The last hanging in Puerto Rico history took place on this date in 1927.
Like most such instances, it was more remarkable as a milestone than as a crime. Pascual Ramos, piqued that he’d been fired from a night watchman job upon his boss’s accusation of theft, revenged himself upon that man:
According to eye witness accounts, on December 23, 1926, Pascual Ramos went to the Hacienda Sabater and “[n]ervously … circled the oxcart where Rosso was working. He stalked his prey for forty minutes, waiting for the proper moment to strike the mortal blow.” Those present were unaware of [Carlos] Ramos’ “fierce intentions” and, because of this “unfortunate circumstance, Pascual [Ramos] was able to close in reepeatedly, machete in hand, where Carlos Rosso was working.” Ramos tarried, “waiting for the moment in which Rosso was more exposed so as not to miss and make the blow more effective” …
The “lethal instant came” when Rosso kneeled to unscrew the wooden slab usually placed below an oxcart to keep it horizontal, lightened the load for the oxen while the cart was at rest. As Rosso “lowered his head” Ramos, “with the agility fo a beast, with the speed of a lightning bolt, lifted the weapon and let it fall with all his strength” in the center of Rosso’s neck, “miraculously not completely severing it … The head was left dangling from a thin muscle and, as Rosso’s body fell, lifeless, it resembled a heap of human flesh”.
Twenty-seven people were executed in Puerto Rico under American auspices, after the U.S. seized the territory during the Spanish-American War — including at least five via the holdover Spanish execution method of garroting.
The Puerto Rico legislature abolished the death penalty in 1929, and that prohibition was enshrined in the island-territory’s constitution in 1952. (Article 2, Section 7: “The right to life, liberty and the enjoyment of property is recognized as a fundamental right of man. The death penalty shall not exist.”)
The death penalty remains broadly unpopular in Puerto Rico, and the fact that one of the most prominent recent wrongful conviction cases on the mainland involved a Puerto Rican man, Juan Melendez, surely does the executioner’s standing no further favors. U.S. federal death penalty prosecutions there have a tough row to hoe.
On this date in 1927, Catholic padre Mateo Correa Magallanes was martyred during Mexico’s brutal Cristero war.
We’ve previously noted the bloody 1926-1929 rebellion of Catholics in central and western Mexico against the liberal and secular state that had emerged from the previous decade’s Mexican Revolution.
Imprisoned as a Cristero sympathizer during this conflict, Correa (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) administered the church’s sacrament of confession to some fellow-prisoners.
When the nearest general caught wind of this event, he immediately demanded of the priest the details those comrades revealed in the rite. Correa positively refused: the inviolable seal of the confessional being a principle that Romish clergy have bravely died for down the ages.
Correa joined their number by refusing every threat and blandishment to break his silence. He was shot in a cemetery outside Durango on the morning of February 6, 1927.
A call back to the sadly demobilized crime blog CLEWS for the double execution on this date in 1927 of Louisiana adulterous lovers Ada Bonner LeBoeuf and Dr. Thomas E. Dreher, for the murder (via hireling) of Mrs. LeBoeuf’ husband …
The first-degree murder trial that followed a month after the murder of Mr. LeBoeuf was billed in the press as one of the Southland’s most sensational legal battles, since, it was reported, the South hadn’t convicted and hanged a white woman for murder since Reconstruction days, and Louisiana had never hanged a white woman for murder, not even in the days of French and Spanish rule.
The trial was a cross-country sensation. The state produced nearly a dozen witnesses who testified to the details of the scandal. Per these many witnesses, the light-o’-loves carried on their small-town affair in the “negro shacks” on the outskirts of the village. The evidence included love letters that were read aloud.
From the London Times, Aug. 25, 1927. (See also reports from public newspaper archives such as California’s.)
I could not find any source that directly provided the full names of the Klepikoffs. Based on the brief description of events in this Russian book, the husband approached by a foreign agent to spy for Great Britain was one “E. Klepikoff”; this chance genealogy pagemight relate that name to Efram and Nadezhda Klepikoff.
SOVIET EXECUTIONS.
OFFICER’S WIFE SHOT.
(From our correspondent.)
RIGA, AUG. 24.
The Soviet authorities of Leningrad yesterday, following the rejection of her appeal by the Soviet Government, shot Mme. Klepikoff, who, after a second trial, was condemned to death by a Soviet Court for not betraying to the authorities her husband’s alleged “espionage in favour of England.” The husband, a former captain in the Russian Navy, was shot a few weeks ago.
Yesterday, also, the Soviet authorities shot three Customs officials, Zykoff, Peterleiter, and Borisovsky, and a trader, Kivman, who were condemned last week for defrauding the Customs. They appealed against the sentence, but the Government refused to stay the executioner’s hand.
Meanwhile, officially arranged meetings throughout the U.S.S.R. continue to pass violent resolutions, almost all of which proclaim that August 23 will remain marked in their calendars until they have taken full vengeance for Sacco and Vanzetti.
MOSCOW, Aug. 23. — The Central Executive Committee of the U.S.S.R. has suspended the execution of the sentence on General Annenkov and General Denisov, who, at the sitting of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court at Semipalatinsk, were condemned to be shot.
The two generals, it was alleged, were implicated in the shooting down of the entire population of villages during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. –Reuter.
* On June 16 the tribunal sentenced Klepikoff to death and his wife to three years’ imprisonment. The Soviet authorities, dissatisfied with the sentence on the wife, ordered her re-trial “under conditions involving the death penalty.” The Court assembled on July 12 and passed sentence of death on her.
At Saragossa this morning three men convicted of murder and robbery were executed by the garrotte.
On July 23 last the three criminals and another, who is still at large, ambushed an employee of a liquorice factory, whom they knew was carrying money. They attacked him from behind, and after killing him secured 4,000 pesetas.
Passers-by witnessed the crime and raised an alarm, but the murderers fired upon their pursuers and escaped. One of the shots killed a child.
Later, three of the men were arrested. After their trial the Government refused to recommend them for the Royal clemency.
The Government has issued an official statement in connexion with the execution exhorting all classes of society to meditate on the sad extremes to which vice leads. All teachers are likewise invited to draw the attention of school children to the case, and explain why the Government was obliged to let the law take its course.
On this date in 1927, Robert Greene Elliott — the “state electrician” who wired the majesty of the law to condemned men and women from Rockview, Pa. to Windsor, Vt. — had the busiest day of his illustrious career.
Once just a regular prison electrician, Elliott graduated himself to the euphemism in 1926 and was soon the go-to angel of electric death throughout the northeast. He pulled the lever a reported 387 times for men and women who sat in the new killing device in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut and (just one time) Vermont; when John Dos Passos wrote that “they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch,” well, he could have been talking about Elliott’s $150-per-head bounty.
January 6, 1927 was a full and lucrative day for Elliott.
He started the day off with a triple execution in Boston’s Charleston Prison — the first triple electrocution in Massachusetts history.* Then he took a train to New York — relaxed with family — took in a picture — and then conducted the Empire State’s triple execution in the evening. (All six of his luckless subjects in either state had been sentenced for various robbery-murders.) His $900 in wages between the two occasions would be the equivalent of a $12,000+ payday today.
Friend of the site Robert Walsh has a wonderful post detailing this character’s remarkable career; venture if you dare into the world of a prolific killer of the Prohibition and Depression eras, here.
Elliott also wrote an autobiography, Agent of Death, which is out of print and difficult to come by.
* Elliot would return there a few months later for a more famous trio: Sacco and Vanzetti, along with their accomplice Celestino Madeiros. Some other noteworthy clients of Elliott: alleged Lindbergh baby kidnapper Bruno Richard Hauptmann and illicitly photographed femme fataleRuth Snyder.
On this date in 1927,* the Bohemian playboy Jindrich Bažant was hanged at Kutna Hora for a murder spree directed at his several lovers.
Thanks to wealthy parents, Bazant‘s major occupation was the pleasures of the flesh.
But really, “I was destined to be a murderer,” he confessed upon arrest. He’d certainly thrown himself into the role once he tired of his girlfriends.
Two women who fancied themselves future Mrs. Bazants were the victims: Marie Safarikova, age 19, lured into a supposed elopement to Slovakia and then coldly shot dead in the woods; and Josefa Pavelkova, who was already pregnant with Bazant’s child.
Yet another lover, Bozena Rihova, almost met the same fate after she threatened Bazant with a criminal complaint for infecting her with a venereal disease. Bazant shot her, bludgeoned her with a hammer, and set her on fire — but Rihova miraculously survived to testify against her former paramour.
Bazant was among the last put to death by Leopold Wohlschlager, one of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s five state executioners at the time of its dissolution. Wohlschlager got started in the craft at the tender age of 15, and was well into his seventies when he hanged Bazant.
* I’m going with the plurality (and the best-detailed) of Czech-language articles here, against some cites for the same date in 1926.
On this date in 1927, Cuban murderer Baldomero Rodrigues was garroted in Pinar del Rio prison.
But when his body was laid out on a stretcher for disposal and the official witnesses were filing out of the death chamber, Rodrigues began showing signs of life.
It was “a defect in the garrote or due to careless adjustment of the metal band which fits about the victim’s neck to cause strangulation,” an Associated Press wire report ran.*
In present-day Iran, one of the most aggressive death penalty states going, a drug dealer managed to survive a hanging just weeks ago as I write this in 2013. That man got shipped to the hospital and placed on life support, with the justice minister eventually announcing that he wouldn’t be noosed again.
With nary a pause to await further instruction, the execution-chamber guards forcibly subdued Rodrigues, who had reanimated sufficiently to “put up a furious struggle.” They forced their thrashing victim back onto the garrote, double-checked the metal band this time,** and tightened it until it asphyxiated Rodrigues a second time … then left the now-actually-lifeless body on the machine a full 22 minutes to make good and certain of their work.
* Here quoted from the Oct. 30, 1927 Los Angeles Times. Also see the New York Times from the same date for a truncated paraphrase of the same report.
La Paz, Bolivia, Nov. 5 (AP). — Selected by lot to die for the murder ten years ago of former President Jose Manuel Pando, Alfredo Jauregui, 28, was executed this morning. The young man died instantly from eight bullets from the rifles of a firing squad.
–New York Times, Nov. 6, 1927
Jose Manuel Pando (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish), wealthy landowner, military leader, former president, had seen Bolivia’s Liberal Party to power by prevailing in civil war in 1899, then peaceably handed off power to a Liberal successor in 1904.
The Liberals controlled Bolivia until 1920, but Pando grew overtly critical of his increasingly authoritarian successors. Though the circumstances of his murder in 1917 remain murky, his disgruntled affinity for the upstart Republican party is a likely contributing factor.
Jauregui faced the fusillade proclaiming his innocence; his supposed confederates were the beneficiaries of a Bolivian law permitting only one execution for a single murder … even of the former President’s murder. The four drew lots to determine which would be the “one”.
On this date in 1927, Huibrecht Jacob de Leeuw was hanged for blowing up the mayor of Dewetsdorp, South Africa.
This 26-year-old town clerk had spent himself into debt and started dipping his beak in the public finances to tide him over. Unfortunately for him, the malfeasance was detected.
On April 7, 1927, Mayor von Maltitz openly accused him of corruption at a meeting with the town’s finance committee; the session was adjourned for lunch pending the apparently imminent sack of the young wastrel.
When the committee reconvened (less de Leeuw), it was suddenly blown to smithereens by an explosion.
All three died, but two survived long enough to tell investigators what they’d been working on. As Robin Odell observes in his Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes,
De Leeuw had succeeded in destroying his accusers, along with the damning evidence of the account books but was now a prime murder suspect. He was sent for trial at Bloemfontein in August 1927. A town hall employee testified that he saw two cans of petrol in the town clerk’s office on the day of the explosion. And a local shopkeeper described how de Leeuw had appeared in her shop that afternoon in an agitated state saying, “I only want some matches.”
Clearly, what de Leeuw’s crime packed in megajoules it lacked in subtlety. Even had he made clean kills and left no deathbed implications, it’s hard to imagine how the trail wouldn’t have led right back to the guy who was just in the room with all the victims.
There’s a chapter on this fellow (more words than this author has found for him anywhere else) in a long-out-of-print 1951 South African volume, The Evil that Men Do, by Benjamin Bennett.
Imprisoned as a Cristero sympathizer during this conflict, Correa (
Once just a regular prison electrician, Elliott graduated himself to the euphemism in 1926 and was soon the go-to angel of electric death throughout the northeast. He 
Thanks to wealthy parents, 
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