When we have come to recognize that witches, werewolves, and vampires are nothing but myths, we begin to look elsewhere for monsters. Much as explorers who failed to find dog-headed people nevertheless came to believe that the indigenous people they encountered must also engage in the same monstrous acts attributed to the creatures of their imagination, in the absence of true monsters, people who are thought to commit evil acts prove handy stand-ins, and there are none more monstrous in our eyes than those who commit murders, and particularly those who perpetrate many murders. Like the notion of everyday culinary cannibalism, the notion of the habitual or serial killer chills us, and there is overlap here, as many a serial killer may be driven by their pathology to consume the flesh of their victims. Especially monstrous are those said to have claimed a huge number of victims. One example is Gilles de Rais, whom I spoke about briefly in my episode The Specter of Devil Worship. A war hero and compatriot of Joan of Arc, in the Hundred Years’ War, he was arrested in 1440 and charged with the murder of more than one hundred and forty children, mostly boys. In his trial at the ecclesiastical court of Nantes, the gruesome details of his alleged crimes, including sexual assault, ritual abuse, and necrophilia, truly made of him a human monster. But worse still was Countess Elizabeth Báthory, a Hungarian noblewoman who stood trial for killing hundreds of young women and girls in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. By the highest count, she is said to have claimed as many as 650 victims. It was said that the Countess chose only virgins as her victims and bathed in their blood to ensure her own youth and beauty. In both of these cases, it was not only the aristocratic individual who was tried for the crimes, but also their complicit servants, and also in both cases, there are today doubts about the reality of their crimes. Gilles de Rais had made enemies among the nobility as well as in the church, and questions about exaggerated numbers of victims and dubious witness testimony and perhaps coerced confessions led to some, as far back as Voltaire in the Enlightenment, suggesting that the accusations of devil worship and ritual murder leveled against de Rais may have been a plot against him, much as is suspected of the accusations against the Knights Templar in France 133 years earlier. And in the case of Elizabeth Báthory too, the number of 650 victims is widely thought to be embellishment, and the stories of her bathing in blood are believed to be a later invention. Báthory too is also thought by some researchers to have been the victim of a conspiracy, accused by debtors whose debts would be canceled upon her arrest, and tried by Catholic authorities who sought to seize her wealth and land and to destroy the influence of a Protestant family. Certainly in both cases, there do seem to have been genuine reports of missing children, but how much of these stories are total fiction? It is similar, in some ways, to the demonization of the Mongols. Genghis Khan is sometimes called the world’s most destructive mass murderers, claiming some 40 million victims, such that the resulting reduction in carbon dioxide cooled the planet. And the Mongols, another early candidate for Pliny’s dog-headed monsters, were also rumored to be cannibals. However, this is the portrait of Genghis Khan created by those he invaded. Even the most devoted pacifist can recognize the difference between a serial murderer and a general marshalling troops in warfare, and among his own people, Genghis Khan was a hero, whose empire was ruled by law and encouraged religious and racial tolerance. We find this to be the case again and again, when we look at the claims of human monsters throughout history. Much of what is claimed about them is questionable, if not downright fictional.

In my last episode, I established that in many cases, accusations of conspicuous, habitual cannibalism as a core aspect of cultures considered “savage” was largely, if not entirely, a fiction. However, the same cannot be said of cannibalism generally, as I conceded. When starving, people will break the taboo and resort to eating the remains of other humans, or even killing their fellows in order to eat them. This is not denied. Nor can it be denied that there do exist cannibal murderers, those whose pathology or mental illness compels them to commit acts of anthropophagy during the course of their murders. Many of these have been Americans: Boone Helm, the Kentucky Cannibal, Albert Fish, the Brooklen Vampire; Arthur Shawcross, Henry Lee Lucas, Lester Harrison, Jeffrey Dahmer… the list goes on, and that’s not even considering cannibal killers from other countries. To walk a fine line between respecting the grief and suffering of these murderers’ victims and also recognizing the many contributing factors that may lead some individuals to commit these heinous acts, I do want to recognize that these killers are human beings. However monstrous their acts, they are not “monsters” in the principal sense of the word, that of a nonhuman creature of strange or terrifying shape. Despite what Netflix calls these killers, they are less monsters and more precisely are sociopaths or psychopaths. They are people who suffer from antisocial personality disorder or borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. Rather than demonize, we must recognize that they are the product of their particular background and environment, their specific genetic predispositions, and their developed pathologies. Some may object that this leaves no room for evil, and very well. If by evil one means demonic possession or some such nonsense, then yes, I am not leaving room for that, and I would suggest that to literally demonize mass murderers in this way is to take away culpability for their crimes. It is something that such criminals may sometimes try to do themselves, claiming they are not responsible because the devil made them do it, which is nothing but a convenient fiction. Many such serial murderers also demonize themselves by vastly inflating the numbers of their victims, claiming they killed hundreds when there may only be evidence for a handful. The point is that both murderers themselves and the public that struggles to comprehend their crimes and is morbidly fascinated by them both tend to construct false versions of these killers, mythical monsters that we then tell scary stories about. In this way, it is much like the Euhemerist view of mythology, which states that mythological accounts likely originated in actual historical events and people, but were distorted in their retelling through the ages. And if we want to know how people will tell stories about Jeffrey Dahmer and other modern day serial murderers 500 years from now, perhaps the best model would be how we remember legendary murderers who lived half a century ago.

A depiction of Gilles de Rais using his victims’ blood to perform black magic.

The first and most famous of legendary murderers from long ago that I think serves as an apt example of how some potentially true story can be inflated and fictionalized into legend is Sawney Bean of Scotland. According to the legend, Alexander Bean, Sawney for short, the surname spelled sometimes with an e at the end, was born in East Lothian to a family of ditch-diggers and hedge-tenders. He didn’t much care for the life of manual labor he was born into, and his father beat him savagely for his indolence. Eventually, he ran away from home, and during his wanderings, he found a kindred spirit in one Agnes Douglas, called Black Agnes because of her cruelty and because of rumors that she practiced witchcraft. The two were a match made in hell, for they both had no compunctions about robbing people to sustain themselves, murdering them to cover their crimes, and even consuming the flesh of their victims to serve both ends. The two of them took up residence in a cave on the coast, near Bennane Head, a very real cave that can be visited today. There, over decades, Sawney Bean and Black Agnes raised fourteen children, 8 boys and 6 girls. Withdrawn from society entirely, they continued to prey on passing travelers, ambushing them as they traveled at night, dragging their corpses back to the family cave, feasting on their remains and pickling whatever they could not eat to preserve it for later. Searches for these victims would conclude when discarded body parts washed up on beaches nearby, and the deaths were typically blamed on animal predators. Over the decades, the Sawney Bean clan grew, with his children incestuously producing numerous grandchildren, some 32 grandsons and granddaughters. With so many mouths to feed, their depredations increased, to the point that they could no longer be hidden. Local inhabitants came to recognize that there were murderers in the area and began searching for them. Some found the cave but did not believe that any person could live in it. Instead, more than one innocent person was accused of the Sawney Bean clan’s crimes and hanged for them. Eventually, one of their victims escaped. He was a man riding home from a country fair. While his wife was pulled from her horse and killed by the inbred cannibals, the man held them off with his sword and pistol and was eventually saved when a large group of travelers approached, scaring the cannibal clan away. When the news spread, a posse of 400 men was mustered by the king for the purpose of seeking out the clan. Their bloodhounds led them right to the cave, where along with a pile of pilfered valuables they found, to their horror, barrels full of pickled body parts and corpses hanging from the walls like a butcher shop. In the end, according to almost every version of the tale, every last member of the Bean Clan was killed for their horrific crimes. Sawney Bean himself was defiant to the end, it was said. “It isn’t over,” he shouted, according to one telling, “it will never be over!” And indeed, it never would be, for his legend lives on today. Although the Bennane Cave is difficult to reach, visitors still frequent it. One can easily find YouTube videos of people exploring it. Its interior is covered in graffiti. And beyond local lore, the story survives in the lyrics of various heavy metal songs and in numerous fictionalized retellings, the most prominent of these being Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes, as well as other films centering on inbred cannibals, like Wrong Turn and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But how much of the original story was itself fiction?

First, it must be acknowledged that the story did not appear until long after the time it is supposed to have happened. So far as anyone can determine, it was first told in British chapbooks, small booklets printed on the cheap and sold cheaply that told lurid stories of criminals. These cheap publications were preceded by the broadside ballads that sold for just half a penny and had previously done so much to popularize stories of cannibalism, and they would be followed by the “penny bloods” or “penny dreadfuls” of later years, so-called because of their gruesome content. The earliest of these to contain the story appeared sometime in the late 1700s, whereas the story itself is said to have happened in the late 1500s or somewhat later. This is a difference of some 200 years. Add to this fact the claim in the story that the Sawney Bean clan murdered more than a thousand people, and we begin to recognize that there must be some fiction here. The murder of thousands would not go unrecorded for two centuries and only first appear in literature known for embellishment. It is especially so if the news had reached the royal court, and a force of men was dispatched upon royal decree to find and bring the cannibals to justice. There would be record of that. Yet there are no reliable historical records of these events previous to the chapbooks. Additionally, in the several chapbooks and many later retellings of the story, there are numerous differences and contradictions. Early ones indicate that it took place during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, while others claim it was King James VI of Scotland, James I of England, who brought the clan to justice. Likewise, the story of the clan’s end was inconsistent. By one account, when they were taken to stand trial, the men of the clan were first forced to watch their women and children burned at the stake before they were themselves drawn and quartered, but in other versions, the women and children were first forced to watch the men be mutilated and bled to death, their hands, feet, and genitals severed. Then in still other versions, they were all executed without process, as the posse that found their cave destroyed it with the clan inside, detonating a charge of gunpowder and collapsing the cave on them. Of course, this version does not work with the identification of Bennane Cave as the Sawney Bean cave, since that cave is not collapsed, but then again, there are further issues there. That cave, for example, is simply not big enough to have housed such a massive clan. With 14 children and 32 grandchildren, we’re talking about a family of nearly fifty people, and beyond the difficulty of even finding a cave big enough to house such a brood, it is simply unlikely that so massive a clan could have gone unnoticed for 25 years, as the story claims, even if they did hide in their apparently huge cave during the day and only came out by night.

One further theory is that this story originated as anti-Scottish propaganda, and there are several points to be made in favor of this notion. First, it should be recalled that there was a long history of characterizing the people of the region as savage cannibals. According to the Romans, cannibalism was practiced all over Europe by the primitive peoples there—another example of claims that the Other is inhuman because they do unthinkable things. Julius Caesar claimed the Irish were cannibals. Pliny claimed the Druids of Gaul were cannibals. Likewise, in the Common Era, St. Jerome of Stridon described, in the late 4th century, “the Attacotti, a British tribe,” which he claimed “eat human flesh,” saying that “when they find herds of swine, cattle, and sheep in the woods, they are accustomed to cut off the buttocks of the shepherds, and the paps of the shepherdesses, and to consider them as the only delicacies of food.” These mysterious inhabitants of the British isles were then said to prefer the shepherd to the flock, as it were, and it is telling that this baseless account was long taken to mean that the Scottish were cannibals, when really no one knows if the Attacotti were entirely made up or who they were, if they really existed. Now consider when and where the story of Sawney Bean emerged: specifically in British publications, not Scottish literature, and in the wake of the Jacobite rebellions, when supporters of James II, the exiled Stuart king, made five attempts to restore him to the throne. The movement was strong in Scotland, so fears of Jacobite revolution often centered on fears of Scottish uprising. Therefore, a story about British forces being dispatched to root out the threat of Scottish savages does seem somewhat to have been a thinly veiled propaganda story. Driving home that notion is the fact that, among the British, “Sawney,” the name given to the chief savage in the tale, was actually a racist epithet for Scotsmen. However, there are reasons to doubt this characterization of the story as well. While early versions of it have Queen Elizabeth, the last Tudor monarch, wiping out the Bean clan, many versions of the story have James I crushing the cannibal brood, and this English king was also James VI of Scotland, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and himself a Stuart monarch. Therefore, the symbolism does not really work. Moreover, the sorts of chapbooks in which the story appeared mostly told the stories of vicious and savage British criminals, so it is difficult to suggest that it was pure propaganda.

Some of the chapbooks of the era did tell the stories of real crimes, and the Sawney Bean story was thereafter immortalized in sensational true crime catalogues like The Newgate Calendar, which was a publication associated with Newgate Prison. It has therefore long been thought that there may have been some truth behind the story, some kernel of history that served as the basis. One of the earliest versions of the Sawney Bean tale that wasn’t anonymous gives the author name “Captain Charles Johnson,” and it has been pointed out that this was a known pseudonym of the pamphleteer and novelist Daniel Defoe, author of the famous castaway novel Robinson Crusoe. Since Defoe was known to have based that story and others on true life sources, it has been suggested that he may have done likewise with the story of Sawney Bean, or may in fact be the inventor of the tale. However, the potential real life basis of the story is hard to find. No contemporaneous sources, such as 16th century pamphlets or private diaries, have ever been found relating a story about someone named Sawney Bean. The closest would be a broadside from 1750 that mentions one “Sandy Bane,” a murderous Scotsman who ate cats. Some have found other potential candidates. In a 1696 popular history, Nathaniel Crouch wrote of a thief who lived with his wife and children “in a den,” who were all burned alive for the crime of killing and eating young people over the course of many years. And then perhaps the most likely candidate is Andrew Christie, called Christie-o-the-Cleek, a butcher who during a 14th century famine lived in the Scottish wilds with a group of scavengers who resorted to cannibalism to survive. Thereafter supposedly developing a taste for it, it was said that Christie led the group in ambushing travelers and eating both them and their horses. He derived his name from the detail that he supposedly hung the corpses on butchers’ hooks called “clekes.” Stories of Christie Cleek predate those of Sawney Bean by a century or more. However, if we were able to identify Christie Cleek as the basis of Sawney Bean, the same problem remains, for we find that Christie Cleek’s story was also embellished in its retellings. The earliest accounts describe only Christie’s resorting to cannibalism during the famine, not to any group of accomplices or their ambushing of travelers. And studies of all such literature indicate that the theme of ambush on the roads was a common trope used again and again in such pamphlets and chapbooks as those in which the stories of Christie Cleek and Sawney Bean appeared. So it seems that the entire story of an inbred cannibal clan that might set upon unwary travelers was simply a horror fiction invented to capitalize on common fears of highway robbery at the time.

Depiction of the capture and execution of legendary German arch-killer, Christman Genipperteinga

Complicating further the entire question is the fact that there are numerous other such strikingly similar stories that appeared in generally the same time period but elsewhere in Europe, specifically in Germany. The most awful of these was one Christman Genipperteinga, also variously called Gniperdoliga. Like Sawney Bean, Christman took up residence in a cave, not on the coast but in the woods near Bernkastel, in the Rhineland. His cavern home was chosen because it offered a nice vantage of the nearby roads and passing travelers. Genipperteinga turned highway robber, murdering travelers and discarding their corpses in the deepest recesses of his cave. According to some tellings of his tale, he kept a journal in which he detailed the wealth he had amassed as well as the number of his victims, which, being supposedly 964, was rivaled only by that of the Bean clan, but Genipperteinga did it all by himself. He did have children, which he fathered by raping a certain woman victim he had kept alive and captive as a slave, but rather than amass a brood of little killers, he was said to have murdered all of his children, hanging them, and then remarking on how they danced as they hanged. Eventually, he allowed the female hostage he kept, the mother of his murdered children, to go into town, and she revealed the killer’s den to authorities. Christman Genipperteinga is said to have been condemned in 1581 and broken on the wheel—a brutal method of torture and execution in which the limbs are snapped and woven within the spokes of a wheel that is then suspended above ground on a pole, allowing gravity to do the rest. Genipperteinga survived 9 days on the wheel, according to the story, but there are no local records that attest to the tale, only a series of pamphlets. Thus much like Sawney Bean, Christman Genipperteinga is considered likely a fictional character. Like Bean, the inflated number of victims strains credulity, for he would have had to murder a traveler something like twice a week to reach such a number. And we see elements of his story in other folklore, as well. The element about the female captive turning him in recalls the Brothers Grimm story The Robber Bridegroom, in which a young woman finds herself the bride of a robber and cannibal. While Genipperteinga was not called a cannibal in the earliest of the pamphlets, in some later ones, this was added to his story. And the detail of Genipperteinga living in a cave also reappears. There is the legend of the Robber Lippold, who supposedly lived in a cave in Lower Saxony and abducted a local mayor’s daughter, and years later, when she was allowed to visit the market if she swore to talk to no one, she turned the robber in. Perhaps this was the inspiration of the Brothers Grimm tale, but since it goes back to the 15th century, or perhaps it was the inspiration of the Genipperteinga story. Then there was Daneil’s Cave, also in Lower Saxony, which was supposedly home to the robber Simon Bingelhelm, who, it was said, killed several infants and even cut unborn fetuses from the bellies of his pregnant victims. The infanticide of this tale certainly corresponds with Genipperteinga’s, and the fact that Bingelhelm was said to make candles with the children’s entrails for black magic purposes may correspond as well, for in some later versions of Genipperteinga’s story, he too was said to be a magician, turning himself invisible.

With the introduction of child murder for the purposes of black magic, we find here undeniable parallels with the story of yet another German serial killer, who coincidentally or not, was put to death in the same year that Genipperteinga was said to have been executed, and in the same way, on the wheel. His name was Peter Niers, and while he too was dramatized and embellished in pamphlet literature, there are also local records to indicate that he was a real person. He did not claim the rather unbelievable total of a thousand victims, but his number of killings is still rather unbelievable, having been convicted of 544 murders, 24 of which were unborn infants cut out of their mothers. Unlike Sawney Bean and Christman Genipperteinga and the Robber Lippold and magician Simon Bingelhelm, it was never claimed that Niers or his band of robbers lived in a cave. Like actual highway robbers of the period, they roamed and hid in different places. But like Sawney Bean, he was accused of cannibalism, and like Simon Bingelhelm, he was said to use the fat and the flesh of the infants he killed to craft magical candles, and as was said of Genipperteinga, he was supposedly able to make himself invisible, specifically through the lighting of those magical candles. It was also said that, through his black magic practices, he could turn himself into an animal to avoid capture. Yet he did not avail himself of these powers when he was captured, first in 1577, and then after escaping, again a few years later, when it was claimed an innkeeper and some suspicious citizens of a town he was visiting opened his bag to find fetal organs. While, as I said, there is much reason to conclude that Peter Niers and his gang were real criminals, the stories of his black magic, invisibility, and transformation into animals should make clear that he was thoroughly mythologized. The fact that confessions of his crimes were extracted under torture makes the stories about him no more reliable, since as we have seen with the Inquisitions and witch hunts that were still going on then in Europe, torture will cause people to say whatever their captors want to hear. And Niers’ torture was horrific. His skin was peeled off in strips, and hot oil was poured into his wounds. His feet were oiled and roasted over coals. And finally, he too was broken on the wheel. When Niers was first captured, in 1577, he confessed under torture to 75 murders, but somehow, by the time of his execution in 1581, it had become 544, which would mean 469 murders in just 4 years. That’s ten murders a month, 2.5 a week. What is more likely, that he was actually able to carry off so many murders or that he simply kept increasing the number of murders he was confessing to in order to get his captors to stop torturing him?

A depiction of torture and execution by the breaking wheel

Then there is the further fact that Peter Niers was said to have been mentored by another prolific German arch-killer of the 16th century, a robber named Martin Stier who had been executed in Württemberg in 1572. Martin Stier was a shepherd, and he was said to have organized a gang of other shepherds, and while today we may have some idyllic view of shepherds and their pastoral lives, as one of my principal sources, Joy Wiltenburg makes clear in her book Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, herdsmen were of a low station at the time, thought to be dishonorable sorts who loitered out in fields plotting their crimes. So already, we have some reason to suspect that Stier and his fellow shepherds may have only been the victims of prejudice against their class. It was claimed that Stier was really the master sorcerer, and that he taught Peter Niers all he knew. It was apparently Stier who showed Niers how to turn invisible, who taught him the power of eating the hearts of unborn fetuses. How do we know this? Because it was claimed by the author of a single anonymous pamphlet, which was actually a ballad or song about Niers, and we might imagine that this connection was only made because it offered a convenient rhyme. Yet much of what was said of these arch-killers in ballads and pamphlets was taken as truth, and we know this because of the work of Johann Jakob Wick, the compiler of the largest surviving collection of broadsheets and pamphlets on the heinous crimes and supposed miracles of the 16th century, called the Wickiana. Wick was a Protestant clergyman, and he collected these reports in an attempt to compile evidence of Satan’s works and to discern indications that the world was in the End Times. Interestingly, when the pamphlets he collected were actually signed, it was revealed that they were often also written by Protestant clergymen, and thus motivation for their embellishment of the crimes and the dubious claims of sorcery and the supernatural appears clear, as with the claims of cannibalism, which were common of many accusations of devil worship and witchcraft. Therefore, the crime literature of 16th century Germany is revealed to be little more than religious mythmaking, inventing more satanic bogeymen to scare the public into pious devotion, just like the witches and devil worshipers that were claimed to lurk everywhere, and much like those other supposed sorcerous murderers who were accused of being werewolves, like Peter Stumpp, about whom I spoke in detail in my series on the topic. In the end, everything is questionable, from the number of their victims to the savagery of their deeds, and even, in some cases, their actual existence.

The 16th and 17th century accounts compiled by Wick of prolific serial murderers are too many to actually examine in detail. There was also Ulrich Oettinger, who was nicknamed Sew Vile, and Melcher Hedeloff, who was credited with 251 murders, and numerous others. And that is just in the Wickiana, which was specific to Mainland Europe and not considering the many British arch-killers profiled in later English chapbooks, like Sawney Bean. Most were highway robbers, many were the founders and chiefs of gangs, several were said to live in caves, and commonly they were said to practice cannibalism and black magic, especially that which required them to kill pregnant women and remove their unborn children. Some, like Niers, were even said to be possessed by the devil, or on the Devil’s payroll, as in literally, Satan was said to have provided them a monthly salary. Another term for these books that Johann Wick collected were “Devil books” because it was thought they kept readers apprised of the literal works of the devil. In some ways, the legendarium surrounding highway robbers in Early Modern Europe is very similar to the later myth surrounding the Thuggee strangler gangs of colonial India, which I spoke about in great detail in my episode on the topic. Like those highway robbers in India, who may have been prolific murderers but whose crimes were also undoubtedly embellished, European highway robbers became not only killers on the road, but also evil cultists practicing ritualized sacrificial murder, which wasn’t actually the case with the Thuggee at all. Whether tapping into fears of travel in a dangerous world or fears of the end times, these Devil Books, these gruesome pamphlets, were essentially inventing monsters, much as their successors, the penny dreadfuls, would do in the 19th-century. These monsters were upsettingly human, but as we try to track them down, to find the truth of them, we find them to be phantoms, as illusory as any phantasm. So after all, everywhere we look for monsters, whether it be werewolves, vampires, witches, giants, savage cannibals, devil worshippers, or even just extraordinarily wicked murderers, we find a lot of myth and falsehood. True crime aficionados will argue that, certainly, heinous crimes are real, which is true, but they must recognize that most good research on most true crime stories involves debunking the mythology that has developed around each case. And the fact is that, while true crime obsession can lead one to feel that heinous crimes happen everywhere all the time, in reality crime rates are dropping, something also not widely reported on because there is often more interest in crime than in the lack of it. All of this is, I think, rather comforting. Perhaps, much of the time, the only thing to fear in this world is actually the falsehood that is spread to make us fearful, or as FDR said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Devil Books and Murder Ballads: The Myth of the Arch-Killer

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