On this date in 1927, Huibrecht Jacob de Leeuw was hanged for blowing up the mayor of Dewetsdorp, South Africa.

This 26-year-old town clerk had spent himself into debt and started dipping his beak in the public finances to tide him over. Unfortunately for him, the malfeasance was detected.

On April 7, 1927, Mayor von Maltitz openly accused him of corruption at a meeting with the town’s finance committee; the session was adjourned for lunch pending the apparently imminent sack of the young wastrel.

When the committee reconvened (less de Leeuw), it was suddenly blown to smithereens by an explosion.

All three died, but two survived long enough to tell investigators what they’d been working on. As Robin Odell observes in his Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes,

De Leeuw had succeeded in destroying his accusers, along with the damning evidence of the account books but was now a prime murder suspect. He was sent for trial at Bloemfontein in August 1927. A town hall employee testified that he saw two cans of petrol in the town clerk’s office on the day of the explosion. And a local shopkeeper described how de Leeuw had appeared in her shop that afternoon in an agitated state saying, “I only want some matches.”

Clearly, what de Leeuw’s crime packed in megajoules it lacked in subtlety. Even had he made clean kills and left no deathbed implications, it’s hard to imagine how the trail wouldn’t have led right back to the guy who was just in the room with all the victims.

There’s a chapter on this fellow (more words than this author has found for him anywhere else) in a long-out-of-print 1951 South African volume, The Evil that Men Do, by Benjamin Bennett.

On this day..

• 1921: Fanya Baron, anarchist lioness
• 1915: Cerkez Ahmed, disposable fanatic
• 1921: Carl Wanderer, of the Ragged Stranger case
• 324 B.C.E.: Glaucias, negligent physician
• 1946: Takashi Sakai
• 1567: The Michelade of Nimes
• 1724: Christian George, Peter Rombert, Peter Dutartre, and Michael Boneau
• 1981: Mustapha Danso
• 1814: Mary Antoine, jealous lover
• 1860: Juan Rafael Mora Porras, President of Costa Rica
• 1630: John Billington, signer of the Mayflower Compact
• 1952: George Muldowney, for loving and killing the original Bond girl