On this date in 1989, the then-united Czechoslovakia hanged Vladimir Lulek for slaughtering his wife and four children. (Czech link, as are the others in this post.)
Lulek, who died at Prague’s Pankrac Prison, has the distinction of being the last person executed in what now constitutes the present-day Czech Republic. (A Slovak man named Stefan Svitek was put to death later that same year in Bratislava; Svitek holds that same distinction for both present-day Slovakia and for the former Czechoslovakia as a whole.)
On this day..
- Feast Day of St. Apronian the Executioner
- 1610: Pierre Canal, Geneva sodomite
- 1715: Ann Wright, branded
- 1637: Tabaniyassi Mehmed Pasha, former Grand Vizier
- 1940: Mikhail Koltsov, Soviet journalist
- 1905: Elisabeth Wiese, the angel-maker of St. Pauli
- 1708: Indian Sam and his female accomplice
- 1951: The first four of the Martinsville seven
- 1945: Carl Goerdeler, as penance for the German people
- Daily Double: 1945, and the legacy of Valkyrie
- 1461: Owen Tudor, sire of sires
- 1940: Vsevolod Meyerhold
- 1512: Hatuey, defied Spanish colonization