Laura Wright True crime is not a modern obsession.
Long before television documentaries reconstructed murders in painstaking detail, long before podcasts attracted millions of listeners, and long before amateur detectives gathered online to debate unsolved cases, people were already fascinated by murder.
They followed notorious crimes.
They discussed suspects.
They examined evidence.
And in nineteenth-century Britain, the fascination became sufficiently elaborate that murder could even be discussed as though it were a form of art.
The idea sounds remarkably modern.
It isn’t.
The Original Armchair Detectives
During the nineteenth century, murder cases could become public sensations.
Newspapers provided readers with details of investigations and trials, while pamphlets and other publications allowed notorious crimes to circulate far beyond the communities where they occurred.
People discussed the cases.
They developed theories.
They argued about guilt and innocence.
Some social groups even gathered specifically to discuss famous murders.
One such group was described as the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder.
In some respects, they were early armchair detectives.
But their interest went beyond solving crimes.
They were also interested in the qualities that made one murder more extraordinary than another.
Murder as a Fine Art
The concept was deliberately provocative.
If paintings could be judged according to composition and execution, could murder be examined in the same grotesquely detached manner?
Could one assassination be more historically impressive than another?
Could certain crimes possess drama, ingenuity, or spectacle?
The connoisseurs supposedly considered some murders worthy of particular attention.
Several of their examples involved the assassination of powerful European leaders.
William the Silent
One was William I of Orange, better known as William the Silent.
He was assassinated in 1584 by Balthasar Gérard.
Gérard used a handgun to kill William, making the assassination historically significant as well as politically consequential.
The assassin was captured and subjected to an extraordinarily brutal execution.
The murder became one of the historical crimes later remembered by connoisseurs of notorious killings.
Henry IV of France
Another was Henry IV of France.
In 1610, the king was assassinated by François Ravaillac, who stabbed him to death.
Again, this was no obscure domestic murder.
It was an attack upon a monarch, transforming the crime into a major historical event.
For people interested in murder as spectacle, the assassination of royalty naturally occupied a special place.
The Duke of Buckingham
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was another celebrated victim.
In 1627, according to the original article, Buckingham was stabbed to death by John Felton.
The killing entered the same strange catalog of historically memorable murders.
Kings, military leaders, politicians and nobles became characters in what amounted to a macabre history of assassination.
The Death of Gustavus Adolphus
The death of Gustavus Adolphus II of Sweden was somewhat different.
He wasn’t murdered by an assassin.
He died during the Battle of Lützen in 1632, one of the major engagements of the Thirty Years’ War.
But the circumstances surrounding his death possessed the sort of mystery that fascinated later readers.
During the fighting, Gustavus became separated from his companions.
For a time, he effectively disappeared.
His horse was discovered before his body.
When the king’s remains were eventually found, he had suffered several gunshot wounds and his body had been partially stripped.
Even on a battlefield filled with death, the fate of a missing king possessed its own grim drama.
Wallenstein
Another figure associated with the Thirty Years’ War was Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Wallenstein.
The Bohemian soldier and political figure became suspected of treachery.
In 1634, he was assassinated.
Once again, murder and politics became inseparable.
But famous rulers weren’t the only people whose deaths attracted this peculiar historical fascination.
Even philosophers supposedly became targets.
Murdering the Philosophers
The original account describes a curious seventeenth-century belief or trend involving the murder of philosophers.
One supposed victim was the French thinker Nicolas Malebranche.
According to the story, Malebranche became ill while visiting friends and gradually wasted away.
Some believed he had been poisoned.
Suspicion supposedly fell upon a man identified in the account as Bishop Berkeley.
Whether that accusation survives historical scrutiny is something best left for the later research pass.
But it demonstrates the atmosphere surrounding famous deaths.
If an important person died under unusual circumstances, people looked for intrigue.
Sometimes they found it.
Sometimes they created it.
Murderers Nearly Forgotten by History
The famous assassinations involved people whose names remain familiar centuries later.
Other alleged killers were not so fortunate.
Their stories survived while their identities faded.
Some became little more than fragments in old collections of crimes and curiosities.
Yet those fragments can be remarkably disturbing.
John Rosbeck
One such criminal was an English highwayman named John Rosbeck.
Rosbeck didn’t merely rob his victims.
According to the account, he tortured them.
Eventually, authorities captured him.
He spent approximately eighteen months in shackles, but even torture failed to produce the confession authorities wanted.
Officials couldn’t agree about what should be done with him.
So Rosbeck was released.
It proved to be a disastrous decision.
Rosbeck Returns to Murder
Once free, Rosbeck simply returned to his former life.
He robbed again.
He killed again.
Eventually, authorities captured him for a second time.
This time, there was no release.
John Rosbeck was executed.
Other forgotten killers were stranger still.
The Murderous Musician of Holland
An elderly musician in Holland became known throughout the countryside for his skill with the violin.
He traveled from community to community, performing at weddings and other celebrations.
He would have been a familiar and welcome figure.
Then authorities began to suspect something terrible.
Bodies appeared in places the musician had visited.
Precisely what first connected him with the deaths has apparently been lost.
Eventually, he was arrested.
According to the story, the elderly violinist confessed to an astonishing 34 murders.
No clear motive was ever established.
The musician had traveled across the countryside providing entertainment at celebrations.
And somewhere along the way, according to the surviving account, he had become a serial murderer.
The Milanese Cannibal
Another obscure case concerned a woman from Milan.
Nothing about her initially distinguished her from anyone else in the community.
Then her crimes were discovered.
According to the account, the woman lured children into her home.
There, she killed them.
She then cured their flesh.
And ate it.
Her identity has largely disappeared from the story.
Only the horror remains.
The Tailor of Châlons
Then there was the Tailor of Châlons, whose story survives precisely because authorities supposedly attempted to destroy it.
The French tailor was accused of murdering victims and concealing human remains beneath his shop.
Barrels of bones were supposedly discovered.
When he was tried in 1598, the judge regarded him as so evil that his identity should not survive.
His name was ordered removed from the record.
The documents associated with the case were supposedly destroyed, and the tailor himself was burned at the stake.
The intention was to erase him.
Instead, he became immortal as an anonymous monster.
The Tailor of Châlons.
People Who Feared Becoming Murderers
Not everyone included in old collections of killers actually killed anyone.
Some stories are considerably sadder.
They concern people who experienced terrifying impulses and understood that those impulses might make them dangerous.
Rather than surrendering to them, they asked others for help.
The Berlin Soldier
One account concerns a soldier in Berlin.
While he was away, his wife died.
The loss devastated him.
Afterward, something began happening approximately once every month.
The soldier suffered violent convulsions accompanied by an overwhelming urge to kill anyone near him.
The impulse horrified him.
He didn’t want to hurt anyone.
So he devised a solution.
When he sensed the dangerous period approaching, the soldier asked authorities to chain him up.
He remained restrained for several days.
Eventually, the urge passed.
Then he could safely be released.
The Man From Haina
A similar story came from Haina near Hesse, Germany.
A man living there experienced powerful urges to physically attack other people.
He was frightened by his own thoughts.
Rather than acting upon them, he approached authorities.
He asked to be confined until the impulse disappeared.
The story places him in a very different category from the murderers surrounding him.
He wasn’t remembered because he killed.
He was remembered because he feared that he might.
And he took steps to prevent it.
The Fine Art of Murder
The fascination with murder is sometimes treated as a peculiar feature of modern culture.
It isn’t.
The technology changed.
The appetite did not.
People once gathered around newspapers instead of television screens.
They read pamphlets instead of listening to podcasts.
They debated suspects in parlors instead of online forums.
They followed famous trials, assassinations and unexplained deaths with the same mixture of horror and curiosity familiar today.
Some even went so far as to discuss murder as though it possessed artistic qualities.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they admired murderers.
Often the fascination lay in the mystery itself.
Who did it?
Why?
How?
Could the crime have been prevented?
Was the accused person actually guilty?
Those questions are centuries old.
So is the uncomfortable human tendency to look at something terrible and want to know every detail.
The modern true-crime audience didn’t invent that impulse.
We merely gave it microphones, cameras, streaming services and comment sections.
The armchair detective is much older than the armchair.
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