Northern Ireland checks in today at a half-century death penalty-free, dating back to the hanging this date in 1961 of Robert McGladdery.

An agricultural laborer and “well known bad lad”, McGladdery followed a young woman named Pearl Gamble out of a dance hall one night and strangled and stabbed her. It became an open-and-shut case when the police tail surveilling him witnessed McGladdery tramping into some undergrowth where his bloody dance-hall clothes were stashed.

This was all the more remarkable because McGladdery knew he was being watched. In fact, the Daily Mail later got into hot water with the crown because it went and interviewed the suspect: that interview was published while McGladdery was still free, the day before he decided to pay his respects to the evidence that could hang him.*

The case is the subject of the BBC “dramatised documentary” Last Man Hanging, as well as a couple of books.

(Review of Orchid Blue.)

* See London Times, Feb. 18, 1962.

On this day..

• 1583: Edward Arden, Shakespearean kin
• 1769: Three Spitalfields weavers, well located
• 1717: Five at Tyburn
• 1531: John Tewkesbury, Thomas More's unwilling guest
• 1689: William Davis, the Golden Farmer
• Themed Set: The creation of a Newgate Calendar legend
• 1879: Swift Runner, wendigo
• 1806: Hepburn Graham, HMS St. George rapist
• 1704: John Smith, peruke-maker and highwayman for a week
• 1946: A triple execution in Washington, DC
• 1974: Mun Segwang, errant assassin
• 1786: Hannah Ocuish, age 12
• 1882: Guglielmo Oberdan