Privates Eliga Brinson (of Tallahassee, Florida) and Willie Smith (of Birmingham, Alabama) were hanged on this date in 1944 at Shepton Mallet prison.
The two U.S. servicemen had ambushed and raped 16-year-old Dorothy Holmes in Gloucestershire that April. Tried and sentenced by the U.S. military, their hangings occurred over 100 years after Great Britain abolished the death penalty for rape.
On this day..
- 979: Gero, Count of Alsleben
- 1264: Not Inetta de Balsham, gallows survivor
- 1853: Hans McFarlane and Helen Blackwood, married on the scaffold
- 1869: Charles Orme, rambler
- 1849: Konrad Heilig and Gustav Tiedemann, Baden revolutionaries
- 1838: The slave Mary, the youngest executed by Missouri
- 1703: Tom Cook, Ordinary's pet
- 1908: Khudiram Bose, teenage martyr
- 1828: William Corder, for the Red Barn Murder
- 1916: Private Billy Nelson
- 1997: Zoleykhah Kadkhoda survives stoning
- 1978: Antonina Makarova, Nazi executioner