We are the Harps. Those are words you never wanted to hear as a tale end of the 18th century if you were a person traveling along or living along the Natchez Trace.

An early highway of sorts extending roughly 440 miles from Nashville, Tennessee to Natchez, Mississippi, linking the Combriland, Tennessee and Mississippi rivers.

It meant one of three things. You're about to be robbed, about to be killed, or both.

The name Harps struck terror into the heart to the settlers of the Appalachian Mountains and rightfully so, they were vicious murderers and rapists who didn't seem to need much of a reason to take human life.

They wouldn't hesitate to kill someone, if that person had something that they wanted. They also wouldn't hesitate to kill someone if that person just happened to irritate them by doing something as harmless as snoring.

Frontier settlers readied their guns and weapons locked their doors and formed possees to protect themselves against the harps.

And that often still wasn't enough to stop the harps often referred to as the bloody harps or the vicious harps.

The name Harp was synonymous with violence, death, terror and evil at the end of the 18th century at the western edge of the American Frontier.

Makasia and Wiley Harp were considered the United States first documented serial killers.

Calling themselves big and little harp, respectively. These two brothers left behind a trail of senseless bloodshed, wherever they went.

The harps weren't like most outlaws of their era. They didn't just, you know, hurt or kill people for their money, but they're good.

They often seem to kill people because they felt like it. Maybe they enjoyed it.

The typical thing they didn't just kill their victims, they mutilated them. The signature mark of a heart murder was a disemboweled corpse filled with rocks, lining a river somewhere in the mountain wilderness, or someone with their head bashed in or nearly split in two by Tomahawk.

The harps murdered victims all over the place. Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois and Mississippi.

And that doesn't count additional places where they may have murdered innocent people during the Revolutionary War.

In total, not counting the warriors, the harps brothers killed an estimated 35 to 50 men, women, children and babies.

Yes, babies. No one was safe when these two were around.

Although their timeline in victim count is a bit muddy, the harps were real people. Their lives and many of their deeds documented by numerous contemporaries, and they also show up in genealogical records.

This week we did our best to sort through a lot of conflicting sources to determine who really were the harps brothers.

Well, for starters, they weren't actually brothers, and their names weren't wily and macaque.

They were savage young men who first plundered, raped and likely killed during the chaotic years of the American Revolution when they fought on behalf of the British.

They may have developed a considerable taste for violence during the war years, one they never stopped trying to satisfy when the war was over.

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