Hanged April 23, 1845 for poisoning her brother Charles Dimond — and commonly suspected to have offed several other family members by means of arsenic — the “Shapwick Murderess” Sarah Freeman insisted her innocence to her very last breath. “I am as innocent as a lamb,” she said to the hangman William Calcraft as he noosed her.
Serial poisoner or wrongfully executed? Find out more at the Capital Punishment UK Facebook page …
On this day..
- 1935: Fred Blink, with hatred on his lips
- 1941: Harry Gleeson, posthumously exonerated
- 1943: The massacre of Janowa Dolina
- 1886: Robert Silas Fowler, lustful
- 1290: Alv Erlingsson, the Last Viking
- 1801: Angre Kethi, Polygar prey
- 1886: Joseph Jackson and James Wasson, at Fort Smith
- 1945: Massacres of Treuenbrietzen
- Feast Day of St. George
- 1969: Sirhan Sirhan condemned
- 1992: Billy Wayne White, after 47 minutes
- 1945: Albrecht Haushofer, German Resistance intellectual
These callous burial club arsenic poisoners terrify me. Arsenic poisoning is so terrible and to do that to somebody who loves and trusts you just twists me up inside. From the 1820s and increasingly from the late 1830s to about 1860 there was a plethora of familial arsenic killings particularly in East Anglia and the poor in larger U.K towns. It was why arsenic became a poison which needed to be signed for by the purchaser.