A few of the accused may have been actual pedophiles or serial killers, but many were beggars, hermits or recent émigrés who were tortured into confessions.Some 200 years before the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, courts in Europe were convicting men—and some women—of transforming into werewolves and mutilating and eating children. The punishments were sometimes as gruesome as the alleged crimes. In Germany in 1589, executioners strapped accused werewolf Peter Stumpp to a cart wheel, removed his skin with hot pinchers and chopped off his head before burning his body at the stake. Stumpp's head, attached to a wolf carcass,...