The Devil's Dozen by Katherine Ramsland Read Free Book Online Page A

altogether inhuman, villagers were certain they were committed by someone possessed by a force that could only originate from supernatural evil. Some evil is so overwhelming it’s nearly impossible for normal people to accept that it originated with a rational being. Such a person must have been transformed.
    The belief in the possibility that humans could change shape has been traced to 600 B.c., when King Nebuchadnezzar in the Bible thought he’d suffered from a condition that made him grow out his hair and romp around as a wild beast. By the 1500s in France, lycanthropy was a diagnosable medical condition. An informative early book about the myths was The Book of Were-Wolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, a nineteenth-century archaeologist and historian. Shape-shifting ideas were traced from ancient times and across different cultures, with many accepting that man-beasts were the result of an encounter with the devil.
    These folks were thought to dress in wolfskins at night as a way to contact Satan to gain the wolf’s special powers. As the myth goes, when they managed to make “the change,” they gained a period of complete abandon into blood and violence. Common tales around Europe told of hunters who had hacked off the paw of a wolf that had run away only to find that the paw in their pouch had become a woman’s hand, and then they’d discover a woman in town with a mysteriously bandaged arm.
    Some practitioners viewed shape-shifting as a gift, and those who possessed a strong sexual drive viewed a pact with the devil as a perfect excuse to claim that their misdeeds were beyond their control. For example, in 1521, Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun were tried in Besançon, France. They admitted that they had pledged obedience to the “master” of three black men they’d met in exchange for money and freedom from trouble. They were then anointed in a ceremony with unguents that changed them into savage animals. Together they had torn apart a seven-year-old boy, a grown woman, and a little girl, whose flesh they consumed.
    A pioneer in the early days of
psychiatry, Richard von Krafft-
Ebing’s theories aided in the understanding
of killers such as Tessnow.

    They so loved lapping up the warm blood, they stated, that they could not help but continue to kill. They also claimed they had sexual relations with female wolves. The court sentenced both men to be executed for sorcery.

The Psychology of Impulsivity
    Lycanthropy has long been considered a form of lunacy that compels people to eat raw meat, attack others, let their hair grow, and run on all fours. By the late nineteenth century, such behavior had drawn the interest of mental health professionals, known as alienists. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, one such practitioner at the Feldhof Asylum, and a professor of psychiatry in Strasbourg, believed that without a standard diagnostic system, psychiatry could not consider itself equivalent to the field of medicine, so in 1880, he published three volumes, collectively titled A Textbook of Insanity, in which he outlined an elaborate system for categorizing mental diseases. By this time, insanity had already been accepted as a legal concept in England, so this medical context would cloud the waters, because it would become apparent in certain proceedings that some people who suffered from psychosis might still appreciate that what they were doing was wrong. Thus, they might be medically insane but legally sane.
    Krafft-Ebing’s more well-known text, published in 1886, was Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study. His approach was to identify a foundational problem, the development of degeneracy, and study it according to its manifestations in sexual deviance. He set up a theoretical framework through which to identify and interpret the various behaviors, relying on such factors as heredity, corrupting influences on the nervous system, the evolution of a motive, and