On this date in 1812, William Booth was hanged at Stafford for counterfeiting.
Booth might have murdered his brother John, who was found beaten to death in a Warwickshire stable in 1808. He defeated that charge for want of evidence.
But he would not be two times lucky before the bar.
As a “farmer” living on 200 acres, he enjoyed the privacy to build his own mint, complete with forged royal stamps for churning out banknotes — more than enough cause to hang a man should he be caught, which Booth was. He was a difficult fellow to arrest, the Bury and Norwich Post reported (Aug. 19, 1812), because his farmhouse turned out to be “a little fort, full of trap-doors, and barred and bolted like a bastile.”
Booth’s engineering acumen might have come in handy for his executioners. As a broadside notes, the gallows Booth
ascended with a firm and steady step, but turned his back upon the populace almost immediately; after some time spent in prayer, the rope was adjusted, and a signal being given by the malefactor, (throwing his handkerchief from him that he was ready to submit to his fate,) the drop sunk, when, shocking to relate, by the cord slipping from the fatal tree, the unfortunate man fell from the top of the gallows upon the platform, a distance of eight or ten feet, where he remained motionless and insensible for some minutes.
The stunned prisoner was gradually revived, and redoubled his pieties. The fall must have rendered the noose unusable, because for some reason a delay ensued sufficient to stretch out the proceedings to two full hours, all of which Booth spent in the shadow of the gallows. Even when they finally had him trussed up and ready to hang again, they needed a do-over: Booth once more dropped his handkerchief, but the drop embarrassingly failed to dislodge. Booth, who had twice prepared himself to walk to the brink of death only to twice survive, asked for his handkerchief back once the apparatus had been fixed so that he could re-drop it.
Having faced two capital trials, and two executions, Booth couldn’t even get buried right on the first time. Apparently a re-drawing of the county line required his remains to be exhumed and re-interred, giving rise to a ballad, “Twice Tried, Twice Hung, Twice Buried”.
(Although this version proposes twice hanged and once drowned: suffice to say, Booth lived an interesting death.)
On this day..
- 1905: Thomas Tattersall, taking the hangman with him - 2020
- 1963: Eddie Lee Mays, the last executed in New York - 2019
- 1293: Capocchio, Inferno-bound - 2018
- 1720: Matthew Tompkins, Daniel Lazenby, and Maurice Fitzgerald - 2017
- 1741: Juan de la Silva, Spanish Negro - 2016
- 1817: Four arsonists in the rain - 2015
- 1714: Constantine Brancoveanu and his sons - 2014
- 1941: Josef Jakobs, the last executed in the Tower of London - 2012
- 2010: Two Afghan adulterers stoned - 2011
- 2004: Atefah Rajabi Shalaaleh, schoolgirl - 2010
- 1986: The Stoning of Soraya M - 2009
- 1963: Henry John Burnett, Scotland's last hanging - 2008