The Most Notorious Brain
in the Annals of Crime

The calm, dark waters of Cayuga Lake—the longest of the eleven glacial Finger Lakes in central New York—are bewitching. Its current sparkles in the daylight but in darkness, it’s a frightening abyss. And in 1845, the lake had been an excellent accomplice to murder. What lay at the bottom almost 175 years ago thrust Edward Howard Rulloff into the annals of history as quite possibly one of the most intelligent known killers in America.

Nineteenth century scientists wanted to inspect Rulloff’s brain, dissect it and measure it to see if they could spy some irregularity that could predict evil; they suspected his devilish nature would be inscribed in its tissue, if they only looked closely enough. Scientists in Europe had cracked open the skulls of common criminals and inspected their brains, but Rulloff was different. His violent impulses, his incredible charm, and his undeniable intelligence all made his brain worthy of examining, the first murderer in America to be referenced in scientific journals. His case attracted contemporary neuroscientists with a tantalizing question—perhaps he wasn’t to blame for his crimes? His brain made him do it.   

***

The story of Edward Rulloff’s tragic life and the fates of the people he killed began in May of 1842 when he shook the hand of a boat master in upstate New York. Henry Schutt’s mother and father had raised their brood of twelve to welcome the wayfaring men who stumbled onto their sprawling homestead in Dryden, a village near Ithaca. So Henry wasn’t suspicious when he met a charming stranger on the canal looking for work. Edward Rulloff had been a capable worker, a brawny man with a wide chest and strong shoulders. Soon, Henry invited him home to the farm.

The more the Schutt family came to know Rulloff, the more impressed they were with his accomplishments. He spoke multiple languages including Latin, Greek, French and German. His penmanship was gorgeous. He was charming, generous—and thought very highly of himself.

John Schutt treated him politely, but with reservation. He was reticent to trust a foreigner and Rulloff claimed he was German. But Schutt allowed the young man to work on the farm and soon Rulloff began teaching classes for local students.

Sixteen-year-old Harriet Schutt was a beauty—tall, slender with long, luxurious light brown hair, pale skin and hazel eyes. She could be coy with men, even seductive, but her flirting was tempered with a certain naivety. Rulloff wooed her in the classroom.

By the fall of 1843, he appeared to be thriving as an apprentice under a botanical doctor in Ithaca, learning how to treat patients with herbs and roots. But Rulloff’s rising status wasn’t a comfort to the Schutts—he seemed unstable.

If Harriet became too coquettish with another man, Rulloff might scowl, then switch to a cool dispassion and, when she finally apologized, he would flash a wolfish half grin, pleased that she relented. What an odd man, thought her brother Ephraim.

Duplicity was distressing to most people in Victorian America, especially in rural villages—a man’s handshake should have been sufficient to earn trust. But despite his wide smile and welcoming gaze, it was clear to some that Edward Rulloff was a fraud.

***

His real name was John Edward Howard Rulofson, born on July 9, 1819 in New Brunswick, Canada—he was not, in fact, German. His father was a poor farmer who died when Rulloff was just five. His mother, Priscilla, cultivated his love of academia, “a woman of more than ordinary intellect,” he remembered.

Young Edward devoured books at night—he only slept because his mother habitually extinguished his lamp. He attended church, but simply as an intellectual study. The Bible fascinated him and he ardently studied the Greek Testament, marveling over the beauty of its words and viewing all languages as works of art. But he had little money for college, so now the brilliant young student faced life with no real direction. For years, Rulloff bounced from job to job, committing petty crimes—like theft—until that day in 1842 when he met Henry Schutt.

***

Edward Rulloff married Harriet Schutt on her parents’ farm in Dryden—New Year’s Eve of 1843. The Schutts were suspicious, nervous and even hostile. John Schutt told his sons that Harriet was lost now, that he “washed his hands of the crime, if she chose to marry that foreigner.” Rulloff could hardly hide his disdain.

“I was their superior in every way,” he complained. “I would not have stayed with them if I had not been poor, and had no other place to go.”

Rulloff’s desperation to keep Harriet had quelled his pride. She was 17-years-old the day they married—she glowed in her white silk wedding dress. But Rulloff wasn’t the only one admiring her. He fumed as her cousin, Dr. Henry W. Bull, strode around the property. He was too friendly with the Schutt women, even his own cousins. He lingered as he kissed Harriet.

“I was disconsolate—I was wild,” Rulloff remembered. “I resolved to put an end to her existence and mine.”

Within a week, Rulloff packed up their meager belongings and moved his wife ten miles away. He converted a large old store in the village of Lansing into a home. His reputation as a botanical physician was exceptional and his character, according to townspeople, was beyond reproach. And Rulloff had been gaining prominence as a scholar. His specialty was languages, but he also earned money by lecturing on the emerging science of phrenology—the detailed study of the size and shape of a person’s skull to reveal character traits and personality. Phrenologists claimed the shape and size of the cranium could predict whether a man had been a devout minister or a vicious killer using categories like “low brow” versus “high brow.” His interest in phrenology was ironic—no cranial test could have predicted the horrors Edward Rulloff would soon commit.

In 1843, he felt dissatisfied in the countryside. When Harriet would press him about visiting her family, he would dramatically fling open a suitcase, hurl clothes inside, slam it shut and stomp out the door. Harriet’s flirtation with Dr. Bull tormented him. And he had become increasingly unstable as his obsession with becoming an academic deepened. A few months after their marriage, he had “accidentally” whacked Harriet in the forehead with a heavy, marble pestle used to prepare medicinal herbs, almost knocking her unconscious.  A few after that, the couple was staying in a boarding house when Rulloff tried to force Harriet to take deadly poison before the landlady stopped him. He began cursing his wife and her dalliances with Dr. Bull.

“Oh, Edward. I am as innocent as an unborn child,” Harriet cried.

“God Damn, you,” Rulloff yelled before smacking her in the face. “You know better than to come near me when I am angry as I am now.”

On April 12, 1845, Harriet gave birth to little Priscilla and the Schutts prayed that fatherhood would temper Rulloff’s dangerous impulses.

***

It was June 1845 and William Schutt, Harriet’s older brother, was frantic because his wife and their newborn daughter were dying from a bacterial infection. He raced on horseback toward Dryden to his family’s farm, begging Rulloff to cure them with his medicinal herbs. While Rulloff resented Harriet’s entire clan, he had been most disgusted with William, the brother who had insisted on defending Dr. Bull. Rulloff agreed to help.

Hannah Schutt loathed her son-in-law—he seemed to make her daughter miserable. As she rode alongside him toward Ithaca, Rulloff turned to his mother-in-law and issued a startling statement about William’s wife.

“It was wholly indifferent to him whether she got well,” Hannah recalled. “William had misused him about Dr. Bull, and that thing would yet mount to the shedding of blood.”

It might have seemed menacing, but Hannah Schutt had long ago grown accustomed to her son-in-law’s melodramatics. When they arrived, the baby was nearly unconscious. Rulloff pulled out his medicine bag—a short time later, she died; her mother passed away two days later.

“William’s wife and child have gone,” Rulloff said, sneering at Hannah. “Who will go next? Harriet and her babe would go next.”

He was threatening his own wife and daughter, yet Hannah wasn’t alarmed, nor did she suspect that Rulloff had a hand in the deaths of her daughter-in-law and grandchild. It was impossible, she believed, that a man with such potential could also be a killer.

***

Less than three weeks after the double funerals, Rulloff braced himself for yet another argument with his young bride. He hoped to move his little family out west to Ohio where he had been offered a position as the head of a prestigious academy. “No,” she shrieked. Harriet would never go to Ohio with him or anywhere, for that matter.

He was enraged. He accused Harriet of cheating with Dr. Bull—he let loose a string of horrible profanities. Then he glanced at his daughter and turned to Harriet.

“I said she might go to hell if she chose to,” recalled Rulloff, “but that she should not take the child, that I would take care of that.”

He lunged at her and tried to strip the baby from his wife’s arms, but she clung on too tightly. And then Rulloff spotted that heavy marble pestle. He flung it at her head.

***

“Everything that had before been bright and hopeful turned black and forbidding in my mind,” he later recalled.

Rulloff sat on his bed and fretted all night—he vowed to commit suicide. No. Suicide would deprive the world of his knowledge.

“I had ambition to live for, and responsibilities,” he said. The mind of a genius had been no match for the poison of narcissism.

Rulloff quickly pulled out his largest chest and soon knocked on his neighbor’s door, requesting a horse and cart. He drove all night slowly toward the southern shore of Cayuga Lake. It was dark as he rowed a stolen boat. He estimated the deepest part of the lake and opened the trunk before dumping out the contents.

“It sank rapidly to rise no more,” Rulloff said.

Six weeks later, Harriet’s brothers, Ephraim and William Schutt, were sitting inside a store in Ithaca when Edward Rulloff strolled in. It was a hot, sticky day, late summer in the country. Shocked, the Schutt men eyed their brother-in-law.

“Where have you been?” William asked, pointedly.

“Between the lakes,” Rulloff calmly replied.

“Where’s your wife and child?”

Rulloff smiled.

“Between the lakes.”

***

Soon, Edward Rulloff led his brothers-in-law on a dramatic cross-country chase until he was finally arrested in Ohio in late 1845; he went on trial in January. The prosecutor’s case was weak; there was virtually no evidence. The jury convicted Rulloff of kidnapping, not murder. He received a ten-year sentence. Meanwhile, the national media published daily stories, all depicting Edward Rulloff as a vicious monster.

For a decade he pondered literature, philosophy and linguistics inside Auburn State Prison, about 40 miles north of Ithaca. He struck on a theory about the origin of human language, an idea he felt certain could bring him enormous wealth and, more importantly, respect.

Over that decade, the Schutt family’s confusion over Edward Rulloff’s dual personas had hardened into malice. On the day their brother-in-law was released from prison, Rulloff was rearrested with new charges: the murder of his own daughter. He quickly escaped from jail and newspaper headlines screamed about the dangerous criminal on the loose.

Despite being an internationally known fugitive, he refused to delay his success. Using an alias, Rulloff managed to impress professors at a local college with his skill in languages, securing a faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—an incredible stroke of luck. But self-sabotage would become a theme in his life, a habitual weakness. On his way to North Carolina, he had been caught with stolen goods and returned to jail in Ithaca, yet the sheriff refused to hold him on any charges.

Rulloff was free once again, but he could only see a downward spiral into hell unless he could sell his manuscript. He was convinced it would change the field of linguistics—his specialty, philology, was the study of the history of language. For now he needed to remain anonymous, so in January 1860 Edward Rulloff disappeared.

Folks imagined him as a villain waiting to exact revenge on the townspeople who cursed him. He had become rural New York’s bogeyman.

***

Edward Rulloff now pursued a double life—fugitive and respected academic—in an apartment in respectable Irving Place, in downtown Manhattan. He needed money, so he recruited Al Jarvis and William “Billy” Dexter, both criminals with a desire for higher learning. He offered them room and board in exchange for “working.” There was also an Irish woman who would sell the stolen silks. Her boyfriend, a boxer and a thief, would sometimes accompany Jarvis and Dexter.

By day, Rulloff tutored the young men in ancient languages, classical poetry and writing. At night, the pair burglarized silk merchants, small town banks and large dry good stores. They crisscrossed New Jersey, Connecticut and even Upstate New York, not far from the Schutt family’s farm. The gang would case each location and then sneak in using special tools.

Rulloff was a killer and now the head of a crime ring that empowered—of all things—his academic work. While his cohorts stole, he worked diligently on his treatise now titled the Method in the Formation of Language.

“Things which are opposites in meaning, are named from the same roots, in which the elements are reversed,” Rulloff wrote. “Take the words stir and rest, for example, the meanings of which are opposites. In stir, the roots is composed of s,t,r; in rest these are reversed—r, s, t.”

He wept over his own words, yet he worried that the world’s most renowned philologists would be dismissive. In 1869, he offered to sell the manuscript for half a million dollars at the American Philological Association in Poughkeepsie, New York. The linguistic experts laughed and roundly rejected Rulloff’s theory, though it was actually no more outlandish than other proposals. The aging academic bellowed profanities. His façade of “country gentleman” crumbled. His theory had been undermined by his arrogance. But Edward Rulloff vowed to gather money and publish the manuscript on his own.

In the summer of 1870 Rulloff, Al Jarvis and Billy Dexter broke into a dry goods store that backed up to the Chenango River in Binghamton in Upstate New York. The three had a violent row with two clerks when Rulloff shot and killed one of them before jumping into the river. His young partners couldn’t swim and they drowned as Rulloff, exhausted and in tears, reached the shore before vanishing.

Soon the bodies of Jarvis and Dexter were recovered from the water. A crowd of nearly 200 people cheered—a gruesome reaction to the sight of two dead killers. Police ordered a manhunt led by bloodhounds and Rulloff was soon arrested.

He might have been jailed, but the Schutts still had that nagging dread, the angst that he would once again escape justice after almost 30 years. He was an international celebrity now. “The Rulloff Trial”—declared newspapers around the world—no first name needed. The townspeople, including women and children, waited in line to attend the trial. Rulloff showed little emotion in court, even as he himself cross-examined witnesses, until a key piece of evidence was submitted: his beloved manuscript.

“He almost seemed to fondle it,” reported a witness.

After only five hours, the jurors convicted him of first-degree murder in the shooting of the store clerk. That night Edward Rulloff lit his oil lamp in his jail cell, flipped open his manuscript and vowed to finish his book before his execution.

***

“A monster of unequalled monstrosity,” wrote one paper. In the late nineteenth century, the explanation for murderous behavior lay in the killer’s race or his physical attributes. The lack of a satisfying explanation in Rulloff’s case entranced reporters and their readers. How could the devil also be a genius?

“Crucify him,” they cried outside his jail cell.

He hoped to delay his hanging because his academic reputation lay in that manuscript. He would not appeal his death sentence if he could just finish the theory. And then came a disturbing shift in public opinion.

The respected Manhattan daily paper, the New York Sun, began printing sympathetic stories, hinting that Rulloff had been unfairly treated. The first influential editorial came from Republican presidential candidate Horace Greeley’s popular newspaper, the New York Tribune.

“In the prison at Binghamton there is a man waiting death who is too curious an intellectual problem to be wasted on the gallows,” it said. “He is one of the most industrious and devoted scholars our busy generation has given birth to.”

Mark Twain submitted a piece to the Tribune, requesting that someone else volunteer to take Rulloff’s place on the gallows because he was too intelligent to kill. “What miracles this murderer might have wrought,” wrote Twain, “and what luster he might have shed upon his country if he had not put a forfeit upon his life so foolishly!”

And though the essay was satirical, Twain said privately that he hoped to start a national conversation about commuting Rulloff’s death sentence. And in letters to the editor, some readers agreed.

Other politicians, editors and academics weighed in. Some suspected that Rulloff was insane—executing him would be wrong. Others thought capital punishment was inhumane. And still more believed that his linguistic work might be sufficiently valuable enough to warrant a delay in the hanging.

The townspeople in Upstate New York were horrified. He might just escape the gallows because of his brain, the same brain that compelled him to kill. Scholars studied his theory, his declaration that language had been “constructed” by human beings. Rulloff argued that it was neither divine, nor natural, but cultural—invented by early man. This notion infuriated some luminaries in linguistics. But a professor of Greek and German from Amherst visited Rulloff in jail, and quizzed him on Socrates and the Bible and when he left, he was convinced he was in the company of a finished Greek scholar with a gifted mind. A waste of a promising life.

Rulloff’s lawyer offered a petition to delay his execution so he could finish the treatise. He invited almost a dozen scholars from around the country to the Binghamton jail to test Rulloff’s knowledge. After a brief conversation, each refused to sign the petition. One remarked that Rulloff was brilliant, but his “system” of simply unlocking human language was underdeveloped—it needed more work and collaboration with other academics. Too late now.

Three days before his execution date on May 18, 1871, Rulloff reflected on his troubled life. His book was complete, though ridiculed by the scholars he hoped to impress. His legacy, he feared, was cemented—a worthless life. His attorney suggested filing more appeals.

“No, let her rip,” Rulloff ordered.

The scene in Binghamton was macabre. Thousands packed the town square. Families spread blankets along the lawn and picnicked. An escaped prisoner even stopped in Binghamton long enough to watch the execution.

“I cannot stand still,” Rulloff whispered at the gallows.

A large weight dropped to the ground and Rulloff was jerked three feet in the air. He began to gasp as his hand popped out from his pocket. The crowd watched horrified as he tried to shove it back in his pants.

His thick neck wasn’t broken, only dislocated and he was violently strangled for more than 20 minutes—the last public execution in New York State. Some thought it was a fitting end to a life ruled by brutality, but death penalty critics used it as a tool to campaign against capital punishment.

***

Thirty-six hours after Edward Rulloff’s execution Binghamton pathologist Dr. George Burr sawed off his head, which was quite laborious because the neck cords were so incredibly thick. Rulloff’s skull wouldn’t crack easily—it was twice the thickness of ordinary skulls, about half an inch. The surgeon struggled for almost an hour.

Dr. Burr was methodical as he examined the brain—he measured the length and depth of every fissure and fold.

“Height of the middle lobes: 4 1/3 inches,” he wrote.

He searched for abnormalities, like pools of blood or obvious damage. The surgeon’s final report was full of data, but it had also been peppered with odd statements about a warped mind—brain-imaging analysis from the nineteenth century.

“An examination of Ruloff’s brain showed the animal portion of it (the cerebellum) to be unusually large in proportion to the upper portion (the cerebrum),” read the report, “which is supposed to cause the moral and religious sentiments.”

According to Victorian-era scientists, a brain was naturally divided into specific areas with each governing the owner’s actions. Rulloff’s unusually large “animal” portion and smaller “moral” portion offered tidy explanations for why he was a murderer with no conscience. The wiring of his brain had doomed him from birth.

“In the formation of his brain Rulloff was a ferocious animal,” read one report, “so far as disposition could relieve him from responsibility, he was not strictly responsible for his acts.”

Scientists now know that there is no “moral” section or “animal” section. The brain is comprised of the cerebrum, the brainstem and the cerebellum; the cerebrum is divided into four lobes and each part controls different actions—speech, reasoning, muscle movements and digestion, but not morals.

Neurologists in 1871 may have concluded that Rulloff’s “bad brain” was to blame, but well-regarded alienists disagreed. These psychiatrists, tasked with uncovering some proof of insanity, interviewed him in prison. How could someone mentally sound kill innocent people and remain so callous?

The alienists published their results in the American Journal of Insanity and the Journal of Psychological Medicine. Rulloff was brilliant yet troubled, they agreed, but he was “in sound physical health, and entirely sane.” His execution was morally just. Mental health conditions like narcissism and antisocial personality disorders would not be recognized for more than 100 years. Edward Rulloff’s diagnosis today would likely be much different.

In his lab in 1871, Dr. Burr’s most important measurement was a startling one. He wrote “weight: 59 ounces,” making it the heaviest and largest brain he had ever seen. Rulloff’s remarkable brain was intensely documented in respected medical publications. Dr. Burr presented his findings to the esteemed members of the Medico-Legal Society, scholars who met to debate the issues around the intersection of science and law.

Based on its reputation in scientific study, Rulloff’s brain was purchased for 15 dollars by one of the world’s foremost brain anatomists Burt Green Wilder at Cornell University. In fact, Rulloff’s brain was so valued that it was the very first acquisition in the first brain collection in America.

Dr. Wilder had competition in anatomists who wanted to dissect the brains of well-regarded men like themselves—white and elite. They had no interest in proving intelligence, like phrenologists who studied skulls; these scientists wanted to use the brain to prove the superiority of “civilized men.” Surely their brains would be far bigger and much heavier than those of criminals, women and minorities—racist and sexist ideology dominated nineteenth century science.

There would certainly be deep fissures and many convolutions in the white, elite brains, which would signal superiority, they hoped.

But Edward Rulloff with his massive criminal brain and specific structure posed a problem. When Dr. Wilder declared it the second largest on record, more than thirty percent bigger than the average man, it discredited those prejudiced theories. And it placed Rulloff in an elite group: Baron Cuvier, the brilliant French naturalist, had the heaviest brain recorded at almost sixty-five ounces, just six ounces heavier. Daniel Webster boasted a similar brain size. Modern scientists say Rulloff’s brain now belongs in the top one percent, still an incredible mark.

According to nineteenth century neurology, Edward Rulloff’s hefty brain might have proven that he was a genius, and perhaps might have staid or nullified his execution. But, as we now know, and as Dr. Wilder soon learned, brain size is no indication of intellect, or of belonging to a privileged group with claims on superior intelligence. Referencing his own collection, Wilder declared that the brains of African-Americans, criminals and women were not inferior in size or quality to those of elite white men and other scientists were aghast—he was the first medical professional to make that statement. Rulloff’s brain became one of his prized specimens, like one of Charles Darwin’s finches—the birds used to illustrate his theory of natural selection.

And then Dr. Wilder drew even more startling conclusions by suggesting that the structure of Rulloff’s brain was actually similar to that of Chauncey Wright, a gifted, white philosopher and mathematician, along with the brain of a “common mulatto” (a term then used to denote a person of mixed race).

The three brains were almost identical. Dr. Wilder concluded that Wright’s brain did not have those “deep fissures and many convolutions” that scientists expected to find in well-respected men—to Wilder, a genius’s brain looked no different from that those who were then presumed not to be geniuses, that is, black people and criminals. The overall structure of all brains is similar, he concluded, regardless of the race, sex or morals of the owner. And despite decades of debate, modern neuroscientists have arrived at the same conclusion.

***

In 1894, Wilder made his declaration public by publishing his findings in the well-respected Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. Critics decried Wilder’s claims, but it was too late. His findings were documented in medical history books.

Rulloff was Wilder’s first case study, the avatar for all criminal brains in the 1800s and the only one specifically mentioned in American medical journals for years. His brain received a full-course of phrenological, psychological and neurological assessments—a complete profile of a genius and criminal and the first of its kind. Dr. Wilder even carried Rulloff’s thick skull to a conference in New York.

In 1871, Edward Rulloff’s brain was scanned, at least the 1800s version of scanning—the first criminal brain in America to be officially analyzed, studied and publicly-presented. No brain was more interesting, it seemed, and that argument is still being made today. Just a few years ago, the Wellcome Center in London declared Rulloff’s brain “the most notorious brain in U.S. history.” And it’s still being referenced in medical journals, an exceptional example of genius poisoned by malevolence. And now, almost 150 years later, the mysterious science around the wiring of the criminal brain is trending once again.

Research on the brains of psychopaths in prison shows that there are several neural abnormalities that likely contributed to their criminal behavior. Psychopaths have reduced connections in two crucial sections, according to one study from the University of New Mexico. There’s a lack of communication between the amygdala, the region of the brain that regulates emotional responses, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the area responsible for risk and fear. In other words, their brains had been hard-wired that way from birth to have a lack of empathy.

Psychopaths reportedly make up about 25 percent of the male offenders in American prisons, but they represent only about one percent of the general population—many eventually end up behind bars for violent crimes. If Dr. Burt Wilder had been a modern-day neuroscientist he might have spotted those same abnormalities within an image of Edward Rulloff’s brain. And those results might have been a mitigating factor in his death sentence.

There is also controversy over the brains of criminals with damage from traumatic injuries, like past physical abuse, car accidents—or professional sports. Late last year, researchers at Boston University presented a study of NFL player Aaron Hernandez’s brain, one afflicted with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) after years of head injuries. Hernandez hanged himself with a bed sheet last spring in a Massachusetts prison while serving a life term for murder. Neurologists said the brain damage significantly affected his decision-making, judgment and cognition, but stopped short of blaming it for his criminal history.

For the past ten years, the brain scan has been creeping into American criminal courts through a phenomenon called “the brain defense” (neurobiological evidence). A Duke University study found that between 2005 and 2012, roughly 25 percent of death penalty trials used neurobiological data to argue for a commuted sentence to life in prison.

In one example, a PET scan of a murder suspect’s brain showed abnormally low neuron activity in his frontal lobe. Scientists say that often causes an increased risk of aggressive, even violent behavior. But others suffering from that same condition haven’t committed crimes, argue prosecutors—there must be accountability.

The brain defense is a dangerous precedent because, despite countless studies involving PET scans, MRIs and fMRIs, the human brain is still a mystery. It’s also incredibly controversial because even the country’s most well-respected neuropsychologists can’t agree if the brain can predict criminal behavior. And a new term has emerged: neurocriminology, a discipline that applies brain imaging techniques and principles from neuroscience to understand, predict and prevent crime.

In 1871, Edward Rulloff represented an inherent contradiction in our country—how could a man translate the original language of the Bible, but not be swayed by its tenets? Why would God intertwine both evil and genius inside the mind of one man? Rulloff’s brain was the impetus, so long ago, to explore the criminal mind. Even today, his story immerses us in a fascinating, chilling world that we’ll likely never stop exploring.