5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback (15 page)

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Ten Famous Executioners

1

The chief executioners of Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire excelled in diverse methods of dispatching their victims, including drowning by slow degrees and forcing the victim to imbibe ground glass.

The most active of them all, Souflikar, the executioner during the reign of Mahomet IV, preferred simple strangulation. He personally throttled about five thousand people over a period of five years.

2

The Duke of Alva, the chief executioner to King Philip of Spain, was hired for his efficiency in wiping out heretics during the Holy Inquisition. His chosen method of execution was to seal the victim’s mouth with an iron gag that allowed only the tongue to protrude, then to brand the tongue with a hot iron so it became swollen and could not be withdrawn. The victim was eventually burned alive. At Antwerp, the duke executed eight thousand people in one session. King Philip passed the most ambitious death sentence of all time in 1568 when he declared that the entire population of the Netherlands—approximately 3 million people, was heretical and therefore should be executed. It was a tough nut to crack even for the Duke of Alva, although he did manage to kill 800 people during Holy Week.

3

Richard Brandon, son of the chief executioner Gregory Brandon, was destined to become England’s most famous executioner. Known in the trade as “young Gregory,” the boy put in hours of practice on his ax technique by decapitating cats and dogs and boasted that he never needed more than one blow of the ax to remove a
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victim’s head. The climax of his distinguished career was the removal of King Charles I’s head on January 30, 1649, although on that day Brandon was a reluctant executioner—he and his assistant insisted on wearing masks and false beards to avoid any possible repercussions.

4

The innovative nineteenth-century English executioner William Marwood invented the “modern” method of hanging. Until Marwood’s day, hanging usually involved a very short drop and slow strangulation at the end of a rope; the executioner often had to weight the victim by wrapping himself around his legs. Recoveries from hangings were commonplace. In 1871, Marwood perfected the long drop, a system that caused the victim to fall from six to ten feet through a trapdoor. The drop fractured the neck’s vertebrae, severing the spinal cord and medulla and so causing instant death and reducing the suffering of those hanged. Marwood didn’t always get it right; the long drop often resulted in accidental decapitation.

5

London’s eighteenth-century chief executioner, John Thrift, was considered the most incompetent man ever to have held that position. Thrift, a convicted murderer who was set free on condition that he did the government’s dirty work as an axman, was unsuited to the job: He was highly strung, unsure with the ax, and liable to burst into tears at inappropriate moments. His biggest problem was that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. When he was called upon to execute the Jacobite rebel Lord Balmerino
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at the Tower of London in 1745, he fainted, then lay on the ground sobbing while onlookers tried to persuade him to get on with it. When Thrift finally picked up his ax he took five blows to sever Balmerino’s head. Thrift never quite got the hang of it, yet he somehow managed to blunder and hack his way through a seventeen-year career. He was hated by the public for his clumsiness, and when he died in 1752 a mob pelted his coffin and his pallbearers with stones and dead cats.

6

The best-known executioner of the French Revolution was Charles Henri-Sanson, the most competent member of an extraordinary family that served the nation with six generations of public executioners from 1635 to 1889.

Sanson became so adept at his job, thanks to endless practice on the necks of French aristocrats, that he was able to dispatch twelve victims in thirteen minutes. At the height of the Reign of Terror he removed the heads of three hundred men and women in three days. His guillotine in the Place de la Revolution was so busy that residents in a nearby street complained that the stench of blood from the stones was a health hazard and lowered the value of their houses. On October 16, 1793, 200,000

people turned out to watch Marie Antoinette lose her head. They were all kept waiting while Henri-Sanson untied her hands so she could empty her bowels in a corner behind a wall before her head was cut off.

7

Italy’s most celebrated executioner, Mastro Titta, plied his trade on behalf of the pope, carrying out 516 public executions from 1796 to 1864. Known for his casual
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scaffold manner, Titta would occasionally offer the condemned person a pinch of snuff just before removing his or her head. His work clothes, still stained with the blood of his last job (carried out when he was eighty-five), are on display at the Rome Museum of Criminology.

8

Australian hangmen bore the official title Executioner and Flagellator, as they were also required to carry out whippings. Elijah Upjohn, who hanged Ned Kelly, was the country’s most famous. Like most Australian hangmen, Upjohn was also a convicted felon, originally arrested for drunkenness, indecent exposure, defecating in a main street, and unnatural practices with a chicken.

Fortunately for Kelly, his hanging was one of the few that Upjohn got right; he was usually drunk. It was still a very unpopular execution, and afterward Upjohn, harassed by the public, lost his nerve and was fired by the government.

9

Grover Cleveland, the only American president to serve two nonconsecutive terms, personally carried out the execution of two criminals. As sheriff in Buffalo, New York, in 1872 he hanged twenty-eight-year-old Patrick Morrissey, who had been convicted of stabbing his mother to death while drunk. Six months later he hanged twenty-nine-year-old murderer Jack Gaffney.

When Cleveland ran for the presidency in 1884 his rivals called him the “Buffalo Hangman,” but it didn’t harm his candidacy.

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10

Edwin T. Davis was the world’s first official state electrocutioner. An electrician by trade, Davis supplemented his income by sending 240 people to their deaths from 1890 to 1914, serving the states of New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, traveling from prison to prison in his trademark black felt hat. He was the designer of the original electric chair, helped make many refinements to the system during his career, and held patents on some of the equipment. Before every execution he tested the apparatus on chunks of beef, attaching sponge pads to the meat, inserting the wires, and switching on the current—as soon as the beef began to cook, he knew the chair was in full working order.

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Ten 10

Capital Oddities

1

America executed its last witch in 1692. Poland was still executing witches over a hundred years later, in 1793.

2

The rules for extracting confessions during the Holy Inquisition were spelled out in
The Book of Death
, which was on display in the Casa Santa in Rome until the nineteenth century. There is no record of a single Holy Inquisition acquittal. The accused were rarely told, nor were they ever allowed to ask, what they had been charged with, and they were not permitted a defense counsel or allowed to call witnesses.

3

The authorized method of execution during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius was strangulation. Law forbid the strangling of virgins, but the resourceful Tiberius found a loophole: He ordered that virgins should first be defiled by the executioner.

4

In 2005, a neurologist, Dr. Harold Hillman, published his research into the pain caused by various methods of capital punishment. Dr. Hillman described the executioner’s technique and the effects upon the victim, tabulating the symptoms of pain showed by them. He concluded that death by stoning is the slowest and therefore probably the most painful way to die.

5

In the Indian state of Baroda in the nineteenth century, the maharajah executed criminals by having elephants step on their heads.

6

On October 9, 1789, during a meeting of the French Legislative Assembly, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, a former
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professor of anatomy in the medical faculty of Paris University, proposed that the death penalty should be the same for all social classes and that in all cases some sort of beheading machine should be used. Dr. Guillotin made no further contribution to the development that bore his name. The guillotine in its finished form was the invention of Dr. Antoine Louis, the secretary of the academy of surgery in France. Initially the device was to be called the “louison” or the “louisette” after Dr. Louis, but the name never quite stuck. Nor was the guillotine entirely original; a large wooden structure known as the Halifax Gibbet had been removing heads in England, most Saturday afternoons, since the thirteenth century. It was only one of a hundred similar devices.

7

Two men have survived three hangings apiece. The murderer Joseph Samuels was reprieved in 1803 after the rope broke twice on the first and second attempts and the trapdoor failed to open on the third. A trapdoor mechanism also saved the life of convicted murderer John Lee in 1884. Even though it worked every time it was tested, it failed to open three times in the space of seven minutes. Lee was let off with life imprisonment.

8

Germany retained decapitation by ax as a method of state execution until 1938. Two of the last famous executions by ax were those of Baroness Benita von Falkenhayn and Renate von Natzner, who were accused of spying and lost their heads at the Berlin Plötzensee Prison on February 18, 1935.

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9

The electric chair was first used as the “modern” and

“humane” alternative to hanging after a forty-year-old murderess, Roxalana Druse, took fifteen minutes to strangle to death in 1887. Three years later, William Kemmler, convicted of the murder of his lover Tillie Ziegler, became the first man to die by the new method.

After eight minutes, Kemmler started smoking and a second burst of power was required to finish him off.

The
New York Times
reported, “Kemmler was literally roasted to death.” The electric chair is still unpredictable.

During the execution of Pedro Medina in Florida’s “Old Sparky” on March 27, 1997, witnesses saw a foot-long blue-and-orange flame shoot from Medina’s head.

10

Thomas Edison, inventor of the lightbulb and the phonograph, pioneered his own version of the electric chair. In 1890, desperate to convince people that the alternating current advocated by his rival George Westinghouse was “unsafe,” Edison toured America using AC power to electrocute cats, dogs, horses, and elephants, a process Edison called “Westinghousing.”

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Ten

10

Most Dubious Legal

Defenses in a Criminal

Law Court

1

In 1993, Diana Smith, thirty-seven, from Kinsey, Alabama, was found guilty of tampering with a man’s grave. The court heard that in 1990, Smith had been charged with causing the death of the man whose grave she had interfered with. She said she was only digging up the casket in order to prove that he was faking it.

2

In 2004, Thubten Dargyel, a fifty-three-year-old Tibetan health-care worker employed in a Wisconsin medical center, was charged with first-degree sexual assault on a woman. He explained that his semen could be found on her clothing because he ejaculated every time he sneezed.

Dargyel said that he was surprised that his semen hadn’t shown up on many other patients.

3

In 1964, Mexican sisters Delfina and Maria de Jesús González were arrested when police found the remains of at least eighty bodies on the premises of their brothel in Guanajuato. The deadly sisters recruited prostitutes through help-wanted ads and killed them when they outlived their usefulness. When asked for an explanation for the deaths, one of the sisters volunteered, “The food didn’t agree with them.”

4

In 1994, a court in Virginia dropped charges of rape and sodomy against a forty-five-year-old schizophrenic after accepting evidence that one of the victim’s multiple personalities had consented to have sex with one of the rapist’s multiple personalities. The prosecution heard that the two had previously met in group therapy and that many of their “different selves” had fallen in love and even talked of marriage.

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5

In 2004, a Canadian, Angel Jones, twenty-seven, was convicted of aggravated assault against his girlfriend when he bit off most of her nose during an argument.

Jones admitted the nose was in his mouth but claimed that his girlfriend was on a special weight-loss program that had caused her nose to become brittle so it had just fallen off.

6

Thirty-year-old Frederick Treesh was one of three men detained for terrorizing the Great Lakes area with a series of spree killings during the summer of 1994.

Treesh explained later, “Other than the two we killed, the two we wounded, the woman we pistol-whipped, and the lightbulbs we stuck in people’s mouths, we didn’t really hurt anybody.”

7

Seattle death-row inmate and convicted murderer Mitchell Rupe, who weighed 270 pounds, appealed against his sentence because he was literally too fat to hang. According to his lawyers, not only would his hanging constitute “cruel and unusual punishment,”

Rupe might be decapitated by the pressure of his weight on the rope, risking injury “or worse” to onlookers. The appeal failed, and Rupe swung on July 11, 1994.

8

In 1996 in Providence, Rhode Island, Anthony St.

Laurent admitted to taking part in organized crime.

Upon receiving a ten-month prison sentence, he informed the court that he was really innocent; he had entered a guilty plea only because an illness that
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