On this date in 1929, the Punjabi Muslim youth Ilm Deen was hanged for murdering a blasphemous publisher.
The Rangila Rasul is a pamphlet-length send-up satirizing the “widely experienced”, chortle chortle, Prophet Muhammad for his many wives; Muslim fury at its publication brought the Raj to legislate against “outraging the religious feelings of any class” — a law that’s still on the books in India.
However, there was no such law at the time of the naughty screed’s publication, and as a result the Hindu publisher, Mahashe Rajpal of Lahore, was acquitted of any charge in 1929.
‘Twas a temporary exoneration, for Ilm Deen (or Ilm-ud-din, or Ilmuddin), a 20-year-old carpenter, delivered his verdict extrajudicially by daggering Rajpal in the chest in a Lahore bazaar on April 6, 1929.
The assassin’s speedy trip to the Raj’s gallows thereafter only cinched his place as a sectarian, and later (for Pakistan) national, martyr; the poet Allama Iqbal exclaimed at the young man’s funeral that “this uneducated young man has surpassed us, the educated ones!” To this day, Ilm Deen’s solemn tomb is a place of pilgrimage and veneration.
That also makes this very post the 12th installment of the “annual reports” series, one which has trended increasingly pro forma here in the site’s silver age.
I’m afraid our 2019 edition will be no exception.
For an anticipated 3-to-5-year project, every year — hell, every day — is terra incognita. Certainly carrying the blog across the entire 2010s was never an expectation; merely reaching the 2010s would have sufficed to my imagination back when this all started. And while the plan at this point of course includes closing out the decade, the site’s senescence, already well underway, will not likely permit a very deep expedition into the 2020s.
I’m leaving myself some wiggle room since there’s no fixed date but the site has already accomplished what I dreamt for it tenfold and there are days when it feels not merely laborious but self-indulgent.
Executed Today is all about orchestrated partings but it’ll be a hard and reluctant separation for this writer whenever the time comes: still, that time is surely coming.
Call it triskaidekaphobia as we mount the scaffold for an unimaginable 13th year — in what condition to descend, no headsman can foresee.
* Yes, this post was backdated to the anniversary.
Christian villages, traditionally friendly or not unfriendly towards the Yishuv, were generally left in peace. An exception was ‘Eilabun, a mainly Maronite community, which fell to Golani‘s 12th Battalion on 30 October after a battle on its outskirts with the ALA [Arab Liberation Army], in which the Israelis suffered six injured and four armoured cars knocked out. The villagers hung out white flags and the Israelis were welcomed by four priests. The inhabitants huddled inside the churches while the priests surrendered the village. But the troops were angered by the battle just concluded and by reports of a procession in the village, a month before, in which a large number of inhabitants had participated, in which the heads of two IDF soldiers who had gone missing after the attack on 12 September on a nearby hilltop — ‘Outpost 213’ — were carried through the streets, or by the actual discovery in a house of one of the rotting heads. What happened next is described in a letter from the village elders to [Israeli Minister of Police Bechor-Shalom] Shitrit: The villagers were ordered to assemble in the square. While assembling, one villager was killed and another wounded by IDF fire.
Then the commander selected 12 young men and sent them to another place, then he ordered that the assembled inhabitants be led to [the neighbouring village of] Maghar and the priest asked him to leave the women and babies and to take only the men, but he refused, and led the assembled inhabitants — some 800 in number — to Maghar preceded by military vehicles … He himself stayed on with another two soldiers until they killed the 12 young men in the streets of the village and then they joined the army going to Maghar … He led them to Farradiya. When they reached Kafr‘Inan they were joined by an armoured car that fired upon them … killing one of the old men, Sam‘an ash Shoufani, 60 years old, and injuring three women … At Farradiya [the soldiers] robbed the inhabitants of I£500 and the women of their jewelry, and took 42 youngsters and sent them to a detention camp, and the rest the next day were led to Meirun, and afterwards to the Lebanese border. During this whole time they were given food only once. Imagine then how the babies screamed and the cries of the pregnant and weaning mothers.
Subsequently, troops looted ‘Eilabun.
Not all the villagers were taken on the trek to Lebanon. The four priests were allowed to stay. Hundreds fled to nearby gullies, caves and villages, and during the following days and weeks infiltrated back. The affair exercised the various Israeli bureaucracies for months, partly because the ‘Eilabun case was taken up and pleaded persistently by Israeli and Lebanese Christian clergymen. The villagers asked to be allowed back and receive Israeli citizenship. They denied responsibility for severing the soldiers’ heads, blaming one Fawzi al Mansur of Jenin, a sergeant in Qawuqji‘s army [i.e., the ALA].
The affair sparked a guilty conscience and sympathy within the Israeli establishment. Shitrit ruled that former inhabitants still living within Israeli-held territory must be allowed back to the village. But Major Sulz, Military Governor of the Nazareth District, responded that the army would not allow them back. He asserted, ambiguously, that ‘Eilabun had been ‘evacuated either voluntarily or with a measure of compulsion’. A fortnight later, he elaborated, mendaciously: ‘The village was captured after a fierce fight and its inhabitants had fled.’ The Foreign Ministry opined that even if an ‘injustice’ had been committed, ‘injustices of war cannot be put right during the war itself’.
However, Shitrit, supported by Mapam’s leaders and egged on by the village notables and priests, persisted. Cisling suggested that the matter be discussed in Cabinet. Shitrit requested that the villagers be granted citizenship (relieving them of the fear of deportation as illegal infiltrees), that the ‘Eilabun detainees be released and that the villagers be supplied with provisions. Within weeks, Shitrit was supported by General Carmel, who wrote that ‘in light of the arguments [about their mistreatment]’ and of the fact that the area was not earmarked for Jewish settlement, the inhabitants should be left in place ‘and accepted as citizens’. Within weeks, the inhabitants received citizenship and provisions, and the detainees were released. At the same time, Shitrit, as Minister of Police, persuaded Yadin, to initiate an investigation of the massacre. During the summer of 1949, the ‘Eilabun exiles in Lebanon who wished to return were allowed to do so, as part of an agreement between Palmon, head of the Arab Section of the Political Department of the Foreign Ministry, and Archbishop Hakim, concerning the return of several thousand Galilee Christians in exchange for that cleric’s future goodwill towards the Jewish State. Hundreds returned to ‘Eilabun.
The abortive attack on ‘Outpost 213’, bizarrely enough, triggered a second atrocity four days after the first massacre. On 2 November,vtwo squads of the 103rd Battalion were sent on a search operation to Khirbet Wa‘ra as Sauda, a village inhabited by the ‘Arab al Mawasi beduins, three kilometres east of the outpost. While one squad kept guard over the villagers, the other — led by Lt. Haim Hayun, veteran of the September assault — climbed up to the outpost, where it discovered ‘the bones of the soldiers lost in the previous action’. The bodies were ‘headless’. The troops then torched the village (and presumably expelled the inhabitants), taking with them to their HQ in Maghar 19 adult males. There, the prisoners were sorted out and 14 were determined to have ‘taken part in enemy activity against our army’. They were taken away and ‘liquidated’ (huslu). The remaining five were transferred to a POW camp.
‘Eilabun and ‘Arab al Mawasi were only two of the atrocities committed by the IDF during Hiram, which saw the biggest concentration of atrocities of the 1948 war. Some served to precipitate and enhance flight; some, as in ‘Eilabun, were part and parcel of an expulsion operation; but in other places, the population remained in situ and expulsion did not follow atrocities.
Details about most the atrocities remain sketchy; most of the relevant IDF and Israel Justice Ministry documentation — including the reports of various committees of inquiry — remain classified. But there is some accessible, civilian documentation — and a few military documents have escaped the censorial sieve. It emerges that the main massacres occurred in Saliha, Safsaf, Jish and the (Lebanese) village of Hule, between 30 October and 2 November. In the first three villages, Seventh Brigade troops were responsible. At Saliha it appears that troops blew up a house, possibly the village mosque, killing 60–94 persons who had been crowded into it. In Safsaf, troops shot and then dumped into a well 50–70 villagers and POWs. In Jish, the troops apparently murdered about 10 Moroccan POWs (who had served with the Syrian Army) and a number of civilians, including, apparently, four Maronite Christians, and a woman and her baby. In Hule, just west of the Galilee Panhandle, a company commander and a sergeant of the Carmeli Brigade’s 22nd Battalion shot some three dozen captured Lebanese soldiers and peasants and then demolished a house on top of them, killing all. Civilians appear to have been murdered in Sa‘saas well.
In the early hours of August 6, 1887, nine members of the Woolfolk family of Bibb County, Georgia — ranging in age from 18 months to 84 years — were hacked to death in their home. The only surviving member of the household was 27-year-old Tom Woolfolk who quickly became the prime suspect. The press called him “Bloody Woolfolk” and it was all the sheriff could do to keep him out of the hands of a lynch mob. But when the trap sprung on Tom Woolfolk’s legal hanging, had the State of Georgia finished the work of the real killer?
Polish serial killer Joachim Knychala, colorfully known as “The Vampire of Bytom” or “Frankenstein”, was hanged in Krakow just in time for Halloween on this date in 1985.
Knychala (English Wikipedia entry | the far more informative Polish) was a married miner of mixed German-Polish heritage — a fact which reportedly drew him considerable childhood abuse — who committed five sex-murders in Upper Silesia from 1975 to 1982.
He inherited his appellation from a different Silesian mass murderer, Zdzislaw Marchwicki, the “Vampire of Zaglebie,” with whom he eerily shared a victim: Miroslawa Sarnowska, who survived an attack by the earlier Vampire and gave crucial evidence against him, was Knychala’s third homicide.
Our guy’s m.o. was to surprise his prey with a bludgeon about the head, sometimes killing outright and other times incapacitating; despite his savagery, several women and girls survived his assaults. He did most of his evil work over the late 1970s; arrested as a suspect in such an attack in September 1979, he had a strong alibi* for the occasion at hand and then had the half-discipline to lay low for a few years after his fortuitous release.
But he could not conceal his fangs forever. In May 1982, he reported the death of his 17-year-old sister-in-law in a “fall in the woods.” Examination of the body told a more sinister tale: she’d been done in by a blunt force near the top of the skull (improbable for a mere accidental fall), and she’d had recent intercourse. Knychala was dramatically arrested at the girl’s very funeral, eventually copping to his spree and comforting himself with the hopes of a better afterlife … of pop culture notoriety. He has thus far somewhat maintained his recognizable infamy in a Poland that no longer produces death sentences.
* Seemingly strong: his work card proved his attendance at the mine at the time of the attack. Only later, during the decisive trial, was it realized that his foreman routinely registered leave time earned by Knychala’s overtime work with the state’s official youth organization by simply punching the vampire’s card as if he’d been present on such a leave day.
October 27, 1959 headline of the Palm Springs, Calif., Desert Sun.
Connecticut reluctantly electrocuted paraplegic murderer Frank Wojculewicz on this date in 1959.
A lifetime crook, Wojculewicz was surprised by two patrolmen in the course of robbing the AYO Meat Packing Company of New Britain, way back in 1951. In the gun battle that ensued, Wojculewicz shot dead Sgt. William Grabeck, as well as a bystander named William Otipka — but Wojculewicz was also struck in the spine by a police bullet.
That left the robber alive — and it left Connecticut a very uncomfortable case.
His guilt was in no question whatever and the death sentence for his two murder convictions was mandated by law. But the prospect of putting a permanently paralyzed man into the state’s electric chair was so aesthetically discomfiting that his legal odyssey dragged on for nearly 8 years at a time when the median death penalty case resulted in execution in 15 months. He had to be tried in a prison hospital bed.
As this retrospective from the New York Daily News observes, slow-walking Connecticut officials were likely hoping that the killer’s injuries would take his life “naturally” before it came to that. But the tough bastard kept hanging on, and not only that, but fighting for his own life both in the courts (where State v. Wojculewicz cases reached the Connecticut Supreme Court in both 1953 and 1956) and the court of public opinion. Wojculewicz passed his time “feeding pigeons through barred windows. He lobbied for life, arguing in letters to supporters that his paralysis was ‘a greater punishment than death’ and calling state execution ‘the evil of evils.'”
In the end, though, Wojculewicz was a fully competent, fully guilty criminal asking an exemption from the law based on an injury that he’d suffered in the course of committing the crime. Nobody really wanted to put an invalid in the electric chair but neither did anybody have a proper reason not to do so.
Time ran out for Frank Wojculewicz on the frosty night of October 26, 1959. Death row guards found him lying face-down as usual. They gently lifted the helpless man from his mattress and placed him in a wheelchair. Then began a slow procession. One by one the other condemned men called their farewells to Wojculewicz as he was wheeled past their cells. The scene was extremely affecting. When the procession entered the execution chamber it was greeted by the warden. He then asked Wojculewicz if he had a last request. Bitter to the end, the doomed man asked that the prison chaplain not be allowed near him. He said that he neither wanted nor needed any pious prepping for what he was about to face. The warden was displeased but he granted the request. Guards then wheeled Wojculewicz to the middle of the chamber. There they carefully lifted him from the wheelchair and put him in the electric chair. A wooden box was used as a stool to support his paralyzed legs. When the guards completed the task of affixing the electrodes and adjusting the straps they signaled that all was ready. Then the executioner turned on the current and Frank Wojculewicz was no more.
Walkiria (or Walquiria) Afonso Costa was summarily executed on this date in 1974.
Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the two-year campaign of the Brazilian dictatorship to suppress the Communist insurgency in Araguaia — or at least she was the last who was taken into custody.
A pedagogy student at the University of Minas Gerais, she had learned to shoot on forest rambles with her father and so perhaps came better prepared for the wilderness life than some comrades.
According to her sister, the sociology professor Valéria Costa Couto, the military had all but wiped out the guerrillas in a Christmas 1973 ambush, with only Walkiria and a couple of others managing to escape and hold out a few months longer.
There is a street named for her in her home city of Belo Horizonte, and an epigraph from her deceased father awaits if her remains are ever located for proper burial: “Do you think they killed me? They raised an ideal. Do you think they buried me? They planted a seed.”
Though they numbered fewer than 20, Lundgren’s followers bought into his prophetic-revelation act well enough to fork over thousands of dollars to him. Lundgren reciprocated by keeping them under his sway, eventually moving most of them into his own house the better to control them.
Except the family of Dennis Avery.
Avery, his wife Cheryl, and daughters aged 15, 13, and 6 attracted Lundgren’s ire for their reticence about the move-in, although to judge by their liberal contributions the family’s confidence in Lundgren was in no way shaken. Eventually the prophet out of whatever combination of pique, power-tripping, and religious fervor decided to “prune the vineyard” — his phrase — by having the whole quintet slaughtered by his live-in apostles at a camping retreat in April 1989.
This murder kept under wraps long enough for Lundgren to move his little cult to West Virginia, and a few months later to ditch his fellow cultists and move himself to California, before an informant tipped John Law to the shallow grave in early 1990. Besides the prophetic mastermind, Lundgren’s wife Alice and several of his followers caught long prison sentences in payment of the butcher’s bill.
* Rebranded (since 2001) as the “Community of Christ”, this is the more moderate or Protestant mainline-adjacent cousin of the better-known Latter-Day Saints movement, a.k.a. Mormonism — recognizing leadership succession through Joseph Smith‘s son Joseph Smith III instead of through the militant desert pioneer Brigham Young.
On this date in 1908, the “negro boy scarcely of legal age”* Joe James hanged at Sangamon County jail in Illinois. His alleged crimes helped spark that year’s Springfield Race Riot, one of the deadliest such rampages in U.S. history.
He was a southern youth who’d been pulled north up the Mississippi, living by the sweat of his brow. As a newcomer to the Land of (in fact the very town of) Lincoln, he’d been tossed in prison for vagrancy when he couldn’t speedily demonstrate a place of employment, but he’d proven a good-natured inmate whom his jailers trusted with errands outside the walls.
On Independence Day of 1908, which was just three days before he was due to be released, James finally abused his parole and decided to take in the celebrations in Springfield’s majority-black working-class neighboroods, where he proceeded to drink himself into oblivion at one of the town’s many saloons, or so he said. (Many other witnesses did see him boozing and banging away on the piano.) He’d be awoken at dawn the next morning passed out at Reservoir Park — awoken by white men who proceeded to beat him up.
Joe James’s mughot (right) shows the effects of the thrashing.
Reservoir Park, you see, stood but half a mile from the home of a beloved North End white resident, Clergy Ballard. (Clergy was his name, not his profession: this Clergy mined.) That same Fourth of July night, an unknown black intruder had burgled the house late at night and upon being caught out had scuffled with Clergy in a running bout/flight that crossed several neighboring yards before the patriarch caught a mortal wound from the assailant’s blade.
By morning’s light, rumors of the home invasion were afoot in the neighborhood, and the discovery of an unrecognized black kid passed out in the vicinity led everyone to draw the obvious conclusion — a conclusion that subsequently became self-confirming especially given the moral panic licensed by the fact that Ballard’s daughter had first encountered the intruder in her own bedroom. “One conclusion that finds most supporters is that James was a degenerate negro, inflamed by strong opiates with a crazed brain that sought satisfaction only in human blood.” (Decatur (Ill.) Herald, July 6, 1908)
From a century’s distance the evidence, while not impossible to square with James’s guilt, is feeble and circumstantial. James had been arrested within a day of his arrival to town, so he barely knew Springfield at all; he had no motivation to select Ballard’s house, possessed no valuables taken from it, and was armed neither when he was given his day pass from jail, nor when he was taken into custody the next morning. And as his attorney* pled to James’s eventual jury in vain, “No guilty man in his right senses would go six blocks away from where the fatal blow was struck and lie down to pleasant dreams.”
Against this stood eyewitness identifications by the surviving Ballards, who had glimpsed the unfamiliar assailant fleetingly by moonlight or streetlamp and who by the time they were making their official attestations had knowledge of James as the suspect, his every particular now a mold into which liquid recollection could pour.
While it was the Ballard outrage that set Springfield on edge, a second black-on-white crime a few weeks later really set match to tinder: another North End white woman, Mabel Hallam, alleged that she’d been raped in her home by an unknown black intruder. Out of a lineup she picked George Richardson, a respected middle-class streetcar conductor, grandson to Abe Lincoln’s barber. Even while admitting that “colored men [all] looked alike,” she fingered Richardson with the insightful words, “I believe that you are the man, and you will have to prove that you are not.”
Rape across the color line even moreso than murder was a frequent incitement to mob violence, and with Richardson jailed alongside the presumed rape-aspirant Joe James, a crowd of 3,000 or more gathered in downtown Springfield on August 14 with lynch law on its mind. The sheriff thwarted its aim by spiriting both of his endangered prisoners out of town, and announced as much to the multitude, hoping it would disperse.
Instead, balked of its strange fruit, the mob rampaged through the black districts of Springfield and for that night and deep into the following day — when a 5,000-strong state militia quelled the disturbance with some difficulty — put black homes to the torch. At least nine black Springfielders died, but accounts of people forced back into their own burning homes or buried secretly by night to avoid any further incitement hint at uncounted casualties besides. Seven whites were also slain.
Horrific photos show burned-out homes and businesses, and rioters posing smugly at the scenes where they’d lynched two men — one an octogenarian who literally used to be Abe Lincoln’s friend — for no better cause than showing defiance to the mob.
Photos from the Chicago Tribune, Aug. 17, 1908.
This particular atrocity stood out even at the nadir of American race relations for its location: the hometown and burial place of former U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator. Indeed, some caught on the lips of the crowd that awful night slogans explicitly drawing the connection — “Curse the day that Lincoln freed the niggers!” and “Lincoln freed you, now we’ll show you where you belong!” The Springfield events catalyzed the formation early in 1909 of the NAACP. Today, several markers in Springfield commemorate the riot of August 14-15, 1908 — but it still remains a delicate subject in the town that it violently reshaped.
A few books about the 1908 Springfield Race Riot
As for the accused men whose supposed crimes lurked behind this explosion, they proceeded to vastly different fates. Mabel Hallam’s rape charge fell apart and she recanted when it was discovered that she had a sexually transmitted disease, while George Richardson did not. Instead she charged “Ralph Burton”, the son of one of the men lynched during the riots — but this charge also failed to stick on account of there being no such son. George Richardson lived out the balance of his 76 years in Springfield and died peacefully in hospital.
Joe James, however, had no such benediction from his own unreliable accusers. Springfield still smoldered, its bloodlust alongside its ruined buildings; letters delivered to the courthouse threatened a renewed bloodbath should he be acquitted, and black families packed go-bags in the event they should make a sudden departure.
The requisite conviction ensued. James testified on his own behalf, sticking to his claim to have passed out drunk, innocent of the Ballard situation. He would have little to say to anyone beyond that time, referring the many press inquiries to his existing statements.
* There was dispute about James’s age throughout the proceedings; his mother — not an unbiased source, of course — fixed his birthday at November 28, 1890, which would have made him just 17; James estimated it at “19 or 20”. Even the largest of these figures would have made him too young to execute by the statutes of the day. The state, by contrast, officially estimated James at 23 years old.
** A man named Octavius Royall, a “former prosecutor and successful middle-class black attorney representing the local bank” who out of an uncommon measure of courage and decency “decided to represent the most dangerous of all clients.” (Source)
The Rangila Rasul is a pamphlet-length send-up satirizing the “widely experienced”, chortle chortle, Prophet Muhammad for his many wives; Muslim fury at its publication brought the Raj to legislate against “outraging the religious feelings of any class” — a law that’s still on the books in India.
Knychala (
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Sickly and emaciated, the 27-year-old was the last guerrilla left in the field after the 
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