Bavarian bandit Mathias Kneissl was beheaded by the fallbeil guillotine in an Augsburg prison on the morning of February 21, 1903.
Kneißl/Kneissl got a juvenile start on his delinquency — the family trade, one might say; his parents were part-time thieves and fences and an uncle was a famous robber of the Munich-Augsburg roads named Johann Pascolini. He caught his first serious jail time at the tender age of 18 in an affair when his brother Alois shot dead a police officer who had come to investigate them for poaching.
Alois died of tuberculosis in prison but Kneissl emerged from his cell in 1899 — 24 years old and penniless. He soon returned to his vomit, mounting a bicycle-borne crime spree around Bavaria’s Dachau district.
Quaint though it might read in retrospect, a mobile gunslinging cyclist could be a hell of a menace in a world without cars or telephones. Kneissl proved it over the span of about a year and a half before his March 1901 arrest, raiding farms and passersby trying to accumulate a stake sufficient to vanish with his sweetheart to America.
Instead that sweetheart betrayed his hideout to authorities, who require an hourslong siege to capture the wanted outlaw. Two Altomünster gendarmes whom he had killed in a shootout supplied the requisite capital charge, notwithstanding the popular “social bandit” glow he had gained from his many months on the lam. (Folk songs celebrating him are still in circulation to this day; there have also been 1970 and 2008 cinematic treatments of this criminal legend.)
On this day..
- 1595: Robert Southwell
- 1896: Ivan Kovalev, Russian meddler
- 1944: Missak Manouchian and 21 French Resistance members, l'Affiche Rouge
- 1719: Patrick Carraghar and Two Arthur Quinns
- 1815: Six militiamen, Andrew Jackson's electoral dirty laundry
- 1862: Nathaniel Gordon, slave trader
- 1946: Cristino Garcia, Spanish Republican and French Resistance hero
- 1934: Augusto Cesar Sandino, national hero
- 1930: Eva Dugan, her head jerked clean off
- 1951: Charlie Gifford, politician-killer
- 1942: Mykhailo and Olena Teliha, Ukrainian artists
- 1803: Edward Marcus Despard, a patriot without a nation
His infant grandson,