On this date in 1965, Andrew Pixley was gassed in Wyoming for butchering the two young daughters of a vacationing Illinois judge.

A 21-year-old high school dropout with a few petty thefts to his name, Pixley on the night of August 5-6, 1964 broke into the Jackson hotel room occupied by 12-year-old Debbie McAuliffe, her 8-year-old sister Cindy, and 6-year-old Susan.

Their parents were relaxing in the hotel lounge at the time, but would return to a nightmare scene: Debbie dead in her bed, beaten to death with a rock; Cindy, strangled; and this slight stranger drunk or insensible lying on the floor of their room covered in their daughters’ gore. Both girls also appeared to have been sexually assaulted. (Somehow, the youngest daughter was not attacked.)

Judge Robert McAuliffe seized the stranger, while police — and soon behind them, an angry mob calling for Judge Lynch — followed his wife’s screams to the scene.

“It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen,” Teton County attorney Floyd King later said. Pixley claimed that the night’s events were a blank in his mind.

Remembered for this one night of madness as one of Wyoming’s most brutal criminals, Andrew Pixley reputedly still haunts Wyoming’s Old Frontier Prison, and gives tour guides at facility (it’s a museum now) the heebie-jeebies.

On this day..

• 1940: Carl Heinrich Meier and Jose Waldberg, the first hanged under the Treachery Act
• 304: Saint Eulalia
• 1591: Edmund Geninges
• 1916: Eric Poole, the first British officer shot at dawn during World War I
• 1919: Not Joseph Cohen
• 1875: William Wilson, taking the priest with him
• 1900: John Filip Nordlund, Mälarmördaren
• 1852: Jose Forni, the first legal hanging in California
• 1718: Stede Bonnet, gentleman pirate
• 1541: Thomas Culpeper and Francis Dereham, the Queen's lovers
• 1796: Jose Leonardo Chirino, Venezuelan slave revolt leader
• 1937: Teido Kunizaki