(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)
At 11:35 a.m. on this day in 1880, three teen boys were publicly hanged in Canton, Ohio. George E. Mann was sixteen, Gustave Adolph Ohr was somewhere between fifteen and seventeen, and John Sammet(t) had just turned eighteen the day before. Between them, they had committed two murders.
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George Mann and Gustave Ohr came from similar backgrounds: both lost a parent in early childhood — George’s mother and Gustave’s father — and both didn’t adjust well. By the summer of 1879, both boys had run away from home. They were riding the rails when they met each other and began traveling with an older tramp, John Watmough.
The trio had reached Alliance, Ohio when, on June 27, 1879, Gustave and George decided to rob Watmough as he slept. They beat him on the head with a railroad coupling pin, mortally wounding him, and the boys took his watch, money and clothes and ran away. Watmough was able to crawl to a nearby house and mumble a few words before dying. His killers were arrested within minutes.
George, although he insisted it was Gustave who’d struck the fatal blows, was convicted of first-degree murder on December 6. Gustave was convicted on December 13. On December 31, both were sentenced to death. George went to his grave saying he was innocent, but his partner-in-crime refused to cinch his clemency argument by taking full responsibility.
According to the Stark County Democrat, while awaiting their deaths, George and Gustave were both able to obtain “many luxuries” by selling copies of the gallows ballads they supposedly wrote themselves. (Mann’s | Ohr’s)
John Sammett, like George Mann, lost his mother at a very early age and lived with his father and stepmother at the time of his crime. Like the Bavaria-born Gustave Ohr, he was of German parentage, although John was born in Ohio. He developed a reputation as a petty thief and was arrested several times, but his relatives always bailed him out of trouble.
In August of 1879, John and a sixteen-year-old friend, Christopher Spahler, broke into a saloon. They were arrested, and Spahler agreed to turn state’s evidence and testify against his erstwhile friend. The burglary trial was scheduled for November 26; the day before, John tracked down Spahler and tried to get him to change his mind. Spahler would not relent, and John shot him in the chest.
People heard the shot and came running; Spahler died a short time later without speaking, but both John and the murder weapon were still at the crime scene. He was arrested immediately, and on March 2, 1880 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
This Akron Law Review article notes,
The public hanging of Mann and Ohr, along with John Sammett, was the occasion for a community-wide extravaganza. People came to the small town of Canton in eastern Ohio by excursion train from as far away as Chicago and Pittsburgh to witness the event. A circus was part of the extravaganza [literally, Coup‘s circus was in town at the same time -ed.] and the night before the hangings included much music, cannon firing, speech making and similar merriment. The next morning, Mann and the other two teenaged boys were hanged in the city square of Canton before an estimated crowd of 10,000 people!
After the triple hanging, sheriffs deputies placed the three bodies in the jail corridor and permitted the entire crowd to file through and view the bodies. The public viewing lasted almost four hours, with the doors being closed at 3:30 p.m.
This was the first time the state of Ohio had executed minors.
These three young killers were featured in Daniel Right Miller’s 1903 book The Criminal Classes: Causes and Cures, which remarks (speaking of Ohr specifically) “that parental neglect, impure literature, and vicious companions were all responsible for this ruined life and forced death.”
On this day..
- 1950: The Martyred, at the outset of the Korean War
- 1999: Eduardo Agbayani, omnishambles execution
- 1942: Gordon Cummins, the Blackout Ripper
- 1942: Evzen Rosicky, athlete
- 1483: Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers
- 1646: Jan Creoli, for sodomy in slavery
- 2003: He Xiuling, Ma Qingxui, Li Juhua and Dai Donggui
- 10 executions that defined the 1980s
- 1804: Georges Cadoudal, Chouan
- 1790: Thomas Bird, the first federal execution under the U.S. constitution
- 1591: Euphane MacCalzean, witch
- 1579: Hatano Hideharu, en route to the Tokugawa Shogunate
- 1959: Charles Starkweather, Nebraska spree killer
I found 2 mistakes in this account. I researched this story for months with my father in the archives of the Stark County Courthouse sixty years ago. We had a keen interest since one of the young perpetrators was my great grandfather’s brother. John Sammet is correctly spelled with one T. (It was my grandmother’s maiden name!) The boy he murdered was named Christopher Spuhler, not “Spahler.” Kimberly A. Kenney’s account in MURDER IN STARK COUNTY has that right. Sammet’s name was misspelled in some newspaper accounts, but is actually spelled with one “T”. My father wrote a novel based on the story entitled “The Black Minute.”
We should bring this back. Only make all the high school kids watch it.
It looks like Mann and Ohr, or whoever actually wrote their gallows ballads, ripped them off the 1874 ballad for Christopher Rafferty (or the 1858 ballad for James Rodgers that Rafferty’s ballad was ripped off of). If you compare all the ballads side by side the plagiarism is obvious.