June 9th, 2013
Headsman
On this date in 1809, Andreas Bichel lost his head.
This killer’s strange m.o. was to entice young women with the promise of divining their fortune in a magic mirror.
His victims were two young women unwise enough to accede to his request to bind their hands on the pretext that the wrong gesture would ruin the spell. With such lamblike naivete, what could Bichel do but clobber the poor maids over the head, strip them down, and butcher them still-living — slicing open their bowels, and cracking their breastbones open with a wedge.
Torture having recently been outlawed with the Napoleonic conquest, Bichel was pressured into coming clean by the novel expedient of moving his questioning ever-closer to the scenes of his crimes — to the Regendorf town hall, at first, and thence to his own home where the two exhumed bodies were stretched out before him.
Visibly affected, Bichel admitted all.
“I opened her breast and with a knife cut through the fleshy parts of the body,” Bichel said. “Then I arranged the body as a butcher does beef, and hacked it with an axe into pieces of a size to fit the hole which I had dug up in the mountain for burying it. I may say that while opening the body I was so greedy that I trembled, and could have cut out a piece and eaten it.”
It was not cannibalism but cupidity that cut Bichel’s spree short: he was foolish enough to sell the women’s distinctive stolen clothes. (An occasional petty thief before he turned Ripper, Bichel said he’d been seduced into homicide by the fine clothes of his first victim.)
According to Lady Duff Gordon,
The sentence of breaking on the wheel from the feet upwards, which had been pronounced in accordance with the laws still in force, was commuted to beheading. This was done, not for the sake of sparing the criminal, whose crimes deserved the extremest punishment, but out of regard to the moral dignity of the state, which ought not, as it were, to vie with a murderer in cruelty.
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Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,History,Murder,Serial Killers
Tags: 1800s, 1809, andreas bichel, june 9
February 8th, 2013
Headsman
On this date in 1804, two known as John Setton/Sutton and James May were hanged at Greenville, Mississippi.
They were, in fact, Wiley “Little” Harpe and his outlaw partner Peter Alston — the survivors (well, up until then) of a notorious gang of Mississippi River pirates and frontier highwaymen.
Their villainous coterie had plagued the Mississippi (river) and the proximate byways from Kentucky down to Mississippi (state), making a couple of spots on the great river legendary pirate hideouts in the process.
With a price on the head of the notorious leader Samuel Mason, “Sutton” and “May” coldly murdered their captain to turn in his head for the reward.
They got their reward alright. They were recognized as Mason’s own fellow-bandits, and themselves put on trial for piracy.
The Harpe Brothers
This date’s hanging was not only the end of the Mason gang — it was the end of the Harpe Brothers.
Micajah Harpe (“Big Harpe”) and Wiley Harpe were brothers or cousins who cut a bloody swathe through the early American Republic, such that some have acclaimed the Harpes that young nation’s first serial killers. They were, in one historian’s words, “the most brutal monsters of the human race.”
Heading west out of North Carolina after Revolutionary War service as Tory irregulars, the Harpes made for Knoxville, Tennessee, kidnapping wives for themselves along the way. When they were rousted out of their cabin on accusations of livestock-rustling in 1797, their notorious careers really began in earnest.
This was, then, the extreme western frontier of the United States, and the Harpes were consequently able to plunder in wilderness impunity.
And they slew with a frequency and savagery far in excess of the professional demands of a bush robber.
Big Harp confessed before dying in 1798 to 20 murders, probably not counting the babies. Estimates are as high as 40, but usually around 30. After two killings, one in Knox County and one on the Wilderness Trail, the Harps left Tennessee in December 1798 for Kentucky, where they killed two traveling men from Maryland…
The final stretch of slaughter took place soon after this, in July 1798, when the Harps returned to Eastern Tennessee. The victims included a farmer named Bradbury; a man named Hardin; a boy named Coffey; William Ballard, who was cut open, filled with stones, and dumped in the Holston River; James Brassel, with his throat ripped apart on Brassel’s Knob; John Tully, father of eight. On the Marrowbone Creek in south central Kentucky, John Graves and his teenaged son, out planting crops, had their heads axed. Moving toward Logan County, the Harps came upon a little girl, whom they killed, as they did a young slave on his way to the mill. Once in Logan County, near today’s Adairville, near the Whippoorwill River, they butchered an entire migrating family asleep in their camp, but for one son who survived. (Source)
TruTV also has an account of them sending a hijacked flatboat passenger over a cliff, and bashing a little girl’s head in against the side of a bridge.
“They murdered all classes and sexes, without distinction,” a Knoxville man* recounted years later, “not for plunder but for the love of shedding human blood.” We don’t have Little Harpe’s conscience on the record, but Big Harpe would only express remorse for one of his dozens of homicides: smashing his own infant child against a tree to make it stop crying.
That sentiment would come at the end, when Big Harpe had been cornered by a posse after murdering a frontier woman. The widower in that posse halved the Harpe menace by hewing Big Harpe’s head from his shoulders.
For generations after the subsequent roosting-spot of this deathly visage — presented to a justice of the peace to verify the man’s death (and pocket the price on his literal head), then hung up for public display by the intersection of Morgenfield, Henderson, and Maidensville Roads in Union County — was known as Harpe’s Head.
Little Harpe’s subsequent career with Sam Mason and his own violent demise capped the Harpe brothers’ nefarious legacy.
Their name was so infamous that many of their family changed it … including, according to rumor, the ancestors of legendary Wild West lawman Wyatt Earp.
* J.W.M. Breazeale was part of the posse that hunted down Big Harpe, and a witness to Big Harpe’s death, and gives the outlaw the (possibly tall-tale) last words directed to his slaughterer in mid-beheading: “You are a God damned rough butcher, but cut on and be damned.”
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Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Hanged,History,Infamous,Mississippi,Murder,Outlaws,Piracy,Pirates,Public Executions,Serial Killers,Theft,USA
Tags: 1800s, 1804, big harpe, february 8, frontier, greenville, harpe brothers, james may, john setton, john sutton, little harpe, micajah harpe, peter alston, sam mason, wiley harpe, wyatt earp
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