Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders (20 page)

Berry, realising that whatever serious defect was causing this appalling problem could not be rectified with his victim standing there, removed the noose and the cap, Lee then being led into a nearby room. Watched by those on the scaffold, the hangman then proceeded to operate the drop again – to find that it worked perfectly. So Lee was brought back in and readied once more for his execution. Berry then pulled the lever so hard that he bent it

– to no avail, for once again, the drop didn’t.

An air of approaching panic now permeating the execution chamber, the chaplain escorted Lee back to the side room while the hangman and a carpenter got to work with planes and an axe, slicing pieces of wood from the sides of the doors until the gap between them and the surrounding boards was so wide that nothing could have caused them to jam. Some secondary catches were also removed with a crowbar, and then Lee was brought in again.

To all present – not only those in an official capacity on the scaffold but also the group of journalists and other witnesses who had been granted permission to watch through a window in the shed – it must have all seemed like some fearful nightmare, as if everyone, victim and onlookers, were trapped in a repetitive cycle of horror, and when Berry pulled the lever again, with totally negative results, the trauma proved too much for some, the chaplain being on the verge of collapse, some witnesses in tears.

At that point, the governor took the only humane action possible under the circumstances, authorising that the execution be halted and that the Home Secretary should be immediately notified.

Lee, still unruffled, was returned to his cell, so cool and collected in fact that, on hearing that Berry could not face eating the breakfast prepared for him, the now ex-condemned man volunteered to eat it instead, and sat down to a repast of chicken, potatoes, muffins and cake, together with a large pot of tea. Meanwhile at the Home Office, rapid decisions were made, and in consequence the Home Secretary ordered that Lee’s sentence should be commuted on humanitarian grounds to penal servitude for life: twenty years’ imprisonment.

He was released in 1907, at the age of forty-three, but after a few years in London he immigrated to America, unfortunately nothing more being heard of him, for it would have been interesting to learn whether he had any theories concerning his good fortune, any premonition, or did he simply accept that, being innocent, it was his rightful due?

Dr Thomas Neill Cream poisoned his mistress’ husband with strychnine and later murdered several prostitutes in the same manner. As these were the same class of victims who had been killed in London and ‘surgically’ mutilated only a few years earlier, great attention was paid when, on 15 November 1892, he was led on to the scaffold. There, hangman Billington hooded and noosed his victim, then stepped back and pulled the lever which operated the drop. Just as he did so he heard Cream say, ‘I am Jack the . . .’ He never finished the sentence but plummeted into the pit below as the rope tightened.

The executioner said afterwards, ‘If I had only known he was going to speak I would have waited for the end of the sentence; I am certain that Neill Cream and Jack the Ripper were one and the same man.’

Michael Magee

Michael Magee was sentenced to death in Australia for trying to deprive the township of its sheriff, and his execution provided entertainment for the large crowds which travelled eastwards from Adelaide to gather under the gum trees which lined the banks of the river Torrens.

To preserve his anonymity in case the would-be murderer had any vengefully minded confederates, the hangman wore a mask, and after he had considerately allowed his victim to apologise to the crowd for his sins, he noosed him, pulled the cap over his face, and then lashed the flanks of the steeds harnessed to the cart in which, in old English style, the felon stood. Unlike the English horses, however, these particular Australian animals were in no hurry to go anywhere; they ambled forward so leisurely that Magee slithered off a fraction at a time, the noose tightening equally slowly around his throat. Worse was to follow, the onlookers gasping in horror as the felon, the badly tied cords round his wrists coming undone in his struggles, managed to raise his hands and grasp the rope above him in attempt to take his weight off it. As if on a turnspit, he spun round and round, the efforts of his scrabbling fingers allowing him just sufficient breath to cry chokingly, ‘Oh, God! Oh, Christ, save me!’

His efforts to free himself came to a sudden end when the hangman, emulating his English counterparts, clutched his victim to him and raised his own feet off the boards, their combined weight on the rope bringing death to the felon – but not until thirteen minutes had elapsed.

John Paynes, guilty of murdering six people, was taken to Tyburn on 19 July 1694. Before he was hanged ‘he kickt the prison chaplain out of the cart and pulled his own shoes off, sayeing he’d contradict the old proverb and not die in them.’

Ewan MacDonald

It was recorded in the
Loval Historians’ Table Book
that Ewan MacDonald, a 19-year-old soldier in General Guise’s Regiment stationed at Newcastle on Tyne, was sentenced to death for murder, the execution to be carried out on 28 September 1752. On the scaffold he struggled frantically and even tried to throw the executioner off the ladder, but sheer weight of numbers triumphed and the condemned man was eventually suspended from the beam. Some little time later he was cut down, his body being taken to Surgeons’ Hall and placed on the slab ready to be dissected. However, the surgeons were suddenly called away to attend to an emergency in the local hospital, only to find, on their return, that the specimen they were looking forward to dissecting was in fact sitting upright on the slab, a dazed expression on his face! Realising his whereabouts – and his likely fate – he desperately started to beg for mercy, but as quoted in the
Table Book
, ‘a young surgeon, refusing to be disappointed of a dissection opportunity, seized a wooden mall [mallet] and struck him on the head, the blow proving too much for MacDonald, who finally expired this time. The identical mall is said to be often produced and shown to new surgeons, but whether as a curio or warning is not known.’

Found guilty of being involved in the shooting of Thomas Thynne with a blunderbuss in 1681, Christopher Vratz was sentenced to be hanged. On the scaffold he told a friend that, ‘he did not value dying all of a rush like this, and hoped and believed that God would deal with him like a gentleman.’

William Gordan

A laudable but failed attempt to cheat the gallows was undertaken, to employ a most appropriate word, by one William Gordan. The blunder however, was not committed by the hangman, but by a surgeon, Mr Chovet, who had the novel but mistaken notion that he could ensure Gordan’s continued existence after being hanged. Gordan already had a criminal record as a career highwayman, and had one time been charged with robbing the Fishmongers’ Company in London, but friends in Ireland conveniently provided him with an alibi for the date in question and so he was acquitted.

He may have been a successful highwayman, but he was riding for a fall when, while looking for likely victims on one of his favourite beats (the lonely road between Knightsbridge and Hyde Park Corner) he held up a lawyer, Mr Peters, who, on hearing the challenge, ‘Your money or your life!’ hesitated not, but decided that he preferred to go on living, albeit broke, and so obeyed Gordan, handing over not only his watch and ring, but also his hat and wig. Alas for the highwayman, he got drunk before disposing of the loot and, being arrested, any defence proved a waste of the court’s time. Consequently the judge appeared on the bench, wearing his black cap, and Gordan later appeared on the scaffold wearing his white one.

The felon was to be hanged at the Old Bailey on 7 April 1733, together with three other criminals and a woman, Elizabeth Arden, who had been found guilty of robbing her mother. Elizabeth, however, ‘pleaded her belly’ and, it being confirmed that she was indeed pregnant, was instead transported to the penal colonies for fourteen years.

Now Gordan, it appears, had hatched a cunning plan with Mr Chovet to cheat the rope. The surgeon had been experimenting on dogs and was confident that by making an incision in the lower part of Gordan’s throat, air would still reach his lungs even though the constriction of the noose immediately below his chin would prevent him breathing in via his nose and mouth. And it worked – well, sort of. Still alive three quarters of an hour later, and long after his gallows companions had ceased ‘dancing the Tyburn hornpipe’ he was cut down and carried to a nearby house. There Mr Chovet opened a vein or two and bled him; Gordan opened his mouth several times but only to emit groans – then died. Someone – possibly the good surgeon – declared that had he been cut down five minutes earlier, he might have recovered. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Whenever a convicted criminal was reprieved, Irish hangman Tom Galvin would complain long and bitterly about anyone ‘taking the bread out of the mouth of a poor old man.’ He was well known for his impatience on the scaffold, cursing the victim if he paused too long on the ladder to complete his final prayers.

‘Long life to you!’ Galvin would exclaim exasperatedly, ‘Make haste with your prayers – the people round the swing-swong is getting tired of waiting!’

Andrew Marshall

Some executioners failed to use the correct ‘left over right, right over left’ recipe when binding their victims’ wrists together with cords; others used straps but did not tighten them sufficiently. But one Scottish executioner went one worse by not securing the felon’s arms at all! When ex-soldier Andrew Marshall was found guilty on charges of robbery and murder and was given no alternative but to keep a certain appointment on the scaffold, he neglected to remind his dispatcher that he should have had his arms bound; instead, after the noose had been positioned round his neck, and before the rope started to tighten, he promptly reached up and took firm hold of the gallows’ beam with both hands.

At such an unexpected move on the part of the condemned man, the hangman took the action recommended in the unwritten rules of the
Executioners’ Manual
; he grabbed the man around the waist and clung to him. Tactics such as these were successful only when a felon was hanging by his neck, not when he was hanging on by his arms, so the hangman, no doubt thinking rapidly before the now-frenzied crowd rushed the scaffold, did what any self-respecting and resourceful executioner would be expected to do under those difficult circumstances; seizing a stick he proceeded to batter the victim’s hands with it so violently that eventually Marshall had to release his hold – and die.

Robber John Williams, found guilty of murdering a policeman in 1912 during an attempted break-in, was sentenced to death. His girlfriend, who had recently given birth to their child, visited him in the condemned cell, taking the baby with her. When saying goodbye, Williams put a piece of prison bread into the infant’s hand, curled its fingers around it, and commented, ‘There you are – now nobody can say that your father never gave you anything!’

James McDonnell and Charles Sharpe

After the Civil War in America, hundreds of immigrants from Poland, Ireland, Germany and Wales poured into the Pennsylvanian mining regions and not unnaturally, in view of the differences in the languages and cultures, kept their own community spirit alive by forming small social societies, their basic aim being Christian cooperation and friendship with all. As time went by, however, an Irish group, originally named the Buckshots, was taken over by criminals. Known as the Molly Maguires, these gangsters established similar ‘chapters’ in other towns, spreading a reign of terror throughout the territory. Blackmail, protection rackets, even murder, became the order of the day, until eventually the mine-owners employed James McParlan, an employee of Pinkerton’s, the world-famous detective agency, to infiltrate the gang’s inner council and obtain evidence which would stand up in a court of law. At the risk of his life, McParlan ingratiated himself with the criminals and became an accepted member.

Some little time afterwards, on 6 July 1875, a policeman was murdered by the gang, this being followed on 3 September by the killing of a mine-owner. The latter had been slain by Michael Boyle and Edward Kelly, their accomplice being James Kerrigan whose testimony, together with that obtained by the Pinkerton detective, resulted in others of the gang being rounded up. Charles Sharpe and James McDonnell were among those who were charged and found guilty of committing other murders across the region, including the murder of a coal operator, George K. Smith. The
New York World
regaled its readers with its version of the proceedings:

 ‘Charles Sharpe and James McDonnell slept well last night and Sharpe was enjoying the soundest kind of midnight nap when the turnkey went to McDonnell’s cell at that hour to rouse him for prayers, as he had requested. This morning however they failed to eat any breakfast, probably on account of the religious services in McDonnell’s cell. Sharpe’s wife, child, brother and a number of other relatives, and McDonnell’s three brothers were present.

A telegram from Pottsville worried those in charge of the execution. It announced that Mrs McDonnell and her children were on their way to say goodbye to their husband and father. After a consultation it was agreed that the meeting might unnerve McDonnell and it was thought best not to wait for the arrival of the family, whose train would not get in until after 10.30, the hour agreed on with the priests for the execution.

At 10.26, just when the crowd was beginning to show signs of impatience, the sheriff knocked at the doors of the men’s cells. Ten minutes later the men appeared and the procession marched the short distance to the scaffold. The doomed men walked erect, with a firm tread, and seemed to have no trouble in ascending the ten high steps to the scaffold. A short service was at once begun and in their responses the prisoners exhibited a firmness of tone that was lacking in the priests.