31 | October | 2013 | Executed Today

They say the coward dies a thousand deaths. Executed Today has now made it six full trips around the sun, and died two thousand, one hundred and ninety-two.*

We’re getting pretty long in the tooth in blog years, and as noted in this space last year blogging daily for five, and now six, years puts us well past our original win conditions for this site.

There has been some consideration hereabouts about how and when to let this blog die its own cowards’ death, but there are still so many stories left untold for the faithful executioner. “Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau,” as Madame du Barry is said to have begged under the guillotine. Just one moment more … one more year at least.

Andrew Jackson’s execution of six militiamen in the War of 1812 introduced the term “Coffin Handbills” to the language.

Traffic

We logged about 2.77 million pageviews over the past twelve months, bringing the site near 10 million all time. (It should reach that milestone in about a month.)

That figure was spiked by a Reddit frontpage referral to the fascinating medical-history guest post on the nameless woman “Aochababa”, whose 1771 beheading and subsequent medical dissection initiated a new era of anatomical learning in Japan. That post, originally published in 2010, had five-sixths of Executed Today’s one-day traffic record (53,646 on May 1, 2013). On that strength it became the most-trafficked post on the site for the entire year, the most common visitor entrance page other than the home site, vaulting from undeserved obscurity into the site’s top 10 all time.

Also making an enormous move: the Ottoman Grand Vizier Pargali Ibrahim Pasha. This post just snuck into the top 60 last year as it began receiving search traffic after the debut of a Turkish costume drama about the reign of Pasha’s friend, sovereign, and executioner Suleiman the Magnificent. In Executed Today’s sixth year, Pargali was consistently among the top two or three most-seen posts day in and day out; it’s the ninth-most-trafficked post all-time on the site as of this writing, but if the next year is like the last, it could easily stand as high as no. 2 next Halloween. (A different post about the capable heir Suleiman foolishly executed also reached the top 50.) For close-but-no-cigar cultural ephemera, the TV series Vikings drove “Ragnar Lodbrok” to the no. 21 search term for the year — surely a spoiler for viewers who learned that the show’s protagonist is destined for execution in a snakepit. Like those snakes, such search wins can be poisonous; while once we had one of the few pages on the whole Intertubes about this fellow, it has subsequently been buried by posts about the television program.**

Current events spurred other movers. Eva Dugan, the last woman executed in Arizona, shot up into the top 20 thanks to the wall-to-wall media coverage of Jodi Arias’s Arizona capital murder case. John Bennett, the last U.S. military execution to date, cracked the top-posts list for the first time because of Major Nidal Hasan‘s death penalty court-martial for the Fort Hood shootings. We’re not above drawing such connections explicitly ourselves on Twitter, where we’ve sent about 17,200 tweets (4,500 in the past year) to a follower universe now nearing 3,000.

The all-time top posts hereabouts run as follows:

1. Ted Bundy (January 24, 1989)
2. Eleven from the Stutthof concentration camp (July 4, 1946)
3. Mohammad Najibullah (September 27, 1996)
4. Samuel K. Doe (September 9, 1990)
5. Rainey Bethea (August 14, 1936)
6. Green Tea Hag (March 4, 1771)
7. Hideki Tojo (December 23, 1948)
8. Jesse Washington lynched (May 15, 1916)
9. Pargali Ibrahim Pasha (March 15, 1536)
10. Thomas Cromwell (July 28, 1540)
11. Karl Hermann Frank (May 22, 1946)
12. Nguyen Van Lem (February 1, 1968)
13. Fou Tchou-li (April 10, 1905)
14. Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni (July 19, 2005)
15. Eugen Weidmann (June 17, 1939)
16. Pulitzer Prize-winning firing squad photograph from the Iranian Revolution (August 27, 1979)
17. James Corbitt (November 28, 1950)
18. The rapists of Maggie dela Riva (May 17, 1972)
19. Allen Lee “Tiny” Davis (July 8, 1999)
20. Eva Dugan (February 21, 1930)
21. Three partisans in Minsk (October 26, 1941)
22. Charles Starkweather (June 25, 1959)
23. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (June 19, 1953)
24. Hamida Djandoubi (September 10, 1977)
25. Claus von Stauffenberg (July 21, 1944)
26. Amon Goeth (September 13, 1946)
27. Pvt. Eddie Slovik (January 31, 1945)
28. Mohamed Oufkir (August 16, 1972)
29. Karla Faye Tucker (February 3, 1998)
30. Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray (January 12, 1928)
31. Eight July 20 anti-Hitler plotters (August 8, 1944)
32. Witold Pilecki (May 25, 1948)
33. John Bennett (April 13, 1961)
34. Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin (December 11, 1962)
35. Michael X (May 16, 1975)
36. Henry Francis Hays (June 6, 1997)
37. Robert Francois Damiens (March 28, 1757)
38. Dhananjoy Chatterjee (August 14, 2004)
39. Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters (January 9, 1923)
40. Princess Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud (July 15, 1977)
41. Du’a Khalil Aswad (April 7, 2007)
42. The Stoning of Soraya M. (August 15, 1986)
43. Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya (November 29, 1941)
44. Partisans by the Sonderbataillon Dirlewanger (Uncertain date, 1942)
45. Mary Surratt and the Lincoln assassination conspirators (July 7, 1865)
46. Hannah Ocuish (December 20, 1786)
47. Che Guevara (October 9, 1967)
48. Prince Mustafa (Oct. 6, 1553)
49. Marion Braidfute (Uncertain date, 1297)
50. Maximilien Robespierre (July 28, 1794)
51. The Belsen war criminals (December 13, 1945)
52. William Johnson (June 20, 1864)
53. Mohammed Bijeh (March 16, 2005)
54. The In Cold Blood killers (April 14, 1965)
55. Henri Languille (June 28, 1905)
56. The Lonely Hearts Killers (March 8, 1951)
57. Cameron Todd Willingham (February 17, 2004)
58. Father Miguel Pro (November 23, 1927)
59. Dr. Jose Rizal (December 30, 1896)
60. Willie Francis (when he was successfully executed May 9, 1947)
61. Cleopatra’s sister Arsinoe (late 41 BCE)
62. Not Willie Francis (when he survived the electric chair May 3, 1946)
63. John Wayne Gacy (May 10, 1994)
64. Mona Fandey (November 2, 2001)
65. 14-year-old George Stinney, Jr. (June 16, 1944)
66. England’s last hangings (August 13, 1964)

For whatever it’s worth, the most popular post actually published in Year VI was by a very wide margin the first-person account of a horrifically botched Thailand execution.

One of the more noticeable site trends in the past year has been the continued steady growth in traffic share of mobile devices. Those accounted for only a bit over 10% of the traffic in Year V (Nov. 2011-Oct. 2012), but that soared to 25% in Year VI (Nov. 2012-Oct. 2013). The month-over-month change shows a still stronger trend than that, with site views from desktop devices bottoming out at 68.7% in August 2013 before rebounding ever so slightly the past two months. Both mobile phone views and tablet views have grown by about +50% relative to where they were last October — perhaps facilitated by plumping for WPTouch Pro, money very well spent by my lights.

Guest Posts

The site has always managed to get by on the kindness of strangers, several of whom once again contributed a trove of guest posts.

In addition to those named below, a special thanks is due my correspondent “Mastro Titta” (here‘s the inspiration for the name) for adding countless names and dates to our expansive archives of potential source material. Similar gratitude goes to Tom E. for reasons which will become clear in the near future.

Grazie to them, and to all of these …

Co-authored with Bora Chung

Our 2001 days‘ meta-post musings on the death penalty in dystopian literature

Nancy Bilyeau

May 17, 1521: Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham
May 27, 1541: Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury

Richard Clark

July 29, 1879: Kate Webster of the Barnes Mystery

dogboy

May 23, 1876: The Lennie mutineers
July 14, 1584: Balthasar Gerard, William the Silent’s assassin

Robert K. Elder

Mar. 9, 1981: Steven T. Judy
Aug. 16, 2001: Jeffrey Doughtie

Meaghan Good

With this year’s contributions (and there are many more already scheduled for future dates), Meaghan’s published posts on Executed today ran past 100. As noted last year, we’d have been hard-pressed to keep this operation running all these years without her prolific and thoroughly researched output.

Nov. 13, 1943: the Zalkind family
Nov. 14, 1930: Mao Zedong’s wife
Nov. 15, 2011: Oba Chandler
Nov. 28, 1828: James “Little Jim” Guild
Dec. 13, 1889: John Gilman
Dec. 16, 1678: Stephen Arrowsmith
Dec. 23, 1926: Petrus Stephanus Hauptfleisch
Dec. 27, 2001: Kojiro Asakura
Jan. 6, 1836: Abraham Prescott
Jan. 19, 1894: Albert Bomberger
Feb. 6, 1997: Michael Carl George
Feb. 18, 1862: Margaret Coghlan
Feb. 26, 1909: C.Y. Timmons
Mar. 22, 1882: George Parrott, who was tanned and made into a pair of shoes after hanging
Mar. 24, 1936: George W. Barrett
Mar. 30, 1883: Emeline Meaker
Apr. 6, 1752: Mary Blandy
Apr. 7, 1933: The “killers” of Pavlik Morozov, an engrossing story of Soviet mythmaking
Apr. 13, 1942: Four Jews from Bedzin and Sosnowiec, with a cameo in the classic Holocaust graphic novel Maus
Apr. 15, 1921: Mailo Segura
Apr. 25, 1900: A triple hanging in McMinnville, Tenn.
Apr. 27, 1940: Wilhelm Kusserow
May 2, 1883: Heinrich “Henry” Furhmann
May 12, 1936: Buck Ruxton
May 25, 1721: Joseph Hanno”, “miserable African”
June 1, 1936: Arnold Sodeman
June 3, 1886: 22 Uganda Martyrs
June 8, 1866: Anton Probst
June 10, 1944: The Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane
June 14, 1897: Choka Ebin
June 18, 1827: Kentucky Gov. Joseph Desha pardons his plainly guilty son Isaac
June 20, 1944: Jakob Edelstein and family
June 24, 1890: A segregated quadruple hanging
July 1, 1943: Gay Dutch Resistance fighter Willem Arondeus
July 9, 1920: Lee Monroe Betterton
July 30, 1888: A 76-pound Newfoundland
Aug. 9, 1786: Tom, a “faithful, industrious, healthy slave”
Aug. 18, 1941: 534 Lithuanian Jewish intellectuals
Aug. 19, 1897: Harvey DeBerry
Aug. 23, 1849: Rebecca Smith, to save her children from want
Aug. 28, 1765: Three Burglarious Johns
Aug. 31, 1876: The reprieve of boy serial killer Jesse Pomeroy
Sep. 12, 1864: George Nelson, Indiana Jones rapist
Sep. 15, 1939: Charles McLachlan
Sep. 18, 1953: Louisa May Merrifield
Oct. 2, 1901: James Edward Brady
Oct. 4, 1648: Alice Bishop
Oct. 5, 1943: The children of the Bialystok Ghetto
Sometime in early Oct. 1943: Yitskhok Rudahevski
Oct. 16, 1946: Neville Heath, torture-killer
c. 19: Some wicked priests of Isis, according to Josephus

Melissa S. Green

Apr. 14, 1950: Eugene LaMoore Alaska’s last execution

Courtney Thomas

Mar. 25, 1586: Saint Margaret Clitherow
May 14, 1631: Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven

Robert Wilhelm

Jan. 10, 1879: Benjamin Hunter, of the Hunter-Armstrong Tragedy

Interviews

In addition to outright guest posts, interviews with a variety of expert sand specialists illuminated a number of unusual cases.

Carlos DeLuna, one of the more compelling innocence cases in recent death penalty history and the subject of an exhaustive 2012 Columbia University Human Rights Law Review investigation, Los Tocayos Carlos (The Two Carloses)
The Sow of Falaise, which was the occasion for my first podcast
All about British naval sodomy
The audacious pro-American revolution British terrorist “John the Painter”
The only Black and Tan paramilitary executed during the Irish War of Independence
The astounding wilderness execution of Pvt. Charles B. Henry during an ill-fated arctic expedition
The long career of Nuremberg executioner Frantz Schmidt, subject of a recent book
Ruth Ellis, the last woman hanged in Great Britain

Editor’s Picks

Regardless of traffic prominence, these are a few of the many daily posts that were among the most interesting to research and write.

Evstolia Ragozinnikova, the pianist turned revolutionary suicide bomber
Britain’s last hangings for sodomy — two men whom Dickens saw in the condemned cells when he toured Newgate, and noted in Sketches by Boz
The Popish Plot, England’s 17th century anti-Catholic freakout
The corpses posthumously executed for the still-mysterious Gowrie Conspiracy
Young delinquent James Rodgers, whose hanging ballad was reappropriated later to remember a presidential assassin
Beguine heretic Na Prous Boneta
James Legg, who was hanged for murder and then crucified for art
The man hanged in 1912 by the exertions of young investigative journalist Emile Gauvreau
The Vichy admiral who brought North Africa over to the Allied side and made enemies from Hitler to De Gaulle was assassinated … and the assassin executed with suspicious haste
The Ordinary of Newgate’s lucrative racket, which Defoe scorned
Mayan revolutionary Jacinto Canek
The death row prisoners defended by future Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine
The great, failed Civil War incendiary plot of one of Tennessee’s finest potters
Was Vladimir Vetrov the greatest Cold War spy?
“It was at that point that I began to hate Sihanouk”
Ginggaew Lorsoungnern, who had to be executed twice
What happened at Thanh Phong?
Stalin-era purgee Alexander Kosarev and the astonishing story of the Spartak Moskva football club
Common criminals turned folk saints, such as Juan Soldado, Emile Dubois and Udilberto Vasquez
General George Pickett, of the Civil War “Pickett’s Charge”, had to flee to Canada after the war because he ordered this mass execution
Two African-American U.S. soldiers who deserted from the army occupying the Philippines to the Filipino resistance
Sean Sellers, the juvenile matricide gamer whose crime gave comfort to the Eighties’ anti-Dungeons & Dragons campaigners
Roger Bushell, who orchestrated World War II’s famed “Great Escape”
A 1662 Bury St. Edmunds witch trial that would be cited as precedent years later in Salem, Mass.
Jesuit missionary Jean de Brebeuf, author of the “Huron Carol” and possibly the guy who named the Indian stick-and-ball sport lacrosse
At last, we get to the eunuchs
Pioneering Chinese journalist Shao Piaoping
The Bonnot Gang: “I would have liked to eat black bread with black hands, but I was forced to eat white bread with red hands.”
Vasily Klubkov, the luckless young partisan tortured by the Soviets into admitting to being tortured by the Germans into betraying Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya
“We see nothing more frequent than Persons confessing the Crimes that others had suffer’d for before.”
We finally got around to Socrates
Murders in once-lucrative, and very exploitive, guano islands
Deserters from the Wehrmacht whom the victorious Allies allowed to be executed by the Wehrmacht immediately after World War II
The Danish teenage migrant worker whom Rembrandt sketched on the gibbet
John Gibson‘s 1890s murder case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court as a vehicle to contest Jim Crow
Thomas Hickey for a plot early in the American Revolution to kill or kidnap George Washington and/or to betray New York and the whole Continental Army to the British
The Simon of Trent “blood libel” case
A notorious triple lynching in Duluth, Minn.
Leatherlips
Saddam Hussein’s terrifying 1979 Ba’ath Party coup, a purge caught live on camera
Herostratus torched one of the wonders of the world to get famous. Guess it worked
An East German border guard who defected but whom the Stasi lured/kidnapped back
Elites’ sodomy in the Dutch East Indies
“John Nelson”, who never gave his real name and is still to this day a cipher
A Cold War defector from North Korea who turned out to have been a spy all along
Lynch victim Emmett Till’s father Louis Till was executed by the U.S. military overseas for raping Italian women, and murdering one of them
John Hurley‘s ugly 1853 execution served the emerging study of how to scientifically hang a man
A 1997 wrongful execution in Taiwan
The ethically questionable Visible Human Project
Two Nantucks and a white prospector in Yukon’s Klondike gold rush
Australian con Joseph Samuel survived three consecutive hanging attempts
The sketchy Matabele War field execution ordered by scouting movement founder Lord Baden-Powell
King Abdullah’s assassins
Do you love your libation enough to mount a Tipplers’ Revolt?
All about how Peter the Great got rid of the Streltsy
Some executions of Germany’s southwest Africa Herero genocide

Meta Content

A want of hours in the day led us to go easy on some of the aspired-to meta content. In addition to the post for our 2001st consecutive day (op. cit.), we extended our sidebar “decade-defining executions” series to the 1970s, and ginned up an election day tour of U.S. Presidents and the death penalty. We also took a very quick and dirty look at which U.S. governors have signed the most death warrants.

If all goes well, we’ll manage a bit more of these in the year to come.

* Actual sum total of persons executed in the 2,192 posts — or however many it ends up being — would be an interesting figure to have but an extremely tedious (not to say depressing) job to compile.

** This same thing happened with Cameron Todd Willingham: when the New Yorker put the story in the national eye, our longstanding account of Willingham’s likely innocence was one of the few already online and became one of the most visited pages on the site in 2009. As one can see from the traffic ranker above where it now sits at #57, it’s been subsumed for everyday websearchers by the many thousands of new Willingham links in the past few years.

Executed Today

Historical executions, day by day.

Daily Archives: 31 October, 2013

Six Years Under: Executed Today’s Sixth Annual Report