We’ve paid tribute before to Christian martyrologies’ adroit remembrances of the dead. December 30 furnishes a crowded example from the Roman Breviary, found here:
Upon the 30th day of December were born into the better life —
At Spoleto, under the Emperor Maximian, the holy martyrs Sabinus, bishop of that see; the deacons Exuperantius and Marcellus, and the President Venustian along with his wife and children. Marcellus and Exuperantius were first racked then heavily cudgelled, then mangled with hooks, and their sides were afterwards burnt until they died. Venustian and his wife and children were shortly afterward put to the sword; holy Sabinus had his hands cut off, and was long imprisoned, and at length lashed to death. These did not all suffer at the same time, but they are all commemorated upon the same day.
At Alexandria, the holy martyrs Mansuetus, Severus, Appian, Donatus, Honorius and their companions.
At Thessalonica, the holy martyr Anysia [about the year 303]. There likewise holy Anysius, bishop of that city. [He succeeded S. Ascole, and died about the year 404.]
Headline from the Tacoma (Wash.) Daily News, June 7, 1895.
On this date in 1895, the hangman noosed for the cycle with single, double, and triple executions in three different U.S. states.
Arkansas
In Morrilltown, William Downs or Downes for criminally assaulting a woman called Pauline Bridlebaugh.
“On the scaffold Downs declared that he was guilty of part but not all he was charged with,” according to multiple newspaper reports. The eight-foot fall failed to snap his neck, and Downs strangled to death over 15 agonizing minutes.
Alabama
“Lee Harris and Abe Mitchell, colored murderers, highwaymen and thieves, were hanged here [Birmingham] today before 2000 people for the murder of Grocerymen Merriweather and Thornton. Both bodies were turned over to the undertakers, who purchased them several weeks ago for $18 from the men themselves.”
From the Oakland Tribune, June 7, 1895.
California
Three Californians hanged, sequentially, at San Quentin prison on the morning of June 7 in an affair timed to ensue the arrival of the 7:40 train from San Francisco, carrying about 100 official witnesses.
Emilio Garcia stabbed and slashed to death a San Bernardino old timer whom he believed to possess a hoard of gold.
Anthony Azoff fatally shot a Southern Pacific detective in the course of a botched robbery of that railroad firm’s offices; he was balked of a suicide attempt in the hours before his execution.
And Patrick Collins acquired more lasting infamy than any of his scaffold brethren by sensationally stabbing to death his estranged wife at the kindergarten where she worked when she refused his demand to hand over her wages.
Collins’s guilt was very apparent, so his trial gave the horrified public ample rein to sketch the brute in terms of the era’s crackpot racist typologies. In one Examiner article tellingly titled “He Was Born for the Rope,” it was postulated that “if a good many of Patrick Collins’ ancestors did not die on the scaffold then either they escaped their desert or there is nothing in heredity … Seeing him you can understand that murder is as natural to such a man when his temper is up as hot speech is to the anger of the civilized.”
Be they ever so headline-conquering in their time, such crimes are like to fade speedily from the public memory. Collins, the man who slaughtered his tightfisted wife, and Collins, the savage ethnic archetype, have improbably survived his moment of notoriety, by imparting to literature the inspiration for San Francisco novelist Frank Norris‘s 1899 offering McTeague.
In McTeague, a vicious husband murders the wife he has abandoned when she refuses him money. The murderer here presents as an overpowering ancestral beast within — attributable, says Christopher Dowd, to Norris’s “study of criminal anthropology, particularly the school of thinking developed by Cesare Lombroso regarding atavism, hereditary criminality, degeneration, and criminal physiognomy. According to Donald Pizer, by the time Norris wrote McTeague, he had developed a ‘preoccupation’ with the themes of atavism and reversion, and ‘particularly with the role of heredity in causing either an obvious physical or mental devolution or a return to an earlier family condition’. Suddenly, Norris had a way to explain the behavior of his murderous protagonist — he was born a criminal, having inherited the degenerate traits and predilections of his Irish ancestors. Combined with the newspaper reports of the Collins murder, criminal anthropology gave Norris all the tools he needed to write, what Pizer calls, ‘that mythical creature of literature, a naturalistic tragedy'”. For example, Norris zooms through the disordered mind of McTeague as he struggles to control himself on one occasion.
He was disturbed, still trembling, still vibrating with the throes of the crisis, but he was the master; the animal was downed, was cowed for this time, at least.
But for all that, the brute was there. Long dormant, it was now at last alive, awake. From now on he would feel its presence continually; would feel it tugging at its chain, watching its opportunity. Ah, the pity of it! Why could he not always love her purely, cleanly? What was this perverse, vicious thing that lived within him, knitted to his flesh?
Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins. Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he to blame?
McTeague does not exit upon the gallows as did his real-life inspiration; instead, having murdered and robbed his wife, the fugitive flees to the scorching desert of Death Valley where he faces a fight to the finish with a friend/rival who has pursued him. McTeague overpowers this foe, but the man’s dying act is to handcuff himself to McTeague — condemning the latter to sure death.
McTeague has long been in the public domain; it can be perused here; a Librivox audio reading of the book is available here. It’s also been adapted to at least two films in the silent era — including one of the genre’s greats — plus a more recent PBS radio drama, an opera, and miscellaneous other media.
The Bluegrass State had what one paper jokingly called a “hanging match” with hangings in the towns of Stanton, West Irvine, and Henderson on this date in 1892 — as we see from this economical entry from the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean of Feb. 6, 1892:
Although not the most historically consequential hangings, uxoricide was good enough to earn Mr. Bush (he’s also called “Simpson Bush” in some accounts) a murder ballad.
… They say he tried to drown her, but in that did not succeed
But with the fatal pistol he carried out the deed
The babe was in its mother’s arms, Up to them he did creep
The demon pulled the trigger and killed her while asleep.
[He stepped] up to her bedside, [and] shot her through the head
The infant drank its mother’s blood, while the woman lay there dead
They say that he was jealous when he done this cruel crime
He shall stand before his Maker and answer another time …
The free imperial city of Nuremberg has been a regular feature on this site thanks to the detailed journal of executions kept by its legendary executioner Franz Schmidt.
We have profiled many of the more remarkable cases individually. Today, we’ll pause for a few of central Europe’s lesser criminals whose deaths at Schmidt’s hand on various August Fourths were more representative of the everyday malefactors who paid the last penalty on early modern scaffolds. All block text records Schmidt’s own words.
August 4, 1586: Hans Weber and Lienhardt Hagen
Hans Weber, of the New Town, a potter and thief, whom I whipped out of Neunkirchen ten years ago; Lienhardt Hagen, of Teusslen, a bath-keeper, alias der Kaltbader, a thief and robber, who with his companion helped to attack people by night, tortured them, burnt them with fire, poured hot grease on them and wounded them grievously; also tortured pregnant women, so that one died at Schwertzenbach; stole all manner of things everywhere. The potter was hanged, the bath-keeper executed on the wheel. The bath-keeper had broken into the church at Lohndorff and stolen the chalice, also helped once to steal 500 florins. (a list of many other small sums follows.)
August 4, 1607: Margaret Marranti
Margaret Marranti, a country girl from the knackers’ sheds, who was in service with the innkeeper there, had intercourse with a carrier whom she did not know, and became pregnant. Took service with the farmer at Dorrenhof at Candlemas, concealing her pregnancy. When she was haymaking in the meadows, was seized with pains and contortions, and when the farmer’s wife said she would send for the midwife, the girl made an excuse, and remaining behind at night, gave birth to a child near a shed by the river Pegnitz. She immediately threw the child into the water and drowned it, though it stirred and struggled. Beheaded with the sword here on this account.
August 4, 1613: Matthew Werdtfritzn
Matthew Werdtfritzn of Furth, a Landzknecht, alias ‘Eightfingers,’ a robber. With the help of a companion he attacked the carrier from Regensburg in the Neuenwald, wounded him and his son mortally, and took about 800 florins’ worth of money and goods. Took 84 florins from the baker woman of Lauff, and wounded her lad in the same way, so that he was thought likely to die. Took 40 florins from a carter and 18 florins from the fisherman of Fach; in all twelve highway roberies. For these crimes he was executed on the wheel as a robber.
This headline tally from the Kalamazoo (Mich.) Gazette of July 1, 1893 omits an additional Georgia hanging on the same day (also overlooked by the Espy File index of U.S. historical executions), but mistakenly attributes the June 29 execution of Pietro Buccieri in Pennsylvania to the 30th; between the two contrary errors, it arrives at the correct total of noosings. A sixth execution occurred by musketry in the Indian Territory on the same day.
(The first post-moratorium hangings actually took place on Friday, December 19: Aqeel Ahmad and Arshad Mehmood, both hanged at Faisalabad Jail.)
“We have started these executions by hanging two terrorists,” Anti-Terrorism Minister Shuja Khanzada said. “Today’s executions of terrorists will boost the morale of the nation, and we are planning to hang more terrorists next week.”
The hanged men on this date had no direct connection to the Peshawar attack; they had instead been condemned for plotting the assassination of former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf.
They were identified as Rasheed Qureshi, Zubair Ahmad, Ghulam Sarwar and Akhlas Akhlaq Ahmed. The last of these men was a Russian national, who protested in vain that he had not even been in Pakistan during the terror plot.
Jordan
Jordan also ended an eight-year moratorium on executions on December 21, 2014 and did so in volume — hanging no fewer than 11 people at dawn for murders dating back to 2005 and 2006.
The Roman martyrology distinguishes August 9 as the feast date of several minor ancient saints of questionable veracity purportedly martyred by the persecutions of Rome.
Firmus and Rusticus
The Virgin of the Rosary with Saints Firmus and Rusticus (1603) by Pietro Marone
Saints Firmus and Rusticus are two gentlemen of Bergamo who are supposed to have wound up martyred in Verona under Diocletian‘s persecutions. There’s an Acts of Firmus and Rusticus that the contemporary church does not consider authentic; it’s possible that if they really existed they might have been North African Christians whose remains were translated to Verona.
Firmus and Rusticus are not the patron saints of Romeo and Juliet‘s hometown; that honor instead goes to Zeno.
August 9 is the vigil of St. Lawrence‘s martyrdom in Rome. St. Romanus is a legendary spinoff on Lawrence: a Roman guard who is supposed to have been so moved by Lawrence that he solicited baptism from the saint, and was immediately martyred for his trouble. Although his dubious historicity — one can’t but suspect outright fiction — has ushered him into the martyrology’s footnotes, he was formerly consequential enough to be sculpted for the colonnade of St. Peter’s.
Noccolo Mauruzi da Tolentino unseats Bernardino della Ciarda at the Battle of San Romano, by Paolo Uccello (c. 1435-1455).
Secundian, Marcellian and Verian
At last we have St. Secundian, another Decian martyr who was supposedly a Senator or similar VIP. August 9 marks his martyrdom perhaps near Civitavecchia, along with two bookish minions — students or scholars of some sort.
