Category Archives: Why

1751: James Welch and Thomas Jones, the right guys this time

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On this date in 1751, two hangings atoned the rape-murder of Sarah Green, and the wrongful execution of a previously accused assailant.

We have detailed previously in these pages the 1749 hanging of Richard Coleman for being a party to that awful crime. Although the dying victim charged him by name, Coleman — scarcely alone in this respect among the numerous victims of England’s noose-rich Bloody Code era — avowed his innocence to the very last.

I do also most solemnly protest, that I am not in any Manner of Degree guilty of that most inhuman Murder of Sarah Green, neither was I at Newington, or in Kennington-Lane that Night that the cruel Fact was committed on Sarah Green.

Events would bear out his words, even if the poor man wasn’t around to say “I told you so.”

It turns out that three men perpetrated the crime, James Welch, Thomas Jones and John Nichols, none of whom was Richard Coleman.

Centuries before cold case units, these guys had got clean away with murder provided they could just manage not to blab about it. As the Newgate Calendar informs us, however, James Welch found the life-and-death imperative of discretion defeated by the urge to make small talk with a stranger.

Welch, one of the murderers, and a young fellow named James Bush, while walking on the road to Newington Butts, their conversation happened to turn on the subject of those who had been executed without being guilty; and Welch said: “Among whom was Coleman. Nichols, Jones and I were the persons who committed the murder for which he was hanged.” In the course of conversation Welch owned that, having been at a public-house called Sot’s Hole, they had drunk plentifully, and on their return through Kennington Lane they met with a woman, with whom they went as far as the Parsonage Walk, near the churchyard of Newington where she was so horridly abused by Nichols and Jones that Welch declined offering her any further insult.

Bush did not at that time appear to pay any particular attention to what he had heard, but soon afterwards, as he was crossing London Bridge with his father, he addressed him as follows: “Father, I have been extremely ill; and as I am afraid I shall not live long, I should be glad to reveal something that lies heavy on my mind.”

Thereupon they went to a public-house in the Borough, where Bush related his story to his father, which was scarcely ended when, seeing Jones at the window, they called him in and desired him to drink with them.

He had not been long in their company when they told him they had heard he was one of the murderers of Sarah Green, on whose account Coleman had suffered death. Jones trembled and turned pale on hearing what they said; but soon assuming a degree of courage said: “What does it signify? The man is hanged and the woman dead, and nobody can hurt us.” To which he added: “We were connected with a woman, but who can tell that was the woman Coleman died for?”

In consequence of this acknowledgment Nichols, Jones and Welch were soon afterwards apprehended, when all of them steadily denied their guilt; and, the hearsay testimony of Bush being all that could be adduced against them, Nichols was admitted evidence for the Crown. In consequence of which all the particulars of the horrid murder were developed.

The prisoners being brought to trial at the next assizes for the county of Surrey, Nichols deposed that he, with Welch and Jones, having been drinking at the house called Sot’s Hole on the night that the woman was used in such an inhuman manner, they quitted that house in order to return home, when, meeting a woman, they asked her if she would drink; which she declined unless they would go to the King’s Head, where she would treat them with a pot of beer.

Thereupon they went and drank both beer and geneva with her, and then, all the parties going forward to the Parsonage Walk, the poor woman was treated in a manner too shocking to be described. It appeared that at the time of the perpetration of the fact the murderers wore white aprons, and that Jones and Welch called Nichols by the name of Coleman — circumstances that evidently led to the conviction of the unfortunate man of that name.

On the whole state of the evidence there seemed to be no doubt of the guilt of the prisoners, so that the jury did not hesitate to convict them, and sentence of death was passed of course.

After conviction these malefactors behaved with the utmost contrition, being attended by the Rev. Dr Howard, Rector of St George’s, Southwark, to whom they readily confessed their offences. They likewise signed a declaration, which they begged might be published, containing the fullest assertion of Coleman’s innocence, and, exclusive of his acknowledgement, Welch wrote to the brother of Coleman, confessing his guilt, and begging his prayers and forgiveness. The sister of Jones living in a genteel family at Richmond, he wrote to her to make interest in his favour; but the answer he received was, that his crime was of such a nature, that she could not ask a favour for him with any degree of propriety. She earnestly begged of him to prepare for death, and implore pardon at that tribunal, where alone it could be expected.

They were executed on Kennington Common, on 6th of September, 1751.

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1917: Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch, Wilhelmshaven mutineers

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On this date in 1917, German sailors Albin Köbis and Max Reichpietsch were shot at the Wahner Heide proving ground near Cologne.

They’d been convicted at court martial of being “ringleaders” of a mutiny of increasingly militant anti-war seamen from the battleship Prinzregent Luitpold, who on August 2 had marched into the port of Wilhelmshaven to resist their continued participation in the futile bloodbath.

“Nobody wanted a revolution, we just wanted to be treated more like human beings,” said one of their number, sentenced by the same military tribunal to 15 years. But this was a bit coy, considering that Kobis wrote his parents that “I die with a curse on the German-militarist state.”

And why not? The Russian Revolution was in full swing at this moment, while the navy had become a center of radicalized anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiment. In a year’s time another sailors’ mutiny would set off the events that finally forced an end to the Great War — and after the armistice, sailors like Rudolf Egelhofer were again prominent in revolutionary ventures like the Munich Soviet. If there is one thing we can state with confidence about the Wilhelmshaven event, it’s that some participants most certainly aspired to a revolution.

Likewise the contemporary left-wing press recognized in Köbis and Reichpietsch heroes and fellow-travelers; they were saluted as martyrs in their own day, and after World War II, East Berlin had a Köbisstrasse appropriately near to the naval headquarters. While some Communist martyrs were persona non grata on the other side of the Berlin Wall, West German television also aired a dramatization in 1969, called Marinemeuterei 1917.


Memorial to Reichpietsch (left) and Köbis (cc) image from Gordito1869.

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2013: Sushmita Banerjee, Escape from the Taliban author

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On the night of September 4-5, 2013, Afghan author Sushmita Banerjee was kidnapped and summarily executed by the Taliban.

Born Hindu to a Bengali Brahmin family in Kolkata, India, Banerjee secretly married a Muslim businessman named Janbaz Khan and moved with him to Afghanistan, converting to Islam in the process.

She ran a women’s clinic there until goons from the rising Taliban movement beat her up and held her prisoner in 1995. In danger of being executed by her captors, she managed to escape and return to Kolkata.

She made her mark publishing a memoir of her harrowing experience. Kababuliwalar Bangali Bou (A Kabuliwala’s Bengali Wife) was the nondescript title; Bollywood punched it up for the silver screen as Escape from the Taliban.

This was Banerjee’s claim to fame or — Taliban perspective — infamy, and it’s possible it was the eventual cause of her murder.

“She had no fear,” a sister remembered of her. Fearlessly, or even recklessly, she returned to Afghanistan in 2013 — daring even to live in the militant-dominated border province of Paktika and refusing to wear the burka.

A Taliban splinter group disavowed by the Taliban itself ultimately claimed responsibility for kidnapping Banerjee on the night of September 4, 2013 and depositing her bullet-riddled body to be discovered the following morning; their charge was that Banerjee was an “Indian spy”.

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1964: Mohamed Chabani

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On this date in 1964 — one day shy of his 30th birthday — Algerian officer Mohamed Chabani was executed as a traitor.

It’s a verdict that posterity has washed its hands of; Chabani (other transliterations include Shabani and Chaabani) was officially rehabilitated in 1984 and his name decorates public spaces in Algeria.

But in 1964, when Algeria was but two years into her post-France independence, this former FLN fighter become Algeria’s youngest colonel was governor of the fourth military district in Biskra when he fell foul of the Defence Minister Houari Boumediene.

Boumediene was in the process in this interim of consolidating power to his own circle; the following year he would overthrow President Ahmed Ben Bella and rule Algeria until his death in 1978. Boumediene allegedly feared that Chabani would form an independent bloc that could oppose him, and attempted to have the young commander assassinated.

“How long is it since you began to travel by short stages and side-tracks?” the Marquise de Merteuil demanded of Valmont in a different context. “My friend, when you want to get somewhere — post horses and the main road!”

Boumediene’s main road was to arrest Chabani for a supposed separatist plot to break away oil-rich southern Algeria and have him shot in Oran.

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1853: Gasparich Mark Kilit

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On this date in 1853, Hungarian patriot-priest Gasparich Mark Kilit was executed by the Austrian empire for his part in the failed revolutions of 1848-1849.

Gasparich — it’s a Hungarian link, as are most sources about the man — was a Franciscan who served as a camp priest to the nationalist insurgents under Perczel, who made him a Major.

After the revolutions were defeated and suppressed, he managed to live a couple of years under a pseudonym. But, writing for a Hungarian newspaper and dabbling with new radical movements, he was hardly keeping his head down. He’d even become a socialist on top of everything else. Captured late in 1852, Gasparich’s fate might have been sealed by the early 1853 attempted assassination of Emperor Franz Joseph and the resulting pall of state security.

Gasparich was hanged at a pig field outside Bratislava in the early hours of September 2, 1853.

A street and a monument in Zalaegerszeg, the capital of the man’s native haunts, preserve Gasparich’s name for the ages.

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1996: Rodolfo Soler Hernandez, burned on video

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On this date in 1996, the people of the Veracruz town of Playa Vicente visited an orderly extrajudicial lynching on an accused rapist and murderer.

This “illegal execution” (in the words of the Veracruz Attorney General) made the airwaves around Mexico and abroad thanks to horrifying video showing the suspect — obviously beaten — lashed to a tree and agonizingly consumed in flames. Warning: Although this is an edited and narrated version of the video, it’s still extremely disturbing.

According to an Associated Press wire report, Hernandez’s “execution” was only the most visible of a spate of vigilante justice around that time, authored by people infuriated by the corruption and inaction of official law enforcement.

Saturday [apparently the same day, August 31 -ed.], residents of Motozintla in southern Mexico overran the town jail, seizing three men and burning two of them alive on lampposts, Mexico’s official Notimex news agency reported. The men were suspects in several assaults, including the rape of a young girl.

On Monday in Puebla state, police saved two other criminal suspects from being taken from their cells and killed, Notimex said.

Residents in the Mexico state town of Tolman recently beat and then held for more than a day in their town square a man suspected of a robbery and shooting. They vowed to kill him if any of his victims died of their wounds.

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1694: Mette Jensdatter, Viborg infanticide

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On this date in 1694, a young woman died an infanticide in Viborg, Denmark.

Denmark in the 17th century consolidated into an absolute monarchy and with this came a consolidation of the sovereign power of life and death. Once a local office comprising a variety of obligations and prerogatives, the executioner gig became in this period a state-level appointee answering to the governor, and charged with exercising his law enforcement aspect throughout a region.

According to a post formerly at the Viborg Museum site but now consigned to the digital oubliette, executioners so appointed soon began exercising their privileged labor position to gouge prices as well as limbs, eventually requiring (in 1698) a royal edict fixing their fees thusly (all prices are quoted in rigsdalers):*

Beheading with an ax 8 dlr.
Plucking off a hand or a finger 4 dlr.
Nailing up a severed head and hand (pair) 4 dlr.
Hanging 10 dlr.
Dismantling gallows 4 dlr.
Breaking someone on the wheel 14 dlr.
Mounting a broken body on the wheel 7 dlr.
Corpse burial 3 dlr.
Tearing flesh with red-hot tongs (per tear) 2 dlr.
Public whipping 5 dlr.
Burning a person 10 dlr.
Burning condemned books 3 dlr.

Hopefully Viborg was saving its rigsdalers accordingly for in the same era as this list we have — again via the Viborg Museum’s phantom post — a sad instance of a domestic tragedy that is all too familiar in these pages:

On 30 August 1694 was the executioner summoned to execute maid Mette Jensdatter. The story behind was tragic; Mette, who was in the house of Søren Kristensen Høeg in St Michael’s Street, secretly gave birth on the first of August to a boy. On the same day she killed her child and hid the body under the bed. Søren Høeg was classified as the child’s father, but apparently Mette alone was tried and convicted.

Høeg did not escape the opprobrium of his neighbors and his conscience, for a few months later he attempted suicide and in punishment was banished from Viborg.

* I’ve limited the list to the most grisly entries.

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2014: Zhou Youping, serial kinkster

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You might want to take a deep breath for this September 16, 2014 bulletin from the South China Morning Post titled “Singer who left six lovers to die by erotic asphyxiation executed in Hunan”.

A karaoke singer who killed six of his sex partners by hanging was executed last month, it was revealed this week.

The Xiaoxiang Morning Post reported Tuesday that Zhou Youping was executed in Changsha, Hunan province on August 29 after the Supreme People’s Court approved a death sentence handed down to him by the Changsha Intermediate People’s Court in March 2011. He was 42.

Zhou, who worked as a singer in a karaoke bar in the Hunan provincial capital, started seeking men online for sadomasochistic play in September 2009. Zhou would encourage his victims to engage in erotic asphyxiation, whereby one cuts off the supply of oxygen to the brain to increase sexual pleasure. After the men hanged themselves, Zhou didn’t release them, leaving them to suffocate to death, the court said.

Zhou said that he knew the dangers of the game, and never took part in it himself, but liked watching other people play. In a pre-trail interview with a local newspaper, Zhou denied killing the men. “I didn’t want them dead, it was only a game,” he said.

Police found the bodies of six men in different hotels between October 11 and November 26, 2009. Zhou was arrested on November 28 after which he confessed to the murders, according to police.

Though the Hunan Higher People’s Court overturned his conviction for four of the murders, but upheld the death sentence against him for the remaining two. China’s top court approved that sentence on August 29 and Zhou was executed later that day.

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1588: Eight Catholics after the defeat of the Spanish Armada

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On this date in 1588, Elizabethan England celebrated the defeat of the Spanish Armada with Catholic gallows spread throughout London, claiming eight souls in all.

It was earlier that August that English pluck, Dutch reinforcements, and the Protestant Wind had connived to see off that great Spanish fleet and the prospect of Catholic and continental domination.

Although Catholics were liable for life and limb throughout these years it’s hard to put down the large-scale public hangings (some with full drawing-and-quartering pains) of priests and laymen down to coincidental timing, particularly given the unusual choice to distribute them to several gallows all around London. Here, surely, was a triumphant gloat for the furtive adherents of the old faith to ponder.

The Catholic Encylcopedia’s entry on the Venerable Robert Morton, a priest who was put to death at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, surveys the carnage:

At the same time and place suffered Hugh Moor, a layman, aged 25, of Grantham, Lincolnshire, and Gray’s Inn, London, for having been reconciled to the Church by Fr. Thomas Stephenson, S.J. On the same day suffered (1) at Mile End, William Dean, a priest (q. v.); and Henry Webley, a layman, born in the city of Gloucester; (2) near the Theatre, William Gunter, a priest, born at Raglan, Monmouthshire, educated at Reims; (3) at Clerkenwell, Thomas Holford, a priest, born at Aston, in Acton, Cheshire, educated at Reims, who was hanged only; and (4) between Brentford and Hounslow, Middlesex, James Claxton or Clarkson, a priest, born in Yorkshire and educated at Reims; and Thomas Felton, born at Bermondsey Abbey in 1567, son of B. John Felton,* tonsured 1583 and about to be professed a Minim, who had suffered terrible tortures in prison.

Another priest, plus four additional lay Catholics, quaffed the same bitter cup on August 30.

* No relation, however, to the executed assassin John Felton forty years on: that man’s father made his way in the world hunting Catholic recusants to inform upon.

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1861: Martin Doyle, the last hanged for attempted murder

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Outside Chester Prison in Cheshire on this date in 1861, Martin Doyle became the last hanged in Britain for “mere” attempted murder.

He’d battered his lover, Jane Brogine, nearly to death — but not all the way to death — on May 30th. “Jane, say no more, I intend to have your life; I came for it, and I will have it,” he incriminatingly declared during the assault, just to leave no possible doubt. If his intent was clear enough, it turned out that 21 blows from a heavy rock were not so sufficient as Doyle supposed to the execution of the deed. Brogine survived, creeping away to the aid of a passing Good Samaritan once Doyle departed the scene thinking her dead.

Great Britain in 1861 thoroughly overhauled its criminal statutes, including an Offences Against the Person Act that rejiggered a variety of punishments, setting the punishment for attempted murder at a prison sentence:

Whosoever shall administer to or cause to be administered to or to be taken by any Person any Poison or other destructive Thing, or shall by any Means whatsoever wound or cause any grievous bodily Harm to any Person, with Intent in any of the Cases aforesaid to commit Murder, shall be guilty of Felony, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, at the Discretion of the Court, to be kept in Penal Servitude for Life or for any Term not less than Three Years, or to be imprisoned for any Term not exceeding Two Years, with or without Hard Labour, and with or without Solitary Confinement.

The above, in Section 11, and similar language in Sections 12, 13, 14, and 15, replaced the attempted murder language of the Offences Against the Person Act of 1837:

Whosoever shall administer to or cause to be taken by any Person any Poison or other destructive Thing, or shall stab, cut, or wound any Person, or shall by any Means whatsoever cause to any Person any bodily Injury dangerous to Life, with Intent in any of the Cases aforesaid to commit Murder, shall be guilty of Felony, and being convicted thereof shall suffer Death.

Unfortunately for Mr. Doyle, the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 did not receive royal assent until August 6 … which meant that what he’d done to Jane Brogine in May still was a capital felony back when he’d done it.

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