On this date in 1962, Marthinus Rossouw was hanged in Pretoria after an unusual defense strategy failed to repel a headline-grabbing murder charge.

Rossouw shot dead Baron Dieterich Joachim Gunther von Schauroth, a rich farmer (dude was born in a castle) who had been forced into city living by a long run of drought and was known for the life expectancy-compromising habit of toting around large sums of cash.

Rossouw insisted at trial that the killing had been at Von Schauroth’s own instigation, so freighted with care was the victim’s life that he implored his younger friend to end it. The defendant hoped thereby to mitigate the sentence as a case of murder by consent.*

Whether telling the truth or not, Rossouw didn’t make a very credible witness; caught in several lies and omissions, and naturally lacking any corroborating witness to the alleged murder pact, the jury gave him no slack.

Neither did the noose.

* The proper legal handling of a case where the victim of a homicide has freely desired to die is a longstanding salami-slicing juridical problem — witness a whole chapter in an 1897 British primer on consent issues in the law.

On this day..

• 1679: Five Jesuits, for the Popish Plot
• 1483: Fernando II, Duke of Braganza
• 1890: Elizabeth and Josiah Potts, wife and husband
• 1684: Sir Thomas Armstrong, Whig plotter
• 1375: Niccolo di Toldo, in the arms of St. Catherine of Siena
• 1816: Peter Lung, uxoricide
• 1979: Bill Stewart, ABC News reporter
• 1944: Jakob Edelstein and family
• 1945: 8 American flyers at Fukuoka
• 1911: Sitarane and Fontaine, Reunion Island occultists
• 1940: Tirailleurs Senegalais, for France
• 1864: William Johnson, a bad example