On this date in 1952, poultry farmer and burglar Alfred Moore hanged at Leeds (Armley) Prison for shooting two Huddersfield policemen dead. Many believe he was wrongly convicted.

Suspected (accurately) of robbing several rural domiciles around Kirkheaton in West Yorkshire, Moore’s farmhouse had been staked out late one night in 1951 by ten plainclothes cops hoping to catch the guy coming or going.

Near midnight, two of their number challenged someone approaching. Was this the master criminal?

Several shots rang out in the gloom, and the midnight rambler fled into the night. By the time their comrades reached them, Duncan Fraser lay dead while Gordon Jagger was mortally wounded.

The latter man would live on several more hours, enough to provide a deathbed identification of Moore as the shooter. That was damning enough to hang Moore at the time.

But years later, Moore’s claims of innocence in the shootings have returned to headlines: we’re far more conscious now of the unreliability of eyewitness identifications — of a stranger seen in the dark — made amid medical duress. And there was never any other evidence implicating Moore save the circumstantial inference following from the fact that it was Moore’s house that was being surveilled. But no ballistics evidence, no blood (the shooting occurred at near point blank range), and no other witness. Investigators even have the name of an alternate suspect. (It’s Clifford Mead, who committed several armed robberies in the area, was known to receive Moore’s stolen goods, and allegedly boasted of shooting two policemen.)

These innocence claims, latterly supported by some Yorkshire police officers, have been welcome news to Moore’s descendants; however, as of this writing, the official reviews of the Criminal Cases Review Commission which could potentially queue Moore up for formal posthumous exoneration have failed to persuade authorities.

On this day..

• 1927: Mateo Correa Magallanes
• 2013: Kepari Leniata burned as a witch
• 1967: Sunny Ang, a murderer without a body
• 1557: Martin Bucer and Paulus Phagius, already in their coffins
• 1528: Ambrosius Spittelmayr
• Themed Set: Anabaptists
• 1481: Diego Suson, by his daughter's hand
• 1997: Michael Carl George
• 1839: Amos Perley and Joshua Doane, for the Upper Canada Rebellion
• 1821: Owen Coffin, main course
• 1885: George Gibson and Wayne Powers
• 1945: Robert Brasillach, intellectual traitor
• 1615: Patrick Stewart, 2nd Earl of Orkney