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

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886

Its strenuous work to saw through a skull.

The job demands an anatomist with dexterity, diligence, physical strength, and a sharpened blade. But the rewards of such physical exertion are great: the brain uncovered beneath the thick layer of bone might prove invaluable to science. This one certainly did.

Tucked deep inside a steel-clad, brown building at one of the most respected universities in the United States sits the brain of a brilliant killer: Edward Rulloff. Curious visitors to Cornell Universitys psychology department in Ithaca, New York, marvel at the brains massive frontal lobe. Its been on display for more than one hundred yearsso long that small pieces have begun chunking off, dissolving slowly in the murky formaldehyde. Though few students ever see the brain itself, its reputation is hinted at across the campus in several small, almost invisible ways. In a whisper from an upperclassman about the universitys macabre history. Or in the name of the popular Ithaca eatery, Rulloffs Restaurant.

There are seven other brains inside that glass display, each one claimed by an owner who earned a place in history. One was a noted naturalist, another was a groundbreaking scientist, and one was an influential political activist... but Rulloffs brain is overwhelmingly the biggest of them all; you can see that right away. It is in fact one of the largest brains studied in the worldeasily among the top 1 percent in size, a ghastly and strange statistic that leads to other, darker questions. (How do scientists know this? How many other brains are out there, waiting to be weighed and examined?) While Rulloff ended his life in ignominy, this brain in a dusty glass jar is in fact an artifact of a once-lauded scholar, a nineteenth-century polymath who charmed his way to the upper echelons of intellectual society. The amiable academic deceived almost everyone he met (at least for a little while), pairing a clever remark with a wink and a grin. But the brilliant Rulloff also had a dark side. He confessed to murdering his wife, though he likely killed his infant daughter, too. His sister-in-law and his infant niece were poisoned while under his care as a doctor in upstate New York... and then he killed again when he settled in Gilded-Age New York City.

After his past was unmasked, Rulloff was tantalizing fodder for journalistsa murderer cloaked as an intellectual savant anonymously roaming the streets of 1800s Manhattan. He might have strolled past the lavish mansions on Fifth Avenue or skirted the perilous alleys of Five Points. Edward Rulloffs New York was a spellbinding world, one teeming with corrupt politicians, self-righteous academics, unscrupulous journalists, horrible poverty, and unimaginable wealth. In the den of iniquity that was much of Manhattan in the late nineteenth century, Edward Rulloff presented himself as New York Citys own Dr. Jekyllfifteen years before the character slunk across the pages of Robert Louis Stevensons famous novella. But Rulloffs adaptation of Mr. Hyde was more ghastly and more merciless than Stevenson could have imagined. Before America became transfixed by Londons Jack the Ripper in 1888 or by H. H. Holmes in 1894, it was riveted by Edward Howard Rulloff and his gruesome murders.

Almost thirty years after his initial crimes, Rulloff was finally captured and convicted of murder. And that was where the next phase of his storythe one that is still debated and discussed even todaybegan. As Rulloff sat shackled to the floor of a dismal jail cell, awaiting execution, he watched more than a dozen men in suits and hats come in turn to meet him. They each sat nervously, clutching their papers and pencils. An author. A newspaperman. A phrenologist. An alienist. A physician. And others. To them, he was a fascinating, unique specimen to study. They were each convinced that Rulloffs mindin all its twisty, enigmatic glorywas the key to unlocking the mysteries of psychology and the human brain.

One by one these experts stared as the charming academic unspooled his life story. If he were truly evil, they each thought,