"Who Is Rulloff?"    Since 1977, curious patrons of Rulloff's have inquired about the man whose name and face have come to represent out establishment. Those who know a little about Edward Rulloff may think of him as the 19th century criminal whose unusually large brain is preserved for public viewing in the Psychology Department at Cornell University. However, there is a much richer history to our namesake, a dual personality who came to be known as the "learned murder".     Never one to embrace humility, Edward Rulloff was a self-described genius, considering himself "the intellectual peer" of Socrates, Kant and Locke. Skilled as a doctor, lawyer, scholar, draughtsman and carpenter, Rulloff was entirely self-taught and well-versed in history, philosophy, mineralogy, biology, expertise and anatomy. Philology, the study of language formation, was his field of expertise and he spoke 28 languages and dialects. In 1869 he presented The Method of Languages, his theory on the origins of all language, to the American Philological Association convention.    Though well-educated and mannerly, Rulloff possessed a darker side. Between 1845 and his death in 1871, Rulloff was accused of a string of burglaries and robberies, as well as several murders. These included the reported poisoning of his sister-in-law and niece, and the beating deaths of his wife and daughter, whom he allegedly disposed of in Cayuga Lake. He was sentenced to several short stays in prison, but the lack of hard evidence in any of these cases led to his eventual release.    In the end, however, Edward Rulloff paid the ultimate price for the one crime for which he was convicted, the fatal shooting of a Binghamton store clerk in 1870. Sentenced to death, Rulloff was executed in the last public hanging in the state of New York on May 18th, 1871. Unrepentant to the end, Rulloff proclaimed in his final interview, published in the Ithaca Daily Leader the week before his death, "...you cannot kill an unquiet spirit, and I know that my impending death will not mean the end of Rulloff. In the dead of night, walking along Cayuga Street, you will sense my presence. When you wake to a sudden chill, I will be in the room. And when you find yourself alone at the lake shore, gazing at gray Cayuga, know that I was cut short and your ancestors killed me." As he stood on the gallows platform in the center of a crowded Court House Square, Rulloff defiantly spoke his last words, "Hurry it up! I want to be in hell in time for dinner."