Author Archives: Headsman

1901: Willie Louw, Boer commando

Posted on by

Field-Cornet Willie Louw, a guerrilla in the Second Boer War, was shot by the British on this date in 1901.

A nephew to the Scots-descended Dutch reform minister Andrew Murray, William Hofmeyer Louw was a Colesberg farmer when that area — part of the British Cape Colony — was invaded by guerrillas from the neighboring independent Boer states.

Questions of the right allegiance out on the frontiers of empire were the very heart of the conflict. Louw sought advice from a judge, who advised him that as the Boer Republics claimed his district, he could join them on commando with a clear conscience.

British law did not see it the same way; Louw pleaded guilty to the consequent treason charge, putting himself on the mercy of a tribunal which was more keen on setting examples. The socialist politician (and future Prime Minister) Ramsay MacDonald, who visited South Africa in 1902, complained that “Willie Louw has been shot upon the verdict of a court which did not understand the first elements of justice and had not the faintest idea when a statement was proved.”

A letter from Willie’s sister to her parents the following morning, published that Christmas in the Manchester Guardian, detailed the commando’s peacable frame of mind as he faced in his last hours his “short journey to the long home.” (via To Love One’s Enemies: The work and life of Emily Hobhouse compiled from letters and writings, newspaper cuttings and official documents)

When we got home we heard that a sentence was to be promulgated on the market square at 11.30. All were eager to know who the prisoner was and we watched to see the procession pass. Bravely like a man he walked, erect with firm and steady step, his face ruddy and beautiful. It took a very few minutes to read the sentence and when he walked back the colour had not left his face nor the vigor his form — he was unchanged.

…

At about 2 o’clock we were there (at the goal) and found him quietly putting a few little things he had used together to be borne home on a tray by Boezak. The tray away, I put my arms around the strong neck while he bent over me and with his head on my shoulder I said, ‘Als ging ik ook dal der schaduz des doods ik sal geen kwaad vreezen, want Zyt met my, U stock en U staf die vertroosten my.’ (When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff comfort me.) We then sat down, my husband at his right side and I at his left. All that was spoken by him bore unspeakably sure evidence of his trust in Jesus’ merit, of his preparedness to meet his God, of his hope of glory. He told us how thankful he was that he had twenty-nine days to prepare for this — how he had not been alone — how he had been strengthened, wonderfully strengthened … he was so sorry for you Dear Father and Mother and for George and then for us all — but we were to try and be brave and bear this. He had prayed to God to strengthen us and poor cousin Hanni as well.

Willie’s own last letter to his mother struck a similarly pious note (this via Innocent Blood: Executions During the Anglo-Boer War)

Saturday 23/11/1901

My dearest Mother,

I am returning your last letter to you because I am departing to a better world where there is no grief and sorrow. It is stipulated that I will depart this afternoon. It is God’s sacred will. He cannot make mistakes. May He always be close to you and dearest Daddy and all our loved ones. May He strengthen you all. Yes, God has promised me that he will strengthen you all, now there is nothing, virtually nothing, that worries me or will hold me back. Oh, I wish I could have done more work for Him. What value there is in a single soul. God, our Father, has allowed it all for the glory and honour of His name. Adieu! Until we meet again my own, dearest Mother.

Willie

On this day..

1872: Thomas Camp, the first hanged in Gibson County

Posted on by

The first legal hanging in Gibson County, Indiana, took place on November 22, 1872, of a careless boy named Thomas Camp (“Kemp” by some early reports) l, ruined by an insupportable debt.

From the St. Louis Daily Missouri Democrat of August 12, 1871, channeling a story published two days previous in the Evansville, Ind., Journal:

Great excitement prevailed in Haubstadt yesterday over the discovery of a murder that was perpetrated about two miles west of that place on Monday, the 31st of July. Persons arriving on the noon train yesterday, brought word of the affair, and a reporter for the Journal went up to investigate the case. From the confession of the murderer at the inquest, and from other evidence before the Coroner, the follwoing appears to be the story, for the full relation of which our reporter is indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Michael Ulsomer[?] of Haubstadt and others who were present at the inquest.

Some time during July the murderer, whose name is Kemp, bought a pair of ponies from a man named Bilderbeck, both being residents of Lynnville, Warrick county. Kemp was to pay for the ponies when he received a sum of money, which he represented was due him from a third person who was known to Bilderbeck as a reliable man.

A few days afterwards Bilderbeck […] the pretended debtor, and asked him about the debt […] he denied any indebtedness to Kemp whatever.

Bilderbeck as soon as possible […] Kemp and reproaching him with his dishonesty, threatened him with a prosecution for false pretenses if his debt was not at once paid or secured.

Kemp was very much alarmed at the threat of prosecution, and to conciliate Bilderbeck told him that he would try to get some money from a relative, named Chas. Monroe, whom he said lived near Stacers, a few miles south of Haubstadt, and representing that he would be more likely to get the money if Bilderbeck went with him, he induced him to accompany him. When they arrived at Haubstadt, Kemp called upon a son of the man whom he claimed as a relative, and it is said was discouraged in the project to get money from that source. He concealed this circumstance from Bilderbeck, and feigned to proceed on his journey. When the two left Haubstadt it was getting quite dark. Kemp took the road leading westward instead of southward, and when about two miles west of Haubstadt he pleaded fatigue as an excuse for going no further that night, he being on foot, while Bilderbeck was mounted on a mare. He also told Bilderbeck that Monroe kept savage dogs, and it would be dangerous to approach the house at night. Thus persuaded, Bilderbeck dismounted, and both lay down under a tree. Kemp says he watched until Bilderbeck was asleep, when he arose stealthily, and with a heaby club about two feet long, beat Bilderbeck about the head until he was dead. When the first blow was struck, Bilderbeck partly raised up, when a second blow stunned him, and the blows he continued until the victim’s life was battered out.

Having killed him, he set about concealing the crime, and to that end, he dragged the body further into the woods, and stripping it of the clothing, threw it into the bushy top of a fallen tree, throwing the shoes and pants in with it, and hanging the hat and shirt on a tree, took the coat with him, and, mounting the mare, rode off toward Poseyville, Posey county, where he traded the mare off for a horse, and returned to Lynnville, taking the murdered man’s saddle and coat with him.

When Bilderbeck’s absence was remarked, people naturally looked to Kemp to account for it, and he answered that the last he saw of him was that he drove off in a buggy with two other men when they were in the neighborhood of Poseyville. People were not well satisfied with the answer, but did not openly accuse him until some one discovered that he was in possession of Bilderbeck’s saddle and coat. This coming to the knowledge of Bilderbeck’s brother he at once demanded an explanation of Kemp, who still persisted in saying that he knew nothing of him, but on closer questioning acknowledged that he knew where the mare was, and after considerable urging and in the face of what looked ominously like a disposition to lynch him, he agreed to go with the brother and show him where the mare could be found.

They started in a hack, accompanied by a couple of neighbors, and arrived at Haubstadt about daylight yesterday, when, for the first time, the facts became known. On the way to Haubstadt Kemp’s story was considerably varied, and he admitted that Bilderbeck was dead, but denied having killed him, saying that he was killed by two members of a gang to which he belonged, and he named two persons whose reputation was such as to give some color of truth to the story.

At Haubstadt, where they stopped for breakfast, it is aid he admitted that he had killed Bilderbeck, but begged the man to whom he confessed not to reveal it, as he was sure the people would kill him, and his fear did not seem to be ill grounded when the story ran about among the people. His confession was not then made known, and he proceeded to the place where he traded off the mare, where a deputy sheriff of Posey county appeared, and taking Kemp aside, told him if he would confess and turn State’s evidence, it would be better for him. He then made a complete confession, volunteered to show where the body was concealed, and at once proceeded with the officers and attendants to where he had thrown it, and where the remains were found, the flesh having been devoured by the buzzards, except a little that still clung to the bones of the legs.

It will naturally be supposed that the witnesses of this were almost beside themselves with horror and indignation, but no violence was offered the wretch.

The party returned to Haubstadt with the remains. The inquest was held, the wretched Kemp, trembling with fear, made a full confession, during which the indignation of the people rose to a fearful hight [sic], but was wisely restrained, even the brother of the murdered man assisting to keep down the indignation.

Mr. Bilderbeck, the brother of the murdered man, afterwards confessed that it was with the greatest difficulty he resisted an impulse to shoot the murderer on the spot, although he could not countenance any interference by others.

At the close of the inquest the murderer was conveyed to Fort Branch, three miles distance, for examination before a justice, whence he was sent to Princeton to jail.

It is said that great excitement prevails in the neighborhood of Lynnville, where Bilderbeck lived, and where he leaves a wife and three children. He was about thirty-one years old, a farmer, and was much respected.

Kemp is only about nineteen years old, although he is married. He is small in stature and slight build, light complexion, and sandy-haired, smooth-faced, and said to be of tolerably fair countenance. He told a gentleman that he never thought of murder until he came to Haubstadt and found that his chance to get the money from Monroe was slim, when believing that he was in danger of going to the penitentiary for the fraud, he determined to kill Bilderbeck and thus get rid of his evidence.

The story, taken all together, is one of the most shocking that has occurred in thes parts, and ranks with the murder of Miss Carson and Lizzie Sawyer for brutality.

From the Terre Haute, Ind., Daily Wabash Express, April 22, 1872.

Camp, the murderer of Bilderbeck, who escaped from the Gibson county jail some time since, is now in jail, on a charge of horse-stealing, at Owensboro, Kentucky, and will be returned to his old quarters on this side of the Ohio.

From the Indianapolis Sentinel, July 26, 1872.

The trial of Thomas Camp for the murder of Belderbech [sic], is in progress at Princeton. The defense set up is insanity.

From the Indianapolis Sentinel, July 29, 1872.

The trial of Thomas Camp, for the murder of Haubstadt, was concluded at Princeton on Friday, the jury returning a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree.

From the Indianapolis Sentinel, August 23, 1872.

Mrs. Camp, mother of Thomas Camp (the murderer of Bilderbeck, who is now under sentence to be hung on the 4th of October), died at her residence in Warrick county on the 11th. Her death was caused by the shock to her system on learning of the sentence of her son. She was a highly respected, Christian lady.

From the Indianapolis Sentinel, November 25, 1872.

Princeton, Ind., November 22, 1872. — The execution of Thomas Camp for the murder of John R. Bilderbeck in August, 1871, took place here to-day. Early in the morning the Sheriff informed Camp that there was no hope of commutation of his sentence, the Governor having refused to stay the execution. For the first time the prisoner seemed to realize his terrible position. Turning to the Sheriff he said, with a faltering voice, “I suppose it must be so.” Being asked at what o’clock he would like the execution to take place, he said, “I am not particular; just use your own pleasure.” The hour chosen was 2 o’clock. At 1 the representatives of the press, and those persons to whom the Sheriff had given passes, were admitted to the jail yard. An enclosure had been erected around the yard to guard the terrible scene to be enacted from the public gaze. The clergymen in attendance, the Rev. John McMaster and the Rev. D.B. Baharree [sic: it’s T.G. Beharrel/Beharrell], together with a few others, were permitted to enter the jail for a short conversation with Camp. The latter we found standing in the doorway of his cell, nervously adjusting the white cottong loves with which he had been provided. He was clad in a full suit of black. His brother-in-law was with him, and had taken the prisoner’s directions for the disposal of his worldly effects, and his last messages to friends and relatives. At 1:50 the sheriff, the clergymen and physicians in attendance, and the reporters, formed the procession to accompany the doomed man to the scaffold. There was no hesitation in his tread. He stepped upon the planks like one who wished to be relieved from a long suspense. The boyish innocence of his face made it almost impossible to believe that he was the hardened wretch which the evidence in the trial proved him to be. At either side of him were the ministers.

ON THE SCAFFOLD.

The Rev. Mr. McMaster read in a clearly audible voice a portion of the fifty-first Psalm. An earnest prayer was then offered by the Rev. Baharrel, the prisoner kneeling, and following the services with calmness and attention. Immediately upon their conclusion, Camp stepped to the front of one platform, and said, with visible emotion:

My friends, I will speak a few words. I am now going to leave you. I confessed to a crime of which I am not guilty. I was there when the deed was committed. I hope to meet you all in heaven, where I hope to meet my mother.

At one minute past 2 Camp placed himself in front of the drop. His limbs were bound, and the usual black-cap drawn over his face. The fatal noose was adjusted, Camp stepped upon the trap, and a moment later he was dangling in the air. For about four minutes there was a slight contraction of the arms and legs, and two minutes later there was another trembling of the body. In about fifteen minutes the physicians pronounced pulsation to have ceased, and the body was lowered in the coffin. The face was calm and peaceful, and looked as if Camp had died without great suffering. The face was calm and peaceful, and looked as if Camp had died without great suffering. The remains were given to friends, and will be taken to Warrick county for burial. Camp had barely passed his twenty-first birthday. A few months before the crime for which he was hung was committed, he was married to a young wife, a person of unblemished character. Camp’s mother died of a broken heart in a month after his sentence was pronounced. Eighteen months ago he was himself a respectable, well-to-do young man, the owner of a good farm left to him by his father. But he fell into evil associations, and as a consequence lies in a murderer’s coffin. It is generally believed that he was not the only guilty party in the Bilderbeck murder. There are others who are being watched, and Camp’s partners in the crime may yet be brought to punishment.

Camp detailed his implausible non-confession in greater detail shortly prior to his execution; you can read about the alleged gang that made him murder his creditor in this two-parter posted to ancestry.com: part 1 | part 2

On this day..

1853: Nathaniel Mobbs

Posted on by

On this date in 1853, Nathaniel Mobbs hanged for killing his wife.

Mobbs’s loutish drunken abuse was of Catherine Mobbs was audible to many neighbors at his Whitechapel tenement. On the night before he finally murdered her, he was so far gone that Catherine slept at a neighbor’s to stay clear of him. Nathaniel found her the next morning, and physically dragged her back home; that afternoon, an unusually violent row and the prisoner’s screams of “murder!” brought at least two guests scrambling up the stairs to their door, which Mobbs blockaded with a chest — until the “murder!” cries eerily stopped.

Then, the scuffing sound of furniture being moved.

And Catherine staggered out the door and down the steps, her dress and hair gorging on the horrid effluence of her slashed throat. She didn’t say a word before she dropped dead.

This nasty affair is covered by PlanetSlade.com’s murder ballads series, including a broadsheet (pdf) with testimony by the Mobbs’ neighbors, and the usual hanging ballad.

A U.S. band called South County YouTubed a haunting version of the ballad, although I believe they’ve taken some liberty with the lyrics.

This wasn’t Mr. Mobbs’s only brush with the literary. Charles Dickens, who could not but delight in the juxtaposition of pickpockets risking their own necks plying their craft on gallows-gawkers, fastened on just such an incident at the Mobbs execution. (Even if pickpocketing was no longer a capital crime by 1853.)

At Guildhall, on the 22nd, Charles Clark was charged before Alderman Humphery with Stealing a Watch the previous morning in the Old Bailey. Robert Pollard, the prosecutor, said: I was present yesterday morning at the Execution of the man Mobbs. I was in front of the scaffold, when I felt something at my pocket, and then missed my watch.

Alderman Humphery — I suppose you were there to see the man hung? Were there many persons there?

Witness: Yes, sir, a great man.

Alderman Humphery: Did you miss your watch before the execution or afterwards?

Witness: The condemned man was just coming on the scaffold, and before he was hung I saw the prisoner moving from my side. I followed him; but perceiving me behind him, he ran up St. Clement’s Inn-yards, in Old Bailey, and threw himself on some matting. The watch produced by the officer is mine. It is engraved with my own name.

Prisoner: I did not throw myself down, I fell down.

Alderman Humphery: There is one thing very clear. The awful sight of a man being hung has no fear for you. William Gardiner saw the prisoner, on reaching the top of Clement’s Inn yard, throw himself on some sacks and drop something down the iron grating. The witness went below and found the watch produced.

Prisoner: I never took the watch.

Alderman Humphery: You came out to witness the execution of a fellow creature, but it does not appear to have done you any good, for your intention in being there was to pick pockets evidently. It is quite clear that you committed a highway robbery, and that too under the gallows, an offence that was punished at one time with dath. It is too serious a case for me to deal with summarily, and I shall therefore commit you for trial.

On this day..

2013: Joseph Paul Franklin, Larry Flynt’s would-be assassin

Posted on by

On this date in 2013, hoping “for people to think of me as a person who is filled with a lot of love for people, not filled with hate for people,” Joseph Paul Franklin was executed by lethal injection in Missouri for a three-year racist killing spree.

Born James Clayton Vaughn, Jr., before he renamed himself into a portmanteau of Paul Joseph Goebbels and Benjamin Franklin, our killer suffered by his own account a childhood warped by the disinterest of his mother and the physical violence of a usually-absentee father. He took up an interest in evangelical Christianity and white nationalism, and in 1977 began crisscrossing the country committing racially motivated attacks against Jews and African Americans.

He would later say that his intent was to trigger a race war. (Franklin renounced racism in prison.)

Victims fit many descriptions to enrage a white supremacist: mixed-race couples ambushed from sniper positions, two black youths walking home, a black fast food manager, a Jewish parishioner waiting for worship outside a synagogue, even two white girls he picked up hitchhiking who said something about a black boyfriend.

He wasn’t tried for all these murders and his own accounts of his career shifted over time; he’s estimated to have taken at least 18 lives in various near-random shootings covering 11 different states. If Franklin himself knew the exact count, he took it to the grave.

“Do you know how many people you murdered?” he’s asked in this interview.

“I’d rather not mention it.”

“By my count, it’s 22 people.”

“That’s approximately it.”

Whatever the exact body count, Franklin is best known for two killings he didn’t quite manage to commit.

On May 29, 1980, he shot civil rights activist Vernon Jordan in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Jordan recovered, and President Jimmy Carter’s visit to Jordan’s bedside in hospital was the very first story covered on CNN’s debut broadcast on June 1, 1980.

Two years previous, incensed by Hustler magazine’s interracial spreads, Franklin had attempted to assassinate porn publisher Larry Flynt. Flynt was paralyzed from the waist down as a result: he’s been confined to a wheelchair ever since. Nevertheless, Flynt opposed Franklin’s execution. “I do not want to kill him, nor do I want to see him die,” Flynt wrote in the Hollywood Reporter a month before Franklin went to his death.

Franklin has been sentenced by the Missouri Supreme Court to death by legal injection on Nov. 20. I have every reason to be overjoyed with this decision, but I am not. I have had many years in this wheelchair to think about this very topic. As I see it, the sole motivating factor behind the death penalty is vengeance, not justice, and I firmly believe that a government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.

On this day..

Feast Day of St. Barlaam

Posted on by

November 19 is the feast date of Diocletian martyr Saint Barlaam of Antioch.*

A Cappadocian peasant, Barlaam defeated through righteous willpower a Roman judge’s diabolical attempt to go easy on him.

Barlaam was doing the old refusal to pay homage to the pagan gods thing and the judge’s plan was a masterpiece of practical jurisprudence: he had the refusenik stationed before the censer, with the offering in his hand. Then hot coals were plopped into the hand, in the expectation that Barlaam would flinch at the pain and involuntarily drop the herb, coals, and all into the fire — and everyone go home with his own honor satisfied.

But Barlaam had for honor “hardened brass, more than iron in mightiness, firmer than a statue” and instead withstood the coal until either it burned out, or his hand did, refusing to permit fire to touch incense under the eyes of the old gods. That earned him his martyrdom from an exasperated magistrate and, let us say, an extremely specific patronage of stoicism under prolonged hand torture, making him the forerunner of figures as diverse as Thomas Cranmer and Paul Muad’dib.

Here’s a laudatio in Latin for our holy militant from John Chrysostom who notes that the expected flinch-and-drop reaction wouldn’t have even counted as a sin.

* Not to be confused with the Russian hermit and painter Barlaam of Khutyn, nor with Barlaam and Josaphat, legendary India Christians who were adopted from Buddhist mythology.

On this day..

1880: Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov, Narodnaya Volya terrorists

Posted on by

On this date in 1880,* Russian revolutionaries Alexander Kvyatkovsky and Andrei Presnyakov were hanged at St. Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress.


Kvyatkovsky (left) and Presnyakov.

Kvyatkovsky, 28, and Presnyakov, 24, had each spent the whole of their brief adulthoods agitating, police ever at their heels. As Russia’s “season of terror” opened in the late 1870s, both immediately cast their lot with the violent Narodnaya Volya movement. They were found by police at their respective arrests to have each had more than a passing interest in Narodnaya Volya’s ongoing project to assassinate Tsar Alexander II — an objective that it would indeed achieve a few months later.

Their fellow-traveler Mikhail Frolenko would remember the mass trial they featured at not for any glorious martyr-making but as a propaganda debacle for his movement.

The Trial of the Sixteen** in October 1880 was a model of judicial procedure — the government had learned, planned carefully and conducted the trial with absolute decorum. The sixteen accused included three of the most important figures in the Movement: Shiraev, who had been arrested in Moscow a year before with two suitcases of dynamite, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky. The last two were old friends of Andrei Zhelyabov. The evidence against the accused was provided by Grigory Goldenberg; the prosecution’s case was unanswerable. The sixteen were allowed to address the court and their speeches were reported. The prosecutors questioned them with a mix of deliberate courtesy and provocation: the sixteen were given enough rope to hang themselves. They followed no clear line and contradicted each other on endless details. They improvised counter-accusations, became mired in irrelevancies, and exploded in fits of petulance. They made a miserable impression, highlighted at every stage by the correctness of the proceedings. In its sentence the court was lenient, another propaganda victory: fourteen were sentenced to hard labor; two, Presnyakov and Kvyatkovsky, were sentenced to be hanged. We lost sixteen good people, which was bad enough. But worse was our irreparable loss of public esteem. One small sign of this was the fate of the word terror. Hitherto we had freely called ourselves terrorists; it had much the same ring as revolutionary. Terror was simply the first phase of the revolution. Overnight the word became a term of abuse and the exclusive property of the government. That alone might have told us we were following the wrong path. (Excerpted from Saturn’s Daughters: The Birth of Terrorism

Kvyatkovsky’s son, also named Alexander, was a Bolshevik close to Lenin in the early Soviet years.

* November 16 by the Gregorian calendar; it was still November 4 by the archaic Julian calendar still then in use in the Russian Empire.

** Not to be confused with at least two distinct Soviet-era mass trials also respectively designated the “Trial of the Sixteen”.

On this day..

1892: Thomas Neill Cream, “I am Jack the …”

Posted on by

On this date in 1892, globetrotting murderer Thomas Neill Cream hanged.

Act I

Glasgow-born, Cream grew up in Canada and did his parents proud by becoming a doctor with a big black moustache.

He manifested an early knack for being in the vicinity of patients who died unexpectedly: Cream’s wife Flora died of consumption in 1877 while on a medicine regimen he had prescribed her (granted, Cream himself was away in London at this time), and a patient and possible mistress turned up dead outside the good doctor’s offices overdosed on chloroform. As suspicion burgeoned, Cream legged it for the United States.

Cream set up as a red light district abortionist in Chicago, and it didn’t take long for his special gift to manifest again. He beat one murder charge when a patient’s rotting corpse was found stashed in his midwife’s apartment; but, in 1881, epilepsy pills he provided another mistress for her husband turned out to be spiked with strychnine in a botched attempt to stitch up the druggist for blackmail. Daniel Stott ended up dead; Thomas Cream, in Joliet — 31 years old with a life sentence.

So ended the homicidal career of Thomas Cream … until 1891, when Gov. Joseph Fifer yielded to the entreaties and bribes of Thomas’s brother and commuted the sentence.

Act II

Cream sailed for England that October and a fresh start … in the same line of work. He’d be back in custody by the following June, with at least four more murders under his belt, sloppy and incontinent now like the late-career Ted Bundy.

Cream took lodgings in Lambeth and dove right into London’s seedy underbelly. Barely two weeks after his arrival, a 19-year-old prostitute he’d plied with drinks was dead of strychnine and Cream was using his old ploy of blackmailing a random bourgeois for her murder. A few days later, he did the same thing with yet another streetwalker and another extortion target.

The nigh-industrial rapidity of these maneuvers speaks to Cream’s self-destructive impulsiveness; one can picture such a high-risk caper working (maybe Cream had even made it work sometimes back in Chicago) but only if the murder was executed with great care and the shakedown target very deliberately selected and framed. The “Lambeth Poisoner” (as the press came to call the writer of these anonymous blackmail letters) had done neither; his hamfisted money grabs only drew the attention of Scotland Yard.

Cream so ached for exposure that he gave a visiting New Yorker whom he met an impromptu tour of the sites associated with the Lambeth Poisoner — whose number had by then been augmented with yet two additional prostitutes, again offed with strychnine. Creeped out at the fellow’s suspicious expertise, the Yank tipped off the police; pieces fell into place quickly from that point.

His whole career, including that bit on the far side of the Atlantic, was exposed now and Cream (who here referred to himself as “Dr. Thomas Neill”, as reflected by the carton above) was convicted in a short trial in October 1892 — just a few weeks before the court’s sure sentence was imposed.

Act III?

Cream murdered a minimum of five people. Beyond those five, he’s worth a cocked eyebrow or more in the death of his wife and several women under his care in his medical (mostly abortionist) guise.

Chris Scott’s historical novel Jack imagines Cream as the Whitechapel killer.

But hangman James Billington put Cream into a whole different coffee when he claimed that the Lambeth Poisoner had gone through the trap uttering the aborted sentence “I am Jack the–” … meaning, Billington means you to understand, Jack the Ripper. As a result, Dr. Cream has a ledger in every Ripperology suspects table but there are at least a couple of major problems with the hypothesis:

  1. Nobody else present for the execution reported hearing any such suggestion from the condemned man; and
  2. The Ripper was an elusive criminal with a whole different m.o.; and
  3. Cream was still serving his Illinois prison term when the Ripper murders toook place back in 1888.

You might think that being clad in irons on a different continent makes for an ironclad alibi, but bars are no bar to a criminal as nimble as Jack. The Cream dossier makes the incredible claim that Cream chanced to have a lookalike double in the criminal underworld, and that the two routinely passed as one another — so Cream could have been serving his sentence while his double committed the Whitechapel murders, or vice versa.

If this twist strikes the reader as a little bit too Scooby Doo for reality, well, the man’s verifiable body count more than qualified the doctor for his place in the criminal annals … and his place on the gallows.

A few books about Thomas Neill Cream

On this day..

1879: Charles Drews and Frank Stichler, graveyard insurance

Posted on by

On this date in 1879, a third of a conspiracy known as the “Blue-Eyed Six” — guess why — hanged for murder.

Having taken out insurance policies on an aged recluse named Joseph Raber, four other men grew tired of waiting for their prospective windfall to shuffle off and hired our date’s principals, Charles Drew and Frank Stichler, to accelerate his actuarial table.

Around dusk on Saturday, December 7, 1878 Drews went into the tavern at Brandt’s hotel and told the people there that Joe Raber was dead. That afternoon he and Stichler had paid a call on Joseph Raber and offered him some tobacco if he would accompany them to Kreiser’s Store. Raber agreed to go with them. The trip to the store had required crossing Indiantown Creek on a crude bridge made of two twelve inch planks. Drews said Raber had a dizzy spell part way across, fell into the water and drowned.

That’s from the account of the sensational case by our friends at Murder By Gaslight. Read on to discover the fate of the four insurance investors …

On this day..

1752: William Montgomery, small enough to fail

Posted on by

In the absence of a modern bankruptcy framework, underwater debtors could be clapped into prisons like the notorious Fleet. As this had the effect of overcrowding the dungeons with otherwise productive persons who were little likely to meet the theoretical obligation to repay their bondsmen, the British Parliament passed Insolvency Acts intermittently throughout the 18th century as bankruptcy holidays that would permit orderly mass discharges of debt. Given the chaotic state of record keeping there must also have been a wide swath of grey-area debtors who for the benefit of resuming economic life would bend whatever facts needed bending to slide themselves into the Acts’ safe harbors.

Our William Montgomery was one of these, who told a white lie about being abroad on the date necessary to wipe the slate clean — but found that his creditors were not so easy to forgive either invoices or prevarications, to the extent of revenging their balance sheet at Tyburn.

This Newgate Calendar entry gives us a heavy dose of editorializing and also misstates the date of Montgomery’s execution because of course it does. For the rentiers’ side of the moral preening, compare to the Ordinary’s Account.*

WILLIAM MONTGOMERY
Executed at Tyburn, December 2, 1752 [sic], for defrauding his creditors

In a country like England, and more especially when we view the overgrown capital, though productive of crimes in fraudulent debtors, we must advocate acts of insolvency.

The good of many must be pre-eminent to the villainy of a few; and, where we find one punished for the abuse of the lenity of the legislative body, we happily find thousands of unfortunate beings rescued from the horrors of a prison, where they had long been immured without the means of support, much less were they able to satisfy the demands of inexorable creditors.

The necessity of good faith in contracts, and the support of commerce, oblige the legislature to secure for the creditors the person of the bankrupts; and in this point of view may the subject of this case, and all others who take the benefit of an act of insolvency, be considered.

The fraudulent bankrupt should be punished in the same manner with him who adulterates the coin of the realm; for to falsify a piece of coin, which is a pledge of mutual obligations between men, is not a greater crime than to violate the obligations themselves.

But the bankrupt who, after a strict examination, has proved before the commissioners that either the fraud or losses of others, or misfortunes unavoidable by human prudence, have stripped him of his substance, on what barbarous pretence is he thrown into prison, and thus deprived of the only remaining good, the melancholy enjoyment of mere liberty? Still more hard is the case of an unfortunate trader, who, disclosing his whole transactions, and offering to assign over to his creditors the remains of his stock, is cast into prison by a single hard-hearted unrelenting claimant. Yet this is constantly done in Britain.

Why is such a man cast into a loathsome prison, ranked with criminals, and, in despair, compelled to repent of his honesty? Conscious of his innocence, he lived easy and happy under the protection of those laws, which, it is true, he violated, but not intentionally. Laws are dictated by the avarice of the rich, and tacitly accepted by the poor, seduced by that flattering and universal hope, which makes men believe that all unlucky accidents are the lot of others, and the most fortunate only their share.

Mankind, when influenced by the first impressions, love cruel laws, although, being subject to them themselves, it is in the interest of every person that they should be as mild as possible; but the fear of being injured is always far more prevalent that the intention of injuring others.

But, to return to the innocent bankrupt. Let his debt, if you will, not be considered as cancelled till payment of the whole; let him be refused the liberty of leaving the country with out leave of his creditors, or of carrying into another nation that industry, which, under a penalty, he should be obliged to employ for their benefit; but what pretence can justify the depriving of an innocent, though unfortunate, man of his liberty, without the least utility to his creditors?

Then it may be in answer be said, that the hardships of confinement will induce him to discover his fraudulent transactions: an event that can hardly be supposed, after a rigorous examination into his conduct and affairs.

It will be necessary to distinguish fraud, attended with aggravating circumstances, from simple fraud, and that from perfect innocence. For the first, let there be ordained the same punishment as for forgery. For the second, a punishment with the loss of liberty; and if perfectly innocent, let the bankrupt himself choose the method of re-establishing himself, and satisfying his creditors.

With what ease might a sagacious legislator prevent the greatest part of fraudulent bankruptcies, and remedy the misfortunes that befall the innocent and industrious! A public register of all contracts, with the liberty of consulting it allowed to each tradesman — a public fund, formed by the contribution of fortunate merchants, for the timely assistance of unfortunate industry — would be the establishments that could produce no real inconveniences, but would be attended with numberless advantages.

Many eminent bankers, in the history of the trade of London, by an unexpected run upon their house, must have become bankrupts, and thereby embarrassed thousands, had not the Bank of England come to their assistance; but alas! The unfortunate tradesman has no one to prevent his fall. Unhappily, the most simple, the easiest regulations, await only the nod of the legislator to diffuse through nations wealth, power and felicity; laws, which would be regarded by future generations with eternal gratitude, are either unknown or rejected. A restless and trifling spirit, the timid prudence of the present moment, and a distrust and aversion to the most useful motives, possess the minds of those who are empowered to regulate the actions of mankind.

It must at the same time, be acknowledged, that the baseness of a few failures often tends to render callous the feelings of creditors.

No act of insolvency has been carried into effect without the detection of fraud. Eager to embrace its benefits, and thus rid themselves of debt, men will wade through perjury, and employ every means to accomplish their purpose.

After the destruction of the prisons in London, during the riots of the year 1780, an act was passed for the purpose of absolving all who had been confined. Of this every rascal in London was ready to take the advantage. A mere form was only necessary, to enter their names; but the signatures, that Lord Chief Justice Mansfield, to his infinite honour, ordered the lists to be printed and published, which put to rout whole hives of impostors. Names were herein found that might as well have expected to appear in the list of Gazette promotions.

A man of this description was the subject who led to this enquiry.

William Montgomery was a native of Elphinstone, in Scotland, and educated in the Presbyterian form of religion.

His father dying when he was about thirteen years old, his mother sent him to sea in a ship belonging to Alloa. Having continued in the naval line of business some years, he at length married, and opened a public house in Bishopsgate-street; and dealing largely as a smuggler, he frequently went to Holland, to bring home prohibited goods.

Quitting Bishopsgate-street, he lived some years at the sign of the Highlander, in Shadwell; but, on the death of his wife, he resolved to decline business as a publican; and having saved some money, he entered again into the matrimonial state, and taking a lodging in Nightingale-lane, he let lodgings to seafaring men.

Meeting with success, he took a shop as a seller of seamen’s clothes; but left the care of it chiefly to his wife, while he employed his own time in frequent trips to Holland, in pursuit of his former illicit practice of smuggling.

An act of insolvency passing in the year 1748, favourable to such persons as had been in foreign parts fugitives for debt, Montgomery took the benefit of it, swearing that he was at Rotterdam on the last day of the preceding year: in consequence of which, he was cleared of his debts, to the injury of his creditors.

No notice was taken of this affair till the expiration of four years, when, Montgomery having arrested a neighbour, the man gave notice of his former transactions to one of his creditors, who laying an information before the lord mayor, Montgomery was lodged in Newgate on suspicion.

Being brought to trial at the next sessions at the Old Bailey, several persons deposed that they spent the evening with him at his own house at the time he alleged that he was in Holland, in order to take the benefit of the act: so that he was convicted, and received sentence to die.

For some time after conviction he behaved with apparent signs of devotion; but asserted his innocence, and said that the witnesses against him were perjured; and in this tale he continued till the arrival of the warrant for his execution.

Being pressed by the divine who attended him to tell the truth, he persisted in the former story until the Friday before his death; but in the afternoon of that day he acknowledged, that after having been on board a Dutch vessel; in order to take his passage for Holland, he had come on shore, owing to the contrary winds.

On the following day he insisted that, “as he had been sworn according to the methods used in Scotland, without kissing the book, his crime could not come within the meaning of the act”. In reply to this he was told that the mode of administering could make no difference to the nature of an oath.

Hereupon he made a full confession of his crime, and owned that, having come on shore, he concealed himself for some weeks in his own house; then appeared publicly, saying he had been at Rotterdam: after which he surrendered himself to the warden of the Fleet prison, and obtained the benefit of the act of insolvency.

On the Sunday following, when he was pressed to declare the whole truth, he exclaimed, “What would you have me say? I have told you all the truth, and can say no otherwise than what I have done. If I did, I should belie myself, and my own knowledge.”

This malefactor appeared dreadfully shocked on the morning of execution, and wished for time for repentance, which he now considered highly necessary. At the place of execution he warned the spectators to beware of covetousness, which had been the cause of his destruction.

* Sample of the Ordinary’s take on the gravity of disappointing your creditors:

That he suffered justly, as an Example, and for a Terror to such an Undertaking again, I believe no one can gain-say …

for which Atonement can scarce, but if ever, not without the utmost Difficulty, be made: And, through this Filth, and Mire of Wickedness, must he pass, who resolves to make an intentional, a real Fraud.

What can the Man think that shall be guilty of such high Offence? ‘Tis publickly known that human Laws are determined to punish it with Death, and what is to come afterwards, God only knows.

Let this then the Fate of poor Montgomery deter all others for the future from attempting a Breach of such an Indulgence, if ever it should please the Legislature to grant one again. And tho’, in a former Part of these Sheets, he did not scruple to say, he was not the only one who feloniously laid hold of the Benefit of the last Insolvent Act, yet Charity engages to think better Things, and to hope there is not an Instance of the like Kind to be met with in England.

On this day..

1963: Four CIA saboteurs in Cuba

Posted on by

Cuba executed thirteen people in the course of this week in 1963 as CIA agents. This date marked the middle group, as detailed in the Nov. 13, 1963 New York Times:

HAVANA, Nov. 12 (UPI) — Four more Cubans were executed by firing squads today as “agents” of the United States Central Intelligence Agency.

Five other Cuban [sic] accused as “CIA agents” were executed last Friday.

The victims today were identified as Antonio Cobelas Rodriguez, Orlando Sanchez Saraza, Juan M. Milian Rodriguez and Jose S. Bolanos Morales.

An official announcement said that they had been captured while trying to sneak ashore from an armed boat that sailed from Marathon, in the Florida Keys, on an undisclosed date.

On this day..