Thief Elisabetha Gassner (English Wikipedia entry | German) was beheaded in Oberdischingen by executioner Xaver Vollmer on this date in 1788.

Gassner (English Wikipedia entry | German) was an industrious laborer who, born a vagrant and soon after losing her father, busted her hump into a home and a small farm of her own while maintaining a large family (seven kids by the time of her beheading, plus an invalid mother).

Nimble fingers made her this nest egg — fingers for knitting stockings, and, more and more, for picking pockets in Biderberg and Württemberg.

With a purported 300+ thefts attributed to her, she acquired outsized reputation as a thief transcendent enough to apotheosize her under the nickname Schwarze Lies (“Black Lisa”) alongside the legendary outlaws of the day.

Her ambition for a foothold in this precarious world made her as bold with the quality of her targets as their quantity: her arrest was for lifting a 1,700 guilder purse from Count Franz Ludwig Schenk von Castell, in the chapel of Ludwigsburg Palace.

On this day..

• 1860: George Waines, forensically boned
• 1714: Eleven at Tyburn, amid recidivism
• 1450: Jack Cade posthumously quartered
• 1950: The Chaplain-Medic Massacre
• 995: Tormod Kark
• 1517: Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci, plotter
• 1793: Joseph Chalier, Jacobin martyr
• 1936: Mary Frances Creighton and Everett Applegate
• 1937: Pavel Vasiliev, peasant poet
• 1676: Marie-Madeleine-Marguerite d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers
• 1546: Anne Askew, the only woman tortured in the Tower
• 1573: Wigbolt Ripperda, Haarlem city governor