Youth With Executioner by Nuremberg native Albrecht Dürer … although it’s dated to 1493, which was during a period of several years when Dürer worked abroad.
November 13 [1617]. Burnt alive here a miller of Manberna, who however was lately engaged as a carrier of wine, because he and his brother, with the help of others, practised coining and counterfeiting money and clipping coins fraudulently; he had also a knowledge of magic. His brother escaped from the mill, and the Margrave locked the place up and confiscated the property. A certain Zachariah, a farrier and ‘scutcheon-maker, called ‘the heralds-smith,’ was mixed up in this; also a file-cutter living in the Bretterne Meer quarter, called ‘Karl the file-cutter.’ He had a familiar spirit and was a lying knave. These two escaped. This miller, who worked in the town mills here three years ago, fell into the town moat on Whitsunday. It would have been better for him if he had been drowned, but it turned out according to the proverb that ‘What belongs to the gallows cannot drown in water.’ [alternatively, ‘he who is born to be hanged can never be drowned.’]
This was the last person whom I, Master Franz, executed.
This site launched way back on Halloween 2007, which is objectively the ideal holiday to premier an execution blog. And it’s kept up a daily posting schedule for 13 years plus 13 days,* which is objectively the ideal length of time to maintain this unhealthy fixation on death. Against every probability, we’ve attained level 13 Death Master.
This isn’t the last post that will ever appear on Executed Today — there are a number of additional executions we mean to profile, as well as meta-content and other features in the pipeline. But this Friday the 13th marks the end of every-day posting.
* We’re viewing Halloween itself … liminally. If you want to be a calendar pedant about it, it’s 13 years and 14 days.
From now until the end of 2020, use the simple discount code 13 to save 13% off all sales of the Executed Today playing cards.
On this date in 1941, Ivan Sullivan was hanged at Fort Madison, Iowa — in a prison yard near where he’d committed his crime.
Sullivan was lumbered with a 30-year sentence for robbery and kidnapping when he and a buddy, Lowell Haenze, cut their way through an electrified fence while they were working on a prison baseball park ahead of a Fourth of July game in 1940. “In a news report about the escape and the following crime spree, they were likened to John Dillinger and his gang in the Midwest.” And like the Dillinger gang they were loyal enough to orchestrate prison breaks for their chums still in the stir.
Returning to the jail, they attempted to spring another pal, William Cunningham. The attempt failed: Cunningham was wounded in the fray and apparently committed suicide as it all went awry. Meanwhile, a prison guard named Bob Hart was shot dead.
The fugitives weren’t recaptured in this moment but their celebrity lam was short-lived. In late July, after the botched robbery of a Diller, Nebraska bank, both men were hunted to ground and captured — Haenze after playing the hare in a dramatic chase/shootout in tiny Marysville, Kansas, wherein “some 150 or more persons assisted officers in chasing down Haenze … [and] about a dozen shots were exchanged in the main intersections of the city.” (Marshall County News (Marysville, Kansas), July 25, 1940) Sullivan surrendered shortly thereafter to officers in Atchison, Missouri.
Although he pleaded guilty to the hanging crime, Sullivan wheedled for consideration — seeking legal remedies up to the Supreme Court, suggesting continually that Hart had actually been killed by friendly fire rather than Sullivan’s own never-recovered gun,* and at the end asking that his execution be postponed through the 1941 holiday season in consideration of his aged parents. “My Dad and Mother are getting old and won’t have many more Thanksgivings and Christmas[es],” he wrote to Iowa governor George A. Wilson. (Des Moines Register, Nov. 11, 1941) He got no traction at all.
“I do not for one minute mean to insinuate that I am any other than a bank robber who kept his word to a friend. I know I’m not fit for honest people to associate with,” he told newsmen when all hope was gone. (Des Moines Register, Nov. 12, 1941) “I know I have no more chance now to escape the rope than a snowball in hell but I will pray not only for myself but also for the ones who are afraid to be a man for the fear of losing a vote.”
This interesting blog post shares the personal recollections of the hanging’s impact by one of Sullivan’s family members, who was a small child at the time of the execution.
* His charge that “the state crime laboratory [is] for the state only and against the defendants” — because this laboratory wouldn’t or couldn’t produce the bullet that killed Bob Hart for forensic examination — has a prescient feel about it.
At a hanging-day at Tyburn on this date in 1738, 11 men (no women) were executed en masse.
Nine committed different varieties of malappropriation: burglaries, highway robberies, horse-thefts, even a charge of coining, all of whom can be read about in thumbnail at that date’s account by the Newgate Ordinary.
The other two were men who murdered their wives. While the prelate here does single them out for committing the elevated crime of homicide, he does not especially dwell on the domestic and gendered nature of these men’s attacks upon their wives. The excerpts below from the mouths of neighbors who were privy to the relationships in question open a terrifyingly intimate window on a pair of violent relationships.
These of course are far from the only domestic murders in the voluminous archives of the Old Bailey. However, most violence by husbands against wives obviously fell short of the criminal annals, and the nature and extent of that violence is difficult to reckon. From the perspective of decades and centuries, historians perceive a long-term — too long-term — decline in “everyday” wife-battering.
“It has been noted that even by the mid-eighteenth century the physical violence alleged in marriage separation suits was not necessarily life threatening, and tended to be less serious than that described in the seventeenth century,” notes the topical volume Marital Violence: An English Family History, 1660-1857. (Review.) Yet “while all historians of violence agreed with Stone* that there was a decline in the number of recorded [conjugal] homicides, and that this was particularly marked for the period between the Restoration and the start of the nineteenth century, it took further research for historians to conclude that there was little change over time in the proportion of homicides that were domestic.” So that suggests less a special abhorrence of violence in the home, and more a wider social evolution making masculine personal violence ever less routine — the same trend that, for instance, gradually saw off the formerly ubiquitous practice of dueling.
All this falls into the active space of historians far wiser than any mere headsman. And all, of course, was cold comfort to Hannah Harding and Mary Briant.
George Whalley, a 60-year-old carpenter, knifed his wife Hannah Harding in the head on June 10th. She languished with the wound for nearly a month before succumbing on July 6. It was his second marriage, and while he had seemingly lived amicably with his late first spouse, George had furious rows with Hannah over money. Testimony from his trial:
Eliz. Dur. The Yard that belongs to the Prisoner’s House and our Yard join together, they are parted by a thin Wainscoat Partition, and there is a loose Board that lifts up between the 2 Yards. On the 10th of June I was in our own Yard, and heard the Deceased say, she would not be lock’d into the Kitchen. I listened, and heard the Prisoner curse and swear at her in a violent Manner, then he shut her and himself into the Yard, and told her she had robb’d him of all he had, and that he had not a Farthing to help himself with. She told him she had not, and the Quarrel encreasing, I lifted up the loose Board, and saw him take Hold of her Shoulder, and pull off a Handkerchief which she had upon her Neck; then she cry’d out Murder, and I observed a large Clasp Knife in his Hand upon her Shoulder. This is the Knife, and the Blood is still upon it. I was not above a Yard from him, and saw him plainly cut her across the Shoulder; then he moved his Hand higher, and cut her in the Neck; and then he moved it again, and cut her nearer her Ear. After he had cut her in this Manner, he open’d the Kitchen Door, and push’d her into the Kitchen. Our Sink likewise is parted from theirs by some slight Boards, and when I ran to alarm our Family, I saw her leaning over the Sink, and bleeding into it in a very violent Manner. When the Neighbours came in, he open’d the Door and ran away. I have often heard him abuse and curse her, and never heard her give him any Provocation. This was the 10th of June between 5 and 6 in the Afternoon.
Nathaniel Harris. On the 10th of June, when I came Home to Dinner, (I live in the same House) the Prisoner was cursing and swearing at his Wife, because a Gentleman that had got his Money, would not let him have it again, but had told him he would make him knuckle down to his Taw. The Prisoner told her, the Gentleman wanted him to go into the Country, away from his Wife, but he said he would not go, for they shou’d not live together long, and she would die first. He very frequently cursed and abused her, – the House was never at Peace for him. He has been in the Counter before, for abusing her. I told him I would hang myself if I was he, no, (he said) he wou’d not; so I went from Dinner between 1 and 2, and saw no more of it.
Prisoner. I was overcome by her aggravating me.
…
Mary Hignal. I liv’d on the same Floor with the Deceased, (Mrs. Harding) she chose that Name, and did not care to be called by the Prisoner’s. The Morning this happen’d, I went into the Kitchen, and heard him call the Deceased a great many Bitches. I reprov’d him, and he call’d me Bitch, and told me, if I did not be gone, he would murder me. Upon this, I went to the Door of my own Room, and heard him continue to abuse her; after some Time, she went up two or three Stairs, toward another Apartment; he got hold of her to pull her down, and she clung to the Bannisters of the Stairs; but he kick’d her under the Arm, tore her down Stairs, and kick’d her again on the Breast. While she stood in the Passage, he went into the Kitchen, and bid her come in; she refused, and said he had got a Knife, and had some ill Design against her. He said he had none, but I heard a Knife clasp. Then he went down Stairs, and was in and out all Day. But about six in the Evening, he came into the Kitchen again, and spit in my Face, and I spit in his Face, and went out. Immediately the Prisoner shut himself in, with his Wife, and I run up to Harris’s Room, and said, I believ’d the Man was going to kill his Wife. Upon this, Mrs. Harris and I, came down, and heard the Deceased cry
Murder
in the Yard but I could neither get to them, nor see them; and being in a very great Fright, I ran down, and went into a Chandler’s Shop, and told the People, the Prisoner had murder’d his Wife. They said, perhaps I might be mistaken; I ran up Stairs again, to see if I could get into the Kitchen, and I met the Prisoner coming down Stairs into the Alley, with one Hand bloody, and the other in his Pocket. When I got into the Kitchen, I found Mrs. Harding (the Deceased) leaning upon her Hand, and bleeding very much. I believe I saw a Gallon of Blood which she had lost.
Dean Briant or Bryant stabbed his wife Mary in the back with a clasp knife, killing her. Testimony from his trial:
Lydia Cole. On the 7th of July in the Night, I was very ill with the Tooth-Ach, and an Ague in my Head, and not being able to sleep, I walked about my Chamber, which is a Ground Room, and joins to the Prisoner’s. About half an Hour after One, I heard somebody knock at his Door once or twice, and cry softly in a Man’s Voice,
Molly! Molly! Molly!
three Times. The Door was immediately open’d, and he was let into the Room that joins with mine. No sooner was he got in, but Words arose; then I heard a Blow given. Then Words, — then a Blow. At last I heard a Woman in a soft Voice cry,
don’t! don’t! don’t hurt me!
And the Man’s Voice answer’d,
then d-mn your Blood you Bitch, don’t follow me.
After this there were many Words pass’d; and the Woman talk’d to him in a very moving Manner. When the Watchman came Two o’Clock, I heard no Noise, so I lay’d myself down on my Bed; but I had not lain long, before I heard the Woman either crying or squeeling. I jump’d from the Bed again, and heard her groan, for a Quarter of an Hour, and every groan, grew fainter and fainter, ’till I could not hear it at all. From this Time, I heard no Noise, but only a dragging of something along the Floor, and then I imagin’d the Man went out of the House again.
Margaret Carter. I know nothing of the Murder; but I can speak to the Prisoner’s Behaviour to his Wife at other Times. The Prisoner, the Deceased, and I, have been acquainted many Years. He always has been very vile in his Behaviour to her: beating and abusing her frequently, though she always behav’d very mildly to him. The worst Words I ever heard her use to him, were,
why do you use me so? ’tis worse usage than I deserve.
I have seen her fall on her Knees and entreat him not to abuse her, and instead of being mov’d with Compassion, he has beat her ’till she has bled. On the first of February last, she sent for me; I found her darning, or running the Heels of his Stockings. As soon as she saw me, she burst out a crying, and said, she was now at a Distance from every Friend, and had no one to ease her Mind to. Her Husband (she said) was gone abroad in a great Passion; and had told her, that he would neither bed with her, nor ever eat or drink with her more, and that if he met her in the Street, he would certainly kill her; nor would he ever be Friends with her, unless she would own, she took a Guinea and a Half out of his Pocket, which she profess’d she had never touch’d. I was concern’d at her Tale, and went down to the Waterside to see for him, but not finding him, I returned again to the Deceased. While I was with her, the Prisoner came in, and to get him into a good Humour, I invited him to come a House-warming to my House, but he refuss’d: The poor Woman burst out a crying again, and told him she had made him some Broth, and beg’d him to eat some; he reply’d,
no, d-mn you for a Bitch, I won’t touch it, nor ever eat any Thing with you, ’till you have acknowledged you took the Money.
She fell on her Knees, and hung about his Knees, declaring with a great many Tears, that she was Innocent; but he up with his Fist, and dash’d her away from him with such Violence, as to set her a bleeding.
* “Interpersonal Violence in English Society 1300-1980,” Past and Present 101 (1983).
The brigand Luis Candelas was garroted in Madrid on this date in 1837.
Candelas — that’s a Spanish link, as are most available sources on the man — was a bad boy from a bourgeois family with a penchant for high living and high blood, the latter of which got him kicked out of school when a priest slapped him by way of discipine and Candelas repaid him in kind.
From here he went on to the life of a sybaritic picaro, worthy of remembrance in various song and verse.
He was a dashing Don Juan type, smartly dressed and famed for his love of the written word and the opposite sex; he was a triumphant duelist, that noble old sport; and he was the king of a gang of robbers that haunted the taverns of Madrid and won both treasure and popular affection by their exploits.
“Money is badly distributed,” ran one of their reported aphorisms of social banditry, “and it is not fair that while some are dragged in coaches, while others trudge through the mud.”
In this last he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde double life, posing as the respectable Luis Alvarez de Cobos by day only to transform into lovable underworld rogue by night.
As ought to happen to such a romantic desperado, he was betrayed in the end by his heart. Feeling inordinate police heat due to robbing some inordinately important people — the Queen‘s personal dressmaker, the French ambassador — Candelas attempted to slip out of the country with his lover, a woman named Clara. The latter went with him as far as Gijon before she was overcome with longing for hearth and home and convinced Candelas to return to Madrid and ride out the manhunt there. He was caught.
They tried him for 40 different robberies, and he hung with a jaunty “Adiós Patria mía, sé feliz!” (“Farewell, my country, be happy!”)
On this date in 1959, Guenther Podola became the last man hanged in Great Britain for killing a police officer.
A German emigre, Podola had been deported from Canada for committing a series of thefts and burglaries.
He’d just moved to London in May of 1959, not six months before his execution, when he tried to ransom stolen jewelry and furs to an American model he’d stolen them from. The model notified police and when they tracked him down, Podola shot Detective Sergeant Raymond Purdy straight through the heart.
Grasping for straws at his trial, he offered the soap opera-esque claim that he (now) labored under amnesia from a knock on the head suffered during his arrest. “I do not remember the crime for which I stand accused,” he told the court. “I am unable to answer the charges.” A Crown psychiatrist, the jury, and anyone’s common sense figured that he was shamming, which Podola himself also admitted after conviction.
Podola’s was the last British hanging of the 1950s. Five years and nineteen executions later, Britain binned capital punishment.
From the Central New Jersey Home News (New Brunswick, N.J.), Nov. 5, 1912:
Two hours after he had eaten a hearty supper and sat in his cell waiting for the end to come, Alexander Kompovic, the oldest man to be executed in this State, was put to death last night in the New Jersey State prison, Trenton. Kompovic was 62 years old and paid the penalty for killing a ten-year-old girl.
The aged slayer calmly awaited death and told the deputies that he wished it was all over. He was in good spirits yesterday and appeared to enjoy all of his meals. Shortly after 6 o’clock last night he sat on a chair in his cell and finished a good meal. Then he talked with two Polish priests and said he would rather die in the chair than serve a life sentence.
The aged murderer bore up remarkably well when walking to the fatal chair. Father Griffin, the prison chaplain, walked in front of him. Kompovic looked at the jurymen and reporters and kept on repeating the prayers from the lips of the three priests. He was given two shocks of 1,900 volts and 11 ampheres. He entered the death chamber at 8.23 o’clock and five minutes later was pronounced dead. Relatives will take charge of the body.
Heavy curtains were drawn over the front of the cells of the other three murderers awaiting death, but they did not appear to be affected when the child slayer began his march through the death chamber.
Kompovic was the twenty-sixth man to be electrocuted in prison here.
The crime for which he paid the penalty in the chair was one of the most brutal in the annals of New Jersey. The aged slayer boarded with the father of Mary Halliday, a ten-year-old school girl at Perth Amboy.
Kompovic lived at Perth Amboy for nearly twenty-five years and was employed at the Lehigh Valley coal docks. July 1 he enticed the girl from her home by giving her pennies. While walking along the coal docks with the child he assaulted her and then grabbed her by the throat and strangled her. He afterwards threw her body into a tunnel and then went to sleep in a field.
After a search had been made the body was found, but the slayer was missing. The police soon located him. Kompovic was a heavy drinker and had been mixed up in several fights. He stood six feet two inches in height.
The day of his arrest for murder scratches were found on his face, showing that the child had fought to try and save herself from the fiend. The foreigner at first denied that he had seen or been with the child, but it was learned that he had been in the habit of walking with her and boy saw him take her towards the coal docks.
Kompovic was found guilty on September 24, and was sentenced to die in the electric chair by Justice Bergen.
For a time there seemed a possibility that a most unusual defect in the indictment would give the man a new lease of life by furnishing grounds for an appeal. The indicement [sic] read “nurder” instead of “murder”, “n” having replaced “m” by a typographical error. But this technicality was not sufficient to warrant an appeal.
Kompovic was unaffected when he heard the jury’s verdict and the judge’s sentence, but as the days passed he grew more appreciative of the shortness of the time he was to remain on earth, and lost his stolid sulleness [sic], regaining it, however, when time came for him to die.
The capture of Kompovic and his speedy conviction was due to the painstaking work of Prosecutor Silzer and Assistant Prosecutor Stricker.* The accused’s defense was a complete denial, but Kompovic was unable on the stand to account for his actions at the time of the crime. He declared he was intoxicated and “couldn’t remember.”
A most unusual feature of the case was the testimony given by Dr. F.M. Hoffman, of this city, for the State. Dr. Hoffman, who had examined under the microscope scrapings taken from the defendant’s finger nails a few hours after his arrest, testified to having found portions of the opidermis, or upper skin of a human being, in these scrapings. Other witnesses told of scratches on the child’s face when the body was found.
* The Middlesex County prosecutor George Sebastian Silzer later became governor of New Jersey. His deputy in this instance, Joseph Stricker, would go on to become the county’s lead prosecutor; he’s noted as a figure in the sensational 1920s Hall-Mills murder case which (sad for this here morbid site) resulted only in acquittals. -ed.
His journey to the gallows begins a year an two days before his hanging when the 43-year-old miller drinking vigorously as was the style at the time “made some drink with water, rum and molasses, and drank once or twice. I felt dizzy in my head, and a good deal disordered in my mind.” (That’s according to his Last Words and Dying Speech, which we’ll quote repeatedly.)
Sufficiently buzzed, Hadlock headed out on a mean-drunk walkabout, beat up a female neighbor, Comfort Manchester, for arguing with him until another fellow intervened. He then transferred his rage to “the unfortunate Eliab Littlefield Gott, and one Daniel Tarr, crossing the river in a canoe.”
Hadlock hailed the two and then went to work on Gott, repeatedly plunging the younger man’s head into the water in a vain attempt to drown him, before assailing him with a club. Only the meddling of that same Samaritan who intervened for Mrs. Manchester, one James Richardson, abated this attack, eventually subduing the maniac with Gott’s help.
In Mr. Manchester’s telling, Hadlock then decoyed his combatants to get free — “Hadlock said he wante dto git up … Richardson let … Hadlock git up but Hadlock having his hand in the hare of … Eliab … [he] took a stake from the fence … then followed Richardson with said stake, who escaped … [then] turned and ran after … Eliab, whose clothe were wet and boots filled with water.”
The erstwhile canoeist groaned away his life that night in the Manchesters’ bed, his skull fractured in several places.
Condemned to hang, Hadlock — who we can see is nothing if not determined — tunneled out of the jail and laid low under assumed names for a couple of months — albeit unwisely not getting far from his old stomping-grounds, “being sensible in my own mind that I never was in my heart guilty of the murder charged upon me, and God having delivered me from the goal, I still hoped that he would protect and preserve me.”
Hope not being a plan, he was eventually spotted and chased to ground aboard a schooner by a pursuing posse, but had concealed himself so well that they were aboard to abandon the ship as a false lead when one of the pursuers went belowdecks and
heard a gunlock snap and turning round saw Hadlock in the cabin with a gun presented towards the men on deck who were to the number of 10 or 11, and all in a cluster. Had the gun discharged at the time Hadlock pulled the trigger, it is probable he would have killed and wounded as many as five or six, as the gun proved to be loaded with two balls and 18 buckshot.
According to newspaper reports cited in “Hadlock Executed This Day”, the man fell through the noose on the first try at hanging him at Pownalborough (present-day Dresden, Maine).
[H]e was “not of any Business”, but had gone to the East-Indies and China as a servant to someone on board a ship, and had stayed there for four months while the ship was loaded with cargo. On his return to England he was paid over £/80 but he quickly spent it all and “took to vicious Courses”. He related that his mother “some Times told him, she fear’d he lived Dishonestly, and beg’d him not think of subsisting on the Ruins and Spoils of innocent People, for it would terminate in Misery and Destruction”. She would prove to be right.
-From the London Lives biography of John Trantum. (London Lives is digital database with “a wide range of primary sources about eighteenth-century London, with a particular focus on plebeian Londoners”; it’s kin to the oft-used-by-ExecutedToday bonanza of trial records at The Old Bailey Online, and friend of the site Tim Hitchcock is a co-director of both.) Click through to read the whole thing, and don’t forget to navigate onward to his brother Richard Trantum — part of the same gang of criminals, and destined come 1723 for the same fate as John.
On this date in 1979, Jesse Bishop was gassed in Nevada.
The third person executed under the “modern” U.S. death penalty regime — after Gary Gilmore in 1976 and John Spenkelink earlier in 1979 — Bishop was a career felon with a years-long rap sheet of armed robberies and drug crimes.
In 1977, he was engaged in his customary business of knocking over the (now defunct) El Morocco Casino when a newlywed groom left his nearby wedding reception to stage a heroic intervention. Bishop gunned down David Ballard, “like a dog.”
Like Gary Gilmore in neighboring Utah, Bishop was a resolute volunteer for taking his punishment. In his last hours he had a telephone provided him, so that resuming his abandoned appeals would be within arm’s reach at any moment he desired. Bishop never touched it.
Breezily calling the death penalty an “occupational hazard” in his line of work, he was the calmest guy in the place when they sat him down for his hydrogen cyanide sauna. Time magazine cast the scene thus:
Dressed in a crisp white shirt and pressed Levis, he strode purposefully into the freshly whitewashed chamber at Nevada State Prison, near Carson City. “He looked as if he were ready to go to a disco,” recalls TIME’s Guy Shipler, one of 14 official witnesses.
Executed for Murder of Wife in 1926; Mother’s Plea to Governor Fails.
Tells All “Goodby”
Lincoln, Neb., Oct. 19 (AP) — Maintaining his innocence to the last, Frank Sharp, 52, twice convicted and twice sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, Harriett, near here in March, 1926, was electrocuted in the Nebraska penitentiary at 6:29 a.m. today.
A current of 2,400 volts was allowed to course through his body.
Sharp was apparently the calmest man in the room as the attendants strapped his arms and legs to the chair. He was breathing a little heavily and he moved his finger nervously, but otherwise displayed no emotion.
“Good-by and God bless you,” he said to reporters, witnesses and physicians in the room.
Sharp listened attentively while prayers were said by Father Ford and by Chaplain Maxwell.
Visited by Relatives.
Sharp repeated a prayer with the priest while holding a small crucifix in his left hand.
When the chaplain extended his hand toward Sharp, the prisoner said “you’ll have to come over to me. I can’t move my hand.”
“I am not afraid to die, gentlemen,” Sharp said while guards ripped his trousers to clamp part of the death harness on his leg. “There’s no reason for me to be afraid.”
“All right, sir,” he told the executioner after a request that he close his eyes. “Fix things to suit yourself. Whatever you do is all right with me.”
Even after the head piece was placed on him and the heavy strap over his face, Sharp continued to talk.
“You’re smashing my nose,” he said twice before the executioner adjusted it.
The doomed man had cheerful good-bys for the warden, chaplain, priest and his friends and in each case ended by saying “God bless you.”
The current was turned on at 6:29 and after 45 seconds was turned off. The doctors examined the body and pronounce Sharp dead at 6:32.
His body was claimed by his family and will be buried at the local cemetery.
The condemned man’s brother and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Charley Sharp, visited the death cell yesterday evening.
Wife Slain in 1926.
Among those who were present at the execution were the murdered woman’s brother, Homer Wilis, and her son by a former marriage, Art Ostbloom.
Mrs. Sharp was killed on the night of March 16, 1926. Her body, its skull mutilated by blows of a hammer, was found in the family [obscure], two miles northeast of Havelock, the next morning, after an all-night search by local police.
Blood stains on his clothes directed suspicion toward Sharp. Foot prints near the murder scene that were found to coincide with the shoes Sharp was wearing that night. Other circumstancial evidence also was found, the most important of which was a palm print of the hammer, used to kill Mrs. Sharp.
Convicted on Palm Print.
This print was declared by experts to be similar to Sharp’s and had a large part in his conviction. It is believed Sharp was the first man to be executed largely on palm print evidence.
His first conviction was reversed by the supreme court on technical errors, but his second conviction was affirmed.
Sharp always contended he was held up by robbers who bound and blindfolded him and abducted his wife. This was the story he told when he aroused a farm home on the night of the murder and to which he staunchly clung during his trials and his appeal to the state pardon board in a final attempt to escape the death penalty.
Without retracting this story, Sharp remained composed and apparently confident. He declared he was ready to die and forgave everyone concerned with his conviction.
“Innocent as a Child.”
After Warren W.T. Fenton had read the death warrant, the condemned man asserted that he was as innocent as a child. “If it will help things any to kill me,” he said, “it is all right with me.” He then handed his statement to the warden and asked the newspapers to print it. The statement, written in long hand with a pencil, follows:
Frank Sharp’s final statement to the newspapers:
I have always contended the facts would come to light before I would go to the electricity chair.
I hold no imminity to anybody.
I want to thank everybody that tryed to help me in my last hour.
The state onley claims circumstanced evidents in my case and I believe the evidents proves my innocents far beyond a doubt. I wish to forgive everybody that hold an evial thought against me and may God bless them.
And all I have to ask for is a chance to prove my innocents.
FRANK E. SHARP.
Members of the Sharp family called at the capitol last evening to make a last presentation to Governor McMullen. Mrs. A.G. Sharp, 75, mother of Sharp, was leaning on the arm of one of her sons. The group comprised two brothers of Sharp, a son, two sisters and the mother. They were received in the governor’s private office and remained half an hour. Governor McMullen explained the manner in which the board of pardons had considered Sharp’s allegation of newly discovered evidence and its decision that the facts presented had no bearing on the case and told them of the powers and duties of the governor and of his inability to take further action. Upon taking their leave members of the party said they had no fault to find with the governor’s decision of his duty in the case.
Sullivan was lumbered with a 30-year sentence for robbery and kidnapping when he and a buddy, Lowell Haenze, cut their way through an electrified fence while they were working on a prison baseball park ahead of a Fourth of July game in 1940. “
He was a dashing Don Juan type, smartly dressed and famed for his love of the written word and the opposite sex; he was a triumphant duelist, that 
A German emigre, 
The third person executed under the “modern” U.S. death penalty regime — after 
Lincoln, Neb., Oct. 19 (AP) — Maintaining his innocence to the last, Frank Sharp, 52, twice convicted and twice sentenced to death for the murder of his wife, Harriett, near here in March, 1926, was electrocuted in the Nebraska penitentiary at 6:29 a.m. today.
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