Category Archives: Murder

1887: Joseph Morley

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

On this day in 1887, a teenager named Joseph Morley was hanged for the brutal murder of his 24-year-old landlady, Martha Bodger. He had been only seventeen at the time of the crime.

Morley, a journeyman blacksmith, lived with a married couple, Martha Bodger and James Mears Bodger, along the Romford Road in Essex. James worked as a gardener at nearby ominous Hainault Lodge.


The Overlook Hotel-esque lodge is no longer extant and its former site has been turned into a nature preserve.

Joseph had been living with them since early in 1887 and had caused no trouble in the household.

James last saw his wife alive on October 11, 1887. He rose at 4:00 a.m. and, at 5:40 a.m., took a cup of tea to his wife. He set off for work at 5:45, reminding Joseph to make sure and shut the front door on his way out.

Just a few minutes later, the neighbors heard screams coming from from the direction of Martha’s bedroom.

The noise was cut off abruptly, and did not resume. One of the witnesses, next-door neighbor Thomas Briant, tried the Bodgers’ front door, but it was locked and no one answered. Briant’s niece, who was present, said she heard the sound of a man’s heavy footsteps coming from the kitchen. Briant also worked at Hainault Lodge and, uncomfortable with the situation, he decided to go there and tell James what had happened, just to be on the safe side.

While Briant was hurrying to the lodge, his niece stayed inside and heard someone leaving through the Bodgers’ front door. She looked out and saw Joseph Morley walking away from the house at an unhurried pace, evidently en route to his job at a blacksmith’s shop 200 yards away.

When Thomas Briant told James Bodger about the noises, the worried husband and father rushed home to see what had happened. The sight that greeted him in the bedroom was something from a horror movie. As Linda Rhodes and Kathryn Abnett describe in their book, Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Barking, Dagenham and Chadwell Heath:

Martha was lying on her back across the center of the bed. Her nightdress was pulled up towards her waist, leaving her lower body exposed. Her legs hung over the side of the bed facing the door, the feet not quite touching the ground. There was blood everywhere — across her throat, on the floor, and across the walls. The blanket, counterpane and sheet lay on the floor, and were also saturated with blood.

Next to Martha’s body lay the couple’s six-month-old baby, Amy Elizabeth. Little Amy was covered in blood but unharmed, and giggled when she saw her father. The murder weapon, James Bodger’s razor, was under the bed. The killer had wielded it with such force that the blade had snapped off the handle.

Martha was beyond help; she was already dead by the time her husband found her. The doctor counted four long, deep cuts across her throat as well as a gash on her face and defensive wounds on her left hand. She had also suffered a blow to the side of the head. There was no evidence of sexual assault, in spite of the position of her clothes. Her purse was by the bed with no money missing.

James had no doubt who must have killed his wife, and went storming off to Joseph Morley’s place of work. Morley flatly denied having had anything to do with the matter, but his boss noticed some small spots of blood on his coat.

Closer scrutiny revealed additional stains on his coat and pants, as well as on his shirt, which had been turned inside out. Morley claimed the blood was from a cut he’d gotten when he fell off his bicycle the night before, and produced deep cuts on both hands that he said were from yesterday’s accident. But the same doctor who had examined Martha’s body had a look at Joseph’s hands and said the cuts were very recent, an hour or two old at the most.

He was placed under arrest for murder. Morley, with a “dreamy unconcerned manner,” followed the police constable to the station.

At his trial in early November, Morley’s attorney argued the case against him was only circumstantial. Forensics of the 1880s could not have identified the source of the bloodstains on his clothes, or even proven they were human. Nevertheless, he was convicted, and shortly afterwards he confessed his guilt.

Deploying the timeless “blame the media” gambit, Morley claimed he had had lately been obsessed with reading about murders and other crimes in the news, particularly a case in Suffolk where a vicar had been murdered with a razor in his own bed. He said he had yielded to an irresistible impulse to kill Martha and he deeply regretted his actions. He denied any sexual motive for the crime.

He was hanged by executioner James Berry, who told reporters that Morley was the youngest person he’d had to hang so far in his career. After a good night’s sleep, Morley enjoyed a breakfast of fish, bread and butter before mounting the scaffold. He died quickly and easily, and a reporter who viewed his corpse afterwards said it looked as if he had passed away peacefully in bed.

James Bodger remarried two and a half years after his first wife’s murder, and his second marriage produced a son. Unfortunately, Bodger’s life would be a short one: he died of influenza in 1894, aged only 33.

Amy Elizabeth was brought up by her aunt and uncle. She stayed in the local area, married in 1912 and lived a long life, dying at age 90.

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1781: Margaret Tinkler, abortionist

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British Evening Post, Nov. 27-29, 1781

On this date in 1781, midwife Margaret Tinkler hanged at Durham.

Tinkler had care of Jane Parkinson who wished to rid her belly of a pregnancy. The reader might well guess that procuring an abortion in 18th century England was a frightful procedure; in Parkinson’s case it took her life thanks to (as the court found) Tinkler’s “thrusting and inserting 2 pieces of wood into & against the private parts & womb of the said Jane giving the said Jane diverse mortal wounds punctures and bruises of which she languished from 1st to 23rd July & then died.” (Source) All that “languishing” gave the dying Parkinson time to accuse Tinkler; the midwife’s insistence that she had merely counseled her patient how to contrive an abortion rather than performing that abortion fell on deaf ears. (Tinkler maintained that story to her last confession.)

As a murderer, Tinkler was posthumously anatomized. The surgeons discovered “two long black double wire pins, as used at that time in women’s hair … in her belly, which it was supposed she had swallowed to destroy her life.”

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1933: John Fleming, not taking it too hard

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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.)

I’m sorry to have caused all this trouble. You seem to be taking harder than I do.

— John Fleming, convicted of murder, hanging, California
Executed November 17, 1933

Prior resident of Folsom and San Quentin prisons for robbery and assault charges, John Fleming murdered Amos Leece at a gas-station and road house when a prostitute named Peggy O’Day (aka Leonora Smith) made derogatory remarks to Leece after he refused to buy her a drink. Leece left the station to crank his car but not before he called O’Day “a cheap, chippy whore.” Fleming then confronted Leece, demanding that he apologize and then shot him three times when he refused.

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2016: Jia Jinglong, nail gun avenger

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China today carried out the controversial execution of Jia Jinglong, a peasant who found a nail gun was his only avenue of redress.

Jia’s village home in the northern Hebei province was demolished three years ago at the order of a local Communist chief who subsequently balked the family of compensation. (They got a small apartment in a high-rise.)

Rapacious developers backed by the power of the state expropriating dwelling-places in an environment of weak legal protections make for one of the most deeply felt abuses in boomtime China, and it goes without saying that it’s a racket where the wealthy and powerful dip their beaks and the other 99% shift as they can and nurse futile grudges. According to the Associated Press, Jia’s village near the city of Shijiazhuang “is overwhelmed by a cacophony of drilling, pounding and jack-hammering coming from construction sites. More than a dozen cranes could be seen in the distance, adjacent to high-rise apartment towers still being built.” As if to add a literary flourish to the injury, Jia also lost the girl in the end as his fiancee, now deprived the prospective roof over her head, promptly called off the wedding.

“What he has experienced is what many are going through or will be going through,” Jia’s sister Jia Jingyuan told reporters. “Because my brother is part of this society’s underclass, he represents the lives of many ordinary people.”

That’s because Jia Jinglong didn’t allow his grudge to remain futile: he used a nail gun to murder the local party chief who wrecked his house and life. It is hardly the only time that a desperate common person has lashed back at the cruelties of state capitalism with the pleasurable self-destruction of personal violence.

While premeditated homicide with a power tool is surely your basic capital case in any jurisdiction keen on the death penalty, the story behind it brought most of China to Jia’s defense; even some state media editorialized for abating the sentence. That wasn’t only in a spirit of vicariously joining the man’s revenge: the severity of the law towards an ordinary citizen charged with slaying an official raised an obvious equal-treatment grievance when contrasted with the likes of the wife of disgraced party boss Bo Xilai, who had a British businessman assassinated but still dodged execution.

(In fairness to the People’s Republic, China has executed powerful officials and plutocrats in various other recent high-profile cases.)

Thanks to Twitter friends including @jewssf and @luimnea for tipping me this story.

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1886: William Wilson

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

On this date in 1886, 45-year-old William S. Wilson was hanged for murder in Jonesboro, Illinois. He had killed his wife, Margaret.

Wilson was good at producing offspring — he was the father of at least seven children and possibly as many as nine — but not so good at providing for them. At Christmas in 1885, he left his family and went to Kentucky, leaving his destitute wife and kids only $5 in cash (the equivalent of about $130 in modern terms) and very little fuel. When supplies ran out in early January, several neighbors took pity on Margaret Wilson and her brood and banded together to cut enough firewood to get them through the winter.

When William returned home on January 7, however, he was furious when he learned Margaret had shamed him by accepting charity.

Daniel Allen Hearn, in his book Legal Executions in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri: A Comprehensive Registry, 1866-1965, records,

Wilson berated his wife for allowing the neighbors to act. He chased the heavily pregnant woman out of their cabin and shot her down in the mud and slush. The sight of her near-term unborn baby vainly kicking against the interior wall of her abdomen appalled witnesses, who could do nothing to save it. Details such as these illustrate the brutality that often characterizes these all-too-common wife-killing cases.

William had shot Margaret twice: once in the chest inside the house, and once again outdoors as she was running away. As she lay dying on the frozen ground he walked away. He didn’t get far before he was arrested.

A contemporary newspaper article speculated that William might be crazy, noting that he had been “affected for a long time with some incurable disease” and “is not regarded by some as sane.” But it wasn’t enough. William paid the ultimate price for his crime eleven months after the murder.

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1882: Samuel and Milton Hodge

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From the Lebanon Daily News, Nov. 11, 1882:

KNOXVILLE, Tenn., Nov. 10 — Samuel and Milton Hodge, both colored brothers, were hanged here to-day in the presence of about 8,000 persons. The doomed men spoke for about ten minutes, each saying they were prepared to die and were “going home to glory.” They warned those present to beware of their fate. As the black cap was pulled over Milton’s face, he sang in a strong voice “Going Home on da Even’ Train,” and Samuel was singing “Going Home to Die no More,” when he was choked by the rope.

The crime for which the Hodge’s [sic] were hanged was the killing of their brother-in-law, James McFarland, over a year ago.

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1866: Robert Dodge, haunter

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(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. 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.)

“The time will come when my innocence will be proven, and then Bob Dodge will haunt you for his murder.”

— Robert S. Dodge, convicted of murder, hanging, California.
Executed November 8, 1866

Borrowing a double-barrel shotgun, ostensibly to hunt quail, Dodge could not account for his whereabouts when a man who was quarreling with his brother was shot. Dodge went through two trials and during the second was found guilty of first-degree murder. In prison, he attempted suicide by taking opium.

To Elder’s hanging-day sketch (and since blog column-inches are free) we add the report of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin, Nov. 10, 1866 — itself channeling the Nevada Transcript. (Meaning Nevada City, Calif., not the state of Nevada.)

[Dodge] was twice tried and convicted of the murder of Mark P. Hammock, and after both trials the case was taken to the Supreme Court, whence the case was once sent back.

The verdict after the second conviction was sustained and the District Court ordered to fix a day for the execution.

The testimony against Dodge was entirely circumstantial.

Sheriff Gentry read the death-warrant, after which Dodge stepped to the rail in front and addressed those in the yard in a speech of ten minutes. He said he had once more the privilege of addressing them in this dark and gloomy world. He alluded to his home, his mother and friends, speaking of them in affectionate terms, and picturing the grief they would feel on hearing that their youngest son had died upon the gallows.

He spoke of the anxiety manifested to witness his death, and warned those present that the time would come when they would repent having seen it, and that when they discovered, as they surely would, that he was innocent, remorse would forever follow them.

He declared that he suffered on account of false testimony offered against him. He alluded to the future, saying that in “eternity Bob Dodge would be seen coming in glory.”

At the conclusion of the speech he turned to Sheriff Gentry and requested him to finish the work quickly. When asked if he had anything further to say by the Sheriff, he replied only “I am innocent.”

He then bid those on the platform good-bye, shaking hands with them, and then stepped upon the trap. His limbs were lashed with cords and the black cap placed over his head.

He then said, in a loud voice, “Boys, I want you all to hear, I am innocent.”

A prayer was read by Mr. Anderson, and at 18 minutes past 1 o’clock the trap fell, and the soul of Dodge was sent to a higher court for judgment.

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1607: Jan Le Loup, Maastricht werewolf

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A Dutchman known as Jan Le Loup (John the Wolf) was burned at the stake on this date in 1607 as a werewolf.

In a Europe where wolf attacks were still a real threat, the werewolf superstition waxed in partnership with the witch superstition. “Werewolf witch trials” form a distinct subspecies of the regular old witch trial; one of them even constitutes the maiden post of this here execution blog and it’s not very difficult to imagine predatory megafauna terrorizing a region could be attributed supernatural powers; the occultist Montague Summers devoted a whole book to plumbing the records of bygone werewolf cases for evidence of genuine lycanthropy.


This illustration of Beast of Gevaudan, a notorious man-eater from the 1760s, looks like the animal leaped straight out of hell. (via this fantastic Pinterest gallery)

Werewolves could likewise be rolled up via the familiar machinations of the witch-hunter. In John the Wolf’s case, he was accused out of the trial against Henry Gardinn of having used their transmogrifying beast personas to devour a child in Limburg. Gardinn burned in 1605; John was able to flee to Heusden but was recognized in 1607 and returned to Maastricht for the inevitable.

Though John tried claiming that Henry’s indictment had been to revenge himself for an altercation between the two, torture soon changed The Wolf’s story and placed he, Gardinn, and a third companion into a forest coven with a devil-avatar with whom they danced and feasted on human flesh.

After execution, his remains were exhibited on a pole surmounted by a wooden illustration of a werewolf.

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1895: Emma Williams, Frank Tinyana, and Jackey

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From The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA), Nov. 5, 1895:

Melbourne, November 4.
Emma Williams, who was convicted of the murder of her child at Port Melbourne on August 13 last, was executed in Melbourne Gaol this morning in the presence of about a dozen persons.

Public excitement was aroused over the murder when it was first discovered owing to the callous and unfeeling way in which the deed was done and the careless attitude of the mother afterwards. The victim, who was only two years of age, was taken by its mother to the pier in the Sandridge Lagoon, where she tied a stone to its body and pushed it into the water.

After her conviction the Anti-Capital Punishment League made strenuous efforts to obtain a reprieve, chiefly because the condemned woman alleged that she was pregnant.

Medical examinations did not support that statement, and it was discovered on Friday last that the condition which lent color to the woman’s statements was produced artificially.

At first Williams treated her terrible sentence with apparent unconcern, being buoyed up with the hope of reprieve; but when that expectation had passed she became most devout and earnest in her attentions to the ministrations of the gaol chaplain (the Rev. H. F. Scott), by whom she was attended to the scaffold. She expressed great sorrow for the crime she had committed and for the loose life she had led.

She remained in that frame of mind to the end.

When the sheriff demanded the body of the prisoner from the governor of the gaol at the door of the little cell alongside the gallows this morning she walked calmly on to the drop, but her face was blanched and wore a terrified expression.

In answer to the usual questions from the sheriff as to whether she wished to say anything Williams answered “No,” in a low but firm voice.

The white cap was immediately drawn over her face and the rope adjusted, and then, as Roberts, the hangman, turned to pull the lever, she exclaimed, “Oh, Lamb of God, I come.”

The next moment the drop fell, and at that moment Williams uttered a nervous, plaintive exclamation that was not quite a scream. Then all was over. The whole of the proceedings did not occupy more than a quarter of an hour, and death was instantaneous.

The dead woman had a very eventful career, having been married when she was 14 years old. At 15 she bore a daughter, who is still living. Her husband left her, and afterwards died in the Melbourne Hospital, while the widow continued a career of dissipation. Her daughter was adopted by a friend of her husband, and the child which she drowned was born after his death.

She was born in Launceston, Tasmania, where her mother still lives.

Brisbane, November 4.
A double execution took place at the Boggo Road Gaol this morning.

Jackey, an aboriginal, was hanged for the murder of a Javanese, Jimmy Williams, at Mount Morgan, and Frank Tinana [or Tinyana -ed.], a Dative of Manila, was executed for the murder of Constable Conroy, on Thursday Island. The men behaved well in prison. Jackey was able to recite prayers taught him by the Bey. Mr. Simmonds, and Father Dorrigan attended Tinana, who admitted having committed murder. He said he bad a jealous quarrel with another colored man, in which Constable Conroy attempted to arrest him. He then stabbed Conroy to death.

During the past few days both condemned men ate and slept well, and this morning they partook of breakfast. When they came upon the scaffold Tinana was agitated and seemed afraid. Neither man spoke.

The preliminaries were quickly arranged and the bolt was drawn. Death, in each case was apparently instantaneous. When Jackey, whose height was nearly 6 ft, fell blood burst from his nose and stained his white cap.


Diagram from an 1880 memorandum the British government sent to colonial authorities in Queensland detailing procedures for the cutting-edge long drop hanging method.

No colored men were present to witness the execution, which was carried out in the presence of the usual officials. Jackey left a letter to a woman who is looking after his child, telling her to take great care of the infant, to bring it up as a white man’s, and not to let it drink rum or go to the blacks’ camp. Tinana left a letter coached in terms of great affection to his wife.

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1803: Ludovicus Baekelandt, Vrijbos bandit

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On this date in 1803, Flemish outlaw Ludovicus Baekelandt was guillotined at Bruges with about 20 of his gang.

Deserting the army of the conquering French, Baekelandt set up as a bandit preying the deep spruce forests of the Vrijbos, eventually attaining leadership of a gang more than 30 strong.

Baekelandt is one of those whom popular memory and national sentiment (resentful here of the French occupation) has elevated into huggable social banditry. But the evidence remaining us testifies to little but a garden-variety brigand whose offenses were in no way confined to property crimes.

The gang was rounded up in 1802 and the Bruges court heard testimony from more than 100 witnesses, eventually dooming 21 men and three women to death for a litany of murders and robberies.

Almost all the information about Baekelandt available online is in Dutch; if that tongue is in your toolkit, gentle reader, this public-domain book is sure to level you up on Ludovicus Baekelandt and friends.

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