Category Archives: 20th Century

1929: Peter Kudzinowski

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Peter Kudzinowski was electrocuted on this date in 1929 in New Jersey.

The son of Polish immigrants to Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mining country, Kudzinowski made his way to the Atlantic seaboard as a young man and entered the executioner’s annals by luring seven-year-old Joseph Storelli from New York’s East Village. For the promise of some candy and a movie, the boy accompanied Kudzinowski onto a train out to the New Jersey Meadowlands. Kudzinowski walked the kid into the marshes and slashed his throat.

That was in November 1928.

It was his third homicide but evidently the worst of the lot for the murderer. A couple of weeks later he forced a confused Detroit traffic cop to take his confession. “I’m willing to pay the penalty, and the sooner it’s over, the better,” he explained later to Detroit detectives. “I had to confess. It was troubling me.” On trial back in New Jersey, he reiterated his willingness to die and the likelihood that his body count would grow if released. Jurors understandably spurned his attorney’s desperate insanity defense.

For a time he was a suspect in the cannibalistic destruction of a three-year-old Brooklyn boy named Billy Gaffney. Posterity has cleared him of that crime thanks to the later confession of a whole different caliber of mass-murderer who turned out to be operating in the same environs at the same time — Albert Fish.

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1944: The massacres of Wereth and Malmedy, during the Battle of the Bulge

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Two mass shootings of U.S. World War II infantrymen in Belgium marked this date in 1944.

It was the second day of the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s surprise last offensive in the Ardennes. Hitler, in an inspired albeit ultimately unsuccessful gambit, intended here to burst through the thin-spread Allied line under cover of air power-negating foul weather, and still his western front enemies in time to fortify his east before the Red Army could destroy the Reich.

Needing to inflict a demoralizing lightning defeat, Hitler authorized rougher treatment of POWs than was usual on the western front, resulting in six weeks of savage no-quarter fighting and battlefield atrocities more characteristic of the eastern front. Our focus today is two such instances.

Wereth Eleven

Eleven artillerists from the all-black 333rd Field Artillery Battalion — having taken refuge at a farmhouse in the village of Wereth after their position was overrun during the German offensive — were arrested by the SS on December 17, 1944, taken to a nearby field, and summarily executed.

A monument in Wereth commemorates the massacre. (cc) image from Herald Post.

A villager named Matthias Langer had willingly taken them in, but an informer in the community made the Germans aware of their presence.

So, as dusk fell, a patrol of SS men pulled up to Langer’s home and took the black Americans into custody. They weren’t ever seen alive again.

Their bodies were recovered after Americans recaptured the position weeks later, showing the injuries of gratuitous brutalization inflicted before their murder.

However, the U.S. Army closed its investigation hastily and kept the soldiers’ families in the dark about the nature of the men’s deaths.

It only came to public light many years later thanks to Matthias Langer’s son, Hermann — who was a 12-year-old boy during the Battle of the Bulge but could never shake the haunting sight of the frightened refugees being marched away under German guns.

Malmedy Massacre

About 10 kilometers away on the same day, a column of approximately 120 American POWs was machine-gunned without warning by its German captors in a field near the village of Malmedy — which is where those who survived fled to for safety.

This Malmedy Massacre, which is much the larger and better-known atrocity compared to that of Wereth, claimed 84 lives.*

It also resulted in a postwar death sentence for the German commander Joachim Peiper — although that sentence was never carried out, at least not judicially. Controversially freed in 1956, Peiper was assassinated in 1976: an unknown group calling itself the Avengers claimed credit.


The Malmedy Massacre as depicted in the 1965 film Battle of the Bulge.

* The figure of 72 is sometimes given; this appears to describe the count of bodies initially (in January 1945) recovered in the meadow where the shooting took place. An additional 12 victims of the massacre were discovered in outlying stretches over the following weeks: men who had managed to flee some distance before they were felled. This same unit also massacred other prisoners in the surrounding days.

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1931: Fatma Demir, the first woman hanged in Turkey

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The modern republic of Turkey executed a woman for the first time in 1931.

Fatma Demir (German Wikipedia page: there’s none on Turkish Wikipedia) broke the Ramadan fast with a friend whom she bludgeoned with an ax handle during a prayer. It seems that it was at the instigation of others, like the victim’s husband and that husband’s mistress, both of whom helped Demir sink the body in a river.

Her hanging took place in public.

There’s a 2013 Turkish-language documentary about her case, titled Dar Agacina Takilan Düsler (Dreams Hanged from the Gallows).

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1903: A day in the death penalty around the U.S. (and Canada)

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The U.S. states of Illinois, Georgia and California, and the Canadian province of British Columbia, all distinguished December 11, 1903 with hangings.

Duluth (Minn.) News-Tribune, Dec. 12, 1903:

Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle, Dec. 12, 1903:

Santa Cruz (Calif.) Evening Sentinel, Dec. 12, 1903:

Anaconda (Mont.) Standard, Dec. 12, 1903:

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1988: Sek Kim Wah, thriller

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Thirty years ago today, Singapore hanged Sek Kim Wah for his “thrilling” home invasion murders.

A sociopathic 19-year-old army conscript, Sek had got a taste for blood in June 1983 by strangling a bookie and his mistress to prevent them identifying him after a robbery. It was only days after his unrequited crush had given him the cold shoulder; he’d seized the rejection as license to give rein to his darkest desires. “I was frustrated. I like someone to exercise control over me, to care and look after me. But all they are interested in is money. Since everybody is busy about money, I would get it by hook or by crook and the more the merrier.”

Those robbery-murders he got away with in the moment.

On July 23, he bid for an encore performance by forcing his way into a split-level bungalow armed with an M16 pinched from the Nee Soon Camp armory. With him was another 19-year-old, Nyu Kok Meng. It was Nyu’s first crime, and events would prove that he and Sek had made some unwarranted assumptions about one another.

After forcing businessman Robert Tay Bak Hong and his wife Annie Tay to withdraw bank funds for them, Sek set about replaying his previous crime script by eliminating the witnesses, strangling and bludgeoning the couple as well as their 27-year-old Filipina maid Jovita Virador.

Nyu heard the bashing sounds from another room, where he held the M16 on the couple’s 10-year-old daughter Dawn, and Dawn’s tutor Madam Tang So Ha — and he was aghast when he investigated the commotion. Nyu had intended only to steal money, not to hurt anyone. He took his two charges under his impromptu protection, and because of it they both survived to give evidence against him.

“Suddenly, the male Chinese who was holding the long gun rushed into our room and locked the door behind him,” said Dawn.

Nyu refused to let Sek into the room. Sek then decided to leave the house in Mr Tay’s Mercedes car. Nyu handed over his identity card to Madam Tang, and asked her to convey a message to his parents to buy a coffin for him, as he planned to commit suicide after releasing her and Dawn. (Singapore Straits Times, excerpting Guilty as Charged: 25 Crimes that have shaken Singapore since 1965)

Nyu pointed the gun at his head and pulled the trigger … “but nothing happened,” he said. “Frustrated, I put the rifle down.” He fled on Sek’s motorbike as the two souls he saved ran to a neighbor’s house for help. That night, he escaped, temporarily, to Malaysia.

Nevertheless, his clemency — or his stupidity, as Sek called it — saved his neck; he caught a life sentence plus caning.

Sek would not be so lucky and he seemed to know and revel in it from the moment of his capture, mugging obnoxiously for the papers. “I’ve always wanted to die on the gallows,” he exulted at his sentencing. “It must be thrilling to be hanged.” He’d used that same word — “thrilling” — to describe the experience of committing murder.

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1982: Charles Brooks, Jr., the first by lethal injection

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Besides being Pearl Harbor Day and Noam Chomsky Day, December 7 is a black-letter anniversary for capital punishment as the date in 1982 when the United States first executed a prisoner by means of lethal injection.

Charles Brooks, Jr. — who had by the time of his death converted to Islam and started going by Shareef Ahmad Abdul-Rahim — suffered the punishment in Texas for abducting and murdering a car lot mechanic. With an accomplice,* he had feigned interest in a test drive in order to steal the car, stuffing the mechanic in the trunk and then shooting him dead in a hotel room.

The “modern” U.S. death penalty era had just dawned with 1976’s Gregg v. Georgia decision affirming new procedures meant to reduce systemic arbitrariness — and the machinery was reawakening after a decade’s abeyance.

In the wake of the circus atmosphere surrounding the January 1977 firing squad execution of Gary Gilmore, the laboratories of democracy started casting about for killing technologies that were a little bit less … appalling.

“We had discussed what happened to Gary Gilmore,” former Oklahoma chief medical examiner Jay Chapman later recalled. “At that time we put animals to death more humanely than we did human beings — so the idea of using medical drugs seemed a much better alternative.”

This was not actually a new idea: proposals for a medicalized execution process had been floated as far back as the 1880s, when New York instead opted for a more Frankenstein vibe by inventing the electric chair. And the Third Reich ran a wholesale euthanasia program based on lethal injections.

But 1977 was the year that lethal injection was officially adopted as the lynchpin method for regular judicial executions. It happened in Oklahoma, and Chapman’s three-drug protocol — sodium thiopental (an anaesthetic), followed by pancuronium bromide (to stop breathing) and potassium chloride (to stop the heart) — became the standard execution procedure swiftly taken up by numerous other U.S. states in the ensuing years. As years have gone by, Chapman’s procedure has come under fire and supply bottlenecks have led various states to experiment with different drug cocktails; all the same, nearly 90% of modern U.S. executions have run through the needle.*

Texas was one early adopter, rolling in the gurney to displace its half-century-old electric chair. Its debut with Charlie Brooks was also Texas’s debut on the modern execution scene, and both novelties have had a lot of staying power since: every one of Texas’s many executions in the years since — 557 executions over 36 years as of this writing — has employed lethal injection.

* For up-to-date figures, check the Death Penalty Information Center’s executions database.

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1958: Istvan Angyal, Hungarian revolutionary

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On this date in 1958, Angyal Istvan was hanged for the failed 1956 Hungarian revolution.

A working-class Jew who survived Auschwitz as a boy — his mother and sister were not so fortunate — Angyal was a convinced leftist who became disaffected with the Hungarian regime not because of its Communism but because of its failure to realize the democratic and egalitarian aspirations of that ideology.

A fixture on the youthful intellectual ferment in Budapest in the early 1950s, he was one of the leaders of street protests against Soviet domination during the doomed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, even conferring personally with Prime Minister Imre Nagy during its last days. In a gesture that not all of his comrades would have supprted, he set out the hammer and sickle along with the Hungarian national flag on November 7, the very eve of the revolution’s defeat, arguing to Soviet troops that they were fighting against true communism.

He’s commemorated today at an Angyal István Park in Budapest; it’s evidently “a modern social place with free Internet” and a nifty paper plane art installation.

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1937: Vincenzo Baccala

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Italian Communist Vincenzo Baccala was executed on this date in 1937 … but not by the fascists.

The blackshirted turn of his country in the 1920s had driven Vincenzo into emigre exile, pursued by an in absentia prison sentence for “subversive propaganda tending to insurrection and incitement of class hatred.” He went first in Paris and then in 1931 to the USSR.

Although present in the fortress of Communism at the Party’s direction, and eventually an outright Soviet citizen, Baccala came into trouble after criticizing Stalin in 1933 and had to leave his family in Odessa as he struggled to find work. Come the height of the purges in the later 1930s, he was predictably denounced.

Baccala’s wife Pia Piccioni swallowed a bitter draught of her own; unable to see her husband or find support amid Stalin’s purges, she returned to her native country, finding little comfort either in Mussolini‘s Italy (for obvious reasons) or in postwar Italy (where red comrades shied from traducing the USSR). She wrote a book about her own and Baccala’s experiences, Compagno Silenzio: Una vedova italiana del gulag racconta.

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1943: Floyd McKinney

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Nevada executed Floyd McKinney in its gas chamber on this date in 1943.

McKinney had caught a ride westward across the state on Highway 50 with 2nd Lt. Raymond Fisher and his wife.

Somewhere around Sand Springs, McKinney murdered Lt. Kinney with some sort of bludgeon, like a car jack, and shot Mrs. Fisher.

No motive was ever established, it might have been pecuniary since McKinney subsequently sold the Fishers’ car in Reno for $650.

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1928: William Charles Benson

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William Charles Benson hanged at Wandsworth prison on this date in 1928, the murderer of his ice cream factory co-worker’s wife.

Benson in 1925 had moved in with his mate Sidney Harbor in Kentish Town where the quarters were so close that everybody shared the same bedroom.

The savings in rent were drawn from the heart’s account, once Sidney’s wife Charlotte — the couple had two children together — took a shine to the boarder in the other bed. Benson in 1927 lost job and side piece alike when he was fired from Wall’s and also kicked out of the house by the suspicious Sidney; Charlotte, however, continued the affair and eventually even took an apartment nearby Benson’s new place to facilitate assignations.

Early on the morning of September 6, 1928, Benson hailed a constable with the words, “I want an ambulance, I have just killed my girl.” Apparently, she had proposed putting the adultery to an end and returning to Sidney.

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