Category Archives: Murder

1963: Ralph Hudson, the last man executed in New Jersey

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On this date in 1963, Ralph Hudson was electrocuted in New Jersey for stabbing to death his estranged wife.

It was to be the last execution in New Jersey.

No prisoner has been put to death in the Garden State these past 45 years. And last month, New Jersey became the first state to abolish the death penalty legislatively since Iowa and West Virginia did so in 1965.

Whether the move will be a sign of things to come remains to be seen.

In 2005 — the death penalty’s future has been debated in New Jersey for some time — the former governor’s stepson remembered the toll this day’s event exacted from its participants.

In 1963, the year in which New Jersey last employed the death penalty, I was an adolescent. My late stepfather, Governor Richard J. Hughes, found himself in the position of Chief Executive with the power to end or continue the life of a fellow human being. Years later he told me how tortuous it was to be thrust into that role.

…

The last execution in New Jersey, of Ralph Hudson in 1963 for the murder of his wife Myrtle, was carried out during my father’s administration. The painful decision to allow Hudson’s execution to go forward profoundly impacted him.

Time has shed light on the impact of the Hudson execution that cold January day in 1963. Hudson’s attorney never accepted another death penalty case. Seeing his client go to the execution chamber had exacted too great an emotional toll. Many years later Hudson’s executioner, Dow P. Hover, borrowed from New York, was discovered dead in his Plymouth, the engine running and the window open – in a closed garage.

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1977: Gary Gilmore

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On this date in 1977, Gary Gilmore uttered the last words “Let’s do it” and was shot by a five-person firing squad in Utah as the curtain raised on a “modern” death penalty era in the United States.

Famous for volunteering for death — he had nothing but disdain for his outside advocates and angrily prevented his own lawyers pursuing last-minute appeals — Gilmore rocketed through the justice system at a pace now unthinkable.

Mere days after courts blessed the resumption of executions in 1976, the career criminal — just paroled from a decade mostly behind bars in Oregon — murdered two people in the Provo, Utah, area. He was convicted in a three-day trial in October 1976 … and dead little more than three months later.

Owing to his milestone status and the unfamiliar public persona he cut insisting on his own death, Gilmore left a trail of cultural artifacts far surpassing his personal stature as small-time crook.

He was lampooned in an early episode of Saturday Night Live. His public desire to donate his eyes (the wish was granted) inspired a top-20 punk hit:

Norman Mailer wrote a book about Gilmore (The Executioner’s Song) and adapted it into an award-winning television movie. Gary’s brother Mikal published his own memoir (Shot in the Heart), later made into an HBO movie.

In a weirder vein, Gilmore is the touchstone for the surrealistic film Cremaster 2, in which magician Harry Houdini — who might have been Gilmore’s grandfather — is portrayed by Norman Mailer.

Gary Gilmore’s was the first execution of any kind in the United States since June 2, 1967. According to the Espy file, it was also the first firing squad execution since James Rodgers was shot in Utah March 30, 1960; only one of the other 1,098 men and women put to death since Gilmore — John Taylor in 1996, also in Utah — faced a firing squad. (Update: After this post was published, another Utah condemned man also opted for a firing squad execution: Ronnie Lee Gardner, shot in 2010.)

Both Gilmore and Taylor chose to be shot in preference to hanging. The firing squad is all but extinct in the U.S., though it still remains on the books in some form in Idaho, Oklahoma and (for prisoners convicted before 2004) Utah.

Part of the Themed Set: The Spectacle of Private Execution in America.

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1936: Albert Fish

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On this date in 1936, serial killer Albert Fish was electrocuted in New York’s Sing Sing Prison for a cannibalistic murder.

The deeply troubled Fish — “deranged, but sane”, the doctors thought him — was condemned for murdering and eating a 10-year-old girl.

He was free and clear of the crime until, seven years later, he sent the child’s parents a grotesque taunting letter* that ultimately led police back to its author.

From posting that note to riding the lightning was a bare 14 months, but Fish found time to confess to additional murders (and deny others — the doubtful relationship of any Fish statement to reality makes it difficult to pin down his criminal career exactly).

The newspapers called him “The Werewolf of Wysteria” and “The Brooklyn Vampire”; if as a serial killer he was far from the most prolific, the thoroughgoing strangeness of his mind has made him, at least to some, enduringly fascinating** — as this documentary trailer suggests:

A 2007 feature film, The Grey Man, is also based on Fish’s exploits.

* The mother was illiterate, and her son had to read aloud to her Fish’s descriptions of cannibalism.

** Others find him less than interesting

Part of the Themed Set: The Spectacle of Private Execution in America.

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1943: Sue Logue, George Logue and Clarence Bagwell

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On this date in 1943, as the New York Times laconically led the story, “[t]wo men and a woman died in the electric chair … bringing to eight the number of deaths in ‘The Logue Case,’ which started over a dead calf.”

This culmination to an operatic South Carolina feud has a book all its own, and that scarcely seems equal to the events.

The dead calf in question* belonged to the Logue family, and (your headsman wouldn’t make this up) had been kicked to death by a mule of the neighboring Timmermans. Perhaps mistaking themselves for a cartoon parody, the two leading families of rural Edgefield County, S.C., used the incident to escalate a long-simmering feud.

Killing higher up the food chain soon followed.

The Timmerman patriarch wasted the Logue patriarch — Sue Logue’s husband and George Logue’s brother — but claimed self-defense and was acquitted. (Body Count: 1)

So Sue and George hired (via nephew Joe Frank Logue) a down-on-his-luck plasterer to even the score. Clarence Bagwell said he’d kill everyone in the county for $500, but he earned his fee just by gunning down old man Timmerman. (Body Count: 2)

The investigation brought the law to the Logue doorstep, and the requisite gun battle ensued. A sharecropper on the farm was killed. So was the sheriff — he was Sue Logue’s cousin — and the sheriff’s deputy. (Body Count: 5)

“[T]he only circuit court judge in South Carolina history to have made love to a condemned murderess as she was being transferred … to Death Row.” (Source)

The officers’ death necessitated the appearance of the man who now became the senior law enforcement official in the county: Strom Thurmond, still a local judge and a few years away from his vault into national prominence as a segregationist presidential candidate and 46-year South Carolina Senator.

Thurmond waded through the posse and talked the trio into surrendering. His warning that they were liable to be lynched must have been compelling in any circumstance, but the old goat was a uniquely qualified ambassador: he’d been having an affair with Sue Logue.

Small wonder the trial venue was moved. “[N]o section of the county could be found that did not include a relative of theirs.” (Source)

And small good it did the Logues, who died with their hireling in the early morning hours this day. (Body Count: 8)

For such an outlandish case, it earned only muted national coverage — a pittance reckoned against the feeding frenzy latterly occasioned by such relatively meager gruel as Scott Peterson. World War II stole its thunder, although local interest was intense.

Yet it lives on for the involvement of Thurmond in a second guise that rates as quite possibly the juiciest slice of death row gossip in American history. According to Ol’ Strom: An Unauthorized Biography of Strom Thurmond:

Randall Johnson, a black man who supervised “colored help” at the State House and often served as driver and messenger, drove Sue from the women’s penitentiary to the death house at the main penitentiary in Columbia.** In the back seat with her, he said many years later, was Thurmond, then an Army officer on active duty. They were “a-huggin’ and a-kissin’ the whole day,” said Johnson, whom Thurmond later as governor considered a trusted driver… In whispered “graveyard talk” — the kind of stories not to be told outsiders — the word around SLED (State Law Enforcement Division) was that Joe Frank said his aunt Sue was the only person seduced on the way to the electric chair.

* A “prize calf,” to be fair.

** On Christmas Day, according to Dorn.

Part of the Themed Set: The Spectacle of Private Execution in America.

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2005: Nguyen Van Van

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On this date in 2005, Nguyen Van Van, the onetime coach of Vietnam’s national taekwondo team, was shot for murder in Ho Chi Minh City.

The wire story does not appear to be available in a current archive but was secondhandedly cited here and here. Here’s how it ran:

Martial arts master executed

From correspondents in Hanoi
January 14, 2005

A FORMER coach of the Vietnamese national tae kwon do team was executed by firing squad in Vietnam for murder, a court official said today. Nguyen Van Van was put to death today at Long Binh execution ground in the southern Ho Chi Minh City, an official from the city People’s Court said.

A municipal appeal court handed down in June 2004 the death sentence to Van, who was only sentenced to life imprisonment at his first trial in March of the same year, for murdering a man in an ambush on December 19, 1996.

The incident took place at a cafe after one of Van’s sons got involved in a brawl with a customer. Accompanied by family members, Van stormed into the cafe where he injured the cafe owner and stabbed to death his brother-in-law, Le Hong Quan.

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1951: Albert Guay

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On this date in 1951, Albert Guay was hanged in Canada for one of the earliest commercial airline attacks — bombing a Canadian Pacific Airline flight to murder his wife.

Stuck in a loveless marriage with little recourse to divorce, Guay‘s loins burned for a young mistress.

He engaged a watchmaker colleague, Généreux Ruest, to make a bomb, and the latter’s sister, Marguerite Ruest-Pitre, to air freight it on the doomed plane. Both would maintain their innocence of the plot, but after Guay’s own conviction, he implicated both — possibly in an attempt to delay his own hanging.

A time bomb in the luggage hold of this airplane took 23 lives on September 9, 1949, for which three people were executed — and inspired a copycat crime with 44 more deaths and one more execution.

Guay had intended the plane to explode over the St. Lawrence River, eliminating the forensic evidence, but a slight delay before takeoff laid the damning debris over the land. The flight’s entire complement of four crew and nineteen passengers — including three top executives of the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation — perished.

The crime had ample media attention both north and south of the Canada-U.S. border — flight still being something of a terrifying novelty for the general public. Guay’s purchase of life insurance for his wife on the day of the trip was not especially inculpatory, but a standard procedure for air travelers.

Guay’s last words caught the irony of his celebrity: “Au moins, je meurs célèbre” (“At least I die famous”).

A few years after this day’s events, an American attempted a similar crime, with similar results.

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1923: Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters

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On this date in 1923, adulterous lovers Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters were simultaneously hanged at two different prisons in England for the murder of Thompson’s husband.

From left to right, Freddy Bywaters, Edith Thompson, and the victim, Percy Thompson. (Source.)

As a bored middle-class housewife, Edith had struck up an affair with their handsome, adventurous 18-year-old boarder.

The affair met a horrifying and sensational conclusion when Bywaters confronted the cuckold in October 1922 and slew him in the ensuing altercation.

Bywaters was unquestionably and confessedly guilty, but the case became a national cause celebre — and an enduring historical artifact — because of the widow’s place in it.

Mrs. Thompson had fled the crime scene to police distraught and implicated her paramour. The police didn’t view her as a witness, but as an accomplice. In dozens of love letters that soon surfaced, she had fantasized about escaping Percy Thompson and claimed to have attempted to poison him. Coroners could not establish that she had in fact done so, and no evidence but her letters linked her to the crime; those letters were not given to the jury as a whole but censored for her frank treatment of menstruation, abortion, and lovers’ rendezvous. Thompson’s defenders see them as some mixture of escapism and confused romanticism much less sinister than the crown charged — though the letters are indeed suggestive of more than sensuality.

Both were condemned.

Bywaters gallantly defended his lover’s innocence throughout the ordeal and more than a million people petitioned the government for her reprieve.

Edith Thompson’s fate bore an unmistakable stamp of gendered social prejudice from the start. “Mrs Thompson was hanged for immorality,” her lawyer would say later. That sense has only become more pronounced in the intervening 85 years.

Academics have taken on the matter:

Women in the 1920s had won certain freedoms, and writings on sex and marriage now presented married women as legitimate sexual beings, but there was still significant hostility towards the expression of explicit female sexuality, let alone a woman’s adultery, especially with a younger man. In the years immediately after the First World War there was particular concern to differentiate normal from deviant sexual behaviour, acceptable from unacceptable, and the War’s aftermath saw deep concern as to the disruptions of gender boundaries.

And here, in a piece contrasting the Thompson-Bywaters case with a recent hanging in Singapore:

[T]he stark contrast between the cases of the men, on the one hand, and the woman on the other, raises issues about the gendered aesthetics of sentimentality and abjection in media representations of contested death-penalty cases.

From a less exalted plane, Rene Weis, author of a book about Thompson, is convinced of Thompson’s innocence:

Edith Thompson paid a terrible price for daring to be ruled by her passions, and for behaving out of her social class. If confirmation were needed that it was her perceived immorality that brought her to perdition, it is provided by the foreman of her jury. “It was my duty to read them [the letters] to the members of the jury … ‘Nauseous’ is hardly strong enough to describe their contents … Mrs. Thompson’s letters were her own condemnation.”

The sexuality at the heart of the affair was to set its mark upon this day’s grim doings as well. When hanged, Thompson bled copiously from her vagina, feeding speculation that she had been pregnant or that her uterus had inverted.

Her hangman — who also executed Hawley Harvey Crippen — emerged from the secretive procedure raving, and retired shortly thereafter. Some friends thought a lingering disturbance over his part in the Thompson case eventually led him to commit suicide. (John Ellis reportedly hated hanging women.)

Besides Weis’ book, this renowned case has also generated a fictionalized treatment and a 2001 film, as well as inspiring the recent novel The Adulteress.

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2002: Sani Yakubu

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On this date in 2002, a young murderer from the northern Nigerian state of Katsina became the first person executed under that country’s controversial introduction of sharia law two years before.

Yakubu was convicted of stabbing to death a woman and her children, and according to the BBC was initially to be stabbed to death using the same knife. The sentence was moderated to hanging, perhaps to avoid inflaming sectarian sensibilities.

The introduction in 2000 of sharia in several northern majority-Muslim states of the oil-rich nation has pitted those states against majority-Christian territories to the south in a complex duel of identity politics under the klieg lighting of international human rights pressure.

Yakubu went from a guilty plea to death within three months, apparently because he failed to pursue any form of appeal, which might well have availed him: Nigeria’s federal government has pledged to stay sharia executions. Yakubu is in fact believed to not only be the first Nigerian executed under sharia — but also the last.

(It should be noted that just last month, Amnesty International charged Nigeria with carrying out executions in secret over a period of years. Although there was no explicit sharia connection documented in that expose, such behavior counsels caution with any assertion about recent death penalty activities in Nigeria.)

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1898: Joseph Vacher

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On this date in 1898, “the French Ripper” Joseph Vacher was guillotined for a three-year homicidal spree through the French countryside.

Less renowned to posterity than the unidentified British contemporary to whom his nickname alluded, Vacher was thoroughly infamous in his day. The New York Times‘ report of his beheading noted that “[t]he crimes of Joseph Vacher have surpassed in number and atrocity those of the Whitechapel murderer.”

After release as “completely cured” from a mental hospital to whose hapless mercies a failed murder-suicide — both murder and suicide failed — involving his unrequited love had left him, Vacher drifted through rural France from 1894 until his arrest in 1897 killing randomly, frequently, and savagely.

He left at least 11 victims, and possibly several dozen, often atrociously mutilating the bodies. The seeming sang-froid of his murders — one story has him coolly misdirecting a police officer in a frantic chase for the killer of a body he has left behind minutes before — and their horrific nature and extent threw his case into the eye of a public already fearful of “drifters”.

If it is likely that the murders themselves demanded their author’s execution regardless, Vacher’s claim that madness — “simulated insanity”, the Times called it — drove the killings and negated his culpability remained a challenging medical and judicial issue. As Susan A. Ashley writes in The Human Tradition in Modern France:

The … judicial proceedings centered on his mental competence. Could he be held responsible for his actions? He claimed that he acted on impulse, that he was driven to kill and maim by fits of uncontrollable rage. The court-appointed experts, however, concluded that he had carefully planned and carried out the killings, and the jury agreed.

…

Medical experts and legal authorities seriously disagreed over Vacher’s mental state and over the limits of his legal responsibility. They examined his past and his behavior after his arrest and drew very different conclusions about his sanity.

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2006: Saddam Hussein

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One year ago today, Saddam Hussein was hanged in “the hell that is Iraq” — his riposte to the mob scene at his gallows, transmitted worldwide by way of illicit footage shot with a cell phone.

Caution: This video contains graphic footage. You knew that already.

How it was then:

Who could follow in his footsteps?

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