Category Archives: Crime

1959: Leonard Shockley, the last juvenile executed?

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On this date in 1959, Leonard Shockley was gassed in Maryland.

The appeals court that considered his case found it “perfectly clear that Leonard killed the victim in an attempt to perpetrate a robbery or a rape,” during a heist committed jointly with Leonard’s older brother.

On that basis, young Shockley achieved the distinction of being the second-last person ever put to death for a crime committed as a 16-year-old. For a very long while, it really looked like he might be the last, but Oklahoma’s 1999 execution of Sean Sellers usurped the claim.

While it makes little ethical difference, from the standpoint of attributing criminal culpability, whether a 16-year-old offender is executed promptly at age 16 or held for a lifetime in prison and executed in his eighties, Shockley may also be the last human put to death on American soil before he had attained his own majority. Shockley’s birthdate invariably reports as “1941 or 1942”,* and in the absence of the sort of primary research a blogger is naturally loath to conduct, we’re left with conflicting sources on the subject.

The Washington Post‘s headline the following day annonced, “Slayer, 18, Dies In Gas Chamber”. (Surmounting the text of the perfunctory Associated Press story it ran.)

Whereas the Baltimore Sun reported, “Youth, 17 Dies in Gas Chamber: Shockley Executed for Slaying of Shore Mother”. (Alas, no screenshot: it’s cited by Victor Streib, an anti-death penalty academic.)

So it’s not completely clear whether Shockley enjoys this particular claim to fame. Well, not enjoy it exactly. Of course not that. And poor Sarah Hearne didn’t enjoy being slashed to death; this is also understood. Let’s just say, a sad affair and a minor milestone, and leave it at that.

* The crime was in January 1958, 15 months before the execution. It’s simple enough to work out when Shockley’s birthday would have to fall for the various scenarios.

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1763: Elizabeth Morton, bad with kids

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

On this date in 1763, fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Morton was hanged on Gallows Hill, Nottingham for the murder of her employer’s two-year-old daughter.

Elizabeth, a servant girl employed by the farmer John Oliver and his family in the parish of Walkeringham, was caught after attempting to kill one of the Olivers’ other children. Loretta Loach describes Elizabeth’s crime in her book The Devil’s Children: A History of Childhood and Murder:

In August 1762, Mrs. Oliver found one of her children under some straw in a barn, “struggling in the agonies of death, the blood gushing from its mouth, nose and eyes.” The child recovered and accused Elizabeth. The servant was immediately suspected of having strangled the family’s two-year-old daughter Mary, who had been found dead in her cradle months earlier.

Elizabeth confessed to the crime, but said she had been incited to commit it by a gentleman in black who came to bed with her and told her she must murder two of her master’s children. She could not feel easy, she said, until she had done as he directed. Despite the fact that the report in the Annual Register suggested she was an “idiot” (which would have been grounds for a pardon), she was executed…

After she was hanged, her body was dissected and then buried in a village near her home.

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1903: George Chapman, Ripper suspect

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

On this date in 1903, the wife-poisoner George Chapman was hanged at Wandsworth Prison in the United Kingdom.

He had at least three deaths on his record … and, if you fancy, possibly quite a few more.

Chapman was born Severin Antoniovich Klosowski in the village of Nargornak, Poland on December 14, 1865, the son of a carpenter. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon, and five years later he ended his medical studies in Warsaw. Just how much medical training he actually had is hard to determine, but the fact is that after he moved to the UK in 1887 or 1888, he worked not in the medical field but as a hairdresser’s assistant and later in his own barbershop.

In 1890, Chapman (still going by his birth name) married Lucy Baderski, having conveniently forgotten all about the wife he’d left back in Poland. His Polish wife found out about Lucy, however, and went to Britain to settle things. Bizarrely, for a short time the three of them all lived together, before Klosowski’s first wife threw up her hands and returned to Poland.

Klosowski’s relationship with Lucy Baderski was very troubled, and Klosowski was abusive. In one incident, he attacked her with a knife and threatened to cut her head off. Lucy was saved only because a customer suddenly came into the barbershop and Klosowski had to tend to him.

In 1892 she left him, although she was pregnant; they had emigrated to New Jersey by this time, and the beleaguered wife returned to England, where she had his daughter in May of that year.

Klosowski followed her back to England a few weeks later, but they separated for a final time not long afterward.

The following year, Klosowski took up with an Englishwoman named Annie Chapman. This, too, ran aground on Kloslowski’s violence and unfaithfulness, but he left her with daughter (whom he refused to support) and she left him with a surname (probably to assimilate and to escape his previous relationship entanglements).

From here on in, he goes by George Chapman.

Sometime after Annie left him, Chapman took up with Mary Isabella Spink, a woman who lived in the same boardinghouse. She was married and had a son, but her husband had deserted her.

They entered into a false marriage, like Chapman had done before with Lucy, and set up a successful barbershop with “musical shaves.” Mary would play the piano while Chapman did the barbering. For awhile they got a lot of money from the shop, but that didn’t stop Chapman from brutally beating Mary on a regular basis and even trying to strangle her. Eventually their barbershop failed and Chapman became a pub manager, living in the apartment upstairs.

Late in the year in 1897, Mary began suffering nausea and crippling stomach pains. Her husband stayed at her side constantly, tending to her needs and paying for a doctor, but Mary just got worse and worse and wasted to a skeleton. She finally died on Christmas Day. That morning Chapman found her dead, cried a little and went downstairs to open the pub.

The cause of death was listed as phthisis, or pulmonary tuberculosis. A few months later, Chapman sent Mary’s orphaned son to the workhouse.

Chapman needed help with the pub, so he hired Bessie Taylor, a former restaurant manager. What follows is familiar: a love affair, a fake marriage, and domestic violence. Then Bessie became sick, showing the same symptoms Mary Spink had. To avoid curious stares, Chapman moved them into London and leased another pub. Bessie was operated on but her condition didn’t improve.

Like Mary, she died on a holiday: Valentine’s Day in 1901. The cause of death was exhaustion from diarrhea and vomiting, secondary to an intestinal obstruction. Chapman made Bessie’s family pay for the funeral.

In August 1901, he hired the teenage Maud Eliza Marsh for a barmaid. They had another bogus marriage, but Chapman quickly grew tired of her. Maud got sick the same way his previous two wives had. Chapman got a doctor for her and mixed her medication himself. Her parents insisted that she be hospitalized.

Maud showed great improvement there and was released after a few weeks, only to become sick again once back at home with Chapman.

Her father, who had gotten suspicious, called in another doctor for a second opinion, but then Maud died quite suddenly. The doctor insisted on an autopsy, and found 693 milligrams of antimony in her body. The doctor determined that the final dose of poison had been more than 600 milligrams, an enormous amount — evidently Chapman had panicked when he realized Maud’s family suspected him.

Chapman was arrested and charged with murder.

Antimony is an almost perfect poison: odorless, colorless and nearly tasteless. However, it also acts as a preservative. When the authorities exhumed Mary Spink and Bessie Taylor, they saw both bodies were in much better condition than they ought to have been.

Mary had been in the ground five years, but one witness said her face was “perfect” and it looked like she’d been dead for less than a year. Bessie looked positively fresh.

Chapman was convicted of Maud Marsh’s murder in March 1903; the jury deliberated only eleven minutes.

He died without ever admitting his guilt. He never even admitted to being Severin Klosowski, although Lucy Baderski visited him after the trial.

There have been many poisoners, but most of the time the murderer has some tangible gain in mind, such as an inheritance or insurance policy. This doesn’t appear to have been the case with Chapman.

He liked money as much as anyone else, it’s true, and would stoop to crime to get it. (Once he torched his pub for the insurance money, but the police became suspicious when they found out all the furniture had been removed from the premises before the fire started. The insurance company refused to pay, and Chapman had to move, but for some reason he was not prosecuted.)

Still, he really didn’t gain financially from his wives’ deaths. Mary Spink gave him £500, but he let her live for a few years after that. Maud Marsh and Bessie Taylor left him nothing.

Chapman may simply have wanted the women out of the way so he could take up with someone else.

But in that case, he could have chosen better for a quick, clean murder. When a person is given antimony in a single large dose, they usually to expel it by vomiting, and are left relatively unharmed.

The way to murder someone using antimony is give it to them slowly and patiently in small doses over a period of weeks or months. It is a lingering, painful death — but it also taxes the discipline of the poisoner. Chapman wasn’t the slow-and-steady type.

Public interest in Chapman didn’t die with him and remains alive and well, because of the Jack the Ripper case.

This infamous and never-identified killer strangled and mutilated five prostitutes in London’s East End during 1888, and many hobbyists think Chapman and the Ripper may have been the same man.

Frederick George Abberline, who headed the Ripper investigation, had strong suspicions against him, summarized in an interview with the Pall Mall Gazette:

As I say, there are a score of things which make one believe that Chapman is the man; and you must understand that we have never believed all those stories about Jack the Ripper being dead, or that he was a lunatic, or anything of that kind. For instance, the date of the arrival in England coincides with the beginning of the series of murders in Whitechapel; there is a coincidence also in the fact that the murders ceased in London when Chapman went to America, while similar murders began to be perpetrated in America after he landed there.* The fact that he studied medicine and surgery in Russia before he came over here is well established, and it is curious to note that the first series of murders was the work of an expert surgeon, while the recent poisoning cases were proved to be done by a man with more than an elementary knowledge of medicine. The story told by Chapman’s wife of the attempt to murder her with a long knife while in America is not to be ignored.

Philip Sugden, author of The Complete History of Jack the Ripper, noted, “An impressive array of circumstantial factors can be alleged against Chapman.”

  • Chapman was definitely living in London during the time of the Ripper killings, which cannot be said of other suspects such as Frederick Deeming or Michael Ostrog.
  • Chapman’s youthful medical apprenticeship would seem to supply him with the grisly surgical expertise the Ripper displayed.
  • Chapman approximately matched witness descriptions of the Whitechapel fiend.
  • Also, curiously enough, one of the Ripper victims was named Annie Chapman — the same name as his estranged lover.
  • Perhaps most importantly, Sugden points out, Chapman was not only violent and a misogynist but also a known killer: “There must have been few men, even in late Victorian London, capable of multiple murder. The Ripper was one. Chapman was another.”

Sugden thought Chapman was a much better Ripper candidate than any of the other suspects he discussed in his book, but that didn’t mean he was definitely or even probably the real Ripper: “That Chapman committed crimes of which we have no present knowledge I can well believe. That he was Jack the Ripper is another matter.”

The main problem with the Chapman-Ripper theory is the fact that he poisoned his wives, rather than use some more demonstratively violent method of homicide.

Serial killers’ methods do evolve and adapt, but rarely change that drastically. “To exchange knife for hammer, gun or rope, weapons of violence all, is one thing,” Sugden observes. “To forsake violence in favor of subterfuge, as is alleged of Chapman, is quite another.”

It is for that reason that John Douglas, when he talks about the Ripper murders in his book The Cases That Haunt Us, rules out Chapman as a suspect.

Whether Chapman was Jack the Ripper or not, he certainly was an evil, vicious bastard in his own right.

R. Michael Gordon has written a book about his crimes, titled The Poison Murders of Jack the Ripper: His Final Crimes, Trial and Execution.

* This is not strictly accurate. There was one Ripper-type murder, of a prostitute named Carrie Brown, in a New Jersey hotel in 1891. Whether the Ripper actually committed the crime is open to speculation.

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1857: Francis Richeux, witnessed by Tolstoy

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On this date in 1857, a robber-murderer named Francis Richeux was publicly guillotined in Paris before a crowd of 12,000 to 15,000 people.

One of those onlookers was a 28-year-old Russian noble, fresh from the Crimean War and abroad on his first European trip: Leo Tolstoy.*

Overcome with curiosity, Tolstoy (as he recorded in his diary; here it is in Russian)

rose at seven o’clock and drove to see an execution. A stout, white, healthy neck and breast: he kissed the Gospels, and then — Death. How senseless … I have not received this strong impression for naught. I am not a man of politics. Morals and art I know, love, and [understand]. The guillotine long prevented my sleeping and obliged me to reflect.

And he developed the impression into a full-on rant that same day, in his running correspondence with Russian litterateur Vasily Botkin. The following is as translated in Dialogues with Dostoyevsky: The Overwhelming Questions.

The spectacle made such an impression on me that it will be long before I get over it. I have seen many horrors in war and in the Caucasus, but if a man were torn to pieces in my presence it would not have been so repulsive as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which they killed a strong, hale, healthy man in an instant. There [in war] it is not a question of the rational [will], but the human feeling of passion, while here it is a question of calm and convenient murder finely worked out, and there’s nothing grand about it. The insolent, arrogant desire to carry out justice, the law of God. Justice, which is determined by lawyers every one of whom, basing himself on honor, religion, and truth, contradicts each other. With these same formalities they have murdered both the king and Chenier, both republicans and aristocrats.† . . Then the repulsive crowd, the father explaining to his daughter what a convenient and ingenious mechanism it is, and so forth. The law of man — rubbish! The truth is that the state is a conspiracy not only for exploitation, but chiefly to corrupt its citizens. But all the same states exist, and moreover in this imperfect form. And they cannot pass from this system into socialism . . . For my part, I can only see in all this repulsive lie what is loathsome, evil, and I do not want to, and cannot, sort out where there is more and where there is less. I understand moral laws, the laws of morality and religion, binding on no one, that lead people forward and promise a harmonious future; I feel the laws of art which always bring happiness; but the laws of politics constitute for me such an awful lie that I cannot see in them a better or worse. All this is what I felt, understood, and recognized today. And this recognition at least to some extent relieves the burden of the impression for me . . . From this day forward I will not only never go to see such a thing again, but I will never serve any government anywhere.**

He wasn’t kidding about that long insomnia, either: the impression startled him, permanently. Recalling the effect years later in his Confessions, Tolstoy still attributed to it an important confirmation of his egalitarian philosophy.

When I saw the head separate from the body, and how they both thumped into the box at the same moment, I understood, not with my mind but with my whole being, that no theory of the reasonableness of our present progress can justify this deed; and that though everybody from the creation of the world, on whatever theory, had held it to be necessary, I know it to be unnecessary and bad; and therefore the arbiter of what is good and evil is not what people say and do, and is not progress, but is my heart and I.

Tolstoy developed the same theme further a few years later in What Is to Be Done? … the shade of the long-forgotten Francis Richeux still haunting the great man of letters.

Thirty years ago in Paris I once saw how, in the presence of thousands of spectators, they cut a man’s head off with a guillotine. I knew that the man was a dreadful criminal; I knew all the arguments that have been written in defence of that kind of action, and I knew it was done deliberately and intentionally, but at the moment the head and body separated and fell into the box I gasped, and realized not with my mind nor with my heart but with my whole being, that all the arguments in defence of capital punishment are wicked nonsense, and that however many people may combine to commit murder — the worst of all crimes — and whatever they may call themselves, murder remains murder, and that this crime had been committed before my eyes, and I by my presence and nonintervention had approved and shared in it. In the same way now, at the sight of the hunger, cold, and degradation of thousands of people, I understood not with my mind or my heart but with my whole being; that the existence of tens of thousands of such people in Moscow — while I and thousands of others over-eat ourselves with beef-steaks and sturgeon and cover our horses and floors with cloth or carpets — no matter what all the learned men in the world may say about its necessity — is a crime, not committed once but constantly; and that I with my luxury not merely tolerate it but share in it. (PDF source | Original Russian)

* Among Tolstoy’s other activities in Paris was hanging around Turgenev … but the two mostly irritated one another. Nevertheless, they shared a distaste for the guillotine, at least to judge by Turgenev’s repulsion at seeing it in action years later.

** Two days after the execution, Tolstoy left Paris for Geneva. Execution-disgust is a suggestive speculation, although Henri Troyat argues that it merely gave him a “dramatic excuse” to stop putting off travel plans he had already made.

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1962: James Hanratty, the killer all along

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Fifty years ago today, still insisting that he had “a clean conscience,” James Hanratty was hanged at Bedford Prison for the murder of Michael Gregsten and the rape-shooting of his mistress Valerie Storie.

Hanratty, a petty criminal with no history of violence — “I try to live a respectable life, except for my housebreaking” he testified* — fell into a web of questionable circumstantial evidence, plus the (also questionable**) eyewitness identification of the surviving Ms. Storie.

It was called the “A6 murder” because a stickup man had forced the lovers at gunpoint to drive him along that road, until pulling them over at the aptly-named Deadman’s Hill where he did the vicious deeds and left his victims for dead.

This was a bizarre and shocking crime, and the investigation led back to Hanratty only via a winding, almost accidental trail.

The murder weapon materialized on a bus, wiped clean of fingerprints; later, cartridges to match it materialized at a boarding house, and a confused reconstruction of whose aliases were occupying which rooms there uncertainly suggested Hanratty as a suspect.

The case, checking in at a then-record 21 trial days, featured 70 witnesses battling over inconclusive data points like the doubtful relationship between autobiographical remarks made by the killer and Hanratty’s actual biography, and Hanratty’s want of an apparent motive for an act so foreign to his previous m.o. On the other hand, some witnesses put him in incriminating places, and Hanratty damningly lied about and changed his alibi.

What to do? A jury mired in hours of inconclusive deliberation at one point sent back to the court to clarify the concept of “reasonable doubt.” In the end, it decided its doubts weren’t reasonable enough to spare James Hanratty the noose.

Meanwhile, another suspect from the same boarding-house, Peter Alphon, behaved extremely erratically in the run-up to Hanratty’s hanging, hounded Hanratty’s friend until the latter committed suicide, and then eventually (after the hanging) confessed outright. For Hanratty’s many advocates, Alphon looked an awful lot like reasonable doubt … or more.

This case was long a cause celebre for death penalty foes in the U.K. owing to its evidentiary shakiness; none of the other seven put to death in Great Britain after Hanratty were plausible innocents.


John Lennon and Yoko Ono commiserate with James Hanratty’s parents in 1969. (Photo by Express/Express/Getty Images, via here.)

In 2000, DNA tests conducted on Valerie Storie’s underwear and the handkerchief which wrapped the recovered gun finally offered the prospect of more certain forensic identification than had been available at the time of the trial. Those tests matched (pdf) James Hanratty’s DNA … and nobody else’s.

While this result has not resolved all controversy about the A6 murder case — witness this book-length forum discussion — nor ended the Hanratty family’s campaign for exoneration, it’s pretty well cut the legs from Hanratty’s actual-innocence argument. Whatever one can say about the original trial, it sure looks like Hanratty was the killer all along.

A few books about James Hanratty and the A6 case

* Feb. 8, 1962 testimony, as reported in the next day’s London Times.

** Aside from the inherent unreliability eyewitness testimony, Valerie Storie at one point picked an airman stand-in in a lineup; when she later identified Hanratty, it was not by his appearance but by his cockney accent.

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1872: William Frederick Horry, Marwood’s first

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If Pa killed Ma, who’d kill Pa?

Marwood.

–Victorian riddle/pun

On this date in 1872, the landmark hanging career of William Marwood commenced — when, having persuaded the authorities at Lincoln Castle Gaol, he executed his very first subject.

The man of the milestone was William Frederick Horry, a Boston native — not Boston, Massachusetts, but the Lincolnshire port that was its namesake.

“Fred” wed Jane and the two ran The George Hotel in Burslem together.

Until Fred’s drunken, possessive outbursts led Jane to flee the house. Let it be said that a partnership in the hospitality industry might not be the ideal choice for your controlling type.

Jane and the couple’s three children actually took refuge with Fred’s own kin, the husband’s father barring his own son from the home. Horry got around that by showing up with a revolver and shooting her dead in an act of coldly calculated passion: he immediately handed the gun to his stunned brother and stayed to await arrest, saying, “You have no notion, Tom, how I loved that woman, but I could not stand the jealousy.” Nor did he show any interest in appealing for clemency; he hanged within days of his conviction.

If this reads to modern eyes like the unedifying passion play of an abusive, loutish spouse, many in Burslem were ready to consider Fred Horry “a martyr, more sinned against than sinning.” (The funeral oration of a rector!) Three thousand people lined the streets to respectfully see Horry’s coffin to its rest; even the requisite crime broadsheet concurred in the apparent public judgment about Jane’s culpably easy virtue.

Now all you who give way to jealous passion,
And the crimes which it entails,
I hope that you will learn a lesson,
From my sad and mournful tale.
Their married life has ended early,
For his wife he says his temper tried
But for them now it is all ended,
For her faults she bled and died.

Supporters erected a monolith in his honor, an unusual tribute for a wife-murderer.

The man tasked to mete out the lesson for Horry’s jealous passion was, heretofore, a Horncastle cobbler.

Already into his fifties by this time, William Marwood was strictly self-educated in the science of hanging … but it is he who would bring the exacting mechanical arts to the hangman’s ancient craft.

(Actually, Marwood was fond of distinguishing himself from the mere hangman. “Calcraft hanged them,” he said of his notoriously slipshod predecessor’s operations. “I execute them.” He went so far as to assert his professionalism with business cards.)

To make this famous mark in the annals of capital punishment, Marwood the cobbler first had to talk his way into the Horry job. This was surely facilitated by the fact that the most recent execution at Lincoln Castle, that of Priscilla Biggadike or Biggadyke, had been a bit of a botch, with one of the realm’s forgettable barely-competent hangmen clumsily fitting the noose to the front of the convict’s throat on the supposition that this would snap her neck. Instead, she strangled.

Marwood’s arrival spelled the quick end to folklore and guesswork on the scaffold; his was the rational hand of industrial Britain finally touching the ancient hanging ritual.

For most of English history, the hanging had entailed simply shoving the unfortunate subject off a ladder or a cart, leaving them to gradually choke to death at the end of the noose. This protracted process was sometimes associated with unruly public scenes, and with “executed” criminals surviving (and even intentionally calculating to survive) the hanging. “Such as have but a very superficial Notion of Anotomy, may easily conceive how a Person very soon cut down may shew even strong Signs of Life,” the Ordinary of Newgate had passingly remarked in 1736, as if it really were no big deal.

Of course, it had long been understood that adding a little plummet could generate the force necessary to break the neck, to the advantage of both speed and certainty. Guy Fawkes is supposed to have exploited the carelessness of a Stuart executioner to hurl himself off the ladder when they were just setting up for the non-fatal hanging portion of his “hanged, drawn, and quartered” sentence — and thereby cleverly offed himself before they could do the agonizing Braveheart bits to his living body.

Small drops came into use with the move towards hanging platforms late in the 18th century, and by the mid-19th century larger drops of some kind were standard operating procedure: witness the description of the setup for the country’s first private hanging a few years before our date.

But the length and the nature of the drop remained very much within individual hangmen’s ad hoc discretion. The science of dropping would only arrive in the 1860s and 1870s. Until then, execution bulletins reporting that the unhappy soul “died hard” denoted the frequent occasions when death was effected via agonizing minutes of choking spasms. Even in the London Times‘ Dec. 22, 1875 report on one such man who “died hard” noted that “in the memory of Mr. John Rowland Gibson, the prison surgeon, extending, in that capacity, over more than 40 years, there are only two instances on record in Newgate of the neck of a convict having been dislocated during execution.”

Aiming to remedy that substandard record, the Irish doctor Samuel Haughton in 1866 published a landmark paper, “On hanging considered from a Mechanical and Physiological point of view” (read it here), in which he noted that whereas a short-dropped prisoner’s death by apoplexy or asphyxiation is “preceded by convulsions, lasting from five to forty-five minutes,” a broken neck “is instantaneous and painless, and is unaccompanied by any convulsive movement whatever.”

“It seems to me unworthy of the present state of science,” Haughton continued, “to continue a mode of execution which, as at present used, is extremely clumsy and also painful to the criminal.”

In a mass of equations abstractly working out foot-pounds’ shock expended on the neck and which vertebrae constituted the superior articulating surface, Haughton proceeded to suggest a protocol (adapted from the American drop method) “to give hanging all the rapidity of death by the guillotine without the painful spectacle of bloodshed.”

Haughton was just a theorist. Marwood actually put those concepts into practice.

Marwood is presumed to have been influenced by Haughton’s studies; although the basis for that renowned hangmanexecutioner‘s calculations is not known, Marwood is distinguished as the creator of the “long drop” hanging method — giving variable 4- to 10-foot falls to his subjects based on their body weight, with the knot stationed under the left jawline.

He was able to do all that because this first hanging of William Horry went off without a hitch. Still, as a nonentity at first, Marwood had to continue to hustle his hanging assignments — as with this solicitous handwritten 1873 pitch (page 1, page 2) to work an upcoming death date.

But Marwood’s clean long drops — he was the only executioner using the technique — soon secured him appointment as state executioner and the official London and Middlesex hangman. Over an 11-year career from 1872 to 1883, Marwood put 178 humans to death, the bulk of British executions during that period.

Marwood’s legacy — not his direct creation, since it was formalized in the years following his death — was the bureaucratic standardization of the hanging in the form of “drop tables” defining the length of rope to use relative to the weight of the executed prisoner to guarantee the death penalty would be implemented “in a becoming manner without risk of failure or miscarriage in any respect.”

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1911: Joseph Christock

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On this date in 1911, Joseph Christock — a “loose-jawed, low-browed fellow, a brother to the ox, under the fine-spun skin of the human” — was hanged for murder.

The last person executed in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania had, a mere five months before, been a hired farmhand … until he drank himself stupid on cider and proceeded to rape the lady of the farm and murder both her and her 65-year-old mother.

The crime was a straightforward one, even if the prisoner was determined to run out the clock making what reads like a rather self-conscious display of bravado. (He wrote his own death-date into his Bible and coolly showed it off to a reporter; he also attempted suicide several times.)

The definitive blog post on Joseph Christock is this one at Coal Region History Chronicles, but we were drawn to this comment left below it …

my grandfather, charles reigle was a asst. warden at this time and joesph christock made an astrological drawing the night before the hanging which i possess along with a photo of my grandfather,joesph christock and the warden which i also posses.

I took the liberty of following up this comment, and Mr. Ron Young generously sent me copies of the images below, along with the following explanation.

The one is a photo of my grandfather, Charles Riegle, and the other is a drawing cristock made for my grandmother, Sarah Riegle. They,along with my mother, Dora and i don`t remember how many more of 13 children they had were living in a house right outside of the prison walls. The drawing always intrigued me because it looks astological, but could mean a number of things. My grandfather passed aroung 1938, so a lot of the stories, i heard were at a young age.

We don’t have any special research to add on this occasion, but submit them here with great gratitude to Mr. Young, and in the spirit of the uncanny. These small artifacts, from the doomed flesh of a long-dead murderer via two generations of a warden’s family, across a random meeting on the Internet and thence to points unknown.

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1815: Anthony Lingard, the last gibbeted in Derbyshire

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On this date* in 1815, Anthony Lingard was hanged for murder and robbery at Derby.

Lingard strangled the widow who operated the Wardlow Miers tollbooth in order to rob her poor possessions and lavish those ill-gotten proceeds upon the girl he had impregnated — “with a view to induce her to father the child upon some other person.” That’s the world without contraception for you.

Lingard’s girl thought this bribe fishy and gave him back the widow’s incriminatingly distinctive shoes after hearing reports that footwear had been taken from the murder scene. Then, she testified against him at the Derby Assizes (Lingard had also confessed the crime). Tried on Saturday the 25th, convicted “after a few minutes,” and strung up in front of the county gaol at noontime Tuesday, Lingard “met his fate with a firmness which would deserve the praise of fortitude if it was not the result of insensibility. He appeared but little agitated or dejected by his dreadful situation.”

Rather than the increasingly standard post-execution coda of anatomization, Lingard’s body was given over to a use of more ancient vintage: gibbeting.

Hung up in chains on the aptly named Gibbot Field in Wardlow near the spot of the murder, Lingard’s bleaching bones provided a grisly object lesson to passersby of the consequences of crime. Or, maybe not: though the novelty at first made a crowd-pleasing spectacle, it soon faded into the scenery.

A few years later, a 16-year-old girl poisoned off a rival in the very shadow of the gibbet, winding up executed for her trouble. A younger fellow named William Lingard eventually drew a death sentence for highway robbery committed near his own older brother’s clanking remains — a sentence commuted to convict transportation.

If what was left of Anthony Lingard failed to overawe his criminal counterparts, it did at least leave an impression on poet William Newton, who penned this sad meditation on the local landmark, found in full here. (It must have helped his perspective that Newton was into his sixties when the young pup hanged.)

“The supposed Soliloquy of a Father, under the Gibbet of his Son; upon one of the Peak Mountains”
TIME — Midnight. SCENE — A Storm.

 Art thou, my Son, suspended here on high? —
Ah! what a sight to meet a Father’s eye!
To see what most I prized, what most I loved.
What most I cherish’d, — and once most approved,
Hung in mid air to feast the nauseous worm.
And waving horrid in the midnight storm!

 Let me be calm; — down, down, my swelling soul;
Ye winds, be still, — ye thunders, cease to roll!
No! ye fierce winds, in all your fury rage;
Ye thunders, roll; ye elements, engage;
O’er me be all your mutual terrors spread.
And tear the thin hairs from my frenzied head:
Bring all your wrathful stores from either pole.
And strike your arrows through my burning soul :
I feel not, — fear not, — care not, — shrink not, — when
I know, — believe, — and feel, — ye are not men!
Storms but fulfil the high decrees of God,
But man usurps his sceptre and his rod.
Tears from his hand the ensigns of his power.
To be the petty tyrant of an hour.

 My Son! My Son! how dreadful was thy crime!
Thy name stands branded to remotest time;
Gives all thy kindred to the eye of scorn,
Both those who are, and those that may be born;
Scatters through ages on thy hapless race
In every stage of life, and death, — disgrace:
In youth’s gay prime, in manhood’s perfect bloom.
Ah! more, — it ends not, dies not, on the tomb!
O woman! woman! choicest blessing given.
If pure; — the highest gift of highest heaven!
If lax, corrupt, deceitful, — worse than hell!
Worse than the worst of demons dare to tell!
It was thy lot, ill-fated Son! to find
Thy doom pour’d on thee by the faithless kind;
Fraudful, and false, their treacherous snares they spread.
And whelm’d destruction on thy thoughtless head.

 To die, to perish from the face of earth.
Oblivion closing on thy name and birth.
Hid under ground from each invidious eye,
From every curious, every rancorous spy,
Was what thy crime deserved: — not more;
The rest seems cruelty. — When heretofore
Our barbarous sires the aweful Gibbet rear’d.
The Gibbet only, not the laws were fear’d:
The untutored ruffian, of an untaught clime,
Fear’d more the punishment than dreaded crime.
We boast refinement, say our laws are mild.
Dealt equally to all, the man, the child: —
But ye, who, argue thus, come here and see,
Feel with a Father’s feelings; — feel with me!
See that poor shrivell’d form the tempest brave.
See the red lightning strike, the waters lave.
The thunders volleying on that fenceless breast! —
Who can see this, and wish him not at rest?

At rest, — vague word! — the immaterial mind
Perhaps even now is floating on the wind: —
Ah! no, — not mind, — not spirit, — but the shell;
The mind ere this has drank of Mercy’s well:
‘Tis not for that I feel, for that I sigh.
But sweltering, putrid, rank mortality.
O! blind to truth, to all experience blind.
Who think such spectacles improve mankind:
Bid untamed youth on such sights feast his eyes,
Harden you may, but never humanise.
Ye who have life, or death, at your command.
If crime demand it, let the offender die.
But let no more the Gibbet brave the sky:
No more let vengeance on the dead be hurl’d.
But hide the victim from a gazing world.

Anthony Lingard was the last person ever gibbeted in Derbyshire. England abolished gibbeting and hanging in chains full stop in the 1830s.

* The date March 8 is widely attributed on other sites, but the primary documentation for March 28 is unambiguous. I want to suspect a seminal typo somewhere that’s been copied a thousand other times over.

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2010: Modise Mokwadi Fly, Botswana pol

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

On this day in 2010, reggae artist, politician, activist and convicted child killer Modise Mokwadi Fly was hanged in Botswana’s capital city of Gaborone.

He was the second person to be executed under the administration of President Ian Khama; the first was also a child killer.

Fly, a South African national, had been general secretary of the Botswana Congress Party Youth League. On November 27, 2006, he killed his two-year-old son, Tawana Mosinyi, with an ax while the toddler slept. Fly maintained until his death that Tawana’s death was accidental and he’d actually been trying to throw his ax at the police who were firing shots at his house from outside. The prosecution believed Fly deliberately killed his son to spite the child’s mother, whom he’d recently quarreled with.

After his conviction on October 17, 2008, Fly apologized to Tawana’s family for his death. He sentenced to hang five days later, then he waited a year and a half for his date with death. Witnesses reported he seemed oddly cheerful and gregarious in court, smiling and chatting amiably with his friends and relatives who attended the trial.

In February 2010, the month before his execution, Fly made an attempt to escape from prison. He was the first prisoner to succeed in escaping from Botswana’s death row — but he was only free for fifteen minutes. After his capture, it was alleged, he was brutally beaten by the guards and then placed in solitary confinement so no one could see his injuries.

If the prison did in fact do this, it didn’t work: the news of the alleged mistreatment became public on March 23. Whether the timing had anything to do with his secretive execution the next day is unclear. Predictably, Botswana’s Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation denied that the prisoner had been abused or placed in isolation.

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1686: A man and a woman broken on the wheel in Hamburg

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The New York Times of Dec. 30, 1900 provides this date’s entry, featuring the unusual scene of a woman being broken on the wheel.

In the diary of that remarkable man, Gen. Patrick Gordon, who left Scotland in 1651 a poor, unfriended wanderer, and, when he died, in 1699, had his eyes closed by the affectionate hands of his sorrowing master, the Czar Peter the Great, the following entry is to be found, under date Hamburg, March 22, 1686:

This day, a man and a woman, a burgher of the towne being the womans master, for murthering, were carted from the prisone to the house where the murder was committed; and there before this house, with hotte pinsers, the flesh was torren out of their armes, and from thence were carted to the place of justice without the towne, and there broken and layed on wheeles.


Executions by breaking wheel: early 18th century engraving. (Source: Wikipedia).

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