Category Archives: Murder

1855: Emmanuel Barthelemy, duelist

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The winner of England’s last fatal duel was hanged at Newgate on this date in 1855 … but not for the duel.

Both participants in that duel, Emmanuel Bart(h)elemy and Frederic Cournet, were French emigres* who had commanded Parisian barricades during the 1848 revolution.

On its surface the duel was one of those trivial affairs of honor: Barthelemy heard that Cournet (otherwise unknown to him) had repeated some defamatory rumors about Barthelemy already abroad in France, and challenged Cournet on that basis; Cournet at first dissociated himself from any such smears, but upon better consideration thought he considered Barthelemy’s notice a little on the ultimatum side and took exception to that.

The consequent set-to was delayed some time by negotiations over every element of its ceremony. When at last it was arranged, it unfolded thus:**

it should commence with pistols, the combatants, being 40 paces apart, advancing 10 paces before firing if they chose, and having two shots each, miss-fires not counting; that the choice of position, the choice of pistols, and the signal for firing should be determined by tossing up; that if the pistols proved ineffectual swords should be resorted to to terminate the affair.

Cournet won the toss and got to choose his position and take the first shot. Barthelemy had to stand stock-still as Cournet

advanced his 10 paces and fired, but though on 14 similar occasions he had never failed to hit his opponent this time he missed. Barthelemy then told him that he had his life in his hands, but would surrender his right to fire if Cournet would agree to terminate the duel with swords. [Barthelemy had wanted swords to be the dueling weapon in the first place -ed.] Cournet declined to do so, saying that he would stand his adversary’s fire and take his second shot. Barthelemy then levelled his pistol, but … it snapped. He put a fresh cap on and it snapped a second time,† and it was then agreed that he should use Cournet’s pistol, which was loaded and handed to him. Before discharging it, however, he again offered ineffectually to terminate the contest with swords. He then fired, and with fatal precision.

Barthelemy himself and all four of the seconds involved (both Barthelemy’s and Cournet’s) were arraigned in this case, but the jury returned only a manslaughter verdict. Barthelemy served a few months; he would have to exercise fatal precision once again to find a different route to the scaffold.

In his non-duelling life, Barthelemy was a mechanical engineer, and it was in this capacity that a soda-water manufacturer named George Moore employed him to repair his machinery at 73 Warren Street, just off Fitzroy Square.

Late the night of Friday, December 8, Barthelemy showed up with a veiled woman at the place and asked for Moore. Minutes later, the servant-girl saw all three emerge struggling violently together from their private meeting. As she raced to the door to scream for help she saw the Frenchman raise a pistol and fire …

“Murder!”

Her screams started attracting the neighbors as Barthelemy burst past her, but an iron gate in front of the house obstructed him. Before more people could assemble he fled back into the house and locked it shut behind him.

Moore’s neighbor, a former East India Company man named Charles Collard, thought quickly to his own grief. Collard raced around the back side of the house where a garden opened onto another street, and arrived just in time to catch Barthelemy vaulting over the garden wall. Collard pounced on him, and in the ensuing melee Barthelemy shot him, too.

This was all too late for Barthelemy, for the delay had brought an onrushing of neighbors and passersby who quickly subdued the gunman. Somehow — nobody quite knew how — his companion was nowhere to be found. She had vanished from the house leaving only her veil, and as she had surely not escaped by the front gate it was thought that she must have found some way to slip out the back casually amid the commotion and made a nonchalant escape. She was never seen again.

Moore was found quite dead in his home: he’d been shot through the head, and the marks on his body indicated that the fatal wound had been preceded by some whacks with a cane. Collard lingered on many hours in agony — long enough for his captured murderer to be brought before him and Collard to deliver a signed j’accuse identifying Barthelemy as the villain.

Barthelemy must have had a way with jurors because even in convicting him for murder on this occasion, the panel still recommended mercy. There seems to have been some thought that the mysterious dispute in the house might have been a spontaneous affair qualifying as manslaughter, while the murder of Collard might have passed (since Collard grabbed Barthelemy) as self-defense. The crown unsurprisingly did not share this exceptionally generous view of a man who had already been in the dock for homicide in the past and declined to extend mercy.

Barthelemy disdained the religious entreaties of his captors, scandalizing the right-thinking with bon mots like “it is no use to pray to God, as God will not break the rope.” Indeed, He did not.

* It was perhaps fitting that Frenchmen, a people with an abiding enthusiasm for the duel, who transacted this milestone encounter. En garde!

** Per the London Times of Oct. 28, 1852, summarizing evidence presented in court.

† Upon post-duel examination it emerged that Barthelemy’s pistol had failed to discharge because of a bit of linen rag stuck in the breach. This eyebrow-raising fact gave rise to the suspicion of foul play, though on whose part and to what end is less distinct. Both guys ended up with a shot at one another with the exact same pistol. Cournet just missed his.

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1891: James Eubanks

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

On this date in 1891, middle-aged widower James M. Eubanks was hanged in the yard of the county jail in San Jose, California. He’d killed his oldest daughter, Ada, thirteen months before.

Ada was fifteen years old at the time of her death, and worked as a waitress at a restaurant called Heath House in Los Gatos. Her relationship with her father was troubled and James was often abusive towards her. Once, the girl’s uncle had to intervene when he saw James chasing after Ada brandishing a stick.

James, a father of six, played the part of the beleaguered single parent with an out-of-control child: he said Ada was a habitual runaway, was “running around at night too much,” and that he he had “heard a great many reports that she was of loose character.”

There were hints of something more than typical inter-generational tension and teenage rebellion in the Eubanks family, however. Ada confided to a female relative that her father had committed “improper actions” that caused a great deal of trouble for her, and there were rumors that she had been pregnant by her own father.

Three days before Christmas in 1889, Ada was at work at Heath House and her father was loitering at the saloon next door.

He’d taken a position at the upstairs window, which afforded him a view of the Heath House kitchen, and was sullenly eyeballing his daughter.

Between nine and ten in the morning, James left his surveillance point carrying a double barreled shotgun. He came into the restaurant through the kitchen door and called for Ada.

When she came to the door, he took aim and fired, hitting her in the chest and killing her instantly. James then fired a shot at his own head, but missed.

He calmly walked back into the saloon, ordered a drink of whiskey, consumed it and went back upstairs. There he tried to cut his throat with a razor, but inflicted only a minor wound before the constable came and arrested him.

Admitting to the slaying, the “drunken, worthless wretch” said he’d been angry because Ada refused to turn over her earnings from her job.

At his trial, Eubanks’s lawyer presented a defense of diminished capacity: he admitted he’d fatally shot his daughter, but said that “from the long and excessive use of intoxicating liquors … he was, at the time of the homicide, and for a long time prior thereto, of a weak and enfeebled mind” and therefore incapable of forming the malice aforethought necessary for a first-degree murder conviction.

His attorney argued for a conviction of second-degree murder, or at least a recommendation of mercy.

The jury would have none of it, and James Eubanks didn’t seem to care. “I am a nuisance to the world,” he wrote in a memorandum confessing to the killing, “so I leave it in disgust.”

He found religion on death row, like so many others of his kind, and said he believed God had forgiven him and he would go to Heaven.

According to one newspaper report, the day before James was hanged, 2,000 men, women and children were permitted to traipse through the jailyard to have a look at the gallows. James Eubanks himself traversed it speedily; he died a speedy six minutes after the drop, having delivered himself of the trite last words, “I hope this will be a warning to others.”

Sheriff Giles E. McDougall‘s duty required him to preside over the hanging, and he was sickened by the experience. He lobbied for a change in California law — going so far as to write to every county sheriff in the state to solicit support — so that executions would fall within the confines of the state prison system and would no longer be the responsibility of individual counties. McDougall got his new law within a year.

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2000: Spencer Corey Goodman

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On this date in 2000, music producer Bill Ham — noted as the manager of ZZ Top — settled into the witness booth at Huntsville to watch Spencer Corey Goodman suffer lethal injection for the murder of Ham’s wife.

“Minutes before the execution, a witness turned to” Ham, one paper reported, “and asked how he was doing. ‘Great,’ Ham replied.”

Ham’s wife Cecile, 48, left her Houston residence on July 2, 1991, and never returned. Five weeks later, her red Cadillac led Eagle County, Colo. deputies on a 32-mile high-speed chase until it plunged over a cliff. The driver survived: he was Spencer Goodman, a repeat felon who had just been paroled.

According to the statement he gave in custody — a statement that helpfully ticks every box a state’s attorney would need for a capital conviction — he’d been very busy during his brief liberty.

On July 1, 1991, I was released from the old Bexar County Jail … I was given a bus ride back to Houston, Texas by Wackenhut [a private prison company -ed.] and dropped off on the east side of town at 9:30 a.m. I was given my papers to report to Texas House at 5:30 p.m. that night. Instead of going to the halfway house I started walking west. I walked most of the night. … During the day on Tuesday, July 2, 1991, I started walking out Memorial Drive. During the mid-afternoon it started raining. I walked up into a Walgreens parking lot maybe about 4:00 p.m. and just hung around the parking lot for about 20 to 30 minutes. I saw a white female drive up in a 1991 red Cadillac. She pulled up in the firelane along the blind side of the parking lot and then went into the Walgreens store. At that time I was not really watching her, but I don’t think that she stayed inside the drug store very long. When the lady came out of the store she opened the driver’s door and started getting into the car. I decided at that point that I wanted to take her car from her. I had been walking for a long time and my feet hurt and I wanted some transportation. I ran up behind her while the driver’s door was still open. She was sitting behind the wheel, and I shoved her over with one hand and punched her just under the left ear, to knock her out. She fell over to the passenger’s side and was knocked unconscious. I got into the driver’s seat. I think that I may have hit her in the back of the neck to make sure that she was unconscious. I think that the keys to the car were in her hand because they fell to the floor. I picked them up and started the car and then looked around to see if anyone had seen what happened. It was raining, and there was nobody around the parking lot. I first pulled out of the parking lot and turned right on Memorial going west, but there was a subdivision down that way, so I turned around and went to the Dairy Ashford for a ways and then turned off towards the west. I know that I was near a high school off of Dairy Ashford. I pulled off the main road and parked on a side road off behind this little building. I then used martial arts and broke the lady’s neck. I don’t know why I did it, but I know that I was lost. I then put her in the trunk of the car. I did not have on a shirt because my shirt was wet from the rain. I was also wearing jogging pants. After I put her in the trunk, I drove down this road. I was right by this high school when I saw this guy in a truck. I then asked him how to get to I-10. . . . I followed the guy’s direction. As I was driving I went through the lady’s purse and got out her wallet. I found about $20.00 and some change in her purse and some credit cards. I saw an Exxon gas station at HWY 6 and Westheimer so I stopped and filled up with gas. I used the Exxon gas card and signed the name on the card. I then got on I-10 and headed west. . . . . . . I knew that she was dead when I put her in the trunk because I felt on her pulse.

The killer’s niece, Megan Goodman, posted a sad memorial to a man who became in his last months “like my older brother”. Though the original host site appears to be several years gone, archive.org preserves it here.

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1869: William German, surprising Klan lynch victim

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

On this date in 1869, a man named William German was lynched by the newly formed Ku Klux Klan.

German, a white man, had been hanged for killing a black man, Bill Cullum.

Yes, you read that right.

Bill Cullum was a former slave; William German, a former soldier in the Confederate Army. German was living on a farm he’d rented from a white plantation owner, Alvin Cullum, who had been Bill’s owner.

German was ordered to clear off the land so the ex-slave could live there instead. Furious, German put on KKK robes and, with another man, tracked down Bill Cullum and shot him several times. The dying man was able to crawl to a nearby house and name his attacker before he expired.

The local KKK chapter was outraged. William German had committed his act wearing their garb, but without their authorization and against their rules.

What happened next was recounted in the Memphis Daily Appeal (now called The Commercial Appeal):

The Union and American of Saturday says: “By a private letter from a trustworthy gentleman residing at Cookville in Putnam County, we give some further information in regard to the recent execution near Livingston, in Overton County, by a body of supposed Ku-Klux, of the young man Wm. German, an account of which we published Thursday morning. “He says that a few days before the execution, German shot and badly wounded, and supposed he had killed, a Negro man living in his neighborhood. The shooting took place in a public road, and the Negro managed to crawl to the house of his employer, where he told who had shot him. The Negro had the character of being a quiet, peaceable man, and as there had been no previous trouble between him and German, it was supposed the crime was perpetrated in pure wantonness.

It is thought that the persons by whom German was killed were members of a secret organization, to which he belonged — but whether Ku-Klux or not, nobody in the neighborhood appears to know. The body of men concerned in the execution numbered about 200, and none of them were identified by citizens who witnessed their appearance and departure. Accounts reported Bill German was found hanged in a nearby barn; a sign posted there declared: Hung for shooting a Negro, Bill Cullum, and violating the laws of Ku Klux.”

These days, this story has been used by the KKK as evidence that they are a peaceable organization and not at all racist, honest, pinky-swear.

An aside: executions ran in the German family. William German’s brother, Columbus C. “Lum” German, had also served in the Confederate Army and also met his death at the end of a rope, in 1866.

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1864: Samuel Wright, by contrast

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Samuel Wright and George Townley both murdered romantic partners late in 1863. Both were tried, convicted, and condemned to hang in very short order and both the subjects of intense pressure for a crown commutation of sentence.

Only one of those men hanged. It was 150 years ago today.

George Townley

Townley lived near Manchester and was courting a young woman named Bessie Goodwin from Derbyshire. Described as a man from a respectable upper middle class family with “refined manners,” and an intelligent linguist* to boot, Townley was nevertheless a rung or two below Miss Goodwin on the wealth and status ladder.

He was, accordingly, frustrated of his designs when the young lady accepted a clergyman’s proposal and broke off her previous engagement to Townley. Despite being disinvited by ex-fiancee, Townley took a train to her village and pressed his company on her. The two went for a walk that evening, and Townley stabbed her in the throat — a fact which he confessed on the scene to the first person who responded to the commotion and found Miss Goodwin staggering towards her home with a fatal gash in her neck.

In the great tradition of weird stalkers everywhere, Townley then helped the Good Samaritan carry the dying woman home, and kissed her tenderly, all the while bemoaning to arriving gawkers his guilt. “She has deceived me, and the woman who deceives me must die,” he responded chillingly to the inquiries of his would-be father-in-law. “I told her I would kill her. She knew my temper.”

This is all a very bad hand to deal a defense barrister.

Having little to work with, his superstar attorney — remember, the family had money — went with an insanity defense, aided by the lunacy diagnosis of prominent psychiatrist Forbes Winslow.** There was some history of insanity in his family, and everyone seemed agreed on the point that Townley didn’t set out with the intent to commit murder, but impulsively — madly? — took that course as he realized during his interview that he would surely not be putting a ring on that.

The legal standard of the time gave no purchase to this sort of thing. Townley’s judge instructed the jury to find insanity only if he “was under delusions … [and] supposed a state of things to exist which did not exist, and whose diseased mind was in such a condition that he acted upon an imaginary existence of things as if those things were real.” This is the M’Naghten rule, a historically pivotal and also highly restrictive insanity definition dating to 1843.

On December 12, 1863 Townley was sentenced to death for the murder, with the hanging scheduled for the approaching New Year’s Day. According to the London Times report the next week (Dec. 18), the sentence “has not made the slightest alteration in his demeanour. He partakes of his meals heartily, sleeps well, and repeatedly asserts that he was perfectly justified in taking away his victim’s life, and that he feels no remorse for the deed.”

Nevertheless, Townley’s well-off family and friends had enough pull to pry open a previously little-known legal escape hatch.

Upon the judge’s own request, the crown empaneled a committee to adjudicate Townley’s sanity for his mercy petition. But a sloppily written law actually allowed any two doctors plus any two magistrates to issue a formal certification of madness which would compel the prisoner’s removal to the asylum. Townley’s own solicitor simply assembled himself a quartet so minded and presented their finding to the Home Secretary, forcing his hand — to a great deal of public outrage once the obscure mechanism became known.

“Good friends and abundant means may give a convicted criminal unexpected advantages over an ordinary offender,” the Times complained in an editorial. (Jan. 27, 1864) Plus ça change.

Samuel Wright

Samuel Wright was not a man of means or linguistic gifts, but a bricklayer who lived in a Waterloo Road public house in Surrey, on London’s southern outskirts.

On December 13, 1863, he slashed the throat of his live-in lover Maria Green after they’d both been on a drinking bout. On December 16, mere three days later, Wright voluntarily pleaded guilty and received a death sentence.

A hue and cry for Wright’s sentence to be abated soon arose among London’s working classes, especially in the wake of Townley’s commutation. Wright had a good reputation, while Green was known for her violent temper. Wright intimated that she had menaced him with a knife during a quarrel.

Was this not a case like George Townley’s, only more so?

The contrast in the fates between the two murderers did not flatter. The crimes were analogous even to the mode of slaying.† If anything, the rich man’s suggested a more egregious context: Townley’s victim appeared more sympathetic, and Townley had gone out of his way to track her down in order to kill. Why was Townley’s heat of passion “insanity” but Wright’s was motive and deliberation?

The Home Secretary offered his sympathy but not his mercy. After all, Wright himself agreed that he intentionally killed Green. “To commute the sentence on the grounds on which it has been pressed would, in fact, be to lay down a rule of law as to the distinction between murder and manslaughter contrary to that which is well established,” wrote a Home Office spokesman on Jan. 7 in response to three separate petitions submitted on Wright’s behalf. Maybe they thought the same thing about Townley … but that decision was out of their hands.

In one of the period’s characteristic hanging broadsides, the balladeer has Wright lament,

Friends, for me have persevered,
To save me from the gallows high;
Alas! for me there is no mercy,
Every boon they did deny,
While others who was tried for murder,
And doomed to die upon a tree,
Through friends and money has been pardon’d
who deserved to die as well as me.

But, oh! my friends, you must acknowledge
what I say has oft been said before.
Some laws are made to suit two classes,
One for the rich, one for the poor;
So it is with me and Townley,
A reprieve they quickly granted he,
He was rich, and I was poor, —
And I must face the fatal tree.

The mood of the populace for the hanging at Horsemonger Lane Gaol this date in 1864‡ was decidedly ugly. On the night of the 11th, when it became clear that the many last-ditch bids for commutation — directed not only at the Home Secretary but even to Queen Victoria and even to the Prince of Wales appealing for a boon on the occasion of his first son‘s January 8 birth§ — a handbill circulated in the prison’s neighborhood entreating its denizens to protest the execution by shuttering all windows. “Let Calcraft and Co. do their work this time with none but the eye of Heaven to look upon their crime.”

Indeed this summons was widely obeyed.

A small crowd only turned out for the occasion, and shouted their disgust for the proceedings: “Shame!” and “Judicial murder!” and “Where’s Townley?” Even many months later, at the controversial August 10 hanging of Richard Thomas Parker, the crowd chanted Townley’s name, now the emblem of the unequal justice of the law.

One diarist’s entry for the day recalled that “[t]he blinds were down in all the neighbouring streets and the military were called out in case of an attempted rescue. When the unfortunate man appeared on the scaffold, loud cries of ‘Take him, take him down’ were heard in every direction, to which the unhappy man responded by repeated bows to the multitude, he still continued bowing and was actually bowing when the drop fell.”

Postscript

The language of the law that permitted Townley his backdoor commutation was revised by Parliament within weeks.

As to Townley himself, another panel appointed by the Home Office found him fully cogent, which meant that officially, he had become insane after his death sentence and the insanity abated thereafter. While this finding theoretically reinstated the death penalty, actually hanging him after these circumstances was thought to be inhumane, and he was reprieved. One supposes there must have been some thought for the potential disturbance Townley’s hanging would have occasioned.

On February 12, 1865 — a year and change after escaping the noose that claimed Samuel Wright — George Townley hurled himself headlong off a high staircase onto a stone floor in Pentonville Prison, where he had been transferred as an ordinary inmate. He died on the spot.

* Of course, he could never hope to match the linguistic’s fields most famous English murderer.

** You might recognize this distinctive name from our Winslow’s son, L. Forbes Winslow, a figure in the Jack the Ripper investigation.

† An additional unflatterering comparison point to Derbyshire contemporaries: a proletarian named Richard Thorley had been hanged in Derby in 1862 for a very similar crime: he slashed his girlfriend’s throat when she tried to break up with him.

‡ Among the very last public hangings at Horsemonger Lane Gaol. All UK hangings were conducted behind prison walls by 1868.

§ This infant, Prince Albert Victor, is the royal eventually identified with Jack the Ripper by a particularly inventive hypothesis.

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1909: The Pollet gang, breaking the French moratorium

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Warning: Graphic severed head pictures await at the bottom of this post.

On this date in 1909, the guillotine returned France after an absence of more than three years.

The sitting president was a staunch death penalty opponent and had blocked all executions since his term began in 1906. That was about the same span of time that the Pollet gang had, in the words of a New York Times wire report,* “infested the Belgian-French frontier, robbing churches, houses, and inns, holding up stage coaches and belated travelers, and torturing and slaying their victims according to the old piratical adage that dead men tell no tales.”

Abel Pollet had been a smuggler who put his native gift for leadership to good use organizing his fellow traffickers into a more lucratively violent line of work. Thanks, presumably, to the syndicate’s pre-existing professional aptitude for evasion, it persisted for years and authored a quantity of robberies and murders that authorities could only guess at. (The official homicide estimation ran north of 50.) It was a spree so atrocious that it helped force the end of the whole death penalty moratorium since sentiment was so strong against the Hazebrouck gang .

Incited by the many depredations and perhaps starved from years without the bloody spectacle of public execution, a vast concourse of 30,000 mobbed the guillotine at Bethune.

“At midnight there were 2,000 watchers in the square,” one report ran. “The main street of the town was crowded as on the eve of a fete. Soon after midnight men brought ladders and benches to the square and mounted them to obtain an uninterrupted view. Others climbed into the branches of trees, where their presence was revealed by the glow of cigarettes and pipes in the dark among the branches.”

Undeterred by the steady winter’s drizzle, they would wait all the night through, their numbers continually augmented as road-trippers arrived by train.

At four in the morning the dread traveling executioner Anton Diebler, who had already plied this trade for a generation and more and would continue in the role for another 30 years, arrived with four assistants to set up the guillotine. It was only with difficulty that police restrained the pawing mob.

By half-past five the public prosecutor officially informed the condemned men what they surely already knew — that there would be no mercy. The crowd on the square would have its prey.

As the first robber, Theophile Deroo, emerged at 7:25 a.m., “there was a painful silence, and then an outbreak of hoots and curses from the crowd.” A wilting Deroo had to be hustled to the board amid the jeers. “A mort! A mort!” came the howls.

Three times in the next eight minutes the executioners furiously scrubbed the apparatus clean while guards (per the Times) “held the crowd back with main force.”

Canut Vromant followed coolly; Auguste Pollet was third, fighting and shouting. His brother, the leader Abel Pollet, went under a rain of curses that he answered with the words “Down with the priests! Long live the Republic!”

People are ghoulish. Far be it from us to deny them.


Top: the heads of the Pollet brothers. Middle: The heads of their two accomplices. Bottom: Canut Vromant’s headless trunk awaits autopsy. All images from the invaluable Bois de Justice, via this goregrish forum.


After the quadruple executions, the heads are cleaned up. (Source)

Perhaps, dear reader, you find the public exhibition of these severed heads objectionable. If so, you have an ally in the French state that did the severing.

For years, French elites had been fretting the indecorous behavior of the crowd at what was supposed to be a solemn occasion. The advent of photography only made matters worse, for now the discomfiting head-chopping exercise could be shared with those indisposed to sitting up all night smoking pipes in trees.

But as the moratorium gave way, the rising media form of cinema promised even more debased exhibitions. Enterprising cinematographers were already staging execution re-creations; now there was the prospect for film audiences to be incited to countless bloodlust frenzies by on-the-scene deathporn footage of hated criminals going under the blade. It was in response to just this fear that France a bit later in 1909 promulgated (French link) its first film censorship rules — forbidding in this case the public display of film liable to disturb the public tranquility.

* Jan. 16, 1909 … under the excited headline “THIRST FOR BLOOD AMONG THE FRENCH”,

On this day..

2013: Zhang Yongming, cannibal corpse

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

One year ago today, 57-year-old Zhang Yongming was executed in China, just six months after a court in the province of Yunnan convicted him of murder. Zhang, a farmer, was modern China’s answer to Fritz Haarmann: authorities believe he killed young men and boys, cannibalized parts of their bodies and sold the leftover flesh at the village market.

Convicted of eleven murders, he’s suspected of six more.

When young people started disappearing in the neighborhood, the police initially assumed they’d been kidnapped and sold for slave labor, a sad situation that’s all too common in present-day China.

From TruTV:

Witnesses reported that Yongming began selling meat at the local market, which he had never done before, after 1997. The meat, which he sold as ostrich meat, was cured and dried.

When police finally searched Yongming’s house, they found strips of human flesh that were hung up to dry around his house. He kept dozens of human eyeballs preserved in alcohol in bottles, which police said looked like “snake wine.” Investigators said Yongming likely fed human remains to his dogs. In a nearby vegetable garden, police found bones believed to be human.

This wasn’t the first time Zhang had faced the death penalty, either: in 1979, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but the sentence was reduced and he was released from prison in 1997. The government even helped him get back on his feet by giving him a bit of land and a monthly allowance.

But Zhang simply couldn’t stay on the straight and narrow: by the spring of 2008, he’d started killing again, and the murders didn’t stop until his arrest four years later.

Following his conviction in July 2012, he confessed to his crimes and didn’t bother to file any appeals. He reportedly showed no remorse and didn’t offer any apologies for his victims’ families or any explanation for his conduct.


Zhang’s victims.

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2013: Rizana Nafeek, Sri Lankan maid

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A year ago today, a blindfolded, white-clad Rizana Nafeek had her head chopped off in public in Dawadmy, near the Saudi capital of Riyadh.

Rizana Nafeek, a Sri Lankan, was among the numerous foreign laborers routinely imported to Saudi Arabia for domestic work. There are an estimated 1.5 million migrant domestic workers in Saudi Arabia from South Asia (especially Sri Lanka), Nepal, Indonesia, East Africa, and the Philippines. Most are employed via the kafala (“sponsorship”) system that places their host in an almost lord-like position of authority.

Such workers are excluded from Saudi Arabia’s labor protections, and as a result stand vulnerable to horrifying abuse.* Household heads often confiscate these workers’ passports, and in some cases have subjected their domestic employees to rape, beatings, wage confiscation, and work weeks of 100-plus hours. One Sri Lankan woman had nails driven into her hands when she complained about overwork.

Rizana Nafeek hardly had time to find out whether any of these perquisites were in store for her. Not long after she arrived in Saudi Arabia in 2005 hoping to make enough money as a domestic drudge to move her impoverished family into a house, she had bottle-feeding duties for her host family’s infant foisted upon her. Nafeek had no training in caring for infants.

In May 2005, that child began choking while in Rizana’s care, and her panicked shouts summoned the mother. By the time the mother arrived, the infant had fallen unconscious, and the upset family immediately handed over their maid to the police, accusing her of strangling the baby.

This was the victim for whom Nafeek was decapitated, and also perhaps an illustration of tunnel vision in law enforcement. It’s quite doubtful whether there was ever any objective basis for supposing a homicide, but the fact that this was the color the family gave to events in the horror of the moment set in motion all the ensuing events.

During the investigation leading up to her 2007 trial and condemnation, Nafeek confessed to smothering the child — but she would later claim this confession was tortured out of her, and that the baby simply started choking on its bottle. (There was never a post-mortem on the dead baby.)

Opaque as the Saudi Arabian criminal justice system is, it’s got ample reputation for obtaining confessions by violence, and for mistreating migrant workers. And the accused had scant legal representation and no translator when she was tried for her life in a Saudi court.

After her conviction, it would also emerge that, order to land her the gig, Nafeek’s Sri Lankan recruiting agency falsified her papers to bump her age up past the legal minimum of 21. Rizana Nafeek arrived in Saudi Arabia carrying a passport that said she was born in 1982, making her 23 years old when she committed the supposed murder … but her birth certificate said that she was born in 1988, and was still a minor when the “murder” took place.

As an international clemency push developed for the potentially-innocent underaged migrant worker, the Saudi government strongly rejected its critics’ charges.

Noting that the dead infant’s family refused repeated blandishments of “blood money” to exercise its right to grant clemency, Riyadh officially “deplore[d] the statements made” by Rizana’s supporters “over the execution of a Sri Lankan maid who had plotted and killed an infant by suffocating him to death, one week after she arrived in the kingdom.”

More sympathetic Saudis, undoubtedly meaning well, offered Rizana Nafeek’s family cash compensation after the young woman was beheaded. That money, too, was angrily refused.

“I will not accept any gifts from the Saudis or the Saudi government which murdered my daughter,” mother Saiyadu Farina told a Sri Lankan newspaper. That anger was widely shared in Sri Lanka; Colombo even recalled its Saudi ambassador in protest.

That’s as may be, but money is sure to carry the argument at the end of the day. Wage remittances by overseas laborers are a massive boon to the island nation, amounting to $6.3 billion in 2012 — 8.8% of the Sri Lankan economy. And Saudi Arabia remains the single largest employer (pdf) of Sri Lankans abroad.

As of the time of Rizana Nafeek’s execution, at least 45 other foreign domestics, most of them Indonesians, were also awaiting execution on Saudi Arabia’s death row.

* Ill treatment of migrant domestic workers is a phenomenon elsewhere in the Middle East, and elsewhere around the world.

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1690: Andrei Ilyich Bezobrazov, stolnik

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On this date in 1690, the Russian stolnik (an administrative office in the Russian court) Andrei Ilyich Bezobrazov was put to death with the magicians he allegedly contracted to bewitch Tsar Peter the Great.

Whatever its other sins, Russia enjoys a reputation for having largely steered clear of the frightful witch-hunts that broke out elsewhere in Europe. Certainly tsars issued many decrees against witchcraft and even prescribed the death penalty in law. But unlike courts in western Europe, Russia does not seem ever to have folded the entire swath of extra-Christian folk beliefs and everyday peasant “magic” together into a juridical theory of omnipresent diabolical terrorism stretching from the neighborhood midwife to the Prince of Darkness himself. Perhaps for that reason, its historical record of witch persecutions presents fewer and more scattered data points.

Elites, write Valerie Kivelson and Jonathan Shaheen,* “demonstrated no interest in formulating a systematized or theorized framework for explaining the uncanny power of magic [and] they also made no effort in their courtrooms to unearth evidence of such a framework … Instead of pursuing connections to the devil, Muscovite judges exerted themselves to track the lineages and results of magic: Who taught you? Whom have you taught? Whom have you bewitched? The judges’ concerns were concrete and this-worldly: who were the victims and who were the victimizers?”

Unfortunately for Bezobrazov, his victim was the tsar himself.

Bezobrazov allegedly obtained the service of “sorcerers and witches” who worked magic “on bones, on money and on water” to enspell the new 17-year-old sovereign during the uncertain period after Peter threw off the regency of his older sister Sophia. Despite Peter’s ultimate reputation as Russia’s great westernizer, the immediate effect of this transition was an oppressive interregnum wherein conservative religious interests took advantage of the new sovereign’s distraction from internal Russian politics to reassert themselves violently.

For Bezobrazov, political turnover augured personal uncertainty. The innocent explanation for his “witchcraft” was invoking a little ritual in hopes of catching a favorable assignment in Peter the Great’s new Russia. It didn’t work.

Bezobrazov was beheaded on Red Square on this date at the same time two folk healers went to the stake with their magic talismans and healing herbs at a swamp across the Moskva from the Kremlin. An essay in this Festschrift describes what it’s like to be a peasant folk healer suddenly under investigation for regicide.

Dorofei Prokofiev … had treated animals belonging to the Bezobrazov household. But when arrested and interrogated, Dorofei did not identify himself as a “sorcerer,” but rather as a posadskii chelovek (artisan), specifically a horse-trainer (konoval) and a blood-letter (rudomet’). He admitted to practicing bean divination and palm reading in addition to treating the illnesses of children and adults with herbs and incantations. His bag contained beans, incense (for protecting brides and grooms from sorcerers, Dorofei said), and a variety of herbs. The herb bogoroditskaia (= royal fern) he gathered himself on St. John’s Day, while reciting the charm “whatever you, herb, are good for, be good for that.” But he denied ever casting a spell to harm the sovereign, and he claimed not to be acquainted with Andrei Bezobrazov — a lie that was quickly uncovered when Dorofei was subjected to torture. At that point Dorofei changed his story: Bezobrazov had asked him to cast a spell on the tsar, but only to make him feel favorably towards Bezobrazov, not to damage the sovereign’s health. Dorofei gave his interrogators examples of the incantations that he used in fortune-telling, all intertwined invocations of Christian figures with sympathetic magic. In short, Dorofei tried to rescue himself by claiming that his healing and fortune-telling activities were all well-intentioned. But the investigators, and Peter himself, were convinced of Bezobrazov’s guilt, which meant Dorofei was guilty as well. Bezobrazov was beheaded, and Dorofei was burned at the stake as a witch.

For everyday folks like Dorofei Prokovie, the author notes, “well-positioned patrons could be either a source of protection or of danger.”

According to Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia, which is also the source of the January 8 date, Bezobrazov’s wife was punitively tonsured for not reporting the “plot” and several other of Bezobrazov’s peasants were knouted and sent to Siberia.

* “Prosaic Witchcraft and Semiotic Totalitarianism: Muscovite Magic Reconsidered” in Slavic Review, vol. 70, no. 1 (Spring 2011)

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1771: Captain David Ferguson, for the murder of his cabin-boy

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(From the Newgate Calendar)

At the Admiralty sessions, held at the Old Bailey, on the 17th of December, 1770, David Ferguson, master of the merchant-ship Betsey, was tried for the murder of his cabin-boy, a lad about thirteen years of age, during his voyage from Virginia to Antigua.

It appeared that four of Captain Ferguson’s crew died, and he was charged with the murder of them all. On one of these alleged crimes he was tried in Virginia, and acquitted.

Lord Botetourt, the then governor of that colony, transmitted the proceedings of the Court to the secretary of state for foreign affairs in London, with a favourable opinion thereon.

Though we have had too frequent occasion, in the course of this work, to state the wanton exercise of that power necessarily given to commanders at sea, yet we also know that the crew are too often ready to construe necessary correction into cruelty; and, should any of the hands corrected by the captain die, even by accident, or the common course of nature, they are sure to aggravate the affair, and persecute their commander.

The ship Betsey sailed from the Capes of Virginia in the depth of winter, when the cold is intense to a degree, of which Englishmen have hardly a conception. Heavy gales of wind and long falls of snow succeed each other, day after day. The shrouds and rigging are incrusted with ice, and they often snap from the tension thereby occasioned. The masts, thus deprived of their principal support, are often ready to fall by the board, while the deck is deeply covered with snow.

(Note: A shocking instance of the sad effects of these sudden snow storms, on the coast of America, happened to the officers of the Assistance man-of-war, lying off Sandy Hook, near New York, in the year 1784. Six seamen of that ship confederated to desert, jumped into the yawl, and pushed off from the ship towards the shore. Another boat was got ready for a pursuit, and was manned by the first lieutenant, eleven other officers, and one seaman. Before they could come up with the deserters, a snow storm came on, which, as is often the case, so overpowered them, and so darkened the horizon, that they lost sight both of the yawl and the ship, and were all, except one, next morning found dead on the beach, near Middleton Point, in New Jersey, most of them sticking in the mud.)

In such cases seamen do their duty with much reluctance; and, when their extravagance in harbour has deprived them of the means of laying in an allowance of brandy and tobacco, they grow clamorous to their captain for those indispensable articles, with which he is not bound to supply them; in fact, he generally provides little more than may serve himself.

Captain Ferguson’s crew, thus situated, were often remiss in their duty; and, on several occasions, his utmost exertions were called upon for the safety of his ship; but that he exceeded the bounds of moderation must be admitted, from his conviction by an English jury of the murder of his cabin-boy.

Perhaps the severity of the season, the crew being unprovided with liquor, and also without sufficient warm clothing, contributed more to the death of the remaining three that perished than correction. The survivors imputed the murder of them all to the cruelty of their captain.

To come to the charge on which he was convicted: it was proved that he had frequently beat the boy in a manner far too severe for his tender years to bear; and that he had knocked him down, and then stamped upon him. After this barbarous usage he confined him almost an hour upon deck, to the weather-side of his long- boat, when the weather was so severe that snow covered the deck, and the shrouds were snapping. That he again pushed him down, and trod upon him with both his feet.

The seamen said that the boy provoked this punishment by coming upon deck with only one stocking on. The sufferer did not make complaint of the effects of his usage until eleven o’clock at night; and the next day he fell into the hold, and was missing five hours. He was found dead upon the ballast.

In his defence Captain Ferguson proved the distress his ship was in from the weather, and the refractory spirit of the crew, several of whom he was obliged to force to their duty.

On the passage of the Betsey home to England, Major Watson and Captain Lilly, who were passengers, proved that she was wrecked on the coast of Sussex; and that it was owing to the resolution and good conduct of Captain Ferguson that they, together with the crew, were saved. It also appeared that many vessels at sea with the Betsey, on the coast of America, had several of their crews frost-bitten, which turning to gangrene, they died. The inference attempted to be made was that the frost had killed the cabin-boy.

Several respectable merchants gave the prisoner a good character for integrity and humanity; but the jury found him guilty, and sentence of death was passed upon him accordingly.

Considerable interest was made to obtain the royal mercy, and (a circumstance seldom granted to murderers, and then only when some doubts arise in the minds of the privy council on the case) he received a respite.

On the 4th of January, 1771, eighteen days after conviction, the warrant arrived for his execution; and the next day, attended by the marshal of the Admiralty, carrying a silver oar, he was carried from Newgate to Execution Dock, and there hanged.

His body was hung in chains upon the marshes of the river Thames.

Thus perished Captain David Ferguson, a victim to his ungovernable passion, in the twenty-sixth year of his age.

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