(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
On this day in 1853, Hans M(a)cFarlane and Helen Blackwood were hanged before a crowd of some 40,000 souls in Glasgow, Scotland.
It wasn’t the only civic ceremony the couple would participate in that day.
McFarlane and Blackwood had been convicted of murdering Alexander Boyd, a ship’s carpenter with the merchant navy. On June 11 of that year, they drugged his whiskey, hit him over the head with the chamber pot, stripped him down to his pants and socks and threw his body out the third-floor window.
McFarlane, Blackwood, and two alleged accomplices, Ann Young and Mary Hamilton, were arrested immediately. Although they tried to make Boyd’s death out to be an accident, two children in the room, whom the killers had thought were asleep, had witnessed the whole thing and told on them.
In the end, the case against Hamilton was ruled not proven. Young was convicted, but her death sentence was commuted to transportation. Blackwood and McFarlane had to swing.
Douglas Shelton, in his book Deadlier Than The Male: Scotland’s Most Wicked Women, records,
While in Duke Street Prison, McFarlane asked for permission to marry his lover, Blackwood. Permission was refused but they were determined to be man and wife. As they stood on the scaffold near to Glasgow’s South Prison on the site of the present-day High Court, McFarlane announced to the woman — and the 40,000-strong crowd there to see them hang — “Helen Blackwood, before God in the presence of these witnesses I take you do be my wife. Do you consent?”
The woman replied, “I do.”
McFarlane then said, “Then before these witnesses I declare you to be what you have always been to me, a true and faithful wife, and you die an honest woman.”
The minister officiating the hanging then said, “Amen,” the bolt was drawn and the newly married pair fell to their deaths.
Helen Blackwood was the second-to-last woman to be publicly hanged in Scotland. This broadside was sold to commemorate her and her husband’s deaths.
On this day..
- 979: Gero, Count of Alsleben
- 1264: Not Inetta de Balsham, gallows survivor
- 1944: Eliga Brinson and Willie Smith, American rapists abroad
- 1869: Charles Orme, rambler
- 1849: Konrad Heilig and Gustav Tiedemann, Baden revolutionaries
- 1838: The slave Mary, the youngest executed by Missouri
- 1703: Tom Cook, Ordinary's pet
- 1908: Khudiram Bose, teenage martyr
- 1828: William Corder, for the Red Barn Murder
- 1916: Private Billy Nelson
- 1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda survives stoning
- 1978: Antonina Makarova, Nazi executioner