Edward Rulloff stood trial three times, and the courts reached three different results. In 1846 a Tompkins County court convicted him of abducting his wife. In 1856 a jury in Tioga County found him guilty of murdering his infant daughter, and in December 1858 the New York Court of Appeals reversed that judgment and ordered a new trial, holding that the fact of the child's death had to be proved. In January 1871 a jury in Binghamton found him guilty of murder in the first degree for the death of Frederick A. Merrick during a burglary the previous August. The Court of Appeals affirmed that verdict in March 1871, and he was executed on May 18, 1871.
The record therefore holds one murder conviction that stood, and it concerns the Binghamton killing of 1870. The deaths of his wife and daughter in 1845 are a separate matter. They produced an abduction conviction, a murder conviction that was reversed, and a murder indictment against his wife's name that is not recorded as ending in a verdict. Rulloff was also a man with a reputation as a scholar of languages, and that reputation shaped how the public and the press followed his last months.
Rulloff was born near Saint John, New Brunswick. Accounts disagree on the year: the Cornell University alumni pages give 1821 and note that other accounts date his birth earlier, while Herbert A. Wisbey Jr., writing in the Crooked Lake Review, gives 1819 or 1820. Wisbey describes his parents as German immigrants. He had little formal schooling but a quick mind. He worked as a store clerk in his youth, and Wisbey reports that he was caught embezzling and served two years in jail. Another writer, E. H. Freeman in the New York Almanack, found no record of an arrest or conviction for that, and Rulloff himself is said to have denied it.
He reached the Ithaca area in the early 1840s. By Wisbey's account he taught school in Dryden, and the Cornell Alumni Magazine says he arrived at a farm there in 1842 and later trained in Ithaca as a doctor of herbal medicine. On the last day of 1843 he married Harriet, whom Wisbey identifies as one of his pupils. The couple had a daughter in the spring of 1845.
In 1845 Rulloff's household in Tompkins County came under criminal inquiry. He was charged with abducting his wife, he was convicted of that offense in February 1846, and he was sentenced to ten years at Auburn State Prison. Wisbey places the trial in Tompkins County.
An indictment for the murder of Harriet Rulloff was also found in Tompkins County. It was not brought to a verdict then. The opinion in his later habeas corpus case, decided in January 1860, treats the abduction conviction and the murder charges as distinct matters. No verdict on the indictment for his wife's death is on record.
In June 1856 Rulloff was indicted in Tioga County for the murder of his infant daughter. He was tried at the Tioga Circuit and found guilty in October 1856. Wisbey calls the proceeding the Owego trial and says it followed a second arrest after his release.
The defense, led on appeal by the firm of Boardman and Finch, argued that a murder conviction could not stand when the prosecution had offered no direct proof that the child had died or been killed. The Court of Appeals agreed. In its decision of December 5, 1858, written by Chief Judge Johnson with Judge Roosevelt dissenting, the court held that the common-law rule requires proof of death, by direct evidence or by evidence strong enough to leave no room for doubt, before anyone can be convicted of murder. It found that the trial judge had erred in refusing to direct an acquittal and in telling the jury that it could infer death from the circumstances the prosecution had offered. The judgment was reversed and a new trial was ordered.
The Cornell Alumni Magazine says that this ruling produced what became known as the Rulloff Rule, which it says stayed in New York law for decades. Francis Finch, the attorney who handled the appeal, later joined the Cornell law faculty, according to the Cornell alumni account.
Rulloff did not walk free after 1858. In July 1859 he was indicted for breaking jail, an offense dated to May 5, 1857. He then asked the Supreme Court for release by writ of habeas corpus, and Justice Knox decided the matter on January 15, 1860. The writ was directed to the sheriff of Cayuga County, who held him.
Rulloff argued five grounds. He said that the abduction conviction barred the murder prosecutions; that delays in bringing him to trial entitled him to discharge; that he had already been tried for his daughter's death; and that an order continuing one indictment in his absence was void. Knox rejected each. He held that a habeas corpus proceeding does not decide guilt or innocence; that the two charges were separate, so the abduction conviction was no bar; that because the daughter's conviction had been reversed the case stood as if no trial had occurred, so there was no former jeopardy; and that the statutory time limits for trial were regulatory rather than a bar, with any failure a mere irregularity that habeas corpus could not correct. Rulloff was remanded to custody. The decision adds that he could be discharged only after a trial and acquittal, a nolle prosequi entered by the district attorney, or a court order under the statute.
What followed the 1860 ruling is thinly documented. The Cornell Alumni Magazine says he was held at Sing Sing from 1861 for more than two years, and Wisbey writes that he spent time in Auburn and Sing Sing and in local jails and was connected with crime around New York City. The offenses and sentences of those years are not on record, and neither is the later disposition of the 1845 and 1856 indictments.
On August 17, 1870, three men entered a store in Binghamton in a burglary. Frederick A. Merrick, who was in the building, was killed. The Court of Appeals' opinion calls him Merrick; the trial pamphlet and the press of the day spell the name Mirrick or Mirick. Two of the three men who had entered the store died in the events that followed. The third, Rulloff, was arrested a day or two later, according to the Court of Appeals; Wisbey says within about twenty-four hours.
The identities of the two companions are not part of the conviction that followed.
The case was tried in Binghamton in a court of oyer and terminer in January 1871. Marshall B. Champlain, the Attorney General of New York, argued the case for the prosecution; Cornell holds a printed copy of that argument. A separate trial pamphlet, published in New York by Diossy and Company, covers the prosecution for the death of Frederick A. Mirrick, and Cornell holds that as well.
The indictment charged murder. The trial judge instructed the jury on murder in the first degree, which requires a killing with premeditated design; murder in the second degree, which covers a killing without design by a person engaged in a felony; and the degrees of manslaughter. The defense argued that the offense was at most manslaughter in the second degree, under the statute on unnecessary killing while resisting a felonious attempt, and the judge left that question to the jury. The jury was also told that if the men were acting together, the act of one was the act of all.
The court admitted several kinds of evidence over objection: photographs of the two men who died, used for identification; the coroner's testimony; and physical items from the case. The court refused to strike testimony and refused a motion for acquittal. Rulloff did not testify. The judge's remark on that silence drew an exception from the defense, and the judge then told the jury that no inference could be drawn from it.
Wisbey writes that Rulloff offered little defense, questioned some witnesses himself, and that his lawyer appealed mainly to sympathy. The jury deliberated about six hours, in Wisbey's account, and returned a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. The Mark Twain Project dates the conviction to January 11, 1871. Wisbey says the sentence set an execution date of March 3, and the Mark Twain Project records that he was sentenced to death.
The conviction went first to the Supreme Court at General Term. There Justice Potter held that summoning a juror from among the bystanders was proper, that the photographs were admissible for identification, and that the judge's later clarification of the point about Rulloff's silence cured any error. Justice Miller also found no error, and the judgment stood.
The case then went to the Court of Appeals on a writ of error. The printed record held at Cornell lists Boardman and Finch as counsel for Rulloff and Marcus Lyon, the district attorney, with D. S. Dickinson, for the people. The court decided it on March 28, 1871, in an opinion by Judge Allen.
On the main question, the court held that when several men join in a felony, each is answerable for a killing carried out by one of them in furtherance of the shared purpose, and that a jury may infer such a purpose from the circumstances. It found the trial judge's charge on that point favorable to the accused. It rejected the claim that the killing should be reduced to manslaughter in the second degree, because the evidence did not show a killing to prevent a felony. It held that the judge's first remark about Rulloff's silence was prejudicial but that the later explanation cured it, and it held that the photographs and the physical evidence had been properly admitted. The judgment was affirmed and the case was sent back to the trial court "to proceed upon the conviction and pronounce sentence of death as prescribed by law." The court noted that all the judges concurred.
Appeals had postponed the March 3 date. Wisbey says Rulloff was taken to Elmira in April 1871 and resentenced there, with a new date of May 18. The Mark Twain Project dates the appearance before the Supreme Court in Elmira to April 5, 1871. In Wisbey's account Rulloff admitted at that hearing that he was one of the three men who entered the store, and blamed a companion for the killing. That statement is Wisbey's report of what he said; the courts' findings rest on the jury verdict and the common-design rule.
Governor John T. Hoffman refused all appeals for clemency, according to Wisbey. The Mark Twain Project dates the governor's rejection of a final application to May 15, 1871. Rulloff was executed in Binghamton on May 18, 1871.
Rulloff presented himself as a scholar of languages, and the record supports parts of that. The Cornell Alumni Magazine says he worked on a treatise on the origins of language and that he argued his work was too valuable to scholarship for his life to end. The Annals of Binghamton records that while he was held in the Broome County jail after his final sentence he studied and wrote on philology until three o'clock on the afternoon before his execution. It adds that he sent his manuscript by prepaid express to Professor Taylor Lewis of Schenectady. The Mark Twain Project's editors write that his learning impressed the scholars who examined him.
Wisbey also reports that Rulloff claimed to understand Latin, Greek, German, French and Italian, a little Hebrew and Sanskrit, and a new theory on the origin of languages. These are his claims as reported; the nature and value of the manuscript are not on record.
On April 29, 1871, Samuel Clemens, who was then living in Elmira, wrote to Whitelaw Reid, the editor of the New York Tribune, and enclosed a letter for publication. Clemens said he supported capital punishment but regretted the loss of a man of such learning. His letter, offered half in satire, proposed finding a volunteer who would take Rulloff's crime upon himself and be executed in his place. The Mark Twain Project's editors say he meant to start a public discussion about commuting the sentence. The Tribune printed it on May 3, 1871, under the heading "A Substitute for Rulloff. Have We a Sydney Carton among Us?" It responded in part to a Tribune editorial of April 25 that had argued for confining Rulloff rather than executing him. The effort did not change the outcome.
The record separates three things.
First, the conviction that stood: murder in the first degree in the death of Frederick A. Merrick, on the verdict of a Binghamton jury in January 1871, affirmed by the Court of Appeals on March 28, 1871. The Court of Appeals' reasoning was the common-design rule, since the jury could find that the killing was done in pursuit of a shared felonious purpose.
Second, the conviction for abduction of his wife in February 1846, with a ten-year sentence. It was a conviction for abduction only. It did not decide what became of her.
Third, the matter of the deaths of his wife and infant daughter. A jury found Rulloff guilty of the daughter's murder in October 1856, and the Court of Appeals reversed that judgment on December 5, 1858 and ordered a new trial, because death had not been proved. An indictment for the murder of Harriet Rulloff was also found. No verdict on either charge after the reversal is on record, and no murder conviction for these deaths stands.
Wisbey and the Cornell magazine write that Rulloff was tried and convicted of the wife-and-daughter murders and that the verdict was set aside; the court records show that the conviction was for the daughter alone. Some later writers connect Rulloff with further killings. The Mark Twain Project's editorial note says the 1871 proceedings revealed "decades of crime, including the murders of his wife and child," but that is a modern editor's summary and the courts did not so find. The New York Almanack article says he was suspected of killing a sister-in-law and a niece as well, and says he was never charged with those deaths for lack of evidence. No court convicted him of any of these.
Born near Saint John, New Brunswick, between 1819 and 1821.
Early 1840s: arrives in the Dryden and Ithaca area of Tompkins County, New York.
December 31, 1843: marries Harriet.
Spring 1845: a daughter is born.
1845: charged with abducting his wife in Tompkins County; indicted in Tompkins County for her murder.
February 1846: convicted of the abduction; sentenced to ten years at Auburn State Prison.
June 1856: indicted in Tioga County for the murder of his infant daughter.
October 1856: found guilty at the Tioga Circuit.
May 5, 1857: date of the jail break for which he was indicted in July 1859.
December 5, 1858: Court of Appeals reverses the 1856 judgment and orders a new trial.
January 15, 1860: Supreme Court (Justice Knox) refuses release on habeas corpus and remands him.
1861: held at Sing Sing, according to the Cornell Alumni Magazine.
August 17, 1870: Frederick A. Merrick is killed during a burglary of a store in Binghamton.
January 1871: trial in Binghamton; jury returns a verdict of murder in the first degree; death sentence.
March 28, 1871: Court of Appeals affirms the conviction and remits the case for sentence.
April 5, 1871: appearance before the Supreme Court in Elmira; execution date set for May 18.
April 29, 1871: Samuel Clemens writes to the New York Tribune about the case.
May 15, 1871: the governor refuses a final application for commutation.
May 18, 1871: executed in Binghamton.