This date marks half a century since the hanging of Victor Feguer — the last man executed by the federal government in the 20th century. (And the last executed in the state of Iowa, period.)

A drifter holing up at a Dubuque, Iowa, boarding house, Feguer phoned up a random doctor claiming a woman needed medical attention.

Think about that the next time someone gets nostalgic for house calls.

Dr. Edward Bartels showed up only to be kidnapped by Feguer, and eventually murdered in Illinois. Feguer was picked up in Alabama, trying to sell the doctor’s stolen car; his motive for the whole affair was just to get whatever drugs the luckless physician had with him.

The cross-state crime spree put Feguer’s case in the hands of the feds. (It was not, however, a “Lindbergh Law” case, since Feguer was on the hook for capital murder independent of the kidnapping.)

Although Feguer spent his prison time at the federal lockup in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, he was transported back to Iowa for execution — because that state’s penitentiary had a gallows available.

Iowa still had a death penalty on the books at this time, but it had a death penalty abolitionist for a chief executive; just two years hence, that Gov. Harold Hughes set his pen to the Hawkeye State’s death penalty abolition bill. Iowa hasn’t hanged, shot, electrocuted, poisoned, or otherwise judicially executed anyone since.

It was U.S. President John F. Kennedy, however, who had Victor Feguer’s life in his hands. Despite Gov. Hughes’s support for clemency, Kennedy turned the kidnapper down flat.

Feguer’s last meal, oddly, was a single olive. He tucked the olive’s pit into the new suit he wore to his dawn hanging.

As the death penalty waned into a formal abeyance in the 1970s in the U.S., the federal government stopped executing people for a long, long time. (And stopped hanging people altogether.) The next time a human being was put to death under federal auspices was 38 years later: Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh.

On this day..

• 1547: Diego de Enzinas, Spanish Protestant - 2020
• 1943: Martial Van Schelle, Belgian Olympian - 2019
• 1766: Nicholas Sheehy, Whiteboys priest - 2018
• 1718: Stepan Glebov, lover of the tsarina - 2017
• 1988: Dmitri Polyakov, Cold War spy - 2016
• 1745: Martha Stracey, whore and reprobate-creature - 2015
• 1878: Joseph LaPage, murderer of Josie Langmaid - 2014
• 1865: Marcellus Jerome Clarke, "Sue Mundy" - 2012
• 1536: Pargali Ibrahim Pasha, Suleiman the Magnificent's friend and grand vizier - 2011
• 1990: Farzad Bazoft, journalist - 2010
• 1957: Burton Abbott, reprieved too late - 2009
• 1938: Seventeen former Bolshevik officials from the Trial of the 21 - 2008