German serial killer Adolf Seefeldt was beheaded on this date in 1936 by the Third Reich.

The tramp timepiece-fixer with twenty-plus years of child molestation prison time in his 66 years of life, “Uncle Tick Tock” killed at least a dozen boys in the early 1930s whose creepy uniting feature was sailor suit garb. Their bodies — peacefully posed and innocent of any visible sign of violence — would be discovered in protected forest preserves; the nature of the killings makes it possible that he had other prey who have never been recognized as murder victims, but simply taken for natural deaths. Given that he’d dodged a previous murder charge as far back as 1908 one can’t help but wonder.

It’s been debated whether Seefeldt (English Wikipedia entry | German) poisoned his victims, as he confessed, or suffocated them, or even — fanciful hypothesis — dropped them into a hypnotic sleep only to abandon them outdoors to death by exposure.

On this day..

• 1701: Captain Kidd
• 1942: Georges Politzer and Jacques Solomon, academics in resistance
• 1996: Yevgeny Rodionov, Chechen War martyr and folk saint
• 1699: Nikol List, Golden Plate robber
• 1865: Stanislaw Brzoska, Polish patriot priest
• 1991: Ignacio Cuevas, Huntsville Prison Siege survivor
• 1876: Four for the Mutiny on the Lennie
• 1892: Frederick Bailey Deeming, Bluebeard
• 1673: Thomas Cornell, on spectral evidence
• 1906: Ivan Kalyayev, moralistic assassin
• 1832: Samuel Sharpe, "I would rather die upon yonder gallows than live in slavery"
• 1498: Girolamo Savonarola, as he had once burned vanities