One hundred years ago today at Bussy-les-Daours on the Somme, Canadian Trooper Alexander Butler was shot for the unprovoked murder of another soldier during World War I.
Butler was a veteran soldier with six-plus years in the 7th Hussars. For obscure reasons possibly tracing to multiple head injuries he had sustained in falls from horse during World War I, Butler on June 8 approached a fellow Hussar named Mickleburgh and suddenly poured five rifle rounds into his chest.
Butler was one of only two Canadian soldiers executed for murder during the Great War. (Twenty-two others were shot for desertion, and one for cowardice.) Those two soldiers were excluded from the 2006 posthumous pardon of Commonwealth servicemen who were “shot at dawn” during the war.
On this day..
- 1778: Bathsheba Spooner, the first woman hanged in the USA
- 1350: Tidericus the organist
- 1798: Father John Murphy, Wexford Rebellion leader
- Corpses Strewn: The Murrell Excitement
- 1835: A white man at Vicksburg and two black men at Livingston, and five slaves at Beatties Bluff
- 1752: Thomas Wilford, the first hanged under the Murder Act of 1751
- 1914?: K., in Kafka's The Trial
- 1945: Louis Till, father of Emmett
- 1931: Peter Kürten, the Vampire of Düsseldorf
- 1934: Ernst Roehm, SA chief
- 1983: Phillipa Mdluli, enterprising businesswoman
- 1706: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita, the Kongolese Saint Anthony
- 1822: The audacious Denmark Vesey