On this date in 1884, Joseph Sarver was hanged as a parricide at Indiana, Pennsylvania.

Sarver became enraged by his father’s affair with their housekeeper Mary Kelley, and shot the father dead in his doorway. (He also shot Mary Kelley; she survived.)

As if the parricide rap wasn’t enough to get the blood up, he “greatly intensified the popular feeling against him” by behaving after his arrest like an all-around jerk. Sarver reportedly fought with jailers over the timeliness of his breakfast, made merry in prison, and blithely boasted that “they could never hang him because he was a Democrat, and so was Governor Pattison.” (St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Nov. 14, 1883; Galveston Daily News, same date. It made the national crime blotter.)

He eventually made a full confession, and was said to have died firmly.

Executed on the same date in Cambria County, Penn., Michael Murray “dictated a letter, to be made public after his death, in which he charged that certain persons, possessing the powers of witchcraft, had exercised a spell over him, and while under its influence, he committed the deed.” The deed created by this sorcery was shooting a man on the Pittsburgh turnpike who called Murray a name.

On this day..

• 1959: John Day Jr., Korean War casualty
• 1948: Shafiq Ades
• 1730: Cathrine M'Canna, mother's daughter
• 1831: Slaves of Sussex County, for Nat Turner's rebellion
• 1675: Katharina Paldauff, the Flower Witch
• 1923: Jesus Saleta and Pascal Aguirre, Terrassa anarchists
• 1603: Marco Tulio Catizone, the false Dom Sebastian
• 782: 4,500 Saxons by order of Charlemagne
• 1921: Jake Martin and Putnam Ponsell
• 1947: Nikola Petkov, "a dog's death"
• 1864: Six of Mosby's Rangers
• 1994: Johannes van Damme, heroin smuggler