Monthly Archives: November 2018

1779: Robert Young

Posted on by

This date in 1779 saw the execution in Worcester, Mass., of one Robert Young, a schoolteacher who favored the occasion with the following verse from his very own quill.

The man’s offense one may derive from his confessional, but apart from rapist who was this doomed poet? We refer the reader to the biography at friend and sometime guest-poster Anthony Vaver over at Early American Crime. (Vaver’s book Bound With An Iron Chain: The Untold Story of How the British Transported 50,000 Convicts to Colonial America comes recommended for those interested in the period.)

ATTEND, ye youth! if ye would fain be old,
Take solemn warning when my tale is told;
In blooming life my soul I must resign,
In my full strength, just aged twenty-nine.

But a short time ago, I little thought
That to this shameful end I should be brought;
But the foul fiend, excepting God controuls,
Dresses sin lovely when he baits for souls.

Could you the monster in true colours see,
His subject nor his servant would you be;
His gilded baits would ne’er allure your minds,
For he who serves him bitter anguish finds.

Had I as oft unto my Bible went,
As on vain pleasures I was eager bent,
These lines had never been composed by me,
Nor my vile body hung upon the tree.

Those guilty pleasures that I did pursue,
No more delight — they’re painful to my view;
That monster, Sin, that dwells within my breast,
Tortures my soul and robs me of my rest.

That fatal time I very well remember,
For it was on the third day of September,
I went to Western, thoughtless of my God,
Though worlds do tremble at his awful nod:

With pot-companions did I pass the day,
And then direct to Brookfield bent my way,
The grand-deceiver thought it was his time,
And led me to commit a horrid crime.

When it was dark I met the little fair,
(Great God forgive, and hear my humble pray’r)
And, O! dear Jane, wilt thou forgive me too,
For I most cruelly have used you.

I took advantage of the dark’ning hour,
(For beasts always by night their prey devour)
This little child, eleven years of age,
Then fell a victim to my brutal rage;

Nor could the groans of innocence prevail;
O pity, reader, though I tell the tale;
Drunk with my lust, on cursed purpose bent,
Severely us’d th’unhappy innocent.

Her sister dear was to have been my wife,
But I’ve abus’d her and must lose my life;
Was I but innocent, my heart would bleed
To hear a wretch, like me, had done the deed.

Reader, whoe’er thou art, a warning take,
Be good and just, and all your sins forsake;
May the Almighty God direct your way
To the bright regions of eternal day.

A dying man to you makes this request,
For sure he wishes that you may be blest;
And shortly, reader, thou must follow me,
And drop into a vast eternity!

The paths of lewdness, and these base profane,
Produce keen anguish, sorrow, fear and shame;
Forsake them then, I’ve trod the dreary road,
My crimes are great, I groan beneath the load.

For a long time on sin should you be bent,
You’ll find it hard, like me for to repent;
The more a dangerous wound doth mortify,
The more the surgeon his best skill must try.

These lines I write within a gloomy cell,
I soon shall leave them with a long farewell;
Again I caution all who read the same
And beg they would their wicked lives reclaim.

O THOU, Almight GOD, who gave me breath,
Save me from suffering a second death,
Through faith in thy dear SON may I be free,
And my poor soul ascend to dwell with Thee.

On this day..

1945: The Rüsselsheim Massacre perpetrators

Posted on by

The U.S. Army hanged five German civilians as war criminals at Bruchsal Prison on this date in 1945. Their crime: lynching the crew of a downed American bomber, the day after Allied bombing raids devastated the manufacturing town of Rüsselsheim.

The lynching is known as the Rüsselsheim Massacre, and it claimed the lives of six of the nine flyers of a B-24 Liberator cheekily christened Wham! Bam! Thank You, Ma’m!. One of their number survived thanks to his shrapnel wounds, which saw him safely to hospital while his comrades were being transported.

The other two were simply lucky to survive the beatings administered by a mob of enraged civilians who caught sight of the Americans under the escort of only two German soldiers. On the night of August 25-26, Britain’s Royal Air Force had dumped more than 1,600 tons of explosives on Rüsselsheim to destroy the Opel factory and rail lines there. It was only the latest, and ultimately the largest, of several raids on the town dating back to July. A later U.S. study reckoned 315 Opel workers killed and 277 injured during the July-August raids, to say nothing of the devastation on other townspeople and on Opel’s slave labor.* A POW, Frenchman Pierre Cuillier, recorded of the August 25-26 attack that “a bomb fell on the dug-out for Russian women. We hear of 119 victims, a number that in reality is surely much higher.”

Under the circumstances, the good folk of Rüsselsheim were not pleased on the morning of the 26th to see Allied airmen in their town being marched to a train transfer … even if, and surely the distinction must fail to impress amid the smoldering rubble of one’s own hometown, this particular American crew had not been part of this particular British bombing. (The Americans had been shot down two days earlier en route to do a similar thing to Hanover.)

“There are the terror flyers. Tear them to pieces! Beat them to death! They have destroyed our houses!” cried Margarete Witzler and Käthe Reinhardt. As the Americans protested, the crowd overpowered the guards and took its rough revenge with whatever bludgeons were ready to hand.

At last, Joseph Hartgen, an air raid warden, finished them off with his pistol … or at least, finished off six before his chamber went empty.


Spoiler alert: it will not go well for Herr Hartgen.

Somehow the two un-shot men, Sgt. William M. Adams, and Sgt. Sidney E. Brown, still drew enough breath by the end of the ordeal to sneak away when they were being dumped into a mass grave. Captured again a few days later, they survived the war in a POW camp.**

Eleven Rüsselsheimers stood trial in Darmstadt for these Lynchmorde by July, when war was still raging in the Pacific: it was the very first war crimes proceeding under U.S. occupation.

The defendants tried out a pre-Nuremberg version of the “only following orders” defense, blaming Nazi propaganda against bomber crews for inciting the murders. The U.S. prosecutor† scoffed: “They were all grown men and women. If they are called on to commit the murder and they do, they are just as responsible as any other murderers.”

Harten and six others of the 11 caught death sentences, but the two women — Witzler and Reinhardt — both had their sentences reduced.

Warning: Although not graphic, this is a video of actual hangings.

* Quotes and figures from Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany During the Second World War, which is topical because Opel was a General Motors subsidiary.

** Brown lived long enough to return to Rüsselsheim at official invitation in 2001 for a formal apology. However, at the time of the trial, it was still mysterious how there came to be only six exhumed bodies from eight lynched airmen: Adams and Brown only emerged out of the mass of returning POWs after convictions had already been secured.

† The army prosecutor at the proceeding was one Lt. Col. Leon Jaworski, but he’s better known for hunting larger game later in his career as the special prosecutor during the Watergate investigations. (Jaworski is the guy embattled President Richard Nixon appointed after firing Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre.) Jaworski’s eventual legal victory over the White House in United States v. Nixon obtained the incriminating Watergate tapes in late July of 1974, forcing Nixon’s resignation just days afterwards, on August 9, 1974.

On this day..

1773: Eva Faschaunerin, the last tortured in Austria

Posted on by

On this date in 1773, Eva Faschaunerin was beheaded for the arsenic murder of her husband Jakob Kary, mere weeks after their 1770 marriage.

Faschaunerin (English Wikipedia entry | German), who was interrogated on the rack, is distinguished as the last victim in the Austrian empire of official judicial torture: the practice was abolished in 1776 by Maria Theresa.

She’s still well-known in her locale, the Alpine Lieser-Maltatal region and even further afield than that; the town of Gmünd has an Eva Faschaunerin museum in its former jail.

On this day..

1721: Catharaina Margaratha Linck, lesbian

Posted on by

On this date in 1721, a woman named Catharina Margaretha Linck was beheaded with a sword in the Halberstadt fishmarket for homosexuality.

One projects modern sexualities into the past at peril but as Rictor Norton concludes, “there seems no reason why we should not agree with the lawyers at the trial, who defined her as a fricatrice, a ‘rubbing woman’ — in other words, a lesbian.”

Linck (English Wikipedia entry | German) busted out of the anonymous drudgery due an orphan seamstress and into historical monographs by joining an itinerant Quaker movement called the “Inspirants”.

Under those circumstances her habit of going about in men’s clothing might really have been an expedient to elude the male gaze just like Joan of Arc.

It was also a door into the male world: the gender-bending “Anastasius Rosenstengel”, as she called herself, proceeded to enlist herself by turns in the Hanoverian, Prussian, and Polish armies and fight in the War of Spanish Succession.

By 1717 a demobilized Linck was in Halberstadt, several years gone from the martial life but again passing as “Anastasius” in masculine attire … which was also the case when she married 18-year-old Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn in St. Paul’s church. Who knows how quickly or slowly the young wife grasped the true situation: Anastasius used a homemade leather strapon dildo in the marital bed to such effect that “whenever she [Linck] was at the height of her passion, she felt tingling in her veins, arms, and legs.” (Source)

According to surviving court records, “Anastasius” during soldiering days had delighted in the habit of seducing or hiring women for the same usage. But seemingly the younger Catharina experienced enough physical discomfort from the object that she mentioned it to her mother, who blew the whistle on the whole arrangement after a dramatic domestic confrontation wherein she ripped off her “son”-in-law’s clothes to reveal the artificial cock.

There needs to be a movie made about Catharina Linck. In the meantime, German speakers have access to a 2004 biography, In Männerkleidern. Das verwegene Leben der Catharina Margaretha Linck alias Anastasius Rosenstengel, hingerichtet 1721 or the 2015 historical novel Rosenstengel (review).

On this day..

1707: Bartellemy Pichon dit La Roze, the first executed in Fort Detroit

Posted on by

The execution hook for today’s post does not arrive until the end of the excerpt below. Its subject is Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac* … the French explorer who founded Fort Pontchartrain** du Detroit, the germ of the present-day U.S. Motor City.

How did Monsieur Cadillac administer criminal justice in his frontier fortress? Read on …

Cadillac’s Autocratic Rule

The next step, and a step that was very early taken, was the enforced obedience to the will of the first commandant, Cadillac. The troubles he had with the Company of the Colony of Canada forced him to be arbitrary with the servants of that company, and he was arrested and sent to Montreal for putting one of these disobedient servants in prison. This was an attack on the government itself, and could not be overlooked by the governor-general. Cadillac kept away from Detroit for a long time, but eventually returned with his powers confirmed by the king. During his absence his little village came near being sacked and destroyed by turbulent Indians, and it was partly on this account that the home government looked with favor upon his attempt at arbitrary rule.

In 1711 Cadillac left Detroit for good and his successor got into trouble with the village priest and with many of the foremost citizens without unnecessary delay. Although the commandant was always very powerful, there were some matters that appeared to be beyond his authority to try. He could not try any cases in which he was personally interested. He could not try any capital cases or cases in which the life or liberty of the defendant was involved. He could not try these cases, but yet we find that Cadillac asserted that his authority reached to the taking of the life of any person who refused to submit to his orders. Cadillac himself was defendant in a civil suit in 1694, which was protracted until 1703, arising out of the seizure of the goods of a trader of Michilimackinac, when Cadillac was commandant there.

The goods were seized for infraction of the laws which prohibited the sale of brandy to the Indians. The suit was for the recovery of the value of these goods, which were destroyed. The trial was held at Montreal and was decided in favor of Cadillac.

INCENDIARISM

In 1703 some one set fire to the buildings in the village of Detroit and the church was burned, as well as a large warehouse filled with furs, and several other buildings. Cadillac himself was severely burned in attempting to stem the conflagration. There was much speculation as to who set the fire. Cadillac accused the Jesuits of instigating the work. There were no Jesuits in Detroit, but he accused them of sending an Indian from Mackinac to do the work for them. There were some very bitter letters written on the subject between Cadillac and the Jesuit priests at Mackinac and Montreal, but the matter, with them, ended with the letter writing. This did not disclose the incendiary and others were suspected or accused of setting the fire. Shortly after this, in 1706, Jacques Campau accused Pierre Roquant dit la Ville of the crime. Canadian or French justice was administered in the manner that appears odd at this distance. In this case La Ville was arrested and taken to Quebec and lodged in prison. Campau was also summoned to attend the investigation as the complaining witness and most important person. The trial, or investigation, was held at Quebec December 2, 1706 before le conseil extraordinairment and resulted in an apparently extraordinary verdict, for not only was the defendant acquitted, but the complaining witness, Campau, was compelled to pay five hundred livres for the trouble and expense he had caused.

CRIMINAL ASSAULT

In 1705 Pierre Berge (or Boucher) dit La Tulipe, a drummer (tambour) in the company of Cadillac, committed a criminal assault upon Susanne Capelle, a little girl twelve years of age. He was convicted before the conseil superieur of Quebec and was sentenced to make a public confession of his crime and on his knees in the church he was compelled to ask pardon for his sins — he was then to be executed. It was almost impossible to carry out the last part of the sentence, for no one appeared willing to act as executioner. In the jail at Quebec was a man named Jacques Elie, who had been condemned to death for some offense committed at the siege of Port Royal in Acadia. Elie was promised a pardon for his crime if he would act as executioner of Tulipe and the latter was thus duly hanged on November 26, 1705. These were some of the cases the commandants were unable to deal with at home and sent to the higher courts at Montreal and Quebec for trial and disposition.

MILITARY LAWS

Another class of cases, those involving the military laws — disobedience to military orders, desertions and that class of cases [–] were attended to by the soldiers themselves and came before the commandant in his capacity of military officer and not as a civilian.

There is a record of one of these early trials by court-martial. During the absence of Cadillac from the village in 1705, Bourgmont had charge of the post for a time. He misbehaved himself in various ways to such an extent that the citizens nearly rose in rebellion and the public indignation was so great that Bourgmont sought safety in flight. After Cadillac’s return, he set about investigating the matter and in 1707 sent an officer named Desane, with fifteen men, to hunt up and capture Bourgmont, Jolicoeur, and Bartellemy Pichon dit La Roze, all of whom were deserters, and who were then leading an abandoned life on the shores of Lake Erie. They were also commanded to bring with them a woman named Tichenet, who was then living a scandalous life with Bourgmont and who was, in part, the cause of Bourgmont’s desertion.

Apparently La Roze was the only deserter who was captured and he was tried by a court consisting of Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, Francois LeGautier, Sieur de la Vallee Derasie, Pierre D’Argenteuil, Guignolet Lafleudor and Francouer Brindamour. The defendant was found guilty and sentenced “a avoir la teste cassee jusque a se que mort sensuive,” meaning that he should have his neck stretched until he was dead. The word “teste” in old French, for modern “tete,” meaning the head, was applied in this case to the neck. This sentence was duly carried out in the garrison of the Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit November 7, 1707. No appeal was taken, nor was it possible that any could be. This was the first capital case in Detroit, but not the last one, for there were several others in later years.

* Cadillac’s adoptive title is of course the inspiration for the automobile manufacturer of that name. The name sources to a town in the Gironde, and has now gone international.

** U.S. readers might better recognize Lake Pontchartrain, the enormous, flood-prone estuary jutting into present-day New Orleans. Post-Detroit, our man Cadillac became the governor of French Louisiana, and between the two tributes left him in the New World it is no surprise to find that the comte de Pontchartrain was Cadillac’s patron.

On this day..

1938: Kasym Tynystanov, Kyrgyz intellectual

Posted on by

On this date in 1938, Kyrgyz intellectual and statesman Kasym Tynystanov was executed during Stalin’s Great Purge.


Kasym Tynystanov, on modern Kyrgyzstan’s 10-som bill.

Born in tsarist Russia’s mountainous frontier with Qing China, Tynystanov (English Wikipedia entry | Russian | Kyrgyz) was blessed by the exertions of his father and a local mullah with literacy — a gift shared by only about one in 40 of his countrymen.

He graduated from the Kazakh-Kyrgyz Institute of Education in Tashkent in 1924 and went on to a career in letters — literal letters, as he’s credited with being the first to regularize the Kyrgyz tongue in Latin characters. He would publish several works on the Kyrgyz language; he also compiled the oral folklore of his people, and wrote verse of his own.

Tynystanov served as People’s Commissariat of Education and chaired the language and literature organ of the Kyrgyz Research Institute of Culture.

In 1938 he received Stalinism’s customary reward for the conscientious public servant and was accused as a counterrevolutionary nationalist and shot. The Soviet Union officially rehabilitated him in the post-Stalin era.

On this day..

2009: Xu Wei, Jilin gangster

Posted on by

China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency reported thusly:

CHANGCHUN, Nov. 5 (Xinhua) — A Mafia ring leader, who is also son of a former high-ranking city official, was executed Thursday by lethal injection in Changchun, capital of northeast China’s Jilin Province, according to a court statement.

Convicted of murder, kidnapping, intentional injury, extortion and other crimes, Xu Wei, 42, was sentenced to death by the Changchun Intermediate People’s Court on Sept. 20, 2007. The Higher People’s Court of Jilin Province ruled against Xu’s appeal and upheld the first-instance verdict on July 10, 2008. The Supreme People’s Court approved the death sentence after reviewing the case.

Xu, deputy manager of Yushu City Thermal Power Co. and son of Xu Fengshan, former deputy mayor of Yushu city, was found to have provided guns to two gangsters who shot dead Xu’s business rival in 1997. Xu even pulled strings through his police complice and bailed out one of the killers, the court was told.

Believing a township head didn’t pay him enough respect, Xu ordered his men to beat him to death in 1998. In the end, the man was struck into coma and died in hospital in 2000 at the age of 49, court verdict said.

In a separate case, the father Xu Fengshan was sentenced to death with a reprieve of two years for taking more than 20 million yuan (2.93 million U.S. dollars) in bribery and harboring criminal organizations.

On this day..

1807: Henry Niles

Posted on by

From the Greenfield (Massachusetts) Gazette, November 30, 1807:

NEW LONDON, (Con.) Nov. 11.

On Wednesday last, Henry Niles, an Indian, was executed in this city, for the murder of his wife, pursuant to the sentence of the Supreme Court.

The day before his execution the prisoner attempted to anticipate his sentence, and with a piece of the blade of a knife opened a vein in his thigh, from which a large quantity of blood issued before his purpose was prevented.

On the day of execution, he was taken from prison by the Sheriff and his Deputies, (the Independent Company acting as guards) and carried to the Presbyterian meeting house, where a sermon was preached by the Rev. Mr. [Abel] M’Ewen.

At the place of execution the prisoner made a short speech to the spectators, and was then launched into eternity.

It is 21 years since the execution of a criminal in this city, and the spectacle of the public death of a human being, though “a poor Indian,” drew together a large concourse of people; the number has, by many observers, been computed at 6, 8, and 10 thousand. The prisoner behaved with much calmness, and when passing from prison thro’ the crowd, his countenance bespoke the magnanimity of the American savage.

The death of his wife was occasioned by a quarrel produced by intoxication, the effects of which are known to be peculiarly mischievous among the aborigines of America.

On this day..

1913: Captain Manuel Sanchez Lopez

Posted on by

On this date in 1913, Spanish Captain Manuel Sanchez Lopez was shot for a scandalous affair of incest and murder.

You’ll need Spanish for most sources on this tawdry tale. Our principal was a vicious lowlife of long repute, having driven his wife away by dint of his ungovernable affection for cheap brothels, gambling dens, and drunken brawls.

His oldest daughter, María Luisa Sanchez Noguerol, would be his semi-willing accomplice in the crime that ended Captain Sanchez’s life, but she had for many years before that been his victim: not only of the blows the father meted out to all his children, but also to his sexual attentions.

Captain Sanchez forced this daughter into prostitution to support his own degeneracy but he had a larger score in mind when he encouraged her to accept an assignation with a wealthy widower, Rodrigo Garcia Jalon. At this rendezvous, the father — who probably would have been better advised to content himself with the rents of blackmail or robbery — sprang from concealment and fatally bludgeoned the gentleman with a hammer.

Father and daughter desperately dismembered the body in hopes of concealing the crime but another of Manuel Sanchez’s oft-thrashed children denounced them to the police, to the very great delight of scandal-mongering newspapers throughout Europe. Everything was rumored: that the father had once or twice impregnated his own progeny, that they had pulled the seduction/murder trick several times before.


The discovery of the victim’s remains.

The father had the privilege of shooting instead of a garrote, thanks to his military rank. The daughter received a long prison sentence.

On this day..

1907: Afanasi Matushenko

Posted on by

On this date in 1907,* revolutionary sailor Afanasi Mat(y)ushenko was executed for his part in tsarist Russia’s Potemkin mutiny.

The son of a liberated serf, the Ukrainian Matushenko (English Wikipedia entry | the more detailed Russian) absconded in his childhood to enter imperial Russia’s industrial economy. After spending the late 1890s — his mid teens to early twenties — on the railroads and the docks he was conscripted into the navy.

The revolutionary year of 1905 finds Matushenko a quartermaster aboard the soon-to-be-famous battleship Potemkin stationed at Sevastopol, already politically radicalized enough to have participated in a revolutionary barracks riot the previous November.

Eisenstein is mandatory where the Potemkin is concerned but the fact is that the mutiny was not spontaneously generated: it had been planned, and Matushenko was a part of the planning.

On the day of the rising, it was he who led brother-sailors in a protest against worm-ridden rations, and he who eventually crossed the rubicon into mutiny by calling them to arms. He personally killed several of the ship’s officers, and with the mutiny’s success he was elected the chair of the ship’s executive committee.

The Potemkin sailed for Odessa where her aspirations to catalyze a wider rebellion ran (metaphorically) aground, and eventually sailed for Romania. Matushenko lived abroad for two years as a political refugee, crossing paths with kindred souls but indistinct in his political outlook, nearly terroristic. The leftist writer Vladimir Posse met Matushenko in Geneva and found him

Matyushenko … did not go into theory. And his practice was to destroy — precisely the destruction, not the elimination, of all the chiefs, all the masters, and above all the officers. For him, the people were divided into masters and subordinates … the lower ranks can free themselves only when the officers are “simply” destroyed. He himself killed two or three of his superiors during a riot on the Potemkin. And it seemed to him that the essence of the revolution lay in such murders. In this spirit, he wrote bloodthirsty proclamations to sailors and soldiers, urging them to kill officers. He thought that with such a program it was easy to attract all the sailors and most of the soldiers to the side of the revolution …

He considered himself to be doomed to die in battle or on the scaffold … He considered living in an emigrant position to be dishonorable, something of a betrayal. In his view, a true revolutionary is one who not only kills, but also dies himself.

In June 1907 he acted on the latter beliefs and returned to Russia — where he was promptly arrested and condemned by a military court to fulfill his prophesied destiny.

Several cities in the Soviet Union, including Sevastopol itself, had streets named for Sailor Matyushenko, and a Black Sea minesweeper received that name in 1969.

* November 2, 1907 per the Gregorian calendar. Tsarist Russia was still hanging on to the Julian calendar at this time.

On this day..