On July 9, 1806, Jesse Wood was returning from a hard day’s work on the farm with his sons Joseph and Hezekiah. All of them being somewhat in their cups, they fell to arguing and the father went to his home and retrieved a musket — “loaded with a heavy charge of slug shot” according to the Sherburne, N.Y. Olive Branch of July 30.

Wood pere‘s wife soon heard the report of the gun. Running out of the house, she found Jesse and Hezekaih, upright, and Joseph Wood and the discharged musket, at rest.

“His conduct at the place of execution, was deliberate and calm,” ran a report from Poughkeepsie that ran in many New York papers that December. “He died solemnly denying his built.”

The concourse of spectators was great, and they seemed deeply impressed with the solemnity of the scene, and greatly shocked at the hardened iniquiry of the criminal, in persisting to declare his innocence, when he was convicted on the clearest testimony. There is something inexpressibly awful in the idea that a rational creature has rushed into the presence of his God, with deliberate falsehood on his lips!

In a fine instance of history’s running game of “telephone”, this story was written up in the late 19th century featuring Joseph and the father as co-murderers of the brother … and as such parables demand, Joseph in the end makes good his father’s shocking scaffold denial by confessing on his own deathbed many years later.

1806 sources are absolutely unambiguous that Joseph was the murder victim. I have not found any indication that Hezekiah ever copped to the crime that hung his father.

On this day..

• 1805: Gabriel Aguilar and Manuel Ubalde, abortive Peruvian rebels
• 1705: Edward Flood and Hugh Caffery
• 2005: Wesley Baker, the last in Maryland
• 1998: Cheung Tze-keung, Hong Kong kidnapper
• 999: Elisabeth of Vendome, by her husband Fulk Nerra
• 1774: Peter Galwin, pedophile, and John Taylor, zoophile
• 2012: Richard Stokley, while his accomplice goes free
• 1831: John Bishop and Thomas Head, the London Burkers
• 1640: Bishop John Atherton, buggerer
• 1950: Werner Gladow, teen Capone
• 1939: The 18 corpses of the rebellion
• 63 B.C.E.: Publius Cornelius Lentulus
• Themed Set: The Fall of the Roman Republic