he was so bright that if he had had a normal brain, if he had been able to work with other people of his caliber, he probably could have made some incredible discoveries. But his hubris, his ego, or his lack of self esteem wouldn't allow him to do that.

away from. He is a coldness about him. So again, that intersection incredible intelligence and coldheartedness was something that fascinated people in the nineteenth century.

Buried Bones. And I present Paul with a case with a lot of mystery and he gives me a twenty first century investigator's opinion on what went wrong and what went right from cases over a couple hundred years ago.