Category Archives: Sex

1977: Princess Misha’al bint Fahd al Saud and her lover

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On this date in 1977, a 19-year-old royal adulteress and her paramour were executed in a Jeddah parking lot by the order of the girl’s powerful grandfather.

Princess Misha’al‘s fate has been obscured by secrecy and the Rashomon-like interpretations imposed upon it by observers.

In its outline (and the first stock interpretation we’re imposing) it’s that timeless human tragedy, the love story, in which headstrong royal daughter and suffocating traditional family square off over the seditious power of the feminine libido.

The princess, in a youthful arranged marriage by most accounts, took up with a Saudi boy while both were studying abroad in cosmopolitan Beirut, and dangerously attempted to maintain the affair back in the royal kingdom to the point of a quixotic (and obviously foiled) escape attempt. Whether under color of a judicial proceeding — the story says Misha’al refused to walk away by simply renouncing her lover and defiantly brought down the death sentence by confessing adultery — or simply on his own authority, the girl’s staunchly conservative* grandfather exercised his right as tribal patriarch to inflict an honor killing for the disgrace they had brought on the family.

The execution in Jeddah — she by gunshot,** he by a very clumsy beheading — that is supposed to have occurred on this date was public, but quiet; news of it got abroad only slowly and incompletely. Small wonder that, once it did, the blended motifs of Romeo and Juliet, harem titillation and oil politics made dynamite material for high-, middle- or lowbrow exploitation.

In 1980, the affair became the subject of one of the most notorious television programs ever aired, the docudrama Death of a Princess. This film’s airing in Britain in 1980 led Riyadh to expel the British ambassador, and cost £200 million of lost revenue for the UK from canceled orders and product boycotts by the Saudis.†

It was aired on in the United States on PBS in 1980 to similar controversy, as oil companies rushed to distance themselves from it.

Rebroadcast in 2005, Death of a Princess is available online for your judgment (as is this partial script): is this a muckraking expose of a shameful crime? orientalist heavy petting? “a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of the Arab dilemma,” as per its own advance publicity? and what did the official apologies (and in only a few countries, censorship) say about the political weight of the petroleum industry?

These, meanwhile, are the western reactions, already removed from events by a further layer of mediation, a forest of axes seeking grinding. If the writer who composed this piece is to be believed, the executed girl has posthumously achieved a sort of universal symbolic gravity in the Arab world, standing for the plight of any hopeless cause of justice dashed against authoritarian power.

* For the House of Saud, it must be recalled, the personal was political in the problematic confrontation between tradition and modernity athwart the desert kingdom’s sea of oil.

** “Princess Misha’al” was executed fully veiled, which permits the rumor that the slain woman was actually a surrogate and the onetime royal favorite lives on incognito somewhere.

† According to the July 4, 1980 London Times.

Part of the Themed Set: The Feminine Mystique.

Editor’s note: References to “Princess Misha” corrected; thanks to hannah for the clarification.

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1939: Howard Long, New Hampshire’s most recent hanging

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As of today, it’s been 70 years since the U.S. state of New Hampshire carried out an execution, despite maintaining a death penalty statute almost continuously since.

“Craving for boys,” Long was condemned for molesting and beating to death a 10-year-old in 1937, evidently his second molestation/murder: in the first, he reportedly drove around for 10 hours with his prisoner before plucking up the heart to do the thing, the sort of mental picture to cast a child murder victim of a wannabe-serial killer in the unexpected aspect of boredom.

Long’s execution in the bicentennial of New Hampshire’s first legal hangings was itself the first in 21 years in the Granite State. Although a handful of cases since have potentially fit the steadily narrowing set of death penalty circumstances, none has actually come so far as the gallows (or, today, theoretically, lethal injection) before taking one of the many possible exits — plea bargain, sentence reduction, premature death — from the capital punishment system.

New Hampshire’s present-day death row consists of only one person, and earlier this year its legislature actually voted to abolish the death penalty, a measure spearheaded by State Rep. Renny Cushing, who is the son of a murder victim.* The measure was vetoed by Gov. John Lynch.

* Full disclosure: also a personal friend. Cushing founded Murder Victims Families for Human Rights (MVFHR).

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1839: William John Marchant

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On this date in 1839, a spooked 18-year-old servant was hanged at Newgate Prison for murdering fellow-servant Elizabeth Paynton.

A good Chelsea lad with no rap sheet, Marchant slashed Paynton’s throat with a razor when they were left alone, fled, but was so pursued by guilt that he gave himself up and pleaded guilty. Awaiting death, he lamely told his distraught parents

the upper house-maid and the cook went out, leaving [Marchant] with the deceased in the house by themselves. The cook, as she was leaving the house, dared him to get possession of a riband or pair of garters which the deceased had displayed before the servants in the kitchen in jest, and threatened to inflict some ludicrous punishment upon him if he did not … [Marchant] improperly endeavoured to obtain possession of the garters, but she resisted him, and at length slapped his face, called him some ill names, and said she would get him out of his situation for his rudeness. He then ran to fetch a razor to cut the garters and get them into his own possession, and he then had not the least intention of killing her or perpetrating any other offense … but when he did return with the razor in his hand he was seized, as he says, with a sudden and unaccountable impulse, which he could not define, and in a paroxysm of insanity in a moment, and without premeditation, he cut her throat.

(In a later telling, he dropped the garter cover story and copped to a more distinctly identifiable attempted rape, with the murder precipitated by its object’s threat to have him sacked.)

As the London Times remarked on the hanging,

It is difficult, perhaps, to hold him out as an example to other erring youth; for, as he neither appears to have been a drunkard, nor given up to licentious courses, his crime is of so extraordinary a character, that it is hardly possible any other, by following the same course, should terminate his career by the same shameful death … there [may] be no occasion to read a lesson to those who in ordinary cases might be seduced to commit a similar offence.

The dearth of instructional opportunity (and the fact that “the crowd was not great”) did not obstruct London’s enterprising gallows-foot entrepreneurs from cranking out multiple broadsides,* complete with cookie-cutter didactic poem. This sort of thing was standard fare for the day’s forgettable petty villains, not merely its crimes of the decade.

All ye who pity my sad fate,
With sorrow most sincere,
Unto the truth which I will state,
I pray you lend an ear.
Condemned in scorn and shame to die
My doom is most severe,
‘Tis but a few short days since I
Just reached my eighteenth year.

My face is all beset with woe,
My cheeks are worn with care,
My eyes are parch’d and sunk with Grief,
That once so sparkling were.
Strange horrors chill my every vein,
A voice most wild and true,
Whispers to this distracted brain,
Thy hand Elizabeth slew.

At this my very heart doth bleed
With grief, remorse, and guilt
To think upopn the ruthless deed,
The blood which I have spilt;
For never since that hour have I
One moment’s comfort knew,
And poor Elizabeth’s murdered corpse
Is ever to my view.

Behold my days are like a flower,
That blooms at break of day,
Cut down and withered in an hour,
And vanished away.
Lament, lament, to see me die
All ye who do me view,
A poor, heartbroken, wretched lad,
Must bid this world adieu.

Vain, are my lamentations, vain
These unavailing sighs,
Girm [sic] death is hastening apace,
I must prepare to die.
Heaven grant none may hereafter be
Like luckless me undone,
But always strive with humble mind,
The tempters snare to shun.

* From Harvard University’s collection.

Update: The Times Archive Blog flags another interesting bit of this story: the newspaper’s hectoring the doomed footman’s chaplain for excessive “enthusiasm.”

Part of the Themed Set: The Ballad.

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1578: Five sodomite monks, by Calvinist Ghent

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On June 28, 1578, five Catholic monks were burnt to death in Ghent for homosexuality.

The five holy men being prepared for execution, in this drawing by Franz Hogenberg. (Click for larger view.)

At our scene in the Spanish-controlled Low Countries, the revolt that would become known as the Eighty Years’ War and secure Dutch independence still had about 70 of those years to run.

Stadtholder William of Orange, aka William the Silent, has his hands full with the Habsburg forces determined to crush their disobedient subjects.

Half civil war, half proto-nationalist revolution, this conflict overlaid disputes over both political and religious authority, complicated by a catastrophic Spanish bankruptcy.

Of this compelling history much beyond our scope, the piece of most moment for our unfortunate monks was a grudging agreement to chill out the sectional suppression as part of a temporary truce between the warring sides. Said “slackening of persecution inspired Reformed public worship and attempts to topple the Catholic stewpot.” (Source)

Late in 1577, a political coup in the commercial powerhouse of Ghent did just that, part of a mini-Renaissance of Calvinist city-republics that Spanish arms would truncate in the 1580’s. But here in the 1570’s, the newly elevated slate of Calvinists implemented a “Reform” agenda that included aggressive moves against Catholic authority.

On 18-22 May [1578], the Reformed launched an attack on the four mendicant monasteries. Their churches were purified and made ready for Reformed worship. On 1 June the first public preaching was organized in the Dominican and Carmelite churches. (Source, a pdf)

Rumors of homosexuality in the religious orders swept the overheated city (assuming they were not put about intentionally), and this day opened a summer’s terror that saw 14 monks burned (pdf) for the love that dare not speak its name.

Kenneth Borris translates the inscription on the Franz Hogenberg image linked above thus:

“five monks are being burned in Flanders, in the city of Ghent. Four are Franciscans (Minnenbruder*) and the fifth Augustinian. Also three have been quickly flogged with switches on the market square as they deserve, because of their outrageous sexual offenses (unzuchtt) that greatly offended the authorities. That is why the four mendicant orders have now been driven out of Ghent.”

William the Silent, made of more statesmanlike stuff than these zealots, would actually enter Ghent himself the next year to disarm the ruling clique, realizing that firebrands were driving Catholic cities back into Spanish arms.

But he could not contain the schism. Spain ultimately kept the Catholic-leaning territories that today comprise Luxembourg and Belgium (including Ghent), while the Protestant Netherlands fought onward to independence.

* “Minnenbroder,” Borris explains, “may be a satiric pun on the word minne (which had come to mean debauchery), suggesting ‘brothers in lust’ as opposed to brotherly love. Hogenberg connects sodomy with ‘godlessness,’ as was common.”

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1994: John Wayne Gacy, scary clown

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This date in 1994 was the last on earth for Pogo the Clown — better known as John Wayne Gacy.


Hello, children.

The local small businessman and closeted pederast filled his crawlspace with the remains teenage boys he’d either kidnap off the street, or hire in his capacity as an independent contractor.

When he wasn’t raping and murdering, he kept up appearances as a Democratic machine operative (once photographed with First Lady Rosalynn Carter) and amateur block party harlequin.

Gacy was a notable “serial killer artist” in the years he spent awaiting lethal injection.* In that capacity, the clown motif continued to inspire him.


* The lethal injection was botched with a clogged IV tube. It took 18 minutes.

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1611: Louis Gaufridi, sorceror-prince

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On this date in 1611, the pathetic figure of a former priest — his body shaved to expose Devil’s marks, a noose about his neck — was conveyed to the secular powers to be tortured one last time, then hauled through the streets of Aix-en-Provence and burned to ashes.

Witchsmellers were thick on the ground in pre-Thirty Years’ War France, as elsewhere.

In our scene in the south of France, we find a characteristic entry in this horrible catalogue.

Parish priest and lothario Louis Gaufridi, having seduced a local teenager, found himself in hot water when she contracted the trendy disorder of demonic possession and started raving about the times she went with the cleric to see Black Sabbath.


Not this Black Sabbath.

Other inmates at the convent to which Gaufridi’s paramour had been conveyed were soon in on the act, indicting him for cannibalism, exotic sexual perversions, and — of course — devil-worship.

Gaufridi’s denials were overcome in the usual way, with the support of doctors who filed a report scientifically vouching that the infernal powers had laid their mark upon the subject. The priest soon saw the wisdom in copping to the charges, and not only his torture-adduced confessions (which he vainly attempted to repudiate in court) but the veritable original contract specifying the terms of his demoniacal servitude was produced for magisterial consideration.

I, Louis, a priest, renounce each and every one of the spiritual and corporal gifts which may accrue to me from God, from the Virgin, and from all the saints, and especially from my patron John the Baptist, and the apostles Peter and Paul and St. Francis. And to you, Lucifer, now before me, I give myself and all the good I may accomplish, except the returns from the sacrament in the cases where I may administer it; all of which I sign and attest.

I, Lucifer, bind myself to give you, Louis Gaufridi, priest, the faculty and power of bewitching by blowing with the mouth, all and any of the women and girls you may desire; in proof of which I sign myself Lucifer.

That’s right. He did it all for the nookie.

(That, and to “be esteemed and honored above all the priests of this country.” Thomas Wright, in his omnivorous and freely available chronicle of European witch trials, remarks that these two attributed motives suggest “the reason why Gaufridi was persecuted by the rest of the clergy.” And oh, but the ladykiller — or rather, the reverse — still starred in the fantasies of the possessed years after his death. (French link))

Gaufridi’s execution immediately freed his erstwhile lover from her satanic affliction. Madeleine de la Palud, however, having officially established herself as susceptible to the penetrations of the Evil One, would remain suspect in the eyes of the inquisition for the 60 years remaining of her life. She twice faced witchcraft charges herself.

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1861: Paula Angel … but why?

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Thanks to Laura James for the guest post, which originally appeared on her outstanding blog CLEWS Nov. 9, 2005. Laura’s first book, The Love Pirate and the Bandit’s Son, hits the shelves on May 5.

It’s not clear today how old she was — nineteen, maybe, or twenty-six, or twenty-seven — the reports all differ. It’s not even clear what her true name was: Paula Angel by most accounts, but she was also called Pablita Martin. But the most pressing questions, still unanswered nearly 150 years after her execution, are why she was hanged in the first place and how the sheriff managed to bungle the job so badly.

Paula Angel was the first and last woman ever executed in New Mexico (while it was yet a territory). Her crime: she stabbed her married lover, Juan Miguel Martin, to death when he tried to end their affair. Her execution was on April 26, 1861, in San Miguel, now Las Vegas.

Anyone familiar with historical crimes and trials, particularly those involving women, will marvel at such an outcome. A capital conviction for stabbing a lover, a crime passionel? That’s certainly not the outcome one would expect for that era (or this era, for that matter; today we’d label it second-degree murder at worst).

One explanation for Miss Angel’s hanging is that the newspapermen never got the story. Decades later, the wire services circulated very brief accounts of her trial and execution under headlines such as “The Story The Newspapers Missed.” So she may well have lacked the greatest champion anyone facing a murder charge can have: public opinion — the verdict of the greater jury. Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a universal revulsion for the execution of women, no matter what their crime, and judges and juries were anxious to find a reason to acquit a woman.

But the authorities in New Mexico Territory were eager to see her hanged. The accounts that survive today report that the jailer taunted her every day leading up to her execution — “I’m going to hang you until you’re dead, dead, dead,”* is the quote attributed to the sheriff.

What was her social status? Was she a prostitute? Was she a violent menace to the community? Had she committed other terrible acts? Was she unrepentant? Did she sullenly testify at her trial and put in a poor appearance on her own behalf? Most importantly, was she ugly? The accounts available today don’t say.

When it came time to launch Angel into eternity, the sheriff did not build a gallows. He selected a sturdy cottonwood tree outside of town. Paula Angel was driven there on a wagon, forced to ride on her own coffin to the site of her execution, which was witnessed by ranchers and townsmen. The sheriff fixed the rope to the tree, garlanded her with hemp, and then resumed his seat on the wagon and hawed the horses. But he’d made an error. He forgot to tie her hands behind her.

Paula Angel managed to get her fingers underneath the rope in a last pitiful effort to save her own neck, and she struggled on the end of the rope. It must have been an awful sight to see. The crowds surely voiced loud complaints. The sheriff was forced to put the wagon beneath her a second time, to cut her down, retie the rope amid the jeers and catcalls, properly secure her hands and feet, and to repeat the process. She did not survive her second hanging.

And there hasn’t been one woman executed in New Mexico since. Rarely has any woman from that state even faced the possibility, though a few years ago Linda Henning nearly became the second woman executed there — and she certainly deserved it. Fans of Court TV will recognize the name, since Court TV has rebroadcasted Henning’s bizarre trial more than once. She was tried for the cooly planned and bloody murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft, the estranged wife of her boyfriend, in one of the weirdest trials of the century. But the jury rejected the death penalty. The reason Henning agreed to involve herself in the murder of a woman she had not even met: Henning was convinced that Girly Chew was a reptilian alien queen from another galaxy.

You read that right: an alien queen from another galaxy. You can’t make this stuff up.

***

Recommended reading: Death on the Gallows : The Story of Legal Hangings in New Mexico, 1847-1923 by West Gilbreath (High Lonesome Books, 2002).

For the stories of the men executed in New Mexico see the excellent compilation by Mark Allan of the Angelo State University Library. [Note: link updated from Laura’s original post. -ed.]

For more on the Hossencofft case see the website of author Mark Horner.

* [Shades of Billy the Kid. Maybe it was something lawmen said to lend it that Wild West atmosphere. -ed.]

[Former New Mexico state historian Robert Torrez unpacks the Paula Angel story and reprints a corrido (folk ballad), “La Homicida Pablita” written by her cousin in Myth of the Hanging Tree. -ed.]

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1178 B.C.E.: Penelope’s suitors, by Odysseus

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On this date in 1178 B.C.E., according to some enterprising astronomers, the Greek hero Odysseus returned home to Ithaca from a 20-year absence and slaughtered the suitors who had taken up lodgings in his palace.

The date was asserted in 2008 based on astronomical clues in the text of Homer’s Odyssey.

This sort of putative historical specificity extracted from what could as well be read as literary devices — e.g., an eclipse — for a literary episode might gratify an advocate of “the higher naivete”, but the reader is well entitled to doubt.

Similarly, and more specifically for this venue, is the problem of whether the summary justice exacted by a Bronze Age chieftain meets the definition of an “execution”. This dubious case is resolved here by the unique subject matter.

Crafty quasi- (or altogether) mythical hero Odysseus (aka Ulysses), having left a generation before for the decade-long Trojan War which he finally resolved with the famous Trojan Horse strategem, then spent the next decade wandering about the sea en route to his home island.

When he gets there, he finds that 108 ill-mannered suitors have moved in, dissipated his fortune in merrymaking, and have ceaselessly dogged his faithful wife (and presumed widow) Penelope to remarry one of them.*

Together with his now-grown son Telemachus, Odysseus punishes them terribly .

“Dogs, did you think that I should not come back from Troy? You have wasted my substance, have forced my women servants to lie with you, and have wooed my wife while I was still living. You have feared neither God nor man, and now you shall die.”

They turned pale with fear as he spoke, and every man looked round about to see whither he might fly for safety, but Eurymachus alone spoke.

“If you are Ulysses,” said he, “then what you have said is just. We have done much wrong on your lands and in your house. But Antinous who was the head and front of the offending lies low already. It was all his doing. It was not that he wanted to marry Penelope; he did not so much care about that; what he wanted was something quite different, and Jove has not vouchsafed it to him; he wanted to kill your son and to be chief man in Ithaca. Now, therefore, that he has met the death which was his due, spare the lives of your people. We will make everything good among ourselves, and pay you in full for all that we have eaten and drunk. Each one of us shall pay you a fine worth twenty oxen, and we will keep on giving you gold and bronze till your heart is softened. Until we have done this no one can complain of your being enraged against us.”

Ulysses again glared at him and said, “Though you should give me all that you have in the world both now and all that you ever shall have, I will not stay my hand till I have paid all of you in full. You must fight, or fly for your lives; and fly, not a man of you shall.”

The suitors fight back, and most of the resulting deaths occur in the fray. But it’s about as one-sided as the contest on any proper scaffold.

As eagle-beaked, crook-taloned vultures from the mountains swoop down on the smaller birds that cower in flocks upon the ground, and kill them, for they cannot either fight or fly, and lookers on enjoy the sport — even so did Ulysses and his men fall upon the suitors and smite them on every side. They made a horrible groaning as their brains were being battered in, and the ground seethed with their blood.

And if many of the doomed die with their boots on, there are at least a couple of specific instances that clearly have a summary-execution character.

Leiodes then caught the knees of Ulysses and said, “Ulysses I beseech you have mercy upon me and spare me. I never wronged any of the women in your house either in word or deed, and I tried to stop the others. I saw them, but they would not listen, and now they are paying for their folly. I was their sacrificing priest; if you kill me, I shall die without having done anything to deserve it, and shall have got no thanks for all the good that I did.”

Ulysses looked sternly at him and answered, “If you were their sacrificing priest, you must have prayed many a time that it might be long before I got home again, and that you might marry my wife and have children by her. Therefore you shall die.”

With these words he picked up the sword that Agelaus had dropped when he was being killed, and which was lying upon the ground. Then he struck Leiodes on the back of his neck, so that his head fell rolling in the dust while he was yet speaking.

The minstrel Phemius, whose services had been procured by force, has better luck pleading for clemency when Telemachus intervenes before Odysseus can give him the chop. But the explorer’s son has no use at all for twelve corrupt handmaids who have abetted the suitors’ predations. I like this version in the chilling verse form quoted by Dr. Samuel Haughton in an 1866 paper on hanging that weirdly goes on to produce the physics necessary to demonstrate the intuitively obvious point that this must have required the main rope to anchor to pillars between each suspended noose, rather than all twelve on a single line.

…leading forth
The women next, they shut them close between
The lofty wall and scullery, narrow, straight,
And dreadful, whence no prisoner might escape.
Then, prudent, thus Telemachus advised:
 The death of honour would I never grant
To criminals like these, who poured contempt
On mine and on my mother’s head, and lay
By night enfolded in the suitors’ arms.
 He said, and noosing a strong galley rope
To a huge column, led the cord around
The spacious dome, suspended so aloft,
That none with quivering feet might reach the floor.
As when a flight of doves entering the copse,
Or broad-winged thrushes, strike against the net
Within; ill rest, entangled, there they find;
So they, suspended by the neck, expired
All in one line together. Death abhorred!
With restless feet awhile they beat the air,
Then ceased.

On whatever date imagined, or strictly as fiction, this whole bloodbath fixes the climax of one of seminal works of the western literary canon.

The excerpts quoted here are from the Internet Classics Archive; multiple versions of both The Odyssey and The Iliad are available on Gutenberg.org … they’ve even done The Odyssey as a TV miniseries.

* This site claims that there’s at least one alternate tradition in which the famously virtuous Penelope — wasn’t.

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1961: John A. Bennett, the last American military execution (so far)

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As of this date, it’s been 48 years since the United States military last carried out an execution — the Fort Leavenworth hanging* of John Arthur Bennett for rape.

An epileptic black soldier with a family history of mental illness, Bennett had enlisted to find a way up out of sharecropping. Instead, on Christmas Eve 1954, he drunkenly raped a 12-year-old girl near his base in Austria.

He spent six years awaiting execution — “six years,” observed the Los Angeles Times, “in which six other black soldiers were hanged while all four of the white men — many of them multiple murderers — were saved.”

Bennett dodged two execution dates, once receiving his stay during his last meal, but a seemingly compelling plea for clemency — the victim herself, and her parents, asked for mercy — availed Bennett nothing. His last frantic plea to the new president, John F. Kennedy, was dispatched with only hours yet to live.

I beg in the name of God … Will you please in the name of God and mercy spare my life?”

No dice. Kennedy was preoccupied.

Coincidentally, but poignantly for this case, the Kirk Douglas vehicle A Town Without Pity opened a month before Bennett’s execution. In that film (trailer here), four American servicemen face capital trial for the rape of a German girl — and Douglas, as their lawyer, struggles to talk pity into someone so he won’t be obliged to humiliate the victim in court in order to save his clients from the noose.

The victim’s father in that movie is so blinded by his lust for vengeance that he forces Douglas to destroy his own daughter: striking contrast with the real-life father of Bennett’s flesh-and-blood victim, who wrote in support of clemency for his daughter’s assailant, “I know how hard it is for the parents when their own child is so close to the verge of death.”

Bennett’s milestone, however, is hardly assured of lasting much beyond this 49th year.

In 2008, President George W. Bush affirmed the death sentence of condemned Army cook Ronald Gray, the first such action by any U.S. president since Bennett’s day. According to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Death Row USA most current as of this writing,** Gray is one of nine prisoners currently on the U.S. military’s death row.

* Curious to know about the procedure? The Library of Congress has that period’s Procedure for Military Executions — complete with exact diagrams — online in pdf form.

** Death Row USA, Summer 2008 (direct pdf link)

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1763: Ann Beddingfield and Richard Ringe, two sides of a triangle

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On this date in 1763, another century’s dumb criminals paid another century’s penalty for their timeless crime of lust.

Lovers have trod this path to Calvary since time immemorial, in every age and place.

In the present instance, 19-year-old Ringe had no sooner joined the Beddingfield house than “his mistress became so enamoured of him that her husband was the object of her contempt. Her behaviour to Ringe was such that he could not long doubt of her favourable inclinations; nor had he virtue to resist the temptation.”

So, naturally, “blinded by her passion,” the adulterous Beddingfield put the farmhand to work on a murder plot, without much bothering to conceal it from the other servants. A maid ratted them out … “but postponed the doing so till she had received the wages for her quarter’s service.”

Not every crime can have the stuff of immortality about it.

They were placed on one sledge on the morning of their execution, and conveyed to a place near Ipswich, called Rushmore, where Ringe made a pathetic address to the surrounding multitude, advising young people to be warned, by his fate, to avoid the delusions of wicked women, and to consider chastity as a virtue.

After the fervent exercise of devotion he was turned off, while the body of Mrs Beddingfield, who had been first strangled at a stake, was burning to ashes, agreeable to the practice respecting women who are convicted of the murder of their husbands.

Part of the Themed Set: Selections from the Newgate Calendar.

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