Trollheart

Killer: Micajah Harpe, Wiley Harpe
Epithet: “The Bloody Harpes”
Type: Thrill/profit
Nationality: American
Hunting ground(s): Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, Mississippi
Years active: possibly 1776 - 1799
Weapon(s) used: Multiple
Signature (if any): Bodies emasculated
Victims: 39 - 50
Survivors: 0
Caught by: Big Harpe (Posse), Little Harpe (Sheriff)
Fate: Shot and beheaded (Big Harpe); hanged and beheaded (Little Harpe)

Originally of Scottish descent, it’s accepted by many historians that the Harpe brothers may indeed have been America’s first true serial killers. But that’s about as much as they agree on. Some think the name is wrong, an affectation or alias taken by the brothers, who were born Harper. Others contend they were not even brothers, but cousins. Some say they fought in the American War of Independence, on the side of the British Crown, and used the war as cover to indulge in kidnapping, rape and murder. Micajah went by the nickname of “Big Harpe” while his (possible) brother called himself, you guessed it, “Little Harpe”, but none of their crimes were little, and their reputation certainly grew as they became more feared and reviled throughout the southern states.

The war, of course, did not go their way and when they were forced out of North Carolina they hooked up with tribes of Cherokee indians and continued attacking the American Patriots. They later kidnapped the women who would become their wives - what choice the two ladies had in the matter is unknown, but I would doubt it was much of one, if they wished to live. They settled for over a decade in Tennessee, but were driven out when they began stealing cattle. Big Harpe is said to have had no interest in his own infant daughter, whose crying annoyed him to the point where he bashed her head against a tree. She would certainly not be the only victim of the Harpes, nor even the only one of their children, as their wives (as such) both got pregnant twice and the Harpes killed all four babies. They didn’t even stop at killing one of their own; when one of their gang, Moses Doss, expressed concern over the welfare of their recently-kidnapped wives, Big Harpe killed him. I guess nobody opened their mouth after that. Chased out of their homestead, the Harpes seem to have murdered in a mixture of lust, anger and what they would have seen as expediency, sparing nobody who got in their way.

Strangely enough for a time when guns were readily available and there was no need for what you might call “complicated” murders, the Harpes seemed to revel in the more violent side of killing. Whereas most men might shoot you, hang you from a tree, hit you with a rock or stab you with a knife, the two brothers tended most often to cut their victims open (presumably, though not definitely so far as I have read, after they were dead), fill their bodies with rocks to weigh them down and them dump them in rivers. While sinking a corpse would be seen as basic necessary cover for a killer, even then, hiding the body doesn’t seem to have been the Harpes’ prime motivation, but more the pleasure they got out of ripping bodies up. Perhaps early contemporaries of Jack the Ripper, in ways?

Around May 1799 the brothers joined river pirates harrying the boats that plied the Saline River, and after a particularly successful raid wherein only one man survived, the Harpes devised a wicked form of entertainment to dispose of him. They took him to the top of a cliff, stripped him, tied him to the back of a horse, blindfolded the horse and sent it over the cliff. This kind of unnecessary cruelty was too much even for the hardened pirates, and they kicked the Harpes out. They wouldn’t live much longer anyway. Near the end of August they tried to kill a local justice of the peace, but were driven back from his home by his vicious guard dogs, so instead went to the house of Moses Stegal, one of the judge’s friends. Offered a bed for the night by his wife (Moses was away) they later killed not only her but the soldier sharing the bed with them, and Moses’s four-month-old baby.

The attack had its intended effect. Stegal and the judge, Silas McBee, raised a posse and headed off in pursuit of the Harpes, black revenge on their minds. In a rather strange twist of fate, the ammunition which would do for Big Harpe came from a gun he himself had helped load when one of the very few people they encountered without killing, a man called James Tompkins, who had invited them home for dinner, worried that he had no powder left for his own gun. Before leaving, Big Harpe had filled a teacup from his own horn with black gunpowder for Tompkins.

Making a run for it when the posse caught up with them, Big Harpe was shot by John Leiper with Tompkins’ gun, his backbone destroyed, and as he lay dying he confessed his sins, pushing Moses to cut off the outlaw’s head with his own hunting knife. It doesn’t make it clear if he was dead at this point, but I assume he was. At any rate, his head was stuck on a pole by Stangel. Little Harpe escaped, and rejoined the river pirates for several years, taking the assumed name of John Setton. But when he and another pirate murdered the captain and took his head in for the bounty, a flatboatman who had been robbed by them recognised them both, and they were arrested, tried and hanged in 1804. Little Harpe’s head joined that of his brother, though not at the same place, also stuck on a pole as a warning to other outlaws that justice in this town was swift and merciless, just as the two brothers had been to their victims.

The atrocities commited by the Harpes were so bad that later descendants tended to hide their connection to the brothers by subtly changing their name. Some would go by Harp (without the E), some Harper (believed to have been the original family name, but not associated with the rampage of the two killers) and there is even some, to my mind, spurious suggestion that one of the most famous lawmen in the West was a Harpe, but changed his name to avoid connection with America’s first serial killers. But both Wyatt’s father and his father, Nicholas and Walter respectively, were Earps, so this seems extremely unlikely, especially as Walter Earp lived through the same period as the Harpes, so already had that name before the killers were even known in America.

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