On this date in 1996, the first westerner hanged for murder in Singapore got his deserts in Changi Prison.

Mild-mannered John Martin Scripps had created a sensation in the city-state for turning South African tourist Gerard Lowe into a sack full of dismembered body parts at Clifford Pier.

“The tourist from hell” argued in defense that it had all been a gay panic after Lowe came onto him. Not a bit of it.

Turns out Scripps, recently absconded from British custody after his latest in a series of drug and theft arrests,* had used the same chop-shop m.o. on a Canadian mother and son in Thailand and, as with Lowe, leached their electronic assets thereafter.

(Ever the jet-setter, Scripps was also a suspect in three other murders — of two Brits in Central America and of an American male prostitute in San Francisco.)

“John disappeared on several trips and went to the United States and South-East Asia,” his Mexican ex-wife said later. “I knew something awful was happening, but I could not believe he had started killing people.”

After conviction, Scripps declined to appeal or petition for clemency, saying he wanted the law to take its course quickly. He was hanged alongside two drug traffickers.

* He’d learned butchery in prison — so well that he’d talked about opening a shop when he got out. Which is sort of what he did.

On this day..

• 1418: The hostages of the Armagnac siege of Senlis
• 1800: William M'Ilnea, true to the cause
• 1246: Brandur Kolbeinsson, Age of the Sturlungs beheading
• 1374: Tile von Damm, Braunschweig mayor
• 1012: St. Alphege, Archbishop of Canterbury
• 1779: James Hackman, sandwich wrecker
• 1791: Emanuel the runaway slave
• 1928: Charles Birger, bootlegger
• 1662: John Barkstead, Miles Corbet, and John Okey, renditioned regicides
• 1314: Tour de Nesle Affair adulterers
• 1945: Gen. Charles Delestraint
• 1995: Richard Snell - did he go out with a bang?