ALL THAT IS WICKED

A crime historian’s account of a Jekyll-and-Hyde savant who stunned 19th-century America with a series of murders.

By all outward appearances, Edward Rulloff (1819-1871) was highly intelligent and cultured. 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. 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. 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. Writers, scholars, and alienists (psychiatrists) fascinated with the murderer’s story came to visit him, each for different reasons. “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. 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. Many experts believe Rulloff was a high-level psychopath like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. As Dawson chillingly demonstrates, he was remarkably skilled at manipulating people into getting what he wanted; he was able to convince many scholars, for example, that he was completely innocent of his crimes. As the author memorably portrays an unrepentant killer, she engagingly grapples with the still-unresolved question of whether psychopathic evil emerges from brain anomalies or nurture and the environment—or some combination thereof.

Another darkly compelling work from an engrossing storyteller.