It's January 10th, 1871.

In the jailhouse of Binghamton, New York, a journalist by the name of Edward Hamilton,

Freeman is led by the local sheriff down a cold dark corridor of the cell block.

The sheriff stops outside one cell, finds the key, and unlocks the door.

Freeman comes face to face with a man who has requested him.

51 year old Edward Rullof, on trial for first degree murder,

was described as a monster imbued by the spirit of the devil. He will confess to Freeman, he's

asked him to write his biography, the murder of his wife 30 years prior, likely

killing his daughter at the same time, though he never admits it.

Roloff will detail his career of crime, how he spent decades incarcerated or on the run.

But this man was no ordinary killer if there can be such a thing. A trained doctor, lawyer, a philosopher, by

his own account an accomplished academic, versed in the classics. He spoke 12 languages. Even today, attributes hardly associated with a confessed murderer.

But in America's gilded age, Roluff, convicted and sentenced to death eventually,

would prove to be the fodder for sensationalist

newspaper accounts as academics and journalists speculated on his criminal mind, which many

claimed was too intelligent to be killed. Hi everybody, I'm Don Weilben and this is another episode of American History Hit.

Today we grapple with the strange and twisted tale of a serial murderer in the

Guilded Age, a mysterious enigmatic character by the name of Edward Roloff, who lived

from 1819 and died, as we will soon learn, 52 years later in 1871 by public hanging in Binghamton, New York.

He was, by anyone's estimation, a brilliant mind, a want-to-be academic, even, a scholar who

spent much of his adult years devising a remarkable if deeply flawed theory of linguistics, the origins of languages, all the while engaged in a life of criminal enterprise, which included along the way a series of brutal murders.

He was devious, inventive, a highly determined man whose intellectual acumen was matched only by his craven ambitions. During several different incarcerations, his high-level

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