A Criminal History of Mankind (76 page)

By comparison with Europe, America was a law-abiding country at the end of the eighteenth century. The puritan ethic was still strong, and in small rural communities serious crime was unusual. Inevitably, there were robbers and badmen; but their life span was usually short. In the Ohio wilderness, two robbers named Big Harpe and Little Harpe killed dozens of trappers, but were finally hunted down by a posse; Big Harpe was killed and beheaded; Little Harpe escaped and vanished. In the following year, a killer named Sam Mason was tracked down and beheaded by a bounty hunter named Bill Setten; unfortunately for Setten, he was mistaken for Mason - in spite of being able to exhibit his head in a jar - and hanged.

A surprising number of the crimes of this period were committed by slaves. Pomp, a slave of Andover, Massachusetts, killed his master Charles Furbush with an axe in 1795 after Furbush had flogged him and tied him to a rafter overnight. Edmund Fortis raped and killed Pamela Tilton of Vassalborough, Maine, in 1794. In 1803, Cato, a slave on a farm near Charlestown, New York State, raped and murdered May Atkins. In 1800, a Haitian slave named Gabriel mustered an army of a thousand blacks near Richmond, Virginia, intending to massacre the white population, and committed various murders of whites before his army was broken up by militia. In New Jersey, Cyrus Emlay killed his master, Humphrey Wall, with a hatchet, then burned the house down. In 1831, a slave named Nat Turner led a negro revolt in Virginia and killed fifty white people before being captured. He told the jury at his trial that he had viewed his mutilated victims, including children, ‘with silent satisfaction, and immediately went in search of other victims’.

What we have here, in fact, is an early version of the ‘resentment murder’. The negroes, as a class, had more to resent than the whites, so it is not surprising that some of them should develop an attitude towards society that resembles Lacenaire’s. This is probably true even of the rape murders listed above; white women represented the forbidden, the whole world of which the negro felt himself deprived; therefore a rape murder was a social as much as a sexual crime.

America’s first mass murderer, Samuel Green, was also motivated by resentment, and the case bears some remarkable resemblances to that of Carl Panzram. Born in Meredith, New Hampshire, about 1800, Green was a natural delinquent who began stealing early. Apprenticed to a blacksmith, he was caught stealing, and whipped; sent home, he was whipped again. His reaction was to throw the family dog into the well, so that it polluted the water. Punished again, he reacted by stabbing the family pig. He moved into Newhampton to live with a man named Dunne, and the old cycle of stealing and being flogged was soon re-established. He made two attempts to kill Dunne with a booby-trap, both of which failed; this time he was beaten until his back was a mass of blood and torn flesh. Eventually, Green joined up with another rebel named Ash, and the two began working with a counterfeiter who used them to pass dud money. An event of this period is typical of Green’s vengeful mentality. He hurled a baulk of timber under a fast-moving sleigh full of schoolchildren, which overturned and caused some injury. The schoolmaster attacked Green and Ash and left them bruised and battered. Later, they lay in wait for him, knocked him unconscious and left him bound and naked to freeze to death - fortunately, he was found in time.

Green’s first murder seems to have been of a jewellery salesman whom he and Ash encountered in a tavern in New Hampshire. They waylaid him later and robbed him; then discussed whether it would be safer to kill him. ‘A dead cock never crows,’ said Ash, and Green winked and dashed out the man’s brains with his club.

Green then turned into a version of the later Western badman, specialising in burglary but killing when he was interrupted. The precise number of his murders is unknown, but he was soon the most wanted man in America. His career came to an end in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1820, when he was arrested for stealing goods from a store when drunk. He was sentenced to four years in prison and sent to Boston. He made various escape attempts, after each of which his sentence was increased. Finally, he heard that a negro prisoner named Williams had alerted the guards before his last escape attempt; he managed to corner Williams one morning, then knocked him unconscious with an iron bar and systematically smashed his arms, legs and ribs. Williams died of his injuries, and Green was hanged in April 1822. Unlike Panzram, he wrote no detailed confession, so we know little about his two-year crime-spree from 1818 to 1820. What seems very clear is that he was a man of exceptionally high dominance who, like Panzram, refused to be beaten into submission. He was an ‘assassin’ in the same sense as Lacenaire, a man for whom killing was a twisted form of self-expression. And since he was executed fourteen years before Lacenaire, he may be regarded as the first ‘assassin’ in modern criminal history.

The type became increasingly common during the rest of the nineteenth century, and almost commonplace in the twentieth. Towards the end of the century, Nietzsche discussed a killer called Prado in a letter to the playwright Strindberg: ‘... the history of criminal families... always leads one back to an individual too strong for his particular social environment. The latest major criminal case in Paris, Prado, is a classic example. Prado was more than a match for his judges, even his lawyers, in self-control, wit and bravado. This in spite of the fact that the pressure of the trial had already affected him so much physically that several witnesses recognised him only from old portraits.’ Prado was, in fact, another Lacenaire, a robber who was prepared to murder if discovered. In 1887, he had been arrested as he fled from the scene of a robbery in a hotel; he fired two shots from a revolver and seriously wounded one of the policemen chasing him. Some time later, his two mistresses were also arrested for complicity, and placed in the same cell. One of them told the other that she believed Prado to be responsible for the murder of a prostitute named Marie Agaetan in the previous year; the killer had cut her throat and made off with her jewellery. This story was repeated to an examining magistrate, and the police were able to track down jewellers who recognised Prado as the man who had sold them Marie Agaetan’s jewellery. In court, Prado decided to be his own advocate, and, as H. B. Irving put it in his
Studies in French Criminals of the 19
^th
Century
, ‘shows himself well-read, prodigal of words, and inexhaustible in protestations, overwhelming his judges with denunciations.’ It was all to no effect, of course, and he was executed. From the death cell he wrote a letter to a friend in which he declared: ‘For the wise man, there are no such things as laws. Since all laws are subject to errors or exceptions, it is for the wise man to judge for himself whether he shall obey them or break them.’

But then, Prado, like Lacenaire, was a born actor. Nietzsche is perceptive when he describes him as an ‘individual who is too strong for his particular social environment’ but at the same time, he is romanticising when he says that Prado is more than a match for his judges in self-control. The transcript of the trial shows that he simply talked too much; he sounds like a man who has at last succeeded in getting on television and is determined to make the most of it. His comments about the ‘wise man’ make him sound like a criminal Marcus Aurelius; we have to remind ourselves that he is in court merely for slitting the throat of a prostitute.

What strikes us most about the ‘assassin’ is this element of
miscalculation
. Lacenaire remarked on his own lack of feeling when he committed murders; he seemed to be observing himself from a distance. This is basically ‘schizophrenia’, separation from reality. We can observe the same thing in another remarkable case of the period: that of Jean Baptiste Troppmann. Born in Alsace in 1869, Troppmann was the son of a poor mechanic who - like Samuel Green and Lacenaire - was ill-treated by his father and defended by his mother. He grew up a homosexual. At school he was bullied, but showed such violence when he was attacked that they finally stopped. At work in his father’s workshop, he was bullied by his brother until one day he seized a hammer and hit Edward in the face. After that, Edward let him alone.

Troppmann performed athletic exercises until he gained a remarkable bodily strength. He read and re-read Eugene Sue’s absurd concoction of Gothic horrors
The Wandering Jew
. He studied chemistry in secret, probably to learn about poisons. Everything about him indicates the typical ‘loner’ who is determined to make his mark in the world.

His method of making his mark was to plan the murder of an entire family. When he met a wealthy businessman named Kinck, he tried to persuade him to invest in various moneymaking schemes, all of which Kinck wisely turned down. Finally, Troppmann persuaded Kinck to accompany him on some kind of business trip; as soon as they were in the country, he gave Kinck a glass of wine laced with cyanide; Kinck died immediately. Troppmann buried the body in a forest, and lured the eldest boy, Gustave, into the countryside; he was stabbed in the back and buried. Finally, Troppmann persuaded Madame Kinck - who was pregnant - and her five children to accompany him to meet her husband. They took a cab to Pantin, near Paris, where Troppmann claimed her husband was staying. He persuaded them to alight in a lonely spot, paid off the cab, then killed them all in a field.

The next morning a workman noticed blood on the road, tracked it to a spot where the earth had been newly dug, and gave the alarm. The bodies of the Kinck family were unearthed. The ferocity with which they had been hacked suggested a sadist - the two-year-old girl had been disembowelled. A label in a child’s coat enabled the family to be identified. Troppmann was arrested in Le Havre, where he was hoping to escape to America with the money he had taken from the Kincks. He was publicly executed, and the novelist Turgenev was allowed to accompany him from his cell to the guillotine. His description makes it clear that Troppmann was determined to die well. Turgenev was impressed by the good-looking, twenty-year-old youth, and obviously felt that this execution was a barbarity. One of his companions remarked that he felt they were not watching the execution of a common criminal, but that this was the year 1794 and they were present at the death of an aristocrat. Yet Turgenev took care not to mention the nature of the crime for which Troppmann was condemned.

Troppmann, then, was another ‘assassin’, another ‘man who was too strong for his particular social environment’. Yet again, the most puzzling thing about the crime is that element of miscalculation; it seems as absurd, as excessive, as the Ratcliffe Highway murders. How did he come to plan anything so stupid? We discover the answer by glancing into the novel that Troppmann read again and again -
The Wandering Jew
by Eugene Sue. It is about the brilliant and evil Father Rodin, a Jesuit priest who is determined to secure for his order the vast legacy that should go to the last seven members of the Simon family - descendants of the wandering Jew who mocked Jesus and was condemned to walk the earth until the second coming. So he sets out to prevent them from being present to claim the legacy: one is drugged, one declared insane, one jailed for debt, and so on. The wicked priest is finally killed by poisoned holy water that he accepts from someone’s fingers.
The Wandering Jew
became Troppmann’s Bible; it explains, for example, why he took up the study of undetectable poisons. But he decided to go one better than Father Rodin and kill all his victims. Troppmann was a victim of his own fantasies - or rather, those of Eugene Sue.

What is happening, in fact, is that the nature of crime is slowly changing in a manner that suggests Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’. According to Maslow, the basic need is for food and drink, and the majority of crimes described in the
Newgate Calendar
are committed for food and drink - some quite literally. The next level of the hierarchy is the need for security, for a roof over one’s head. America, with its pioneering spirit and its farming communities, achieved this level a decade or so earlier than Europe, where, particularly in the large cities, the majority of criminals remained on the bottom rung of the ladder. The crimes of Burke and Hare, committed in 1826, are still ‘bread and butter’ murders, while the crimes of Bathsheba Spooner, John Hauer and Samuel Green are crimes that aim at security; they also have a note of individual self-assertion, of the criminal making his own decision about right and wrong.

In fact, this type of crime becomes the typical crime of the nineteenth century; not, in terms of statistics, its most frequent, but at least the kind we instantly remember when someone mentions nineteenth-century crime. We think of Dr John Webster, in the Massachusetts Medical College, striking his colleague Dr George Parkman on the head with a chunk of timber, then burning his body piecemeal in the laboratory furnace; of Constance Kent, the sixteen-year-old schoolgirl who cut the throat of her four-year-old half brother and stuffed his body down an outside lavatory; of Dr Pritchard, poseur and Don Juan, who poisoned his wife and mother-in-law in Glasgow; of Florence Bravo, accused of poisoning her husband with antimony; of Marie Lafarge, accused of murdering her husband with arsenic; of Lizzie Borden, accused of murdering her father and step-mother with an axe; of Dr William Palmer of Rugely, who poisoned his wife, children and several unfortunate business associates; of Madeleine Smith, who poisoned an importunate lover who refused to accept that she was tired of him. All these crimes have a typical Victorian flavour. They are essentially ‘domestic’ murders - committed for various purposes, but always to preserve the killer’s domestic peace and security. The only possible exception on the list is Constance Kent, another strong-minded ‘resentment killer’, who finally unburdened her soul with confession and spent a lifetime in prison. Her case is also remembered for the careful investigative work of Inspector Jonathan Whicher of Scotland Yard, which so impressed both Dickens and Wilkie Collins that they used him as a model for policemen in their novels. In
Bleak House
, Dickens described Inspector Bucket as a ‘detective officer’, so introducing a new word to the language.