Category Archives: Crime

1562: Michael Lindener, poet laureate

Posted on by

The Holy Roman Empire poet laureate — self-proclaimed, at least — Michael Lindener was beheaded with a sword on this date in 1562 in Friedberg as a murderer.

Lindener (German Wikipedia entry) routinely signed himself “Poeten”, or “P[oeta].L[aureatus].” — for instance, in the preface to his vernacular satiric classics Rastbüchlein and Katzipori.

Whether Lindener really was an official poet laureate of the empire, however, is not so clear. Lindener was a bit of a hustler and in scrabbling to support himself with his pen in Nuremberg and then Augsburg in the 1550s did not shrink from forging the likes of Savonarola, Melanchthon, and Hessus. (He also worked as a proofreader and a teacher.) His honorifics might also have been fraudulent.

Lindener’s mischief was not confined to literary offenses; he led the roguish life of a Villon-esque picaro.

But while that latter author, a mere thief, escaped the fate anticipated in his “Ballad of the Hanged Man”, Lindener found that stabbing an innkeeper to death was an offense much beyond his eloquence to excuse.

On this day..

1868: Joseph Eisele, honest, kind-hearted triple murderer

Posted on by

On this date in 1868, several thousand folk braved knee-deep mud to converge on Parkersburg, West Virginia for the last public hanging in Wood County.

Joseph Eisele was a German immigrant who worked at a furniture shop. He had, he would admit, manifested a predilection for crime from his childhood in Germany, on account of which he’d begun going by “John Schafer” once he pulled up stakes for America.

“Joseph Eisele is five feet nine inches high, stoutly built, somewhat round shouldered, and weighs one hundred and seventy pounds,” ran the introduction to Joseph Eisele’s own confessional pamphlet about Joseph Eisele.* “He is thirty-four years of age, with a complexion quite fair and florid, his light brown hair is worn short, and his beard shaved clean, except a light moustache, which gracefully shades a slightly sensual, though well shaped mouth, his nose is straight, well cut and proportioned, his gray eyes are somewhat deep set, and of a mingled expression of sadness and timidity, not in keeping with the open, genial brow, square jaw, strong chin, and other features of his manly and prepossessing countenance.”

It’s a description aiming to suggest a physiognomy of queer contrasts, mirroring the cold-blooded series of crimes committed by a seemingly conscientious and thoughtful man.

Even while “prowling around nightly with his terrible hatchet in his pocket, seeking more victims, he was sustaining a character for industry, frugality, temperance, honesty, kind-hearted liberality, and all the house-hold and domestic virtues, together with a dignity, modesty and intelligence rare among men in his walk of life,” a correspondent mused to the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Eisele murdered three men, Joseph Lilienthal, Aloys Ulrich, and Rudolph Tsutor, and robbed them, and did so with a carelessness for his own safety that would astonish once it became public. Lilienthal he killed in daylight behind an occupied boarding house. Ulrich’s distinctive possessions were sold off with little attempt to disguise them. Tsutor Eisele slew at his home at 10 in the morning, miraculously without being observed coming or going. Then the killer paid out his debts that same day.

Since it looks like Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t be on this case, it would be up to Eisele’s prey to help themselves.

Finally in early January 1868, Eisele clobbered a creditor across the neck in an attempt to take his fourth victim. John White fought back with “almost superhuman strength and courage” as his attacker later put it admiringly. The melee careened out into the street where finally, finally, Eisele was detected in his crime. He managed to flee the scene as bystanders came running, but was arrested shortly after.

At this point, the dignity, modesty, and intelligence stuff resurfaced.

Eisele’s trial began at 2 p.m. on January 20, and so ready was the defendant to expiate his guilt that the verdict was in the books before dinner. In a prepared statement that a translator read from Eisele’s native German (which also begged his adoptive countrymen not to think ill of Germans), Eisele foreswore any defense.

I want no witness and no defense, and can not really give any reason for my misdeeds, except that the evil spirit led me into temptation, and I could not resist it. I am willing to sacrifice my blood and life for my crimes, and hope the Almighty God will forgive me, and after death receive me into his kingdom. I therefore beg the people present for their forgiveness. I have no enmity towards any one in the world, and acknowledge that I deserve all that may befall me and am ready to bear it all with patience.**

There’s apparently some sentiment to mark the spot of the historic hanging in Parkersburg.

* As of this writing, Eisele’s book is available on Amazon! The quotes from it source to the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, March 11, 1868.

** Cincinnati Daily Gazette, Jan. 27, 1868.

On this day..

2009: Abdullah Saleh Al-Kohali

Posted on by

On this date in 2009, Yemen police executed Abdullah Saleh Al-Kohali for machine-gunning a mosque at Bait al-Aqari village.

Despite what one might assume, Al-Kohali wasn’t a terrorist.

No, he was after a fellow clan member named Belal Al-Kohali over an affair of honor.

“He got my sister pregnant three times,” the killer complained to the court.

He did indeed manage to kill Belal Al-Kohali during weekly prayers … along with five other people who died on the spot, and four more besides them mortally wounded who later succumbed to their injuries.

On this day..

1837: The slave Julius, property of John and Rebecca Matthews

Posted on by

(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this date in 1837, a slave named Julius, property of John and Rebecca Matthews, was hanged for the attempted murder of his mistress. He was 20 years old. The story of his crime is told in detail in Lewis L. Laska’s Legal Executions in Tennessee: A Comprehensive Registry, 1782-2009.

Julius was the Matthews family’s only slave and was apparently mentally disabled; Rebecca said he had “but half sense” and John said he “had just sense enough to be a good negro.”

Both John and Rebecca emphasized that Julius was docile, obedient and apparently quite attached to his owners, who had three small children. They were baffled when he brutally assault Rebecca and tried to kill her.

On the day of the attack, John was absent. Julius went out corn-shucking with Littlebury Fallin and his uncle William Fallin, both of them white men. He came home at 6:00 p.m., drunk, did some household chores and made a large fire in the fireplace.

At 7:00, Rebecca heard some whistles outside the house and asked Julius what was going on. He said he didn’t know. He went outside and returned with an ax, saying he would use it to defend Rebecca if they were attacked. Rebecca locked the doors and windows, then sat at her spinning wheel for awhile.

When she bent over to pick something up, Julius grabbed her by the throat and said he was going to kill her, take all the money in the house and run away to a free state. He tried to throw her into the fireplace, saying he’d made the fire to burn her body.

There followed a fierce struggle and Rebecca put up a good fight. She was able to wrestle the ax away from her attacker, unlock the door and run outside. Julius tried to brain her with a large rock but he dropped it when she grabbed his arm. He then tried to stab her with a pocketknife but wound up accidentally cutting his own throat instead. Rebecca wrapped her hands around his neck and choked him until she felt him lapse into unconsciousness.

Then she grabbed her youngest daughter, age three, and legged it for a neighbor’s house. As she ran she noticed Littlebury and William Fallin right behind her.

In the state of Tennessee, even a slave was entitled to a lawyer at a criminal trial. John Matthews refused to appoint counsel for Julius, so the state appointed two lawyers to defend him. (One of them, Alfred O. P. Nicholson, would later serve two terms in the Senate and, after that, on the Tennessee Supreme Court.)

Julius expressed great remorse for his crime, saying he would never have done it sober and he wished Rebecca had killed him. At his trial, he confessed everything and implicated the Fallins, saying that they’d gotten him drunk during the corn-shucking and urged him to rob and kill his mistress.

William, who lived in Kentucky, promised to help him get to a free state. The whistles, Julius explained, had been signals from the Fallins that they were outside the cabin waiting for him to kill Rebecca.

Littlebury testified and denied everything. William did not testify. Neither man ever faced charges for their alleged role in the crime.

The jury convicted Julius after deliberating overnight, but they recommended mercy on account of his youth, his prior good character and the suspicion that he had been lead astray by others. Nevertheless, the sentence was death.

As Julius was awaiting his execution date, help came from an unlikely source: John Matthews, his owner and the husband of the victim. He wrote to the governor, Newton Cannon, asking that the errant slave be pardoned so Matthews could sell him. He listed the following reasons:

  1. The negro is shown to have had a most excellent character.
  2. He was quite young.
  3. He was proved to have but a very limited portion of intellect.
  4. He was shown to be in liquor and the circumstances raised a strong presumption that he was induced by white men to drink for the very purpose of being instigated to commit the murder.
  5. The circumstances rendered it certain that he was instigated by white men, and with his already-impaired sense, and in liquor, that he was almost a passive instrument in their hands.
  6. He was the only slave of his master.

That last might have been the nub of it. Matthews emphasized that if Julius were hanged and his owners got no compensation — and the state of Tennessee never compensated an executed slave’s owner for the economic loss — the family would suffer greatly. This created an odd confluence of interest between the condemned slave and the one-slave family whose matron he had attempted.

John Matthews expressed confidence that Julius “was not himself when he did the act” and added that it seemed unreasonable “to take away a life when no murder had been committed.”

Going against Matthews’s letter was a petition from the citizens of Maury County, asking that justice take its course and Julius be executed. Julius had had a fair trial, the petition said. Sparing his life and merely selling him on would not only endanger public safety but would also set a bad example for other slaves: “For what is to restrain the slave from imbuing his hands on his masters’ blood, with whom he is incensed, if he had good reason to believe that his punishment, if caught, is to only be a change of masters, and a chance that the may be for the better?”

The governor ignored John Matthews’s plea and upheld the rule of law: Julius was hanged at 2:30 p.m. on March 1, and his master was not reimbursed. On the scaffold, the young slave “confessed his guilt, and deplored his error; spoke of his mistress with much tenderness and warned the colored persons present to remember his fate.”

On this day..

1947: Walter Graham Rowland

Posted on by

On this date in 1947, William Graham Rowland was controversially hanged for murdering his lover Olive Balchin.

Balchin had been savagely bludgeoned to death with a hammer, but her condemned murderer was once a bit of a cause celebre for the anti-death penalty movement in Great Britain.

Though less compelling and memorable than the likes of Timothy Evans, Rowland’s case was one of those cases where the evidence pointed towards guilt but maybe not with the vehemence you’d like to see for the gallows.

The Crown and the accused fielded clashing eyewitnesses — the former put him on the scene; the latter said he was miles away — and blood on Rowland’s clothes proved to match Balchin’s blood type.

Five weeks before the execution, a convict in Liverpool Prison named David Ware claimed that it was he and not Rowland who actually murdered Olive Balchin. A commission of inquiry was hurriedly assembled to weigh in on whether an innocent man was about to swing. Ware provided them a reassuring retraction.

“I made these statements out of swank more than anything,” Ware told the commission. “I also thought I was putting myself in the position of a hero. I wanted to see myself in the headlines. In the past I wanted to be hung. It was worth while being hung to be a hero.” The inquiry commission issued its finding accordingly, on the very eve of Rowland’s scheduled hanging, which went off just as it had always been scheduled.

After Ware got out, he murdered a different woman by bludgeoning her to death with a hammer, then committed suicide in his jail cell. Rowland, for his part, turned out to have been already convicted of and reprieved from a different murder in 1934.

On this day..

1920: Albert Fournier

Posted on by

Warning: Disturbing Images Below

Albert Fournier was guillotined on this date in 1920 in Tours, by France’s ubiquitous early 20th century headsman Anatole Deibler.

The previous August, Fournier murdered a M. Monmarche, his sister Mme. Vouteau, and their servant Marie Thillier, also raping the latter victim’s corpse.

On this day..

1828: Antoine Berthet, Stendhal inspiration

Posted on by

On this date in 1828, Antoine Berthet capped his gift to the arts by going under the guillotine at Grenoble‘s Place Grenette.

You probably haven’t heard of Antoine Berthet, but if you’ve read The Red and the Black (Le Rouge et le Noir) you know his story. Stendhal (a native of Grenoble) published his magnum opus not three years after Berthet lost his head, and the novel’s executed fictional protagonist Julien Sorel bears an unmistakable resemblance to the very real Berthet.

Berthet was a smart seminary student of low birth who hired out as a tutor for the Michoud family but was dismissed under a cloud for an apparent affair with Madame Michoud.

Nothing daunted, Berthet caught on as a tutor in another family — where he proceeded to seduce the lovely daughter Henriette. But a letter from Madame Michoud to the new employers terminated job and liaison alike.

The enraged Berthet stalked his former mistress to Mass and melodramatically shot her right there in the church. He failed to kill his target, and likewise failed his attempted suicide.

Unlike his literary doppleganger — the Julien Sorel character defiantly spurns his former lovers’ attempts to pull strings on his behalf and insists on his responsibility in court — Antoine Berthet mounted an unsuccessful insanity defense. It was the “irresistible derangements of love” drove him to outrage feminine virtue, consecrated grounds, and (maybe most scandalously) the upper classes.

His prosecutor disagreed, attributing all to Berthet’s frustrated “ambitious dreams”: “understanding too late that he could not reach the goal that his pride proposed, Berthet, stripped of his hopes, would perish; but his rage would drag a victim along with him to the tomb that he dug for himself!”

On this day..

1698: Guido Franceschini, The Ring and the Book inspiration

Posted on by

Robert Browning‘s long narrative poem The Ring and the Book concerns the murder trial of the nobleman Guido Franceschini — a real-life case that saw the defendant in question executed in Rome on this date in 1698 for murdering his wife Pompilia as a suspected adultress. (And her parents just because.)

The 21,000-line work was Browning’s greatest success in life, though many particulars of Browning’s spin on events have been challenged by the 2001 study Roman Murder Mystery.

We’ll be content this day to take Browning’s audience’s-eye view of the jealous husband’s scaffold comeuppance on execution-day.

To mount the scaffold-steps, Guido was last
Here also, as atriciousest in crime.
We hardly noticed how the peasants died,
They dangled somehow soon to right and left,
And we remained all ears and eyes, could give
Ourselves to Guido undividedly,
As he harangued the multitude beneath.
He begged forgiveness on the part of God,
And fair construction of his act from men,
Whose suffrage he entreated for his soul,
Suggesting that we should forthwith repeat
A Pater and an Ave with the hymn
Salve Regina Coeli, for his sake.
Which said, he turned to the confessor, crossed
And reconciled himself, with decency,
Oft glancing at Saint Mary’s opposite,
Where they possess, and showed in shrine to-day,
The blessed Umbilicus of our Lord,
(A relic ’tis believed no other church
In Rome can boast of) — then rose up, as brisk
Knelt down again, bent head, adapted neck,
And, with the name of Jesus on his lips,
Received the fatal blow.

The headsman showed
The head to the populace. Must I avouch
We strangers own to disappointment here?
Report pronounced him fully six feet high,
Youngish, considering his fifty years,
And, if not handsome, dignified at least.
Indeed, it was no face to please a wife!

The “old yellow book” of original case notes that Browning found at a Florentine market and subsequently served as his reference source is available here. The poem itself is, of course, in the public domain; read it in its entirety here, or get hours of free audio reading here.

On this day..

1878: J.W. Rover, sulfurous

Posted on by

Reno, Nevada had its only hanging on this date in 1878, and it’s never since been certain whether it was the right man they hung.

J.W. Rover, Frank McWorthy, and Isaac Sharp(e) had come from Oakland to work a sulfur claim in present-day Pershing County (then Humboldt County).

Sharp ended up dead, his body horribly mutilated and its dismembered parts scattered to different burial holes.

A mental health counselor I know is fond of saying of the family dysfunctions he has handled that who is crazy depends upon who gets to the phone first. It turns out that sometimes murder does, too.

McWorthy rode in to Winnemucca and swore out a complaint accusing Rover of the murder. Rover would spend the next three years vigorously but never quite successfully insisting that McWorthy was the one who killed Sharp.

Rover was convicted of murder in July 1875, but because the verdict didn’t mention degree of murder, the case had to be retried. In April 1876, Rover was convicted again, of first-degree murder, thank you very much. But the Nevada Supreme Court overturned that verdict, too, and granted Rover a change of venue to Reno’s Washoe County, where Rover was convicted for a third time in June 1877.

In all these proceedings, Rover never wavered from his claim of innocence, calling God to witness at trial after trial that it was his associate and accuser McWorthy who was the guilty party and wanted to frame up Rover to get his hands on that lucrative sulfur deposit.

Having failed three times over in court, Rover’s lawyers turned as the hanging approached to Section 458, a remote provision of the criminal code permitting a special jury to be impaneled “if after judgment of death there be good reason to suppose that the defendant has become insane.”

Three years and all those hearings on, Rover’s fate would finally rest in the hands of twelve new jurors impaneled on the very eve of his hanging. While Rover passed his final night in the Reno jail, his sanity jury met in a courtroom in an upper-story room.

Rover’s lawyers and the District Attorney made their arguments to the jury until midnight that night, then adjourned, and then re-assembled at 7:30 on the morning of the scheduled execution. Rover couldn’t sleep a wink, passing the night rambling emotionally with reporters — at one point breaking down as he read them a letter from his sister.

“As he lay there he formed an object at once of pity and interest,” one scribe wrote for the newspaper of nearby silver mining boomtown Virginia City.*

He was reclining upon a rude bed covered by a coarse blanket. His pillow had no case, and his hair was unkempt and rough-looking. His beard had the appearance of being about one month’s growth. The cell was narrow, and was lighted by the feeble rays of a tallow candle held by a Deputy Sheriff.

Once or twice, he would furtively ask the reporters’ estimation of his chances with the proceedings upstairs. The reporters didn’t know. The jury didn’t either.

That morning, as crowds besieged the courthouse seeking one of the 200 visitors’ permits for the “private” execution, the jury huddled inside it making its final deliberations over four long hours. At last, at noon, it came down seven votes for sane, five for insane.**

Seventy minutes after that vote, Rover was escorted to the gallows supported by two men and a stiff drink of whiskey. This was nearly a two-hour theater in its own right: after a 20-minute recitation of the death warrant, Rover spoke for 50-plus minutes, continuing to insist upon his innocence:

I am so prostrated by this long prosecution that I am unable to say what I want to say …

Gentlemen, McWorthy has got away, but if I had my liberty the face of the world would not be large enough to hide him. I would search him out and bring him to justice, and if the law could not reach him I would find a strong arm of justice that would reach him …

I must be hung; you will be sorry for it some day, but what good will that do me when I am dead and gone? Good-by. My heart is with you.

By the end, Rover could barely hold up. He took a drink of water. “Oh, gentlemen, I cannot realize that I am to be hung!” he cried as his limbs were pinioned at last, and had to be supported lest he swoon. The Catholic priest finally had to settle him down from his last babbling.

“Not guilty,” he insisted one last time. Then to the sheriff: “Go on and do your duty.”

Rumors of Rover’s innocence persisted for years after his hanging, not excluding claims that his ghost was on the haunt.†

In 1899, a newspaper reported that “It afterward developed that Rover was innocent of the crime for which he suffered. McWorthy died a few years ago in Arizona, and on his deathbed confessed that he was the murderer of Sharp.”

McWorthy might or might not have been the guilty party. But that story was not accurate — McWorthy was still alive at the time in Oakland, California.

* The newspaper in question was the Territorial Enterprise, notable for employing the young Mark Twain in the early 1860s. Indeed, it was here that the writer Samuel Clemens first employed that nom de plume. Ten years before Rover’s hanging, Clemens/Twain actually witnessed and wrote about a public hanging in Virginia City.

** Not as close as it sounds: Rover needed a unanimous verdict.

† The present-day Washoe County Courthouse, not built until many years after Rover’s hanging, allegedly has a haunted jail whose spook might be Rover.

On this day..

2004: Yang Xinhai, Monster Killer

Posted on by

When I killed people I had a desire. This inspired me to kill more. I don’t care whether they deserve to live or not. It is none of my concern…I have no desire to be part of society. Society is not my concern.

-Yang Xinhai

On this date in 2004, China executed one of its most prolific serial killers ever.

Yang Xinhai was an impoverished migrant worker with previous theft and rape convictions already to his name when he commenced his infamous spree in 1999.

Over the ensuing four years the so-called “Monster Killer” amassed 67 murders and 23 rapes via terrifyingly bold home invasions: he would break into rural occupied rural dwellings under cover of darkness wielding a heavy iron hammer or similar slasher-villain melee weapon, and then just go to town.

“He didn’t leave survivors, and more than a few families were exterminated by his hand,” one newspaper report described. (In fact, about five people are known to have survived Yang’s various attacks.)

The last of his slayings — eight people in two different attacks in Hebei Province villages — occurred a bare six months before Yang himself caught a bullet to the back of his end. A routine police stop in November 2003 made him a little too shifty and prompted beat cops to detain him. Almost immediately the diabolical character of their new capture spilled out.

Yang himself didn’t see the point in resisting the inevitable. He provided a full confession, didn’t bother to defend himself in an hour-long trial on February 1, 2004, and declined to mount any sort of appeal to prevent his swift execution 13 days after that.

On this day..