It could be argued that Bathsheba Spooner had been anticipated by half a century by Catherine Hayes. But John Hauer, of Heidelberg, Pennsylvania, displayed an enterprising originality that surpasses anything in the Newgate Calendar. When he married Elizabeth Shitz, he expected her to inherit part of her father’s considerable fortune but when Peter Shitz died in 1795, he left most of his estate to his two sons, Francis and Peter; Elizabeth inherited only a thousand dollars. Hauer challenged the will in court, without success. He then went to the Shitz brothers and told them that the ghost of the old man had appeared to him in a dream and declared that the inheritance should be divided equally. They declined to believe him. Hauer warned them that their father had said he would haunt them if he ignored the request. Soon afterwards, the brothers were awakened with the sound of footsteps in the attic, a clanking of chains and a hollow voice announcing itself as their father. They rushed up to the attic and caught Hauer holding a chain – he insisted that he had been summoned there by the old man’s ghost. This time they threw him out.
The next time the younger of the Shitz boys – seventeen-year-old Peter – visited his sister, Hauer got him drunk and bet him five gold dollars that he would not dare to jump from a beam in the loft with a rope tied round his neck. Peter took the dare. Fortunately, the rope broke.
At this point, Hauer ran out of ideas. Two years later, in 1797, he went into a tavern, got into conversation with four Irish labourers, and persuaded them to murder the Shitz boys with a promise of sharing in his future fortune. Three days after Christmas, the Irishmen broke into the Shitz house, found Francis in bed, and shot him through the ear, then struck him with an axe. They then forced their way into Peter Shitz’s room and attacked him; Peter succeeded in jumping from the window and escaping.
The ease with which the burglars had found their way to the correct bedrooms made the authorities suspicious. The pistol that had killed Francis was found and identified as belonging to one of the Irishmen. They implicated Hauer, and all five were tried. Only Hauer and M’Manus – the man who owned the pistol – were found guilty. Hauer then made a determined attempt to convince the police that he was insane, stripping himself naked and biting anyone who came into the cell. It made no difference; he was hanged in July 1798.
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 19th 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.’