Category Archives: Death Penalty

1780: Gerald Byrne and James and Patrick Strange, for carrying off the Miss Kennedy’s

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Today’s short and plaintive broadsheet arrives via James Kelly’s Gallows Speeches From Eighteenth-Century Ireland, a source we have enjoyed often in the past.

Though we have seen elsewhere via Kelly the capital prosecution of Catholic-Protestant marriages; these, however, appear by the thin text to be instances of the old tradition of bride-stealing — a practice which could straddle the vast distance from elopement ritual and kidnapping/rape.

The implication of these texts is that the men did the former, but got prosecuted for the latter: whether that’s down to an initial misunderstanding between the partners, to a change of heart by the wives Kennedy, to the pressure applied by disapproving in-laws, or some other cause, one can only guess.

The Last Speech, Confession and Dying Declaration of Gerald Byrne and James and Patrick Strange

Good People,

As we have for some time past excited the publick attention, it may be expected in our last moments to say a few words regarding the cause for which we suffer. As to our births; we have come from respectable families near Graigenamana, in the counties of Ki[l]kenny and Carlow; from an early acquaintance with the Miss Kennedy’s, we unfortunately conceived an affection for them, grounded on the most virtuous and honourable terms; they received our addresses and seemed to approve of our passions by the mutual exchange of their love for ours; but alas! how we have been deceived.

Thus encouraged with the many repeated assurances that we were not disagreeable, made us imprudently determine to take them away, which resolution we unhappily put in execution, and immediately after, married them, and during the time of their living with us no woman could be happier, as we used them in the most tender, loving and affectionate manner; however, illnatured people have shamefully propagated, that we treated them ungentleman-like; but such ill-natured reports have been founded and circulated by malice, and, we hope, in the humane and honest mind will have no weight.

We freely forgive our unnatural wives, beseeching the Searcher of all Hearts, when they appear before his awful tribunal, will mitigate the cruelty they have shown to us, and receive them into the mansions of bliss. We die members of the Church of Rome, in peace with the world, in the 23d and 20th years of our age, and may the Lord have mercy on our Souls

Gerald Byrne, James Strange

The last Speech of Patrick Strange, who was executed for aiding and assisting in taking away the Miss Kennedy’s

Good Christians,

As it is usual for persons in my unhappy situation to give some account of their past life, I shall only trespass on the public, to mention, that I was born in the county of Carlow, come from a reputable family, and always preserved an unblemished character, the cause I die for was of assisting Mess Byrne and Strange, in carrying away the Miss Kennedy’s. I forgive my prosecutors, requesting the prayers of all good Christians, and depart in peace with mankind, in the 24th year of my age.

Patrick Strange

ENISCORTHY: Printed by R. JONES

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1671: Hans Erasmus, Count of Tattenbach

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Hans Erasmus, Count of Tattenbach, was beheaded as a traitor in Graz.

Governor of Styria in present-day Slovenia, Tattenbach took an unwise interest in Zrinski and Frankopan’s Magnate Conspiracy, hoping to position himself as a big wheel in the prospective southern realm broken away from the Austrian empire.

Perhaps a more thoroughgoing assessment of risks was called for.

Tattenbach’s own valet turned him in. The nobleman lost his head a few months after the plot’s principal authors, and punitive confiscation relieved his heirs of the count’s estates.

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2007: Leong Siew Chor, Kallang Body Parts Murderer

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On this date in 2007, Singapore hanged Leong Siew Chor.

Perpetrator of a crime evocatively known as the Kallang Body Parts Murder, Leong circa mid-2005 was a 50-year-old married man having a fling with a 22-year-old aide, Liu Hong Mei … owner of the body parts in question.

Having swiped his lover’s bank card and withdrawn a few thousand dollars on it, Leong belatedly realized that security camera footage was sure to expose him. A day or two after this epiphany, pieces of Liu Hong Mei’s torso were found adrift in the Kallang River and then elsewhere. She’d seemingly been strangled to death at Leong’s home, after which he’d “cut body bit by bit, starting with feet,” in the words of a headline.

The horror of the crime belied the smallness of its author. For nothing but a pittance of money and a want of commonsense foresight, Leong had careened in a matter of days from humdrum marital malfeasance to an improvised abattoir. He lamely tried to claim that they’d been part of a suicide pact that he chickened out of, while also undercutting himself by acknowledging that he feared her discovering his ATM embezzlements.

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1343: A dozen Breton nobles

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From The Law of Treason and Treason Trials in Later Medieval France, concerning the rough handling the king deployed in an attempt to squelch the Breton War of Succession:

Not long after the executon of Olivier de Clisson a group of Breton nobles attacked Charles de Blois as he was on his way to Paris. Fourteen — among them the two Geoffroys de Malestroit, father and son, Alain de Cadillac, Jean de Montaubon, Fulk de Laval and Henri d’Avaugour — were captured and taken to Paris. Although Philippe VI formally turned the case over to the Parlement, he made sure that the court did as he wished. On 24 November 1343 he advised it that he was sending the prevot of Paris and Jean Richer, maitre de requetes de l’hotel, ‘for certain matters regarding the Breton prisoners. We instruct you accordingly,’ the king cautioned, ‘that you accept what they have to say on our behalf.’

On 29 November the accused appeared in the Parlement, confessed to their treason and were then sent back to the Chatelet without the court having passed sentence. In fact the decision in this case was taken away from the Parlement by the king. On that same day Philippe VI ordered the prevot of Paris to execute the prisoners forthwith, ‘because we condemn them as traitors’. Philippe’s determination in this matter was patent. In concluding his instructions he wrote: ‘take care that there is no slip-up if you do not want to incur our wrath’. Except for Laval and Avaugour, the Bretons were drawn and beheaded that same day; and their corpses were then drawn to the gibbet to be hanged there. These executions had the desired effect on at least some of Montfort‘s partisans: Jean, eldest son of the count of Vendome, for example, quickly made his peace with Philippe VI.

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1405: Astorre I Manfredi, former lord of Faenza

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Baldasar Cossa,* in Romandiola cardinalis Ecclesieque legatus pro Ecclesia romana, Astorgium Manfredum, paulo ante dominum Faventie, publice decapitari fecit.

–Annales Forolivienses: ab origine urbis usque ad annum MCCCCLXXIII

On this date in 1405, the Italian nobleman/warlord Astorre I Manfredi was beheaded in his family’s on-again, off-again stomping ground of Faenza.

A clan made for an HBO series, the Manfredi had cut a colorfully scheming profile on the Renaissance scene for years, not excluding previous encounters with the executioner.

Astorre’s own calling was to retrieve with his sword in 1377 the family patrimony from which his father had been dispossessed twenty years previous. For the balance of Manfredi’s life it would be the seat of an opera buffa for a hard-working mercenary prince trying to claw his place in the peninsular crab bucket.

Manfredi’s mercenary company was destroyed in a Genoa-Venice war, with Manfredi on that occasion only barely eluding the capture and summary death that his brothers in arms suffered. He returned to Faenza to throw his brother in the dungeon for plotting a coup, then tangled with the Marquess of Ferrara who is infamous in these pages for executing his own wife and son for an incestuous affair.**

Manfredi also cultivated an ultimately lethal rivalry with groundbreaking condottiero Alberico da Barbiano, the former beheading the latter’s brother which would help to incite Alberico to a campaign against Faenza that Manfredi could not withstand. At the end of his resources, he resigned his territories to the Vatican in exchange for a pension — but this brief period in the new boss’s employ was terminated when he was found intriguing to reassert his lordship.

Rum luck for Astorre Manfredi was far from the last chapter for his house, which was only definitively relieved of its preeminence in Faenza a century later, by Cesare Borgia. The Manfredi name has graced many notable Italians even since.

* The papal legate Baldasar Cossa who orchestrated Manfredi’s decapitation is more notorious to posterity under a name he subsequently achieved: Antipope John XXIII.

** Parisina Malatesta, the wife/victim of the Marquess in this domestic tragedy, hailed from a Rimini noble house allied to the Manfredi. (Astorre Manfredi for a time was betrothed to the Malatesta lord’s sister, Gentile; likewise, Astorre initially retired to Rimini in 1404 when muscled off his home city.) For detail on the tangled and fascinating dynastic politics proximate to these families, see The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State.

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1927: Three Saragossa robbers

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From the London Times, Nov. 28, 1927:

(From our own correspondent.)

MADRID, Nov. 28.

At Saragossa this morning three men convicted of murder and robbery were executed by the garrotte.

On July 23 last the three criminals and another, who is still at large, ambushed an employee of a liquorice factory, whom they knew was carrying money. They attacked him from behind, and after killing him secured 4,000 pesetas.

Passers-by witnessed the crime and raised an alarm, but the murderers fired upon their pursuers and escaped. One of the shots killed a child.

Later, three of the men were arrested. After their trial the Government refused to recommend them for the Royal clemency.

The Government has issued an official statement in connexion with the execution exhorting all classes of society to meditate on the sad extremes to which vice leads. All teachers are likewise invited to draw the attention of school children to the case, and explain why the Government was obliged to let the law take its course.

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1736: James Matthews and Elizabeth Greenley

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Little primary documentation about these hangings appears to be conveniently available absent a visit to Williamsburg’s archives, but the bare outline of murder in the colonial servants’ quarters lifts the eyebrow. Was our Bess’s crime connected to the horse thief’s, leaving the shades of two star-crossed lovers in death like Bess and her highwayman of verse?

And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
   Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard.
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred.
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
   Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.


Virginia Gazette, Nov. 5, 1736.


Virginia Gazette, Nov. 26, 1736.

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1679: Five Covenanter prisoners from the Battle of Bothwell Bridge

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From The Original secession magazine, Volume 15 (1878), reprinting a public letter that had previously appeared in The People’s Journal:

Sir, —

Our boasted freedom is not so highly prized as it ought to be because we have always enjoyed it; but our forefathers struggled hard for it, in many cases even unto death. In the long array of Scottish patriots the Covenanters in many respects stand preeminent, as they wrestled both for religious and civil liberty; and though the line of duty was often made sharp as a razor’s edge, they refused to cross it by a hair’s-breadth, lest in doing so they should deny their Master. Five of the prisoners taken at Bothwell Bridge, though they had no connection with Bishop Sharp’s death, were executed at the place where he had been killed six months previously in order to terrify others. Their lives were offered them if they would sign the bond acknowledging their appearance at Bothwell Bridge to be rebellion, and binding them not to rise in arms against the King; but they chose rather to be crushed under the iron heel of despotism than to save their lives by a sinful compliance. Their joint and individual testimonies, and also their dying speeches, breathing the fragrance of heaven, are in Naphtali, and are a spirited defence of that covenanted work of reformation which they soiled with their blood. Though unlearned, and occupying a humble sphere in society, they were indeed Christ’s nobility, and their dying words have been quoted to shew what Christianity cau do for man; but, as your space is valuable, I only crave room for one extract from the dying speech of John Clyde, who was about 21 years of age. When at the foot of the ladder, while his four brethren were hanging before him, to the assembled crowd of spectators he said —

I bless the Lord for keeping me straight. I desire to speak it to the commendation of free grace, and this I am speaking from my own experience, that there are none who will lippen to God and depand upon Him for direction but they shall be kept straight and right. But to be promised to be kept from tribulation, that is not the bargain; for He hath said that through much tribulation we must enter the kingdom. He deals not with us as Satan does, for Satan lets us see the bonniest side of the temptation; but our Lord Jesus lets us see the roughest side and the blackest. After that the sweetest thing comes, and He tells us the worst thing that will happen to us. For He hath not promised to keep us from trouble; but He hath promised to be with us in it, and what needs more? T bless the Lord for keeping me to this very hour, for little would I have thought a twelvemonth since that the Lord would have taken a poor ploughman lad, and have honoured me so highly as to make me first appear for Him, and then keep me straight, and now hath kept me to this very hour to lay down my life for Him.

These five martyrs were hung in chains to rot, but the greatest risk did not deter an aged couple from taking them down and burying tbem; and 49 years afterwards, when a gravestone was set up to their memory, some of their bones and clothes were found unconsumed. Fully 70 years ago this gravestone was broken, and for a long time the only thing to mark the place was the uncultivated bit of sward where they are resting. Yesterday a handsome and durable stone, designed from the former cue, and bearing an exact copy of its inscription, was erected by John Whyte Melville, Esq.,* the worthy and respected Convener of the County, and is enclosed by the substantial wall which he built this spring. The inscriptions are: —

Here lies Thos. Brown,
James Wood, Andrew Sword,
John Weddell, & John Clyde,
Who suffered martyrdom on Magus Muir
For their adherence to the word of God
And Scotland’s Covenanted work of Reformation.

Nov. 25, 1679.

On the reverse side: —

‘Cause we at Bothwel did appear,
Perjurious oaths refused to swear;
‘Cause we Christ’s cause would not condemn,
We were sentenc’d to death by men
Who raged against us in such fury,
Our dead bodies they did not bury,
But up on Poles did hing us high,
Triumphs of Babel’s victory.
Our lives we feared not to the death,
But constant proved to our last breath.

Restored 1877.

Andrew Gullan‘s stone, which had long been illegible, but which Mr. Melville caused to be renewed, was also re-erected yesterday in the little copse at Claremont. Mr. Melville’s munificence in this matter deserves the highest praise, and every true Scotchman must feel grateful to him.

Can Scotland e’er forget that cause, F
So dear in times long fled,
When for Christ’s Covenant, Crown, and Laws
Her noblest blood was shed?

No! — Buried memories shall arise
From out each hallowed spot, where lies,
‘Neath turf or heath-bell red,
Her martyr’d worthies. And, again,
Her Covenanted King shall reign.

Let the community show their gratitude to Mr. Melville by protecting these gravestones from thoughtless and malicious persons.

I am, &c.,

D. Hay Fleming.
St Andrews, 11th Dec. 1877.

* I believe the writer alludes to the father of novelist George John Whyte-Melville.

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1883: The martyrs of Quequeña and Yarabamba

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This date in 1883 saw the deaths of six Peruvian patriotic martyrs.

These executions blackened the War of the Pacific, a conflict between Chile and an alliance of Bolivia plus Peru which we have previously featured on this site. Its stakes were a resource-rich borderlands but by this point in the war, Chile had already conquered all the way to Lima. Now it was a war of occupation, a war of resistance.

The inland city of Arequipa — Peru’s capital up until this very juncture — had been captured by Chile in September 1883, setting up a chaotic situation.

Come November 22, three Chilean soldiers engaging the occupier’s prerogative to brutalize the locals were set upon by civilians in Quequeña, just outside Arequipa. Two of the Chileans were kied in the fray.

An immediate dragnet in Quequeña and neighboring Yarabamba hung dozens of severe convictions on various Peruvians, headlined by a staggering 26 condemned to execution for participating in the brawl. Our six — by names, Liborio Linares, Manuel Linares, Angel Figuerioa, Juan de Dios Costa, Jose Mariano, and Luciano Ruiz — were the “only” ones ultimately put to death; they remain national heroes in Peru to this day.

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1901: Willie Louw, Boer commando

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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

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