Trollheart

Killer: Luísa de Jesus
Epithet: “The Foundling Wheel Killer”
Type: Unsure; I don't think she derived any profit so why she killed babies is unclear
Nationality: Portuguese
Hunting ground(s): Coimbra, Portugal
Years active: 1760 - 1762
Weapon(s) used: Hands presumably; these were babies after all. Wouldn’t take much to kill them.
Signature (if any):
Victims: 33 - 34
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Accident really; a young mother seeking adoption of her child stumbled over the grave of one of the many babies de Jesus had killed, and an investigation soon revealed over thirty tiny corpses.
Fate: Executed by garotte

While every serial killer has to be considered evil, there are levels and for me, the slaying of innocent children is the worst level you can sink to in this area. But the killing of defenceless babies trumps even that, and if it exists, there is surely a special place in Hell set aside for the people who commit this most heinous type of murder. Worse again when it’s a woman who is to blame, as was the case with Luísa de Jesus, the daughter of poor farmers who took to opening what was known as a foundling wheel in order to support herself. Similar to the idea, perhaps, of mothers leaving unwanted babies on the church steps, a foundling wheel (also called baby box or baby hatch) was a place where mothers who had just had babies they could not care for or feed (or just did not want) could leave their newborns in the hope of someone better suited adopting them. The owner of the wheel would then get a commission for every baby adopted.

The speed and regularity of adoptions made by de Jesus should maybe have tipped the authorities off, but it didn’t. I guess this was the mid-eighteenth century and such events were not given priority. As a result, de Jesus was able to adopt up to 34 babies, all of whom she killed, usually by strangulation, and buried either on her property or on the nearby mountain. It was in fact on this mountain that the grave of one of the babies was discovered by a charity worker, who brought it to the attention of the police. Investigating further, they found that the baby had been adopted by de Jesus. Quickly arrested and interrogated, she broke very quickly and confessed all. The corpses of 33 babies were found on her property or on the mountain, but she refused to divulge the fate of the final baby she had adopted, and its body was never found.

Like most right-thinking people, the courts in Portugal took an especially dim view of those who slew innocent children, and de Jesus’s fate was appropriate to her crimes, if anything could be. Despite her lawyer’s attempts to remove the death penalty from the table on the basis of her being underage (Portugal in the eighteenth century seems to have had a different idea of adulthood, as de Jesus was twenty-five years old, which still qualified her to be tried as a minor) she was tried as an adult. Having been paraded around in disgrace, her hands were cut off and she was burned with hot pokers, before she was finally garotted to death. Her body was burned and the ashes scattered.


Killer: Klaas Annink
Epithet: “Huttenkloas”
Type: Profit/Comfort
Nationality: Dutch
Hunting ground(s): Hengenvelde, Holland
Years active: 1770 - 1774
Weapon(s) used:
Signature (if any):
Victims: Anything up to 6 but only one confirmed
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Relative of one of the victims carrying out his own investigation
Fate: Executed (no details on method)

Keep it in the family might have been a good (or bad) motto for the Anninks, whose head, Klaas, led them in many suspected robberies and murders over a four-year period. His accomplices were his wife, Aarne Spanjer, and their son Jannes. There are a lot of holes in this story, and every other account I can find just parrots verbatim what Wiki says, so here are my problems with it, my unanswered questions. Every account mentions that Annink was held in “a specially-designed chair” for 114 days while he was tried. No account mentions what that special design was. Was it a torture device? Was it made to restrict his movements? Did it have a rat in a cage underneath who slowly ate his arse as the trial went on? No idea: no further information.

The trial is described on Wiki as “controversial”, but it doesn’t explain why they use that term. Was there no evidence? Well, the same article states that the merchant who was investigating him found “convincing evidence” his relative had been murdered by Annink and went to the authorities, who obviously were swayed enough by what he told or showed them to arrest the guy, so I doubt it was for lack of evidence. Did he not get a defence lawyer? Were lies told at the trial? Was it biased? Again, no idea: what we have about him, at least what I can find, is sketchy at best and no other websites or articles shed any further light on the outstanding points. It’s noted that he and his wife were executed (though it doesn’t make clear how - hanging? Beheading? Broken on the wheel?) but makes no mention of their son, Jannes, who were are told was part of the robbery gang. Was he acquitted? Did he sell out his parents? Did he mysteriously die before the trial, or make his escape? Not a clue. Very poor information.

Even his epithet, “Huttenkloas”, is not explained, and I’m about as fluent in Dutch as I am in Klingon. Ka’plah!

Killer: Thug Behram
Epithet: King of the Thugs
Type: Mission
Nationality: Indian
Hunting ground(s): Oudh, Northern India
Years active: 1790 - 1840
Weapon(s) used: A ceremonial sash or bandanna called the rumal
Signature (if any):
Victims: 125 confirmed but believed to be almost a thousand
Survivors: 0
Caught by: East India Company
Fate: Hanged

Believed to be India’s most prolific serial killer (in fact, look at his believed victims! Surely one of the world’s most prolific, although whether or not all those can be attributed to him personally is debatable) Behram was the leader of the Thuggee Cult in eighteenth century India. His gang were loyal followers of the Hindu god Kali, and seem to have believed the murders they carried out were as a tribute to her. Behram was known to use the ceremonial rumal, a yellow scarf or kerchief which had a medallion sewn into its middle. By positioning the rumal correctly he could force the medallion against the victim’s Adam’s apple, thereby crushing it and causing no doubt a painful death.

Religious or not, ceremonial or not, Behram’s group were not above robbing their victims. Thieves by trade, they looted the corpses and then had them thrown down a well. Interestingly it was not the Indian police who caught Behram, because at this time the East India Company was almost an independent government in India, and it was one of their officers who took on the task of bringing the King of the Thugs to swift and brutal justice. Also interestingly, Behram was seventy-five years old when he finally met his maker, which means his reign of terror was probably one of the longest in certainly early serial killer history, spanning a period of over fifty years.

Behram had a bad start in life, his killing beginning when he was at the tender age of ten years old and exacerbated when he met a twenty-five year old Thug, the same one in fact who would make him head of the cult and also eventually betray him to the authorities when he was himself captured, in order to save himself and his family. The Thuggee cult being devoted to Kali, women were never murdered by Behram or his men, as this was against their religion. So if the final total of 931 is to be believed, then perhaps it can be said that Thug Behram also holds the record for the most male victims of a serial killer, at least before 1850.

And yes, from the Thuggee Cult we get the word thug, used today to describe ruffians, villains and general ne’er-do-wells.

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Trollheart

Killer: Micajah Harpe, Wiley Harpe
Epithet: “The Bloody Harpes”
Type: Thrill/profit
Nationality: American
Hunting ground(s): Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi
Years active: possibly 1776 - 1799
Weapon(s) used: Multiple
Signature (if any): Bodies emasculated
Victims: 39 - 50
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Big Harpe (Posse), Little Harpe (Sheriff)
Fate: Shot and beheaded (Big Harpe); hanged and beheaded (Little Harpe)

Originally of Scottish descent, it’s accepted by many historians that the Harpe brothers may indeed have been America’s first true serial killers. But that’s about as much as they agree on. Some think the name is wrong, an affectation or alias taken by the brothers, who were born Harper. Others contend they were not even brothers, but cousins. Some say they fought in the American War of Independence, on the side of the British Crown, and used the war as cover to indulge in kidnapping, rape and murder. Micajah went by the nickname of “Big Harpe” while his (possible) brother called himself, you guessed it, “Little Harpe”, but none of their crimes were little, and their reputation certainly grew as they became more feared and reviled throughout the southern states.

The war, of course, did not go their way and when they were forced out of North Carolina they hooked up with tribes of Cherokee indians and continued attacking the American Patriots. They later kidnapped the women who would become their wives - what choice the two ladies had in the matter is unknown, but I would doubt it was much of one, if they wished to live. They settled for over a decade in Tennessee, but were driven out when they began stealing cattle. Big Harpe is said to have had no interest in his own infant daughter, whose crying annoyed him to the point where he bashed her head against a tree. She would certainly not be the only victim of the Harpes, nor even the only one of their children, as their wives (as such) both got pregnant twice and the Harpes killed all four babies. They didn’t even stop at killing one of their own; when one of their gang, Moses Doss, expressed concern over the welfare of their recently-kidnapped wives, Big Harpe killed him. I guess nobody opened their mouth after that. Chased out of their homestead, the Harpes seem to have murdered in a mixture of lust, anger and what they would have seen as expediency, sparing nobody who got in their way.

Strangely enough for a time when guns were readily available and there was no need for what you might call “complicated” murders, the Harpes seemed to revel in the more violent side of killing. Whereas most men might shoot you, hang you from a tree, hit you with a rock or stab you with a knife, the two brothers tended most often to cut their victims open (presumably, though not definitely so far as I have read, after they were dead), fill their bodies with rocks to weigh them down and them dump them in rivers. While sinking a corpse would be seen as basic necessary cover for a killer, even then, hiding the body doesn’t seem to have been the Harpes’ prime motivation, but more the pleasure they got out of ripping bodies up. Perhaps early contemporaries of Jack the Ripper, in ways?

Around May 1799 the brothers joined river pirates harrying the boats that plied the Saline River, and after a particularly successful raid wherein only one man survived, the Harpes devised a wicked form of entertainment to dispose of him. They took him to the top of a cliff, stripped him, tied him to the back of a horse, blindfolded the horse and sent it over the cliff. This kind of unnecessary cruelty was too much even for the hardened pirates, and they kicked the Harpes out. They wouldn’t live much longer anyway. Near the end of August they tried to kill a local justice of the peace, but were driven back from his home by his vicious guard dogs, so instead went to the house of Moses Stegal, one of the judge’s friends. Offered a bed for the night by his wife (Moses was away) they later killed not only her but the soldier sharing the bed with them, and Moses’s four-month-old baby.

The attack had its intended effect. Stegal and the judge, Silas McBee, raised a posse and headed off in pursuit of the Harpes, black revenge on their minds. In a rather strange twist of fate, the ammunition which would do for Big Harpe came from a gun he himself had helped load when one of the very few people they encountered without killing, a man called James Tompkins, who had invited them home for dinner, worried that he had no powder left for his own gun. Before leaving, Big Harpe had filled a teacup from his own horn with black gunpowder for Tompkins.

Making a run for it when the posse caught up with them, Big Harpe was shot by John Leiper with Tompkins’ gun, his backbone destroyed, and as he lay dying he confessed his sins, pushing Moses to cut off the outlaw’s head with his own hunting knife. It doesn’t make it clear if he was dead at this point, but I assume he was. At any rate, his head was stuck on a pole by Stangel. Little Harpe escaped, and rejoined the river pirates for several years, taking the assumed name of John Setton. But when he and another pirate murdered the captain and took his head in for the bounty, a flatboatman who had been robbed by them recognised them both, and they were arrested, tried and hanged in 1804. Little Harpe’s head joined that of his brother, though not at the same place, also stuck on a pole as a warning to other outlaws that justice in this town was swift and merciless, just as the two brothers had been to their victims.

The atrocities commited by the Harpes were so bad that later descendants tended to hide their connection to the brothers by subtly changing their name. Some would go by Harp (without the E), some Harper (believed to have been the original family name, but not associated with the rampage of the two killers) and there is even some, to my mind, spurious suggestion that one of the most famous lawmen in the West was a Harpe, but changed his name to avoid connection with America’s first serial killers. But both Wyatt’s father and his father, Nicholas and Walter respectively, were Earps, so this seems extremely unlikely, especially as Walter Earp lived through the same period as the Harpes, so already had that name before the killers were even known in America.

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Trollheart

Killer: Sam Mason
Epithet: “Mason of the Woods”
Type: Profit/Comfort
Nationality: American
Hunting ground(s): Saline River, Tennessee
Years active: 1792 - 1803
Weapon(s) used: Unknown
Signature (if any): Literally signed his name, or nickname anyway, in victims’ blood on trees to be found later.
Victims: 20+
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Originally, Spanish colonial police but later turned on by his own men and killed by them.
Fate: Unsure, but certainly beheaded. May have been shot by Little Harpe.

We’ve come across Mason in the previous entry, when he partnered up with the notorious Harpe Brothers. A river pirate by trade, Mason made a name for himself attacking slow-moving flatboats along the Saline River at Tennessee, mostly from his base in a big depression in the rock called Cave-in-Rock. It was from the top of this bluff that the Harpes threw their naked victim over on a blindfolded horse, an action so savage and unnecessary that Mason demanded they leave. Mason, however, though a vicious thug in later life, had a far better and more noble start than had the Harpes. He was a captain in the Virginia Militia during the War of Independence (fighting for the colonies, in direct opposition to the Harpes, who fought - ostensibly - for the Crown, though really for the rape, murder, burning and looting) and later even served as a justice of the peace in Pennsylvania.

I can’t find any account to explain why he turned to crime (although he had stolen horses in his early teens) but around 1792 he arrived at the Ohio River and took up a new career on the opposite side of the law, becoming a river pirate. In 1797 he moved southwest of the river to Cave-in-Rock, where he continued and expanded his piracy efforts. As noted, the Harpes joined him there but were soon kicked out due to being too bloodthirsty, and in 1799 a group of “exterminators” led by Captain Young forced them out of Kentucky and he moved to Spanish Louisiana (Missouri) where he changed careers slightly and became the feared highwayman “Mason of the Woods”. It was in this guise he would write notes in the blood of his victims to advise who had killed them, coining his own nickname.

In 1803 Mason and his gang were arrested by the Spanish colonial authorities, and when evidence of their being river pirates was confirmed, they were to be extradited back to American territory, as all of their crimes pertaining to river piracy had taken place on American land and against Americans. During the trip though they escaped. Mason eventually fell victim to the disproving of the old adage, “honour among thieves”, when Little Harpe and one of his own men killed him and took his head in for the bounty. As related above, this action backfired on them as they were recognised, arrested, tried and hanged.

Killer: Sophie Ursinus
Epithet:
Type: Comfort
Nationality: German
Hunting ground(s): Berlin
Years active: 1800 - 1803
Weapon(s) used: Poison
Signature (if any):
Victims: 3
Survivors: 1
Caught by: Police, after her servant shopped her
Fate: Sentenced to life “imprisonment” (see below) but only served thirty years, after which she was released.

In general, it does seem that poison is the weapon of choice for female serial killers. Leaving aside Countess Bathory and Darya Saltykova, who could, after all, kill with impunity and had no reason to believe they needed to cover up their crimes, given that women are not often very strong and also not always in a position to obtain or use weapons men could, and also given that they are the ones who would usually prepare and serve up food, poison has always been the way to go for the aspiring murderess. So it was with Sophie Ursinus, who was pushed into an arranged marriage at the tender age of 19, but who took a lover despite - or perhaps with the tacit approval of - her much older (and richer) husband. Both went the way of all flesh, her lover dealt with first as she feared he was to leave her, and then her husband, whom she killed to get her hands on his money.

Having successfully got away with both crimes, she was emboldened to continue her murder spree when her aunt fell victim to her poisonous touch, but she came unstuck when a servant whom she tried to do away with realised what was happening, and took evidence of her poisoned food to the police. Arrested, she was held for trial when the bodies of the three people she had killed were exhumed. Proving that her husband had been poisoned proved problematic, but in the case of her aunt it was easier (doesn’t say why; there were a few years between the deaths so maybe the more recent one showed signs of poison?) and she was convicted of her murder and the attempted murder of her servant.

Sentenced to life imprisonment, she must have bewailed her lot indeed. Incarcerated in a lavish apartment usually reserved for the warden at Glatz, she was allowed servants, fancy furniture and also allowed keep the inheritances she had killed for. She threw lavish parties until she was released in 1833, whereupon she rejoined society, with apparently her crimes all hushed up or forgotten about. She only lived another three years, but it’s a typical example of how the rich and the upper class were treated so very differently than the poor, even when they were convicted as heartless murderers.

Killer: Patty Cannon
Epithet:
Type: Profit
Nationality: American
Hunting ground(s): Delaware
Years active: 1821 - 1829
Weapon(s) used:
Signature (if any):
Victims: 4 - 11 or more
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Authorities after bodies accidentally discovered
Fate: Died in jail while awaiting trial; possibly committed suicide by taking poison

The leader of a gang who operated in the Delaware area during the first half of the nineteenth century, Cannon would capture runaway slaves and sell them back to plantation owners in the south. If she came across free black people, they would do just as well. She had no time for children, especially black ones, beating one severely when the infant cried and then burning it alive in a fire. She also had no morals (if you can attribute such a thing to slavery) when it came to slave owners, happily bashing the head of one in so that she could steal his slaves and sell them. She murdered indiscriminately, without mercy or sometimes reason, leading to the local press to call her, incorrectly, Lucretia Cannon (after Lucretia Borgia, already discussed).

Nobody will be surprised to hear that there was little if any interest in slaves going missing in neighbouring Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from where Cannon adbucted her victims, the state having the largest population of free black people in the north and no real police force, and she was never prosecuted for or even accused of the crime of kidnapping; it was the murders that did for her. Surprisingly, one of her gang was sentenced though for kidnapping, thanks to the honest efforts of Philadelphia’s mayor, and given a staggering 42 years. He died after five though.

When a tenant farmer accidentally uncovered the bodies of four people at Cannon’s farm, the jig was up. Tried for four murders (though it’s believed she is responsible for at least five times that number) she is said to have taken her own life, or alternatively, died of natural causes while awaiting trial. Given that she was in her seventies by now, quite an old age for that time, the latter cause is certainly possible.

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Written Inn Red: the Murders at the Red Inn

Interestingly, the next major scandal we turn up concerning a serial killer again takes us to France, though now we’re well past the time of Louis XIV and into the reign of Louis Philippe I, and the Second French Revolution, or July Revolution. Pierre and Marie Martin ran L’auberge rouge, or the Red Inn, and for years had been staunch supporters of the royalist King Charles X, helping the aristocracy returning after the First French Revolution to reclaim their lands and hiding priests, but when Charles was deposed and his cousin Louis Philippe put on the throne, their usefulness to the monarchy ended, and they became enemies of the state. Not literal ones: they weren’t wanted by the law or anything, but like I guess a family who had supported the House of York became an enemy of Henry VII and would be out of favour.

When a local man, Jacques Enjolras, went missing, the justice of the peace in the area investigated and found the last port of call for the man had been the Red Inn. His body was found the next morning in a river nearby, head stove in and knee crushed. Pierre and his nephew Andre, along with their servant were arrested, but oddly enough the reason given for the wife not being taken was that the magistrate did not believe a woman capable of murder. Had he not heard of the Affair of the Poisons, two hundred years ago? And what about the women who sat in judgement as part of the Assembly during the French Revolution, famously knitting in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities while hundreds or thousands of aristocrats and other “enemies of the Republic” went to the guillotine? Seems a weak excuse to me, but that’s what it says.

June 18 1833 was the date the trial began, and initially it hinged on the testimony of two eye-witnesses, one of whom, a local beggar, said he had been turfed out of his bed and kicked into the street, where he saw the whole thing from hiding. Neither man of course knew the identity of the slain man, but it was pretty obvious it was Enjolras. His murder, however, turned out to be the merest tip of a very dark and bloody iceberg.

More witnesses came forward, testifying to having seen bodies of the dead being cooked and used in pies, hands floating in soup, smelling terrible aromas and seeing foul, pungent smoke coming from the inn’s chimney. Children were said to have been roasted in the ovens and blood was seen on sheets and walls. Allegations of murder, rape and cannibalism were all accepted on face value. In effect, it seems there was no actual concrete evidence against the Martins, and some historians believe they were railroaded in a sort of Salem witch-trials manner. They were hated by their neighbours, and now that they were out of favour at court it is possible that those neighbours decided to take their chance to exact revenge upon the couple. The possibility of Enjolras having died of a heart attack was dismissed by the court without any real notice given to it, the testimony of the beggar, unreliable at best as he was a drunk, was allowed despite the protestations of the defence, and the judge more or less instructed the jury to find the four accused guilty.

Which they did.

Not helping their defence, the lawyer representing the servant accepted that his client was a murderer, but placed all the blame on his employers, claiming he had no choice. Given that the servant did not challenge or take issue with this claim, the obvious conclusion is that he believed and admitted to being a murderer, therefore so were the other three, but they were the masterminds behind it and he just a poor pawn, having to do as he was told. That’s curious enough, because if Rochette had believed his employers not guilty, why put his own head on the block, literally? Such an admission would be unlikely to save him, and if this was all a big misunderstanding and Enroljas had died of natural causes, why support the theory of murder? What would he gain from such a plea?

Not much, in the end. Though the jury acquitted Andre Martin, the other three were sentenced to death and the execution was carried out by guillotine on October 2 1833, in front of their own inn. Many have called the trial a sham, the evidence weak at best, made-up at worst, and consider this one of the biggest miscarriages of French justice in the nineteenth century.

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