Category Archives: Theft

1837: Luis Candelas, urban bandit

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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!”)

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1721: John Trantum, 1/2

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[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 &pound/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.

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1979: Jesse Bishop

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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.

Bishop was the last person to die in Nevada’s venerable gas chamber; all subsequent executions there have been by lethal injection.

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1664: Sawny Douglas, Chevy Chaser

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From the Newgate Calendar:

SAWNY DOUGLAS

A Scottish Highwayman who laid England under toll, and took a Copy of “Chevy Chase” to Tyburn when he was hanged on 10th of September, 1664

SAWNY DOUGLAS, a Scotsman, was the son of a tanner, and born at Portpatrick in the shire of Galloway, where he lived till the unnatural Civil War broke out in 1641. Sawny at this time being very zealous on the side of the Kirk, and consequently against the King, entered himself into the service of the Parliament, was at the siege of Dundee, and boasted after that bloody action was over that he killed with his own hands no less than twenty-nine persons.

Those who have read the histories of that time will remember that Dundee was taken by storm, and that the garrison was put to the sword; which gave Sawny an opportunity to discover his cruelty.

After the restoration of King Charles II, when the Scots were reduced to obedience, Sawny found himself obliged to seek some other subsistence than the army.

He had now been a soldier about twenty years, and though he had never been advanced higher than to carry a halberd [i.e., a sergeant -ed.], yet he was something loth to lay down his commission. However, there was no opposing necessity, and he was obliged to submit, as well as many of his betters, who were glad they could come off thus, after having been so deeply concerned in the rebellion.

Coming into England, and being destitute of both money and bread, he was not long in resolving what course to take in order to supply himself. The highway, he thought, was as free for him as for anybody else, and he was both strong and desperate. But the question was, where should he get a horse and accoutrements? “What,” said he again, “should hinder my taking the first that comes in my way, and seems fit for my purpose?” Pursuant to this last resolution he kept on the main road, with a good crab-tree stick in his hand, till he saw a gentleman’s servant alone, well mounted, with pistols before him.

He had some question ready to ask, and after that another, till the poor footman was engaged in a discourse with him, and rode along gently by his side. At last Sawny observes an opportunity, and gives him an effectual knock on the pate, which, followed with four or five more, left him insensible on the ground, while our young adventurer rode off with the horse till he thought himself out of the way of any inquiry.

The first robbery he committed was in Maidenhead Thicket, in Berkshire, in those times a very noted haunt for highwaymen. The person he stopped was one Mr Thurston, at that time Mayor of Thornbury, in Gloucestershire. He got about eighteen pounds, and was so uncivil as to refuse the poor gentleman ten shillings to bear his charges home; which was all he required, and for which he begged very hard.

Another time he robbed the Duchess of Albemarle* of diamond rings to the value of two hundred pounds, besides a pearl necklace, rich bracelets and ear-rings. After this he came and took lodgings at the house of one Mr Knowles, an apothecary in Tuthil Street, Westminster, where he set up for a gentleman, appeared very fine, and made love to his landlord’s daughter, who was reputed to be a two thousand pounds fortune.

For some time he was very well received both by the young lady and her father; but when his money was gone, and they found him full of shifts, arts and evasions, they not only discarded him as a husband and son-in-law, but turned him fairly out of doors.

Sawny now took to the road again, and committed more robberies than before, ranging all over the north of England, and being often so fortunate as to escape justice when it pursued him. He moreover contracted a familiarity with Du Vall, the most generous-spirited highwayman that ever lived, which friendship continued till Death parted them by his deputy Jack Ketch.

Sawny’s last attempt was on the Earl of Sandwich,** who was afterwards admiral in the Dutch war, and unfortunately lost his life, together with his ship. This noble commander, having arms in the coach, resolved not to be insulted by a highwayman, and discharged a pistol into Sawny’s horse, which immediately dropping down under him, the servants came up and secured our bonny North Briton, who was thereupon committed to Newgate, and in less than a month after ordered for Tyburn.

The Ballad of Chevy Chase, a popular song that survives in several variants, tells the story of a great battle between Scotsmen and Englishmen — won by the Scottish side, as occurred in its likely real-life inspiration, the Battle of Otterburn (1388).

Much beloved on both halves of Britain, it survives in several variants to the present day. The ballad also directly inspired the naming of Chevy Chase, Maryland (which once contained a number of street names alluding to Otterburn), as well as the stage name of National Lampoon/Saturday Night Live comedian Cornelius Crane “Chevy” Chase.

While he was under sentence he behaved in a very profane and indecent manner, cursing the bellman for his bad English when he repeated the usual Memento the night before his execution. At St Sepulchre’s the next day, when the appointed ceremony was performed, instead of composing his countenance, and looking as a man in his condition ought to do, he only told the spectators that it was hard a man could not be suffered to go to the gallows in peace; and that he had rather be hanged twice over without ceremony, than once after this superstitious manner.

He read no Prayer Book, but carried the ballad of Chevy Chase [see sidebar -ed.] in his hand all the way to Tyburn. When he came thither he took no notice of the ordinary, but bid the hangman be speedy, and not make a great deal of work about nothing, or at most about a mere trifle. He died 10th of September, 1664, aged fifty-three, and was buried in Tyburn Road.

* There were only three legitimate Dukes of Albemarle. The first was ancient history, a casualty at Agincourt centuries before. Chronologically, this robbery victim should refer to the wife of the first Duke, who was also the great Roundhead commander — and indeed, the robber’s very own commander at Dundee — George Monck. However, the text might instead be an anachronistic invocation of the wife of the second Duke of Albemarle who attained notoriety, and great wealth, as the “Mad Duchess” even though she didn’t attain the title until 1669. These entries, especially the ones dating back to the 17th century, were full liable to crisscross the unmarked boundaries between history and legend.

** Not the Earl who gave us sammiches, but his ancestor.

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1982: Frank James Coppola, “further incarceration can only lead to my being stripped of all personal dignity”

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Former Portsmouth, Virginia, cop Frank James Coppola was electrocuted on this date in 1982.

Coppola dropped appeals and “adamantly” volunteered for the mercy seat after being condemned for the 1978 home invasion robbery-murder of Muriel Hatchell. With a co-conspirator who lured her to open the door with a sham flower delivery, Coppola tied up Hatchell with Venetian blind cords, and bashed her head into the floor repeatedly to force her to yield up the hiding-places of her valuables. In the end, the felons escaped the house with $3,100 in cash plus some jewelry, and Muriel Hatchell died of her injuries.

Coppola continued to claim his innocence but he wasn’t into fighting about it. As Time magazine reported Coppola just wanted to skip to the end.

“Further incarceration,” he said, “can only lead to my being stripped of all personal dignity.” His one request: a summer date, to minimize the taunts to his two school-age sons.

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1788: Elisabetha Gassner

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Thief Elisabetha Gassner (English Wikipedia entry | German) was beheaded in Oberdischingen by executioner Xaver Vollmer on this date in 1788.

Gassner (English Wikipedia entry | German) was an industrious laborer who, born a vagrant and soon after losing her father, busted her hump into a home and a small farm of her own while maintaining a large family (seven kids by the time of her beheading, plus an invalid mother).

Nimble fingers made her this nest egg — fingers for knitting stockings, and, more and more, for picking pockets in Biderberg and Württemberg.

With a purported 300+ thefts attributed to her, she acquired outsized reputation as a thief transcendent enough to apotheosize her under the nickname Schwarze Lies (“Black Lisa”) alongside the legendary outlaws of the day.

Her ambition for a foothold in this precarious world made her as bold with the quality of her targets as their quantity: her arrest was for lifting a 1,700 guilder purse from Count Franz Ludwig Schenk von Castell, in the chapel of Ludwigsburg Palace.

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2020: Daniel Lewis Lee

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This morning in Terre Haute, Indiana, like the French guillotine making its way to the western front, America’s twilight men saluted Bastille Day by animating their empire’s creaking machinery on an absurd project to kill one guy to nobody’s edification in the midst of a rolling bloodbath.

Back in 1996, Daniel Lewis Lee traveled from Washington state to Arkansas with fellow white supremacist Chevie Kehoe where they slaughtered a family of three in the course of a robbery aimed at financing a racist enclave in the Pacific Northwest. Gun dealer William Mueller, his wife Nancy, and their eight-year-old daughter Sarah Powell were bound hand and foot and suffocated with plastic bags taped over their heads, before being dumped in a bayou. Kehoe and Lee netted $50,000 in cash and weapons.*

Yet family members of those victims were the most vocal critics of executing Lee.

For one thing, everyone involved in the case, including the prosecuting attorney and trial judge, agrees that Kehoe was the instigator of the crime. But perversely, it was Kehoe who received the lighter sentence. Sometimes this occurs when a wily ringleader turns state’s-evidence against his confederates; in the case at hand, it might have been nothing but the comparative visual affect presented to jurors by the baby-faced Kehoe as compared to the menacing Lee, one-eyed (courtesy of a bar fight) and swastika-tattooed. The two were tried and convicted together in a death case; when the jury returned a life sentence for Kehoe, the U.S. Attorney on the case attempted to withdraw the death notice still pending against Lee, only to be overruled by higher-ups at the Department of Justice.

Earlene Peterson, Nancy Mueller’s mother and Sarah Powell’s grandmother, “believes the jury’s prejudices led to Kehoe and Lee receiving different sentences,” according to a Reason magazine profile.

“Chevie Kehoe was dressed very nicely, like a young businessman, and Daniel Lee was not,” Peterson said, noting that Lee was missing an eye and had a swastika tattooed on his neck. “He looked like an outlaw,” and “was instantly judged the minute he walked into the courtroom,” she says.

And Peterson, joined by several other family members, didn’t want anyone whether businessman or outlaw executed in her name.

Peterson, her granddaughter Monica Veillette, and Kimma Gurel (Nancy Mueller’s sister) sued in federal courts arguing that conducting the execution in the midst of the dangerous COVID-19 outbreak frustrated their right and expressed desire to witness Lee’s execution. But what they would have preferred most of all would have been no execution at all, regardless of COVID; they petitioned President Trump to this same effect.** “For us it is a matter of being there and saying, ‘This is not being done in our name; we do not want this,'” Veillette told the press.

As everyone knows, victims/survivors with an attitude of clemency get no special consideration in the breach from the closure-for-victims crowd. Thus while Attorney General William Barr scheduled Lee’s execution — along with four others — last year to the familiar strains of “We owe it to the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system,” his agency defeated these victims’ family members by arguing that their allowance to witness the execution was in fact not any sort of “right” that anyone was “owed.” The first federal execution in 17 years was delayed half a day from its Monday-afternoon schedule by a last-minute judicial injunction that was predictably reversed by the Supreme Court: that issue concerned the lethal injection drug selection.

Peterson, Veillette, and Gurel did not in the end attend the execution, for fear of the coronavirus. Besides being afoot broadly, it was known to have broken out in the Terre Haute federal prison. In fact, one of the execution planners tested positive for COVID-19 just days before the execution and the small viewing chamber reserved for official witnesses makes no allowance for social distancing. (Prison officials and the “Appalachian pagan minister” present to conduct the execution itself also wore no masks, nor did the executed criminal himself.) Considering the short shrift federal authorities have given to protective measures surrounding people who didn’t commit triple homicide, it’s no surprise that the pandemic was also no obstacle, with Barr making the Orwellian assurance — which doubles as a distillation of his philosophy of governance — that his team could “carry out these executions without being at risk.”

* Lee later also pipe-bombed the Spokane, Washington, city hall.

** Lee’s was the first execution to proceed on Donald Trump’s say-so.

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1961: Edwin Bush, Identikitted

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On this date in 1961, Edwin Bush was hanged at Pentonville Prison. On March 3 of that same year, he’d stabbed to death an assistant at a Loondon antiques shop just off Charing Cross, using a pair of antique daggers from the shop’s own stock. (The scene of this long-ago crime is presently a bookstore.)


The Identikit sketch, and the actual photo, of the culprit.

Although a small-time criminal, Bush was an important milestone in the evolution of the panopticon.

Poor Elsie May Batten had been attacked early in the morning, and nobody witnessed the crime. The killer/robber (he stole a sword that he later sold for 15 quid — nothing else) hadn’t left behind any usable physical clues.

“It could have taken weeks to identify the culprit,” notes this MyLondon.News profile, “but luckily a change in police technology would be of great assistance.” This new system, called Identikit,

used a standardised set of facial features to help a witness build a more accurate picture of a suspect.

In shop owner Louis Meier’s interview, Identikit was used to build a picture of the suspicious man who had gone into the shop the day before Elsie’s killing to admire the sword.

Another witness, who had seen a man and his blond girlfriend try to sell a sword on St Martin’s Lane that very same day, also did the Identikit procedure. Two facial likeness from two different witnesses were unmistakably the same man — and they were printed in the local newspapers asking people if they had seen a man looking like this and his blond girlfriend.

Janet Wheeler, the 17-year-old blond girlfriend of Bush, saw the Identikit and joked about how they fitted the description, unaware of what her boyfriend had done.

But Eddie couldn’t count on such naivete from Londoners who weren’t his girlfriend. An eagle-eyed beat cop recognized Bush from the same wanted pictures and arrested him on March 16, just steps away from the antiquarian. He was with Janet, shopping together for engagement rings. Once they had him, fingerprints, lineup identifications, and eventually a confession all fell into place.

What’s been left unspoken thus far is the story’s racial character, but that factor permeates everything. Edwin Bush’s mixed Asian-white parentage helped consign him to the periphery of London’s economic life, his unusual look possibly helped cinch the surveillance triumph for Identikit … and if Bush is to be believed, it was everyday racism that triggered his crime.

Provoked, he said, when he visited the store just to browse for the second consecutive day only to have Batten drop a racial slur on him (“You niggers are all the same. You come in and never buy anything.”), Bush

went back to the shop and started looking through the daggers, telling her that I might want to buy one, but I picked one up and hit her in the back. I then lost my nerve and picked up a stone vase and hit her with it. I grabbed a knife and hit her once in the stomach and once in the neck.

Of course, only Bush and Batten were present for their conversation, and it must be acknowledged that when Bush made this allegation about his victim, he needed to give the courts reason to mitigate his sentence.

You can hear all about the case on your run or commute in episode 7 of the Murder Mile UK crime podcast.

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1958: Raymond John Bailey, for the Sundown Murders

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On this date in 1958, itinerant carpenter Raymond John Bailey was hanged for one of Australia’s most sensational crimes.

This case derives its gloomy appellation, the Sundown Murders, from the same crepuscular handle dignifying the abandoned South Australia station where the bodies of Sally (Thyra) Bowman (43), her daughter Wendy Bowman (14), and family friend Thomas Whelan (22) were discovered in their Vanguard. All three had been bludgeoned and shot, as had the Bowman’s two dogs — an utterly shocking outrage.

The Outback dirt retained sign of the killer’s own conveyance with its telltale trailer; reported sightings pursuing this clue led a gigantic manhunt to the Queensland hospital where Bailey had gone to work … having driven there with a caravan in tow on a northbound course suitable to cross paths with the victims. He owned an unlicensed rifle; the theory of the case, supported eventually by a confession which Bailey repudiated as given under duress,* was that Bailey set upon the vehicle to rob it and even took the trouble to siphon the petrol — which was “dear up in that neck of the woods and Bailey’s old car and caravan would not be doing more than 10 or 12 miles to the gallon.” (Crown prosecutor E.B. Scarfe)

In the 21st century, investigative journalist Stephen Bishop has notably pitched a case for Bailey’s outright innocence. Bishop’s The Most Dangerous Detective: The Outrageous Glen Patrick Hallahan contends that the titular lawman — he’s the leftmost fella on the picture above, taken at Bailey’s arrest — railroaded the suspect, forcing him into a confession that “does not tally with other evidence” and ignoring potentially exculpatory details like footprints at the murder scene too large to be Raymond Bailey’s.

Bishop’s appeals for an official exoneration have thus far gone nowhere.

* Not his own torture, but the threat — in fact the nearby sound — of his sobbing wife being interrogated.

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2014: Mahmoud Al Issawi, murderer of Laila Ghofran’s daughter

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Hiba Al Akkad (standing) embracing her famous mother.

Mahmoud Al Issawi was hanged at Wadi el-Natrun prison outside Cairo on this date in 2014.

In 2008, he stabbed to death Hiba Al Akkad, the 23-year-old daughter of Moroccan star singer Laila Ghofran, along with Heba’s friend Nadine Gamal, in the course of a botched burglary in Cairo’s affluent Sheikh Zayed suburb.

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