John Edward Howard Rulloff (also known as Ruloff, Rulofson, or Rulloffson, as well as several aliases; 1819/1820 – May 18, 1871) was a Canadian-born American medical doctor, lawyer, schoolmaster, photographer, inventor, carpet designer, phrenologist, and philologist, in addition to a career criminal and serial killer.

In 1842 he moved to Dryden in Upstate New York, where he worked as a school teacher and studied botanical medicine with Dr. Henry W. Bull.

Rulloff wanted to be farther away from his wife's family and pressured her to move to Ohio, where he planned to work as a lawyer or college professor.

Besides the chest, the Andersons saw Rulloff placing a half-full sack or pillowcase in the wagon, then driving toward Cayuga Lake, in the direction opposite of his declared destination.

When Rulloff returned, still with the chest, he told Mrs. Anderson that he and his wife would be out of town for a couple of weeks, and left his house in complete disarray.

Neither statement was believed because Harriet's clothes and personal items had been found in the house, implying that she had not left on her own accord.

Rulloff fled a second time, but he was pursued by his brother-in-law, Ephraim Schutt, who had him apprehended and brought to Ithaca to stand trial for murder.

However, his hopes of starting a career in the field were dashed when he was informed that Tompkins County would charge him with the murder of his wife as soon as he was released.

B. Richmond under the alias "James Nelson", and convinced him to start a business partnership after Rulloff brandished his knowledge in subjects as varied as conchology, mineralogy, forensic anthropology and entomology.

Rulloff robbed a jewelry store with the intention of giving the bounty to the Jarvises, but he was arrested and sent back to Ithaca.

Rulloff, Jarvis and Dexter's next plan was the robbery of a dry goods store in Binghamton, New York, in 1870, while the two live-in clerks, Frederick Merrick and Gilbert Burrows, slept upstairs.

Rulloff made himself a suspect the next morning, when he ignored a request to identify himself at the local railroad station and ran across the train tracks to a nearby farm's outhouse, where he was captured.

Documents found on Dexter's and Jarvis's bodies later led investigators to a Brooklyn apartment owned by Rulloff under yet another name, Edward C. Howard.

Some, such as the director of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, believed that a man with the evident intellectual prowess of Rulloff was too valuable to be executed and should be spared, regardless of his guilt.

Rulloff himself, who led his own defense again, refused to plead insanity and requested that Governor John T. Hoffman either pardon him or delay his execution until his theory on language evolution was fully developed, claiming that he would be ready to die after that.