America's First Serial Killers: A Biography of the Harpe Brothers
★★★ Discover America's First Killers ★★★
They murdered. They stole. And they did it all to excess. Unlike other bandits of early America, they didn't do it for the money--they did it for the thrill and love of blood.
They were the Harpe Brothers, and they have been called America's first true serial killers.
In this gripping narrative, the crimes and the lives of America's most notorious sibling killers are documented like a page-turning novel.
They murdered. They stole. And they did it all to excess. Unlike other bandits of early America, they didn't do it for the money--they did it for the thrill and love of blood.
They were the Harpe Brothers, and they have been called America's first true serial killers.
In this gripping narrative, the crimes and the lives of America's most notorious sibling killers are documented like a page-turning novel.
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Excerpt
Chapter 1: Introduction
Along the trails, on the farms and in the towns of Kentucky and Tennessee, a slew of mutilated bodies marked the travels of the Harpe brothers. The shocking discoveries of corpses of the innocent in the early years of the Republic threw terror into the hearts of townsmen and frontiersmen alike. The depraved Harpes left a revolting legacy - a blotch on the optimistic times when a new nation was being forged.
Frontiersmen, settling west of the Appalachians in what is now Tennessee and Kentucky, faced incredible hardships. Carving a patch of farmland from the dense forest, building a log cabin, and blazing trails to the nearest little community was hard enough, but the enterprise was made even more difficult by marauding bands of predatory bandits and unpacified natives.
We believe that frontiersmen in the new republic were a single-minded, hardy, honest, hardworking and heroic lot. They were, according to our romantic ideals, attentive husbands, good fathers and praiseworthy advocates of American values. The archetypical heroes of early America, Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, stand as examples of the kind of men who selflessly rose to the challenges of the new frontier. Their blameless lives and exploits, first the subject of immensely popular biographies and fictional adventures, and later, broadcast everywhere through film and television, have obscured the reality of post-revolutionary life west of the Appalachians. Many, if not most of the frontiersmen, in the towns and wilderness lived lives that were, in the words of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett were exceptions to the rule.
There were two men on the frontier who lived the nastiest and most brutal of lives. Micajah Harp (or Harpe, known as Big Harpe), and Wiley (or Little Harpe), go down in the annals of America as being two of the most amoral, revolting and unrepentant homicidal creatures to haunt the frontier. They claimed to be brothers. They didn't look alike but both were completely identical in their total absence of conscience. They behaved about as close to animals as is possible for a human being. In the wake of their wanderings around Kentucky, Tennessee and southern Illinois they left a trail of dread among frontier families. This was a remarkable accomplishment. The region was continually wracked by rape, pillage and thievery, and the populace was used to the depredations of outlaws and outcast Indians. With almost no civil law enforcement the inhabitants were accustomed to dealing with criminal activity. They watched each other's farms, travelled in groups and exercised vigilante justice when the need arose. Of the criminals on the frontier the vile Harpe brothers were the worst of a very bad, large bunch of outlaws.
At one point in their career the two were part of a gang of pirates who plied their trade at Cave-In-Rock on the banks of the Ohio River in southern Illinois. The river was a busy waterway on which traders transported goods from Pennsylvania and Illinois south to the Mississippi, and families migrated with their earthly possessions to pursue their fortune on the frontier. The Cave-In-Rock pirates attacked the passing flatboats, scared off or murdered their occupants and appropriated their cargo.
In the spring of 1799 one of the flatboats came ashore upriver from Cave-In-Rock. A couple disembarked, climbed up a cliff and seated themselves on the rock to enjoy the view. The sweethearts held hands and whispered to each other their observations on the magnificence of the surroundings. It was their misfortune to be observed by the Harpe brothers, who were skulking in the woods. The two men stealthily approached the couple from behind and, breaking out in loud laughter, shoved them off the ledge and watched their bodies smash on the rocks below. When they told their fellow pirates what they had done, the homicidal pranksters received only muted praise for their exploit. The pirates were immune to the thrill of violence as they were well-practiced in the various ways of dispatching boatmen.
Not long after this failed attempt to get attention, Big and Little Harpe tried again to raise their status among their colleagues. Three men were captured in a battle over a flatboat and its cargo. They were taken to the pirate's lair and presumably trussed up to await their fate. One of the prisoners was spirited away by the Harpe brothers who stripped him and tied him to the back of a horse. They led the horse up to the top of the cliff over the cave and blindfolded it. They smacked its rump with sticks forcing the horse to the edge of the precipice where its flailing hooves dislodged some rocks. The gang below, hearing boulders tumbling down at the mouth of the cave, went out to see what was happening. They came into the open just as the horse with its naked passenger tumbled through the air and splattered on the limestone boulders at riverside. Up above on the cliff's edge Big and Little Harpe cheered and doubled up with laughter. This was too much for their companions. Rather than being suitably impressed by the murder, the pirates were stunned by the cruelty which was, even by their standards, shocking. One can assume it was fear of having what we today would call psychopaths in their midst that caused the outlaws to expel the Harpe brothers from Cave-In-Rock.
Where these vile men came from and even who they were, is unclear. The many versions of their story are not unanimous in speculation on their place of birth and their early lives. The two may not have been named Harpe at all, as they habitually used aliases in their criminal careers. But if they really were Harpes it is likely they came from North Carolina or Virginia and were born with the name lacking its terminal "e". In the days of rampant illiteracy and free-wheeling spelling it is likely that the "e" was added somewhere along the line and it stuck.
The Harpe boys were likely not brothers but rather first cousins. It is believed that they were the sons of Scottish immigrants William and John Harpe, who settled in North Carolina. The son of John Harpe, Micajah was born in the 1760s. Two years later William Harpe was blessed with a son he named Wiley. The young Harpe cousins on the outbreak of the War of Independence joined one of the Tory gangs attacking the property and families of the rebels. Killing, stealing, murdering and burning were their stock in trade. In the chaos of war they helped themselves to the property of American patriots under the guise of furthering the King's cause, but their rape and pillage was motivated less by political persuasion than by greed and the pleasure afforded by violence. The Harpes were observed fighting alongside the British regular forces and militia in the battles at Blackstock's farm and King's Mountain in 1780, and at Cowpens the following year.
At the end of the War of Independence, with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the Harpes, along with large numbers of loyalists and allied Cherokees, were pushed over the Appalachians into Tennessee. On the frontier they continued fighting joining the Cherokees raiding the farms of Patriots and their settlements. Sometimes the renegades were spectacularly successful, such as at the Battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, where the Harpes, with Loyalists and Indians, defeated a force of 182 Patriot militiamen. The Patriot settlers strengthened their forces and forced the raiders to retreat to the Chickamauga Cherokee and Creek Indian village of Nickajack in the Southwest Territory that became the state of Tennessee in 1796. From this settlement the Harpes accompanied the natives on their periodic expeditions to pillaging farms. It is likely that the Harpe brothers were prime culprits in rape and murder. On one of their raids the boys kidnapped Susan Wood, who was said to have been rather ugly, and Maria or Betsey Davidson, described more generously as rather handsome. Big Harpe adopted these captives as his wives. The Harpe brothers parted company with the Cherokees on the eve of the destruction of Nickajack by forces of the Southwest Territory in September of 1794. Big and Little Harpe, with Big Harpe's two wives, moved to Knoxville.
This frontier town was a good choice because it offered a perfect environment for wild men like the Harpes. A visitor in the late 18th century described the capital of the soon to be new state of Tennessee as wild and unruly, dirty and disorganized. It was a sin city if ever there was one. The male inhabitants, much to the disgust of one reporter, even on Sunday caroused drunkenly in the muddy streets, swore profusely, danced and gambled openly and, without shame of promiscuity, swarmed the plentiful brothels. It was said around town that the Devil, old and worn out, had given up travelling and settled in Knoxville so that he could spend his declining years with like-minded people.
The Harpe family cleared a piece of land about 8 miles from town in the summer of 1795. They built a log cabin, a corral for horses and put a couple of acres under cultivation. This was intended to be a front for Big and Little Harpe, who were not cut out to be farmers. They preferred the adrenalin rush of stealing and the satisfaction of living off the toil of others. On every visit to Knoxville, so it was reported, they had more and more pork, mutton and horses to sell to finance their non-stop carousing. Unconcerned with disguising their nefarious ways they came under suspicion, although nothing could be proved. A spate of fires destroyed houses and stables in the area and fingers were pointed at the Harpes, but evidence linking them with what everyone knew to be arson was lacking. The stables of the U.S. War Department's Indian Agent were set alight and when the residents rushed to put it out, the Harpes ran into town and attempted, but failed, to rob the home of the first Governor of Tennessee, John Sevier.
Little Harpe, like his brother, was adept at feigning innocence and exhibiting civil behavior when necessary. He courted and married on June 1 1797 Sarah or Sally Rice. How he managed to win the heart of the pretty and delicate daughter of a nearby farmer is unrecorded. Judging from descriptions of his wild appearance and unkempt nature one can only conclude that standards for potential husbands were very low at that time in the frontier.
The Harpes' idyllic life of thieving, gambling, drinking and womanizing came to an abrupt end in late 1798. A farmer by the name of Edward Thiel discovered that some of his horses were missing. He raised a gang of vigilantes from among his neighbours and headed off to the Harpe homestead where they found the farm abandoned. The Harpes, who always seemed to have prior information of any hostile raid, had packed up and departed. There were traces that Thiel's horses had been in the corral, so the posse picked up the Harpes' trail and followed it up into the Cumberland Mountains. They eventually overtook the Harpe brothers leading the missing horses. The two thieves were bound and led along the trail back to Knoxville. Just 5 miles from town the captives untied themselves and galloped off into the wilderness. With his horses in tow, Thiel, satisfied with the day's work, returned home while the Harpes made their way through the forest to what the locals called Hughe's Rowdy Groggery, located a few miles from Knoxville. They settled down to a drinking bout with the only other patron of the inn, a man called Johnson. His enjoyment of their companionship was short-lived. The following week Johnson's body was found floating in the Holstein River. He had been disembowelled, with rocks placed inside his corpse to sink it to the bottom. They had tumbled out as the current rolled his corpse along the riverbed. Hughes, the innkeeper, was identified as one of the last persons to see Johnson, and in spite of vehemently claiming that the Harpes were responsible for the murder, was severely beaten and kicked out of the county by some of his righteous neighbours.
Johnson was the first widely reported victim of the Harpes. They had wetted their appetite for slaughter in battle and certainly left civilian corpses here and there in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, but these homicides were not laid at their door.
The actual count of the victims of the Harpes' campaign of homicide would never be known. The discovery of bodies and the record of disappearances in the sparsely populated backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee in post-Revolutionary times were recorded haphazardly. Life was difficult on the frontier. Men would disappear, abandoning their families by simply walking off into the wilderness or heading across the Mississippi into Spanish territories. Others disappeared in the forest and drowned, starved or froze to death. Reporting a death to authorities often meant that surviving family members or neighbours would have to walk or ride long distances through tracts of forest that could harbor outlaws, Indians and dangerous wild animals. Official reports to the Sherriff at a county seat or to the few permanently resident churchmen were rare. So a count of the Harpes victims can only be approximate. As we shall see many of the corpses of their victims were discovered by accident.
On the basis of firm evidence the Harpe brothers killed 25 people, but some have estimated the number of their victims may have exceeded 50. This puts them in the same league as Ted Bundy, who is credited with more than 36 murders of women in the 1970's, and his contemporary John Wayne Gacy, who killed more than 34 young men. For these two, the gender of the victims is evidence of motive but for the Harpes gender, age and race were of no concern whatsoever. They were indiscriminate murderers dispatching people they came across by chance with complete abandon. Their crimes were for the most part devoid of any detectable motive.
Modern serial killers are often motivated by a game of hide-and-seek with law enforcement. The Harpe brothers derived little pleasure from eluding capture because news of any of their atrocities travelled very slowly. Skimpy reports of their murders in the few newspapers that had limited circulation on the frontier would not likely have fallen into their hands. News of their violent acts was passed by gossip and rumor, and as a consequence was inaccurate. Hearing tales exaggerating their savagery may have spurred them on to commit even more barbarous acts.
Along the trails, on the farms and in the towns of Kentucky and Tennessee, a slew of mutilated bodies marked the travels of the Harpe brothers. The shocking discoveries of corpses of the innocent in the early years of the Republic threw terror into the hearts of townsmen and frontiersmen alike. The depraved Harpes left a revolting legacy - a blotch on the optimistic times when a new nation was being forged.
Frontiersmen, settling west of the Appalachians in what is now Tennessee and Kentucky, faced incredible hardships. Carving a patch of farmland from the dense forest, building a log cabin, and blazing trails to the nearest little community was hard enough, but the enterprise was made even more difficult by marauding bands of predatory bandits and unpacified natives.
We believe that frontiersmen in the new republic were a single-minded, hardy, honest, hardworking and heroic lot. They were, according to our romantic ideals, attentive husbands, good fathers and praiseworthy advocates of American values. The archetypical heroes of early America, Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett, stand as examples of the kind of men who selflessly rose to the challenges of the new frontier. Their blameless lives and exploits, first the subject of immensely popular biographies and fictional adventures, and later, broadcast everywhere through film and television, have obscured the reality of post-revolutionary life west of the Appalachians. Many, if not most of the frontiersmen, in the towns and wilderness lived lives that were, in the words of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Hobbes, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Daniel Boone and Davey Crockett were exceptions to the rule.
There were two men on the frontier who lived the nastiest and most brutal of lives. Micajah Harp (or Harpe, known as Big Harpe), and Wiley (or Little Harpe), go down in the annals of America as being two of the most amoral, revolting and unrepentant homicidal creatures to haunt the frontier. They claimed to be brothers. They didn't look alike but both were completely identical in their total absence of conscience. They behaved about as close to animals as is possible for a human being. In the wake of their wanderings around Kentucky, Tennessee and southern Illinois they left a trail of dread among frontier families. This was a remarkable accomplishment. The region was continually wracked by rape, pillage and thievery, and the populace was used to the depredations of outlaws and outcast Indians. With almost no civil law enforcement the inhabitants were accustomed to dealing with criminal activity. They watched each other's farms, travelled in groups and exercised vigilante justice when the need arose. Of the criminals on the frontier the vile Harpe brothers were the worst of a very bad, large bunch of outlaws.
At one point in their career the two were part of a gang of pirates who plied their trade at Cave-In-Rock on the banks of the Ohio River in southern Illinois. The river was a busy waterway on which traders transported goods from Pennsylvania and Illinois south to the Mississippi, and families migrated with their earthly possessions to pursue their fortune on the frontier. The Cave-In-Rock pirates attacked the passing flatboats, scared off or murdered their occupants and appropriated their cargo.
In the spring of 1799 one of the flatboats came ashore upriver from Cave-In-Rock. A couple disembarked, climbed up a cliff and seated themselves on the rock to enjoy the view. The sweethearts held hands and whispered to each other their observations on the magnificence of the surroundings. It was their misfortune to be observed by the Harpe brothers, who were skulking in the woods. The two men stealthily approached the couple from behind and, breaking out in loud laughter, shoved them off the ledge and watched their bodies smash on the rocks below. When they told their fellow pirates what they had done, the homicidal pranksters received only muted praise for their exploit. The pirates were immune to the thrill of violence as they were well-practiced in the various ways of dispatching boatmen.
Not long after this failed attempt to get attention, Big and Little Harpe tried again to raise their status among their colleagues. Three men were captured in a battle over a flatboat and its cargo. They were taken to the pirate's lair and presumably trussed up to await their fate. One of the prisoners was spirited away by the Harpe brothers who stripped him and tied him to the back of a horse. They led the horse up to the top of the cliff over the cave and blindfolded it. They smacked its rump with sticks forcing the horse to the edge of the precipice where its flailing hooves dislodged some rocks. The gang below, hearing boulders tumbling down at the mouth of the cave, went out to see what was happening. They came into the open just as the horse with its naked passenger tumbled through the air and splattered on the limestone boulders at riverside. Up above on the cliff's edge Big and Little Harpe cheered and doubled up with laughter. This was too much for their companions. Rather than being suitably impressed by the murder, the pirates were stunned by the cruelty which was, even by their standards, shocking. One can assume it was fear of having what we today would call psychopaths in their midst that caused the outlaws to expel the Harpe brothers from Cave-In-Rock.
Where these vile men came from and even who they were, is unclear. The many versions of their story are not unanimous in speculation on their place of birth and their early lives. The two may not have been named Harpe at all, as they habitually used aliases in their criminal careers. But if they really were Harpes it is likely they came from North Carolina or Virginia and were born with the name lacking its terminal "e". In the days of rampant illiteracy and free-wheeling spelling it is likely that the "e" was added somewhere along the line and it stuck.
The Harpe boys were likely not brothers but rather first cousins. It is believed that they were the sons of Scottish immigrants William and John Harpe, who settled in North Carolina. The son of John Harpe, Micajah was born in the 1760s. Two years later William Harpe was blessed with a son he named Wiley. The young Harpe cousins on the outbreak of the War of Independence joined one of the Tory gangs attacking the property and families of the rebels. Killing, stealing, murdering and burning were their stock in trade. In the chaos of war they helped themselves to the property of American patriots under the guise of furthering the King's cause, but their rape and pillage was motivated less by political persuasion than by greed and the pleasure afforded by violence. The Harpes were observed fighting alongside the British regular forces and militia in the battles at Blackstock's farm and King's Mountain in 1780, and at Cowpens the following year.
At the end of the War of Independence, with the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the Harpes, along with large numbers of loyalists and allied Cherokees, were pushed over the Appalachians into Tennessee. On the frontier they continued fighting joining the Cherokees raiding the farms of Patriots and their settlements. Sometimes the renegades were spectacularly successful, such as at the Battle of Blue Licks in Kentucky, where the Harpes, with Loyalists and Indians, defeated a force of 182 Patriot militiamen. The Patriot settlers strengthened their forces and forced the raiders to retreat to the Chickamauga Cherokee and Creek Indian village of Nickajack in the Southwest Territory that became the state of Tennessee in 1796. From this settlement the Harpes accompanied the natives on their periodic expeditions to pillaging farms. It is likely that the Harpe brothers were prime culprits in rape and murder. On one of their raids the boys kidnapped Susan Wood, who was said to have been rather ugly, and Maria or Betsey Davidson, described more generously as rather handsome. Big Harpe adopted these captives as his wives. The Harpe brothers parted company with the Cherokees on the eve of the destruction of Nickajack by forces of the Southwest Territory in September of 1794. Big and Little Harpe, with Big Harpe's two wives, moved to Knoxville.
This frontier town was a good choice because it offered a perfect environment for wild men like the Harpes. A visitor in the late 18th century described the capital of the soon to be new state of Tennessee as wild and unruly, dirty and disorganized. It was a sin city if ever there was one. The male inhabitants, much to the disgust of one reporter, even on Sunday caroused drunkenly in the muddy streets, swore profusely, danced and gambled openly and, without shame of promiscuity, swarmed the plentiful brothels. It was said around town that the Devil, old and worn out, had given up travelling and settled in Knoxville so that he could spend his declining years with like-minded people.
The Harpe family cleared a piece of land about 8 miles from town in the summer of 1795. They built a log cabin, a corral for horses and put a couple of acres under cultivation. This was intended to be a front for Big and Little Harpe, who were not cut out to be farmers. They preferred the adrenalin rush of stealing and the satisfaction of living off the toil of others. On every visit to Knoxville, so it was reported, they had more and more pork, mutton and horses to sell to finance their non-stop carousing. Unconcerned with disguising their nefarious ways they came under suspicion, although nothing could be proved. A spate of fires destroyed houses and stables in the area and fingers were pointed at the Harpes, but evidence linking them with what everyone knew to be arson was lacking. The stables of the U.S. War Department's Indian Agent were set alight and when the residents rushed to put it out, the Harpes ran into town and attempted, but failed, to rob the home of the first Governor of Tennessee, John Sevier.
Little Harpe, like his brother, was adept at feigning innocence and exhibiting civil behavior when necessary. He courted and married on June 1 1797 Sarah or Sally Rice. How he managed to win the heart of the pretty and delicate daughter of a nearby farmer is unrecorded. Judging from descriptions of his wild appearance and unkempt nature one can only conclude that standards for potential husbands were very low at that time in the frontier.
The Harpes' idyllic life of thieving, gambling, drinking and womanizing came to an abrupt end in late 1798. A farmer by the name of Edward Thiel discovered that some of his horses were missing. He raised a gang of vigilantes from among his neighbours and headed off to the Harpe homestead where they found the farm abandoned. The Harpes, who always seemed to have prior information of any hostile raid, had packed up and departed. There were traces that Thiel's horses had been in the corral, so the posse picked up the Harpes' trail and followed it up into the Cumberland Mountains. They eventually overtook the Harpe brothers leading the missing horses. The two thieves were bound and led along the trail back to Knoxville. Just 5 miles from town the captives untied themselves and galloped off into the wilderness. With his horses in tow, Thiel, satisfied with the day's work, returned home while the Harpes made their way through the forest to what the locals called Hughe's Rowdy Groggery, located a few miles from Knoxville. They settled down to a drinking bout with the only other patron of the inn, a man called Johnson. His enjoyment of their companionship was short-lived. The following week Johnson's body was found floating in the Holstein River. He had been disembowelled, with rocks placed inside his corpse to sink it to the bottom. They had tumbled out as the current rolled his corpse along the riverbed. Hughes, the innkeeper, was identified as one of the last persons to see Johnson, and in spite of vehemently claiming that the Harpes were responsible for the murder, was severely beaten and kicked out of the county by some of his righteous neighbours.
Johnson was the first widely reported victim of the Harpes. They had wetted their appetite for slaughter in battle and certainly left civilian corpses here and there in Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky, but these homicides were not laid at their door.
The actual count of the victims of the Harpes' campaign of homicide would never be known. The discovery of bodies and the record of disappearances in the sparsely populated backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee in post-Revolutionary times were recorded haphazardly. Life was difficult on the frontier. Men would disappear, abandoning their families by simply walking off into the wilderness or heading across the Mississippi into Spanish territories. Others disappeared in the forest and drowned, starved or froze to death. Reporting a death to authorities often meant that surviving family members or neighbours would have to walk or ride long distances through tracts of forest that could harbor outlaws, Indians and dangerous wild animals. Official reports to the Sherriff at a county seat or to the few permanently resident churchmen were rare. So a count of the Harpes victims can only be approximate. As we shall see many of the corpses of their victims were discovered by accident.
On the basis of firm evidence the Harpe brothers killed 25 people, but some have estimated the number of their victims may have exceeded 50. This puts them in the same league as Ted Bundy, who is credited with more than 36 murders of women in the 1970's, and his contemporary John Wayne Gacy, who killed more than 34 young men. For these two, the gender of the victims is evidence of motive but for the Harpes gender, age and race were of no concern whatsoever. They were indiscriminate murderers dispatching people they came across by chance with complete abandon. Their crimes were for the most part devoid of any detectable motive.
Modern serial killers are often motivated by a game of hide-and-seek with law enforcement. The Harpe brothers derived little pleasure from eluding capture because news of any of their atrocities travelled very slowly. Skimpy reports of their murders in the few newspapers that had limited circulation on the frontier would not likely have fallen into their hands. News of their violent acts was passed by gossip and rumor, and as a consequence was inaccurate. Hearing tales exaggerating their savagery may have spurred them on to commit even more barbarous acts.
