Harpe Brothers: America's First Serial Killers

"Colonial American history has many 'firsts' - Harvard University, the first institution of higher learning (1636), Bacon's Rebellion (1676), the first large-scale armed insurrection, the Stono Rebellion (1739), the first major slave revolt, Pennsylvania Hospital (1751), the first hospital - and, among the many others, the Harpe brothers, America's first serial killers. Between 1797 and 1799, the Harpe brothers are known to have killed at least 39 people (though the numbers are unclear, and they are thought to have killed at least 50)."

"Crockett would have actually only been around twelve years old when the Mason Gang - with the Harpe brothers - was operating along the Ohio River in 1799, but the film's writers chose well in pitting Davy Crockett, "the Lion of the West," against Samuel Mason and the Harpe brothers, two of the most amoral and truly horrific figures in American history, as the line between order and chaos, between good and evil, could not have been clearer."

Colonial America recorded many institutional and social 'firsts' alongside violent frontier phenomena. The Harpe cousins, known as the Harpe brothers, became America's earliest documented serial killers, responsible for at least 39 and perhaps over 50 murders between 1797 and 1799. Their killings were motivated by pleasure rather than profit or revenge, and their notoriety inspired fear even among other criminals. Popular culture later placed them alongside the Mason Gang and Samuel Mason in cinematic portrayals, where Davy Crockett was dramatized as opposing them. Their early lives are obscured by legend; they were first cousins from the region that became North Carolina.

Read at World History Encyclopedia