Tumgik
pilgrim1975 · 1 day
Text
Alphonse Brengard. Justice delayed, but not denied.
When New York cop-killer Alphonse Brengard walked his last mile at Sing Sing on September 6, 1934 it may have been with a firm sense of time and his crimes having finally caught up with him. Brengard died for a murder effectively committed years before, but he was not to wait in Sing Sing’s infamous ‘Death House’ for very long. After evading the law for several years after the shooting, Brengard…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 6 days
Text
John 'Babbacombe' Lee - The Man They Couldn’t Hang.
It is February 23, 1885 in the coach house of Exeter Prison, Devon, England. The time is 8 a.m. Outside the prison, a large crowd has gathered to await the hanging of convicted murderer John Lee, condemned for the brutal murder of his employer, Miss Emma Keyes, the previous year. When the execution has been successfully completed the prison bell will toll for 15 minutes and the dreaded black…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 10 days
Text
Jean Lee, Australia’s last woman to hang.
The name of Jean Lee or (to use her real name) Marjorie Jean Maude Wright, is largely forgotten today, as are hey numerous aliases. Depending on who Wright talked to she was Marjorie Jean Brees, Mrs H. Pearce, Jean Deacon, Jean White, Marie Williams, Marjorie Lee, Jean Duncan, Jean Brown, Jean Smith, Mesha Vetos or ‘Skinny Jean,’ but ‘Jean Lee’ was the alias she was most known for. Outside of…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 22 days
Text
Juliet-Stuart Poyntz. Free will? Abduction? Or murder?
When a private citizen suddenly disappears it could be for a number of reasons. Debts, trauma, fear or perhaps a simple desire to start over. If they can’t become somebody else, they can at least be somewhere else. Of course, there could be other reason. Perhaps they didn’t vanish by their own choosing, but somebody else’s. The still-unsolved vanishing of American Juliet-Stuart Poyntz is a…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 29 days
Text
Rudolph Wright, last to die in California for a crime other than murder.
It was January 11, 1962 on San Quentin Prison’s notorious ‘Condemned Row’ on the top floor of North Block. Caryl Chessman, California’s notorious ‘Red Light Bandit,’ was long gone. Executed on May 2, 1960, he was a mere memory. An enduring memory, granted, but dead and gone all the same. Merle Haggard, in for robbery on a three-to-fifteen-year sentence, was paroled just over two years previously.…
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 1 month
Text
The non-capital execution of James Coburn. No, not that one.
Executing Americans for crimes other than murder was once standard practice. Robbery, armed robbery, house-breaking, burglary and rape could all earn a death sentence in a number of States. Under Federal law, bank robbery was once a capital crime even without a shot being fired. The death penalty for rape, particularly in the South, was undoubtedly used along racial lines with far more…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 1 month
Text
Reginald Woolmington, saved from the rope by a ‘Golden Thread.’
When farm labourer and killer Reginald Woolmington entered the dock at Taunton Assizes it was with a heavy heart. The shotgun killing of his estranged wife Violet at her mother’s home on December 10, 1934 looked like an open and shut case. She had left him because of his possessive, controlling and abusive treatment of her. He had stolen a shotgun from his employer, that much had been proved. So…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
Auguste Neel, the only man to be guillotined in North America.
Truly one of a kind, murderer Auguste Neel occupies a singular place in criminal history. The islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, though sited close to the Canadian territory of Newfoundland, remain a French colony to this day. While Canada hanged its civilian criminals and shot its soldiers for capital crimes, France used its dreaded guillotine even if it had to import one for the occasion. For…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
1 note · View note
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
Isidore Hespel, the Jackal finally tamed.
Executioners are, by nature, a divisive group of people. Some people admire what they do and see a useful social purpose in their doing it. Others look down on people prepared to kill in cold blood, seeing them as Society’s assassins or the ultimate expression of tyranny, the State presuming the right to kill its own citizens. In their own way they are perhaps as divisive as the penalty they…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
Peter Seiler and George Ricci, laughter in the Death House.
It is the evening of December 15, 1927. At Sing Sing Prison the convicts are putting on their regular Christmas show, a light musical comedy called ‘A Sweet Little Devil.’ Some 600 of New York State’s toughest convicts are enjoying the show, one of several reforms instituted by famed Warden Lewis E. Lawes. Probably America’s most famous and divisive prison official, Lawes sees it as his job to…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
Sir Claude Champion de Crespigny. Baronet, Knight of the Realm and hangman.
English history is not short of noblemen who met their end at the hands of the public executioner. Minor nobles like Lord Lovat and Earl Ferrers. Queens Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. Even one King, Charles I, kept his date with the axe. Far rarer are noblemen who mounted the scaffold and left it alive and rarer still are ones who did the work of the public executioner. A rather dubious…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
Gordon Cummins, the ‘Blackout Ripper,’ hanged during an air raid.
It is 8am on June 25, 1942. At airfields across wartime England, RAF Bomber Command are preparing the first thousand-bomber raid. That night large parts of Bremen will be destroyed and dozens of bombers will fail to return. In the House of Commons, Members of Parliament will shortly start the day’s work, debating and voting as they normally do. Just across the River Thames at Wandsworth Prison,…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 2 months
Text
James Wells, in the most cruel and unusual manner.
Whether known as Old Sparky, Old Smokey, Sizzlin’ Sally or Gruesome Gertie, the electric chair has always had a dark and troubled history. From its very first use (executing murderer William Kemmler on August 6, 1890) it has been dogged by failures both mechanical and human. Now largely consigned to museums and history, it was once seen as a wonder of a more modern and enlightened time. It did…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 3 months
Text
John Wesley Hardin – Gunslinger
Texas. The Lone Star State. A state famous and notorious in equal measure for its outlaws. Bonnie and Clyde, Ray and Floyd Hamilton, ‘Tex’ Lucas and the notorious “Cowboy” gang that moved into Arizona and ruled Tombstone until the famed gunfight at the OK Corral all spring to mind. But before all of them there came an outlaw as feared, yet also as celebrated, as Texas has ever known and his name…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
1 note · View note
pilgrim1975 · 1 year
Text
July 2, 1962 – Crash-out on Condemned Row (Almost).
July 2, 1962 was supposed to be a quiet day on San Quentin’s Condemned Row. Securely lodged on the top floor of North Block, California’s condemned were expecting a summer’s day as bleak, depressing and dull as any other. So were the Condemned Row officers whose job it was to keep them under control. With a few dishonourable exceptions, they were wrong. Almost a month had passed since multiple…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
7 notes · View notes
pilgrim1975 · 1 year
Text
Major Raymond Lisenba, A.K.A. “Rattlesnake James.”
May 1, 1942, marked the end of an era in Californian crime. The execution of Major Raymond Lisenba was also the end of California’s gallows. Unused since 1938, the gallows had needed renovation before James’ execution. After four years using only the gas chamber, San Quentin’s former hangman had to remember how to prepare it. San Quentin Warden Clinton Duffy had been worried that the hanging…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes
pilgrim1975 · 1 year
Text
February 9, 1934 - Ten men, four states, nine electrocutions and a hanging.
It’s a sad and well-documented fact that America’s death penalty has often been applied as much over race and poverty as guilt or innocence. All too often those without the capital, be it social or financial, get the punishment. Seldom has that been more obvious than on February 9, 1934. The mid-1930’s were halcyon days for America’s executioners. In most states that had capital punishment (which…
Tumblr media
View On WordPress
0 notes