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Articles Posted by CheshireTheCat

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  • 1828: William Dyon and John Dyon, all in the family

    04/02/2024 11:33:16 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 2 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | April 2, 2017 | Meaghan Good
    On this date in 1828, William Dyon, 45, and his son, John, 23, were hanged for the murder of William’s brother, who was also named John. The brothers had fallen out over their father’s inheritance; William Dyon Sr. had favored John’s family over William Jr.’s. Writing dramatically of the case in his book Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths in Doncaster, Stephen Wade described the brothers as sons of a Lincolnshire farmer, and the two boys were so different that this tale almost attains a biblical resonance, with jealousy, brooding and resentment, and finally a deathly hatred that led one brother...
  • 1307: Murcod Ballagh, beheaded

    04/01/2024 12:29:43 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 4 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | April 1, 2015 | Headsman
    “In the yeare 1307 the first of Aprill,” Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland records, “Murcod Ballagh was beheaded neere to Merton by sir David Caunton knight.” First published in 1577, this document — heavily mined by Shakespeare for his histories — is silent as to the further particulars of the beheading. But the accompanying image depicting the execution surprisingly presents a guillotine-like device being employed for the task. s John Wilson Croker’s History of the Guillotine observes, this one illustration 270 years after the fact scarcely suffices to establish that a guillotine precursor really was in use in...
  • 2007: Six Bangladesh bombers

    03/30/2024 6:57:28 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 1 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 30, 2019 | Headsman
    Bangladesh on this date in 2007 hanged six Islamic militants* for a terrorist bombing wave two years prior. Several were agents of the terrorist organization Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen Bangladesh, notable for a headline-grabbing coordinated bombing on August 17, 2005 that saw hundreds of explosions throughout Bangladesh. That organization’s chief Shaykh Abdur Rahman was among those executed on March 30, 2007, as was “Bangla Bhai” (Siddique ul-Islam), the leader of the Al Qaeda-aligned Jagrata Muslim Janata Bangladesh (JMJB).
  • 1572: Annecke Lange, Gesche Herbst, and Annecke Rotschroeder

    03/28/2024 11:05:41 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 3 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 28, 2020 | Headsman
    On this date in 1572, Annecke Lange, Gesche Herbst, and Annecke Rotschroeder were all condemned and burned at Neustadt am Rübenberge, as witches and poisoners. Although commoners, they were the luckless casualties of misbegotten marital politics in the Holy Roman Empire, and in the words of Tara Nummedal in Anna Zieglerin and the Lion’s Blood: Alchemy and End Times in Reformation Germany, “the entire incident laid bare simultaneously the fear of poison and sorcery and the reluctance to advance witch accusations against women of elite status in the princely courts of central Europe.” The particular princely court of interest for...
  • 2009: Two thieves in Riyadh

    03/27/2024 5:55:21 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 2 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 27, 2010 | Headsman
    Two men were beheaded in Riyadh on this date in 2009 for bizarrely causing a man’s death in an unarmed purse-snatching. An Interior Ministry statement says Faisal bin Fahd and Bandar bin Abdullah first stole the Chinese man’s laptop bag while he was walking. When the man tried to catch up with them, he fell and died after hitting his head on the pavement.
  • 1915: 22 Singapore mutineers

    03/26/2024 2:56:21 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 9 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 25, 2012 | Headsman
    On this date in 1915, “the sentences of the court-martial on a batch of 45 mutineers of the 5th Light Infantry were promulgated in public” — as the Straits Times reported — “and, in the case of 22 who were condemned to death, the sentences were executed on the spot.” A crowd of fifteen thousand watched the spirited Indian sepoys shot dead for revolting the previous month. This demoralized 800-strong garrison of Punjabi Muslims — who had, it need hardly be added, a noble history of insurrection to think upon — was already deployed far from home to look after...
  • 1944: Ardeatine Massacre

    03/24/2024 3:41:22 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 5 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 24, 2008 | Headsman
    On this date in 1944, Nazi troops occupying Italy avenged a partisan attack by executing 335 Italian hostages in the Ardeatine caves outside Rome. It was six months since Germany had invaded her onetime ally, eliminating those fascists who had deposed Mussolini. Now an occupied country — an increasingly tenuous occupation as the Allied war effort bore down on Germany — Italy’s partisans multiplied. On March 23, some of them bombed a German army column, killing 33. The Germans ordered an immediate reprisal, although there were administrative debates over how many hostages to shoot for each casualty. Hitler initially ordered...
  • 1540: Hans Kohlhase, horse wild

    03/22/2024 3:29:24 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 22, 2019 | Headsman
    On this date in 1540, the legendary outlaw Hans Kohlhase — a crime victim turned revengeful crime lord — executed* in Berlin. It’s a classic case of stubborn cusses escalating a minor property dispute. En route to the Leipzig fair in 1532, Kohlhase (English Wikipedia entry | German) was stopped by a Saxon nobleman who confiscated some of his horses. In dueling publications years later, Kohlhase would charge that Guenther von Zaschwitz accused him of stealing the horses; von Zaschwitz countered that Kohlhase looked suspicious and got uppity with his retainers when questioned. Proceeding to Leipzig in a huff, Kohlhase...
  • 1963: Frederick Charles Wood, “Let me burn”

    03/21/2024 2:15:19 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 6 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 21, 2014 | Meaghan Good
    On this date in 1963, hardened killer Frederick Charles Wood, 51, became the next-to-last prisoner to be executed at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Although he came from a respectable, law-abiding family, Wood had a terrible temper and was very experienced at homicide. The man’s murderous career makes him the perfect poster child for the death penalty. He committed his first murder while he was in his mid-teens, poisoning a girlfriend. He was out in only a few years, however, and fell back into crime: in 1933, he committed another horrific slaying. This time his victim, also female, was...
  • 2020: The Nirbhaya Gang Rapists

    03/20/2024 10:14:56 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 2 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 20, 2020 | Headsman
    Akshay Thakur, 31, Pawan Gupta, 25, Vinay Sharma, 26, and Mukesh Singh, 32, were hanged at Delhi’s Tihar Jail today — four of the six* widely hated perpetrators of in infamous 2012 gang rape. On December 16, 2012, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student and call center worker named Jyoti Singh was returning from the cinema with a male friend on a private bus in a South Delhi neighborhood when the five other passengers plus the driver sealed the doors and assaulted them. After the man was knocked out with an iron rod, the five passengers turned on Singh and horrifically gang-raped...
  • 1945: Friedrich Fromm, Claus von Stauffenberg’s executioner

    03/19/2024 9:21:47 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 10 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 19, 2010 | Headsman
    On this date* in 1945, Friedrich Fromm found out that you have to pick a side. The cunning career army officer had been serving as the head of the Replacement Army. This position provided access to the Fuhrer for Fromm — and for his chief of staff, Col. Claus von Stauffenberg. And it gave his office the authority to issue the “Valkyrie” orders for quelling civil unrest that Stauffenberg’s circle would use to attempt to seize Berlin. Fromm realized that his underling was involved in a plot against the Nazi dictator, but neither joined it nor smashed it. This play-it-safe...
  • 1871: Generals Lecomte and Thomas, at the birth of the Paris Commune

    03/18/2024 12:41:27 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 4 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 18, 2020 | Headsman
    On this date in 1871, the Paris Commune was born, with the execution of Generals Lecomte and Thomas. Paris had come to the brink of revolution by dint of the country’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. After a monthslong Prussian siege of the capital, Paris had become thoroughly radicalized and stood at tense loggerheads with the newly elected conservative national government of Adolphe Thiers. A militant National Guard swelled by the city’s large proletariat had defended Paris during its late privations, only to see a government of national humiliation accept punishing peace terms from Bismarck and submit to a...
  • 1834: Fusilamientos de Heredia

    03/17/2024 8:52:16 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 2 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 17, 2010 | Headsman
    On this date in 1834, one day after overrunning the Alava village of Gamarra, Carlist General Tomás de Zumalacárregui had 118 of its defenders shot. Zumalacárregui was the outstanding Carlist (read: conservative, absolute-monarchist) officer of the day. (Here‘s a public-domain memoir of his campaigns.) We meet him on the march in 1834, adroitly reversing the grim royalist position in the First Carlist War — a liberal-vs.-conservative civil war that also mapped onto ethnicity, geography, and royal succession. On this occasion, he overwhelmed a contingent of liberals and Basques fighting for the child-queen Isabella II. The survivors were taken prisoner and...
  • 2005: Mohammed Bijeh, the desert vampire

    03/16/2024 1:34:11 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 7 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 16, 2008 | Headsman
    On this date in 2005, Iran “desert vampire” was flogged to the point of collapse and hanged before a bloodthirsty throng in Pakdasht. Bijeh confessed to raping and murdering 16 boys age 8 to 15 over a yearlong spree. His modus operandi? Lure them into the desert on the pretext of hunting animals. Unsurprisingly a figure of intense public hatred, Bijeh stolidly endured his own death before a jeering mob. Riot police held back the angry crowd, but at one point a brother of one of the victims managed to break through and stab Bijeh in the back.....
  • 1718: Stepan Glebov, lover of the tsarina

    03/15/2024 2:12:58 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 4 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 15, 2017 | Headsman
    On this date in 1718,* the vengeful tsar Peter the Great staged a horrible execution on Moscow’s Red Square. Stepan Glebov was the collateral damage of Peter’s ferocious conflict with his ill-favored crown prince Tsarevich Alexei — the whelp who had only recently been repatriated to his glowering father after fleeing Russia altogether, to cap a lifetime of letting dad down. Alexei was back in Peter’s clutches, and a few months from the events in this post would be shockingly knouted to death at Peter’s orders. This Freudian clash also mapped sharply onto Russia’s political schisms (and many of the...
  • 1908: Massillon Coicou and the Firminists

    03/13/2024 9:04:28 PM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 1 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 14, 2014 | Headsman
    On this date in 1908, the octogenarian Haitian president Pierre Nord Alexis had a number of political opponents arrested and, that very night, summarily executed. Nord Alexis, a career officer risen to the post of Minister of War in a provisional 1902 government* when the previous president Tiresias Simon Sam* resigned to avert a constitutional crisis. That was a strange affair: a misreading of the constitution had Sam set to rule until 1903, until someone caught the mistake. Sam’s diligently on-time resignation proved not the Rule of Law victory he might have hoped when the resulting power vacuum brought civil...
  • 222: Elagabalus

    03/11/2024 10:05:09 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 7 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 11, 2018 | Headsman
    March 11, 222 marked the downfall of the Roman emperor Elagabalus (or Heliogabalus, in the Greek rendering).* Notorious to posterity for lapping the field in outrageous sensuality, he was the 14-year-old cousin of the deposed brute Caracalla and stepped into the purple because his crafty grandma won the civil war that ensued Caracalla’s assassination. By family heredity he was by that time already the high priest of the Syrian sun-god Elagabalus,** in the city of Emesa (present-day Homs, Syria). History has flattered the youth with the name of his novel god, although in life the former was simply Marcus Aurelius...
  • 1777: James Aitken, aka John the Painter, terrorist of the American Revolution

    03/10/2024 10:00:33 AM PDT · by CheshireTheCat · 4 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 10, 2013 | Headsman
    This date in 1777 saw the public execution of “John the Painter” — a Scotsman who had been christened “James Aitken” at his birth less than 25 years before, but who had run through countless aliases in his adult life as a (mostly) petty thief. But this man was not a hapless victim of England’s Bloody Code, although he often enough offended the capital statutes against petty property crime. Rather, the scraggly redhead with the thick Scottish brogue was the author of a stunning act of domestic terrorism, in England, in freelance support of the rebellious American colonies an ocean...
  • 1009: St. Bruno of Querfurt

    03/09/2024 4:09:29 PM PST · by CheshireTheCat · 1 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 9, 2009 | Headsman
    We have the rare privilege this date* to salute 1,000 years since the martyrdom of St. Bruno of Querfurt. St. Bruno — also Brun or Boniface — had his head chopped off, and 18 companions were allegedly simultaneously hung or hacked to pieces, by a chieftain who did not appreciate the bishop’s efforts to Christianize the Baltics. The wherefores, and even the wheres (different sources locate it in Prussia, Rus’, or Lithuania) of this missionary’s end are permanently obscure to us. But this relatively forgotten saint has something to tell us about the fluid area of contact between the Latin...
  • 1782: The Gnadenhutten Massacre

    03/08/2024 8:06:18 AM PST · by CheshireTheCat · 9 replies
    ExecutedToday.com ^ | March 8, 2014 | Headsman
    This date in 1782 marks one of the more appalling single atrocities in the United States’s long destruction of indigenous Native Americans — the Gnadenhutten Massacre. This incident during the American Revolution took place in the Ohio River basin, a vast and fertile flashpoint whose part in not only the revolution but the antecedent French and Indian War perhaps entitles it to claim the midwifery of the coming American empire. After victory in the French and Indian War, the British closed the area west of the Appalachian mountains to European settlement. This proclamation: Made good a wartime pact Britain had...