Given that the great city of Buffalo, New York has raised its hangmen all the way to the White House, it might come as a surprise that the Queen City has hosted only a single public hanging day.
This is the anniversary of that day, which saw droogish brothers Isaac, Israel, and Nelson Thayer turned off from the same gallows for the murder of John Love — the Thayers’ former boarder, turned considerable creditor, turned potential forecloser.
The very enjoyable blog Murder by Gaslight, whose beat is America’s 19th century crime scene, has the story of the Thayer brothers fully narrated — along with a separate post featuring a very ungainly murder ballad.
Then the judge pronounced thare dredful sentence
Whith grate candidness to behold
You must all be hanged untell your ded
And lord mursey on your souls
Well, we can’t all be Oscar Wilde.
On this day..
- 1751: Thomas Quin, Joseph Dowdell, Thomas Talbot, and five others at Tyburn
- 1771: Daskalogiannis
- 1581: Christman Genipperteinga
- 2008: Tsutomu Miyazaki, the Nerd Cult Killer
- 2015: Dok Macuei Marer, South Sudan assassin
- 1660: Jan Quisthout van der Linde condemned to drown in New Amsterdam
- 1800: Suleiman al-Halabi, assassin of General Kleber
- 1930: 13 Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang cadres, for the Yen Bai mutiny
- 1842: Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly, Great Game diplomats
- 1939: Eugen Weidmann, the last public beheading in France
- 1795: The last Montagnards
- 1747: Mary Allen and Henry Simms, Gallows Lovers