Category Archives: Murder

1857: John Dorsey

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The public domain volume 1886 Professional Criminals of America might divert the devotee of classic true crime with its numerous vignettes from the latter 19th century, quite a few of them unsolved. Executed Today of course cottons to the section on executions at Manhattan’s The Tombs Prison, such as the following:

JOHN DORSEY (negro), a sailor, was executed in the Tombs prison for the murder of Ann McGirr, alias Ann Hopkins. The crime was committed at No. 3 Worth Street on March 10, 1857. The scene of the crime was a five-story tenement inhabited by colored prostitutes. Dorsey and the woman lived together, and on the night of March 10, 1857, he returned home under the influence of liquor. He met his mistress. Ann McGirr, in the alleyway. They had some words, and Dorsey becoming angry drew a razor from his pocket and cut the woman’s throat from ear to ear. Dorsey was convicted of murder in the first degree, in the Court of General Sessions, May 21, 1857, before Judge Abraham D. Russell. He was hanged on July 17, 1857.

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1857: Danforth Hartson, again

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(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on the Last Words blog. Fans of this here site are highly likely to enjoy following Elder’s own pithy, almanac-style collection of last words on the scaffold. -ed.)

“For God’s sake, don’t do that again.”

– Danforth Hartson, convicted of murder, hanging, California.
Executed July 15, 1857

Hartson (aka Sailor Jim) claimed self-defense in a fight that followed his argument with “estimable citizen” John Burke, whom he knocked to the ground and then shot in the chest. Burke was able to make a full statement, naming Hartson as the murderer, before he died.

Hartson’s last words came after he slipped through the noose and fell through the trap door.

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1515: Gio Batta, on the Capitoline Hill

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You’ll not find the single execution (and its accounting of fees) that forms the very slim hook for this post until the very end of an extensively bloody tour of Renaissance and Early Modern Rome’s execution topography. This unauthorized appendix to your Rome tourism guide comprises excerpts of the public domain volume The Roman Capitol in Ancient and Modern Times, by Emmanuel Rodocanachi.

THE TARPEIAN MOUNT OR MOUNT CAPRINO.

In the Middle Ages nothing survived of what had constituted the splendour of the Tarpeian Mount of antiquity. Here and there only were a few scattered shafts of columns lying, a few sides of walls that had fallen, a few vestiges of foundations, while the other end of the Capitoline Mount was becoming the centre of municipal life, and a church, that of S. Maria Aracoeli, adorned it. Furthermore, this portion of the hill was soon chosen as the public execution place. In a chronicle of the thirteenth century, relating the legend of Pope Filigato (996 [sic]), we read: “… idcirco usque adhuc nullus papa venire vult in montem tarpeium ad arcen Urbis Romae scilicet in Capitolium ubi iste Johannes tormenta sustinuit. Ibi itaque semper ferebantur sententiae mortis contra sceleratos et contra adversarios Romanorum.”

To this spot the name platea of spianata was given, in translation of the word area, area capitolina (as opposed to arx), which had formerly designated it. This explains why the place of execution was often so called. Fra Montreale, who was condemned to death by Rienzo, was led “a lo piano” to be executed there. His head was cut off near the ruins of a tower.

The spot appointed for executions is fixed with accuracy by a curious document. In 1385, Giordanello degli Ilperini or Alberini, a nobleman of the Monti quarter, was cast into the prisons of the Capitol. Fearing the rage of the lords bannerets, furor presentium dominorum banderentium,” and not wishing to die without a will, he drew one up, forthwith, in the great hall where the assemblies of the people were held. Among other dispositions, he required his heirs to spend two florins in having a figure painted “ad imaginem gloriosissime virginis Marie,” in front of the gibbet and place of execution, “ante furcas et locum iustitie.” And, in fact, the figure was painted beneath the portico of a granary belonging to the Maffei family, in a spot indicated by Infessura thus: “in una costa di muro appresso santa Maria delle grazie di sotto a Campidoglio a piedi lo monte.” Thenceforward, criminals had a sight that consoled them in their last moments.

The custom of hanging people in this place was continued in the fifteenth century. In the Diario di Antonio Petri (1407) is the expression: “In loco iustitiae, videlicet in plano Capitolii.” The gallows is clearly visible in the Sienna plan. Somewhat later, documentary allusions become more frequent. An Act dated in 1457 bears on it: “in loco qui dicitur Monte Arpetio (Tarpeio) sive lo piano inter hos fines … ab alio via per quam itur ad furcas.” In another document, dated in 1473, and referring to the settling of a boundary, the following passage occurs: “ab alio tenet locus iustitiae qui dicitur lo piano.” This same document informs us that, behind the palace of the Conservators, lay a garden belonging to them, part of which exists to-day, while the other has been taken into the Caffarelli palace, which, at present, is the German embassy.

Executions were witnessed by the Senator. It was a duty incumbent on his office. He took up his position at the window in the palace situated in the southern tower. This window, as previously said, was ornamented in 1413 by the Senator Nicola of Diano.

Among the celebrated executions which took place on the gibbet of Mount Caprino was that of the accomplices of the Chevalier Stefano Porcari, who himself was hanged from the battlements of St. Angel’s castle in 1453. His accomplices were nine in number; and eight of them were hanged together. In 1490, a man accused of trying to poison Pope Innocent VIII, at the instigation of the Sultan of Constantinople, was beaten to the ground, on the ordinary execution place, by blows on his head with a club; then he was struck on the chest and stomach with an iron-covered fist, after which he was drawn and quartered. Hangings were numerous; in 1507, there were seven. The gibbet continued to be used in this spot until 1550, when the improvements that were undertaken in the surroundings brought about its suppression. Thenceforward, criminals were hanged on the Giudea square, at the entrance to the Ghetto.


A high gallows towers over Rome’s Piazza Giudia in this 1752 engraving by Giuseppi Vasi.

On occasion, use was made, as a prison, of the ruins standing on this potion of the hill, perhaps of some pits that will be spoken of further. Under the pontificate of Innocent III, the Romans confined their prisoners of war there.

The neighbouring quarters, suffering from the presence of the gibbet, remained deserted and neglected. Goats browsed in them, which soon caused the hill to receive the name of Mount Caprino, a name that it retained for a long time. The locality was almost a jungle. Gregory XIII, having remade, in 1582, the road that led to it, was justified in having inscribed on a stone that still exists in the Via di Monte Tarpeio these words: “Hinc ad tarpejam sedem et capitolia ducit. Pervia nunc olim silvestribus horrida dumis …”


The Piazza del Campidoglio atop Capitoline Hill, where beheadings took place. This is a view of its condition prior to Michelangelo’s 16th century makeover of the place, which changed it into this …

EXECUTIONS IN THE CAPITOLINE PALACE.

Whilst hangings took place on the gibbet of Mount Caprino, the beheadings were carried out on the Square of the Capitol [Piazza del Campidoglio -ed.], and even inside the palace. If Fra Montreale was beheaded at the foot of the Mount Caprino tower, it was by way of compromise, since he was considered as much a malefactor an an “enemy of the people” as a prisoner of war. Usually, executions in the Capitol took place on the great staircase, near the lion. It was there that, on the 3rd of March, 1398, the conspirators were beheaded who had attempted to re-establish the power of the bannerets, destroyed by Pope Boniface IX.

In the fifteenth century, executions were frequent. In 1405, Paolo Maracini, Giovanni Gnafri, and Motta were beheaded in the Capitol. In 1406, Antonio Carola was beheaded there also, as well as Giovanni Colonna, Jacovo de Nepi, “miles libertatis,” Ricardo Sanguineis, rebels against Pope Gregory XII. In 1497, Galleotto de Normanis was “decollatus, de mane, hora consueta, in loco institiae Capitolii, tanquam proditor Urbis.” Sometimes the execution was carried out in the evening: “De sero, hora completorii, fuit capta uxor Cole Cancellarii de Reg. Columne ac etiam Paulus de Cancellariis … omnes tanquam proditores Urbis et ducti per mercatum ad Capitolium et martirazti.” Before each execution, the condemned person had his sentence read to him, in the great hall of the Capitol. The bell rang thrice, and, at the third peal, he was put to death. In certain cases, the bell was not run; but this, as previously said, was when the execution was considered to be a murder. Occasionally the execution was inside the palace. We read that Lello Capocci was decapitated “Intus in palatio Capitolii ad pedem secunde columne ubi tenetur ratio.” The Square of the Capitol was also used as a place to expose criminals. Cardinal Vitelleschi shut up in three wooden cages, which were set there for the people to mock at, a triplet of thieves who had stolen the precious stones adorning the reliquary wherein were kept, at the church of St. John Lateran, the heads of St. Peter and St. Paul. The thieves were subsequently executed on the Square of the Lateran.

Now and again, hangings took place from the windows or arcades of the Capitoline loggia. On the 19th of December, 1458, Bernardo della Rosa was hanged from the window of the great staircase. At that time, however, hangings were not frequent. Infessura complains of it: “In Capitolio nulla vel saltem rara executio corporalis fit, nisi quod per curiam domini vicecamerarii aliqui nocte suspenduntur et mane suspensi reperiuntur apud turrim Nonae sine nomine et sine causa: et hoc ordine vivitur hodie in Urbe sedente Innocentio octavo” (1489).

…

EXECUTIONS IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

The hangings that Infessura, in his time, regretted were so few, as was seen in the previous chapter, were not long before they began again; and numerous ones took place on the Capitol during the sixteenth century, and in the few yers prior to it.

In the single year of 1497 were hanged from the windows of the Capitol: Matteo di Andrea, Francesco di Giacomo, Pietro Santi, Giordano della Scarpa. At the same time, hangings were also carried out on the gibbet of Mount Caprino.*

The expenses of executions were generally paid by the Governor, who deducted the necessary sums from the money furnished by fines, taxae maleficiorum. Under the date of the 13th of July, 1515, the executioner received three julii (about a hundred sols) for cutting off the head of a male servant, Gio. Batta; he received, besides, a salary of three gold ducats a month. The price paid for hangings was the same as for decapitations, three julii. It cost no more to have the criminal burned, after he had been hanged. However, it would seem that compensation was made for the wood, the chains, and the scaffold, when the criminal had been burned alive. Eighteen carlins were paid for the execution of a forger; and, for floggings, the executioner charged six carlins.

* A footnote here in the original helpfully explains that the executions referenced in this section come from “Archiv di Stato, Archivio di s. Giovanni Decollato, Busta XXIV. vol. 2″: “This brotherhood’s mission was to assist criminals; a regular register was kept of the executions at which the brethren of the order had been present.”

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1880: A day in the death penalty around the U.S.

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A half-dozen murderers hanged in five different U.S. states on this date in 1880.


Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, July 10, 1880. We make the count six, not four.

George Allen Price (Pennsylvania)


Harrisburg (Penn.) Patriot, July 10, 1880.

George Sanford and Richard McKee (Arkansas)


Columbus (Ga.) Daily Enquirer, July 13, 1880.

Alexander Howard (North Carolina), Daniel Washington (South Carolina), and Henry Ryan (Georgia)

(Note: Henry Ryan’s execution is missing from the Espy File of U.S. executions.)

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1825: Tahvo Putkonen, Finland’s last peacetime execution

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Finland’s last peacetime execution occurred on this date in 1825: the instrument was an axe.

Farmhand Tahvo Putkonen, deep in a blue gap celebrating both Christmas and his December 26 name day in 1822, went off his rocker at the party he was hosting because of a guest’s actual or imagined transgression against good manners.

The drunken Putkonen suddenly attacked that guest, farmer Lasse Hirvonen, until this ill-tempered host got kicked out of his own house by the rest of the celebrants. Once he’d convinced everyone that he’d calmed down, he got back in the house and mortally bashed Hirvonen over the head with a firewood log.

Putkonen spent a long-for-the-time 2.5 years appealing against the legal proceedings before they finally struck off his head. So pedants take note: although he has the distinction of being the last peacetime execution, his was not the last peacetime crime that led to execution: one Abraham Kaipainen managed to commit murder (July 31, 1823) and reach the headsman’s block (October 30, 1824) all while Tahvo Putkonen was still fighting his sentence.

The very last executions in Finnish history took place in 1944, during the Continuation War — Finland’s local installment of World War II, fought against the Soviet Union.

Capital punishment is today formally abolished in Finland.

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1907: Xu Xulin, anti-Manchu assassin

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Chinese revolutionary Xu Xulin was executed on this date in 1907.

As a civil servant in Anhui Province, this militant (English Wikipedia entry | German | the far more detailed Chinese) had just one day before assassinated the provincial governor, En-ming, during the ceremonial graduation of a police academy. Xu himself was the academy’s superintendent.

He’d been hoping to touch off a revolution and his hopes, though not ill-founded, were disappointed in this moment. He was beheaded hours later and his heart carved out as an offering to his victim. Xu’s cousin, the feminist Qiu Jin, was executed the following week for the same disturbance.

Surprisingly, Xu’s murder of a Manchu official — the Mongolian peoples who ruled China’s domestic Han majority under the Qing dynasty — directly spurred a national response to his frankly stated ethnic grievances, as the Qing maneuvered (too late, as it would transpire) to implement reforms that could sustain their state through a revolutionary era.

Xu Xilin, during his interrogation, readily confessed that he had killed Enming simply because he was a Manchu … Xu Xilin professed no grudge against Enming personally, nor did he claim that the governor had been particularly hostile toward Han. Rather, Xu’s enmity was directed toward the Manchus in general:

The Manchus have enslaved us Han for nearly three hundred years. On the surface they seem to be implementing constitutionalism, but that’s only to ensnare people’s minds. In reality they are upholding the centralization of authority so as to enhance their own power. The Manchus’ presumption is that once there is constitutionalism, then revolution will be impossible … If constitutionalism means centralization, then the more constitutionalism there is, the faster we Han people will die … I have harbored anti-Manchu feelings for more than ten years. Only today have I achieved my goal. My intention was to murder Enming, then to kill Duanfang, Tieliang, and Liangbi, so as to avenge the Han people … You say that the governor was a good official, that he treated me very well. Granted. But since my aim is to oppose the Manchus, I cannot be concerned with whether a particular Manchu was a good or bad official. As for his treating me well, that was the private kindness of an individual person. My killing of the governor, on the other hand, expresses the universal principal of anti-Manchuism.

The murder of Enming caused tremendous unease among Manchu officials … Because it coincided with a series of revolutionary uprisings in Guangdong that Sun Yat-sen had launched in early May, the assassination was especially upsetting. According to British diplomats, “Everywhere throughout the country the Manchu officials are living closely guarded in their Yamens.” …

[The Empress] Cixi was particularly anxious about Xu Xilin’s anti-Manchuism. At an audience a month later with her foreign minister, Lu Haihuan (1840-1927), the empress dowager was reportedly still wrestling with Xu’s ghost. She insisted to Lu, “The bandit Xu Xilin claimed that there is prejudice between Manchus and Han, but really when we select provincial officials there is no prejudice whatsoever.” More to the point, she issued within five weeks of each other two edicts that were clearly prompted by Enming’s murder. The first, promulgated on 8 July, two days after the assassination, called once more upon her subjects to present proposals for reform, but this time her appeal went beyond the elite of top officials who were authorized to memorialize the throne to the much broader group of junior officials and scholar commoners, who were now permitted to have their ideas forwarded to her by either the Censorate or the provincial officials.

…

[The second edict, of 10 August] focused specifically on Manchu-Han relations. Cixi maintained, yet one more time, that the Qing dynasty throughout its long history had always treated Manchus and Han impartially, both as officials and as subjects. Nor had it, in recent appointments to the banner system [hereditary provincial military and administrative posts that were overwhelmingly Manchu], distinguished between Manchus and Han … she then called on all officials to offer suggestions on “how to totally eradicate the boundaries between Manchus and Han.”

-Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861-1928

Proposals from various officials ran the gamut, — encouraging intermarriage, abolishing legal privileges still enjoyed by Manchus, suppressing the Manchu language, and moving Manchu cultural practices towards the Han in everything from naming conventions to forms of address. Even Cixi’s Grand Council was shaken up to establish parity between Manchus and Han.

The chilling words of the dead assassin still echoing, the government moved on these proposals with surprising urgency. By the autumn,

the court issued two edicts, ten days apart, that resolved to drastically change, though not abolish, the Eight Banner system. The first edict, handed down on 27 September, ordered … that the provincial garrisons be disbanded over a ten-year period and their inhabitants be prepared to make their own living … The second edict, issued on 9 October, dealt with the customary and legal differences between Manchus and Han, such as the length of the mourning period and the commutation of punishments. It called on the Ministry of Rites together with the Commissioners for Revising and Codifying the Laws to draw up a set of ceremonies and penal codes that would apply uniformly to Manchus and Han, excepting only the imperial lineage.

These two edicts thus accepted many of the proposals advanced by the memorialists after Enming’s assassination …

Meanwhile, in response to the growing demands of the constitutionalist reformers … Cixi, in her own name, issued two other edicts that clarified the vague promise that she had made a year earlier to institute a constitutional regime. On 20 September 1907 she declared that her ultimate intention was to establish “a bicameral deliberative body.” As a preparatory step, she ordered the immediate creation of a Consultative Assembly, appointed the fourth-rank prince Pulun (1874-1926) and the elderly grand secretary Jia’nai as its co-presidents, and charged them, together with the Grand Council, to draw up a detailed plan for this new national assembly. A month later, on 19 October, she authorized the formation of provincial deliberative assemblies as well. Afterward, she sent Pulun to Japan to learn more about constitutional government at first hand.

Cixi died the following year. The Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing dynasty in 1911.

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2018: Shoko Asahara and six Aum Shinrikyo followers, for the Tokyo sarin attack

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Shoko Asahara and six of his followers in the Aum Shinrikyo cult were hanged today in Japan as authors of one of the most infamous terrorist attacks in recent history: the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway of 1995.

Thirteen people died and several thousand more were injured when members of this millenial sect deposited punctured bags of homemade liquid sarin on multiple rail lines of Tokyo’s subway during Monday rush hour.

It was only one of several gas attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo during the 1990s; just nine months previous, they had killed nine people in a sarin attack in Matsumoto. But it is by far the most notorious. Images of stricken commuters, blinded and suffocating under the nerve agent’s influence, sprawled on the transit platforms or outside them shocked orderly Japan in 1995, especially so since it came fast on the heels of the devastating January 1995 Kobe earthquake.

These comprised “two of the gravest tragedies in Japan’s postwar history,” according to Haruki Murakami’s Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. “It is no exaggeration to say that there was a marked change in the Japanese consciousness ‘before’ and ‘after’ these events.” Japanese Justice Minister Yoko Kamikawa struck a similar chord in announcing the hangings today: “These crimes … plunged people not only in Japan but in other countries as well into deadly fear and shook society to its core.”

Its mastermind Shoko Asahara, the first man executed this morning, emerged soon thereafter into public view a bedraggled and half-blind fanatic, almost the picture of an agent of chaos. Shockingly, his cult had been able to thrive in the early 1990s thanks in part to murdering an attorney who was investigating Aum Shinrikyo back in 1989.

Beyond the seven hanged on July 6, 2018, six additional members of the cult still remain under sentence of death in Japan for the Tokyo subway atrocity.

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2006: Sedley Alley

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A gentleman with the interesting name of Sedley Alley was executed by lethal injection in Tennessee on this date in 2006, for the positively horrific rape-murder of Lance Corporal Suzanne Marie Collins.

True crime writer John Douglas has explored this case in Journey Into Darkness and Law & Disorder.

The ghastly crime occurred in 1985, when the 19-year-old Collins went for a jog at Millington Air Force Base; her attacker stabbed her about the head with a screwdriver and raped her with a tree branch so violently that the branch tore the young woman’s lung.

Alley’s next-day confession followed by his shifting accounts of the events led him to try a hail-mary insanity defense at trial … a surprising contrast to the innocence claim he floated late in his appeals process.

The generation-long labyrinth of judicial appeals between homicide and execution led Collins’s parents, Jack and Trudy, to become outspoken victims’ rights advocates. “There never will be closure,” Jack Collins once told a filmmaker. “What you get is a modicum of peace. You get a feeling that somebody cares. The state of Tennessee cared enough about our daughter that it carried out an execution on her killer. But no closure until the day we die.”

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1942: Gordon Cummins, the Blackout Ripper

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It was a black hood for the Blackout Ripper on this date in 1942.

Charming Royal Air Force serviceman Gordon Frederick Cummins gave rein that February to a theretofore unarticulated inclination to femicide, attacking six women in the course of a single week, four of whom were killed by strangulation. The pattern of perverse post-mortem mutilations led one examiner to characterize the wanted man as “a savage sexual maniac”. This predator’s opportunistic use of the city’s protective cloak of air raid darkness reminds a similar spree perpetrated on the Berlin S-Bahn: truly, all men are brothers.

For a few days, this special horror gripped the wartime capital, so recently under enemy blitz. As fingerprint expert Frederick Cherrill, whose evidence would help to tie up Gordon Cummins’ noose, wrote in his now-out-of-print autobiography,

Women police in ordinary clothes strolled about the streets in the hope of being accosted by the unknown killer. So great was the terror which swept like a wave over the square mile in which these crimes had been committed that the regular street-walkers who haunted the area were too scared to venture out. [several of the victims were prostitutes -ed.] Small wonder, for nobody knew when or where the killer would strike again. That he would strike again seemed certain, for the lust of killing appeared to have siezed him in a merciless grip

Unlike his permanently elusive Whitechapel namesake, the Blackout Ripper was not long at his liberty once he loosed the beast within: crime scene forensics were still coming of age in this period, but the ample evolution of the bureaucratic state did for Cummins. On lucky Friday, February 13, Greta Hayward had fought off her attacker with the help of a passerby’s interruption. Cummins, when he fled, abandoned his RAF gas mask case … which was helpfully stamped with a serial number identifying its owner. He was arrested on February 16, just eight days after the start of his spree. (Scotland Yard, however, would later claim that his fingerprints connected him to two previous London murders, from October 1941.) It took a jury 35 minutes to convict him.

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1865: Thomas King, heartstabber

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From the public domain History of Siskiyou County, California Illustrated with Views of Residences, Business Buildings and Natural Scenery, and Containing Portaits and Biographies of its Leading Citizens and Pioneers.

THOMAS KING.

After lying in jail two years, and receiving two trials, hoping for a release from the extreme penalty of the law until a few weeks before his death, Thomas King was executed on the twenty-third day of June, 1865, for a heartless and causeless murder, for dealing a death-blow, unprovoked and unexpected. He was born in Ireland, and when about twelve years of age, left his home because his parents had punished him for some offense. For several years he roamed about the United Kingdom, the associate of bad characters, until for the commission of
some felony he was transported to Australia.

When the Crimean war was raging, a regiment was raised among the convicts, by order of Lord Raglan, the men being given their liberty at the close of the war. In this regiment King enlisted, and after the fall of Sebastopol received his discharge. He made his way to Halifax, and from there to California, and to this county. After mining at Humbug, Scott Bar and various other places, he went to the south fork of Scott river, where he committed the terrible crime, for which the law exacted the penalty of his life.

On the second of July, 1863, having already become considerably under the influence of liquor, he entered French’s saloon, and began flourishing a knife in a threatening manner, and was deprived of it by the barkeeper. Among others in the saloon was James Duffy, who had been drinking, and whom King accused of having his knife. The accusation was denied, and upon being informed where the knife was, King demanded it from the barkeeper and it was restored to him. Throwing the weapon upon the floor and striking a tragic attitude, he exclaimed: “There lays me dagger. Whoever picks it up, dies by me hand.”

Not dreaming of danger, Duffy stooped, picked up the weapon and laid it upon the counter, saying, “You wouldn’t kill me, your best friend, would you?” “Yes, I would,” he said, as he took up the knife and made several false motions, touching Duffy’s breast with the handle, while the victim stood there smiling, unconscious of danger. Suddenly King reversed the knife, and with a, quick, hard blow, buried it deep in Duffy’s heart, the murdered man sinking to the floor with the exclamation, “You have cut me.” King made a pass with the bloody weapon at the barkeeper, and then sprang to the door and fled. The horrified witnesses of the tragedy stood for an instant in blank amazement, and then hastened in pursuit of the murderer, whom they soon overtook and secured after a slight resistance.

He remained in jail until the following February, when, after a trial lasting three days, he was found guilty of murder in the first degree, and was sentenced by Judge E. Garter to be executed Friday, March 18, 1864. An appeal to the Supreme Court gained for the condemned man a new trial, based upon the construction of a statute, and not upon the merits of the case. He was again tried in September, and was sentenced to be hanged on Friday, November 4, 1864, but an application to the Supreme Court produced a stay of proceedings until the case could be reviewed by that body. While awaiting the decision of the court, on Saturday, the eighth of February, 1865, he made a bold, and for a time, successful attempt to regain his freedom. Confined in the jail, which was the old wooden building first erected by the county, were also George Foster and Robert Ferry, both under a sentence to the penitentiary for grand larceny, and McGuire, a deserter from the army. The last named was allowed in the corridor, and was in the habit of calling for water. About eight o’clock on the night in question Foster succeeded in getting out of his cell, and after releasing the prisoners from their cells, had McGuire call for water, as usual, and when Jailor McCullough opened the door he was seized, gagged, and bound, and the prisoners escaped, having their irons still upon them. They had been gone but twenty minutes when their flight was discovered. The town was aroused, and people started in all directions in search of the fugitives. About daylight Ferry was caught at Cherry creek by John Hendricks and others. having been unable to get rid of his irons. About two o’clock Sunday afternoon William Short and Charles Brown found King in a clump of manzanita bushes, near Deming’s old brickyard, but a short distance south-west of Yreka. His long confinement of nineteen months had so weakened him that he had been unable to proceed further or to remove the irons from his limbs, although one of them he had succeeded in sawing partially through. A party composed of Livy Swan, A.V. Burns, J. Babb, A.D. Crooks, Sherman, Stone, and Groots, in pursuit of Foster and McGuire, stopped Monday night at Cherokee Mary’s, a resort for thieves, nine miles from Yreka. About four o’clock Tuesday morning the two fugitives approached the house and were ordered to surrender, and upon attempting to escape were fired upon by Jesse Sherman, with a shot gun, and Foster was wounded in the head and captured, while McGuire escaped by flight. Foster had succeeded in removing his irons, and now, severely wounded, was conveyed again to jail, while McGuire went to Fort Jones, and, finding escape impossible, gave himself up. Foster and Ferry had the terms of their sentences increased, while McGuire, who would have been released in a few days, was sent to San Quentin for two years for his little exploit in jail-breaking.

George Foster, alias Charles Mortimer, alias Charles J. Flinn, was the leader in the jail delivery, a hardened and reckless felon, and ended his career upon the scaffold. He was first sent to San Quentin from San Francisco for three years, and when his term expired, went back, chloroformed a man and robbed him of $1,800, was arrested, and escaped from officer Rose, by knocking him senseless and nearly cutting his throat. He then came to Siskiyou county, and was soon sentenced to three years for grand larceny, which term was increased to seven years for his participation in the jail delivery. After his release he continued his career of crime, finally murdering a woman in Sacramento, September 19, 1872, for which act he paid the penalty upon the gallows, not, however, until his brother lost his life in a desperate attempt to release him from the jail in which he was confined while awaiting the day of his execution.

The Supreme Court having reviewed the case and sustained the decision of the lower court, King was brought before Judge Garter in May, and was sentenced to be hanged on Friday, June 23, 1865. Preparations were accordingly made by Sheriff A.D. Crooks by erecting a gallows in the jail-yard. King’s conduct during the trials had been one of bravado and defiance, and this he maintained to the last, being quite abusive while on the scaffold. He remarked as they were leading him from his cell to the place of his death, “I’m the handsomest man here, if I am going to be hung.” But few spectators were admitted within the jail walls to witness the last act of this terrible drama, which culminated at nine minutes to two o’clock. The murderer who thus received the just punishment for the crime, nearly two years after he had plunged the fatal knife into an innocent and unsuspecting bosom, was buried a little east of town, near the remains of Crowder and Sailor Jim, executed several years before.

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