On this date in 1836, two different Englishwomen hanged in Gloucester and Liverpool for seeing off their respective husbands with arsenic.

They’re the subjects of an excellent pair of posts by Naomi Clifford, author of such topical-to-Executed Today fare as Women and the Gallows, 1797-1837 and The Murder of Mary Ashford: The Crime that Changed English Legal History, which concerns the long overdue abolition of juridical trial by combat in Great Britain … after an accused murderer used this artifact to escape prosecution in 1817.

Here’s Clifford on our poisoners, bound for separate gallows on April 9, 1836:

• Harriet Tarver (Gloucester)
• Betty Rowland (Liverpool)

Clifford makes a triptych here with a third post about yet another poisoner who shared the same fate five days later.

• Sophia Edney (Ilchester, Somerset)

On this day..

• 1892: Louis Anastay, "I wish to mount the scaffold"
• 1858: Alexander Anderson and Henry Richards
• Feast Day of St. Eupsychius, anti-Apostate
• 1859: John Stoefel, the first hanged in Denver
• 1980: Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, Muqtada al-Sadr's father-in-law
• 1812: Jose Antonio Aponte, Cuban revolutionary
• 1912: Tom Miles lynched
• 1945: Johann Georg Elser, dogged assassin
• 1868: The native prisoners of Emperor Tewodros II
• 1747: Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat
• 1740: Charles Drew, parricide
• 1975: Eight South Korean pro-democracy activists