1788: Elisabetha Gassner
Add comment July 16th, 2020 Headsman
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.
On this day..
- 1860: George Waines, forensically boned - 2019
- 1714: Eleven at Tyburn, amid recidivism - 2018
- 1450: Jack Cade posthumously quartered - 2017
- 1950: The Chaplain-Medic Massacre - 2016
- 995: Tormod Kark - 2015
- 1517: Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, plotter - 2014
- 1793: Joseph Chalier, Jacobin martyr - 2013
- 1936: Mary Frances Creighton and Everett Applegate - 2012
- 1937: Pavel Vasiliev, peasant poet - 2011
- 1676: Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers - 2010
- 1546: Anne Askew, the only woman tortured in the Tower - 2009
- 1573: Wigbolt Ripperda, Haarlem city governor - 2008
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Common Criminals,Crime,Death Penalty,Execution,Germany,History,Holy Roman Empire,Public Executions,Theft,Women
Tags: 1780s, 1788, elisabetha gassner, july 16, oberdischingen
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