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America’s First Serial Killers and Many More Deadly Historic Figures

Khalid Elhassan September 6, 2020 35 min

Train - Train robbery — History's first peacetime passenger train robbery. CBS News

35. Baby Killers

Cave-in-Rock, where the Harpe brothers sheltered with river pirate Samuel Mason and his crew. Wikimedia

The Harpe brothers eventually made their way to Cave-In-Rock, a cave in bluffs overlooking the Illinois bank of the Ohio River. It was the stronghold of a ruthless river pirate named Samuel Mason, and the Harpes joined his crew. However, even deadly cutthroats like river pirates soon grew appalled by the Harpes’ sadism. Among other things, the brothers enjoyed taking captives to the top of the bluff, stripping them naked, and kicking them off. So Mason forced them to leave.

They returned to Tennessee and continued piling up the bodies. Among them was Big Harpe’s own infant daughter, whose head he bashed against a tree in August 1799, because her crying annoyed him. That same month they disemboweled a man, and when an unwary family, the Stegalls, gave them shelter in Kentucky, they repaid the hospitality by murdering one of their house guests. They also slit Mrs. Stegall’s four-month-old baby boy’s throat because his crying annoyed them. When a horrified Mrs. Stegall screamed, the Harpe brothers murdered her too.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.