Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (36 page)

In 1964 the death penalty was abolished in Britain, except for offences under the Treason Act of 1351. The last criminals to be hanged were Peter Anthony Alien and Gwynne Owen Evans, found guilty of murder. Tried at Manchester, they were executed at 8 a.m. on 13 August 1964, Alien at Liverpool, Evans at Manchester.

Scotland also had its executioners, who used the same methods and attracted the same avidly watching crowds as in England, the last public hanging occurring in 1866 when murderer Joe Bell was executed at Perth.

From 1814 to 1840 Glasgow’s Thomas Young did a thriving scaffold trade, while in Inverness Donald Ross served for a quarter of a century but hanged only three men in that time: he was dismissed when the council calculated that, based on his allowances, each hanging had cost £400, a fortune in the nineteenth century.

The English method was adopted in many of our colonies. William Reeves emigrated to Fiji in the 1950s and gained employment as a piano tuner. He subsequently volunteered to be the island’s hangman, and supplemented his income to the tune of £5 per execution, his last scaffold appearance on the gallows in Suva Jail taking place in 1966. Capital punishment was abolished shortly afterwards, and William died in 1999 at the age of 91.

But for sheer rarity value, Ireland must surely stand supreme, for they had not a hangman, a Jack Ketch, but a hangwoman, a Jill Ketch! Known as Lady Betty, she was described as ‘a middle-aged, stout-made, dark-eyed, swarthy-complexioned but by no means forbidding woman’. Her grown-up son, having made his fortune, returned from abroad and, in order to ascertain whether his mother’s nature had mellowed, kept his identity secret when asking her for lodgings. It hadn’t, and she murdered him for his money.

Sentenced to death, she was reprieved on condition that she hanged her fellow prisoners, a post which she accepted on a permanent basis, that being the scaffold. Not content with riding in the cart, adjusting the noose and operating the drop, she also performed the ancillary tasks of gibbeting the cadavers afterwards. In minor cases, where the penalty was a flogging, she wielded the whip with gusto, attracting large crowds along the whipping route. Her fame spread far and wide throughout Ireland in the 1820s and 1830s, and many were the disobedient children whose behaviour suddenly improved on hearing their parents threaten ‘Huggath a’ Pooka! Here’s Lady Betty!’

In the British Isles, at the turn of the last century, hanging was no more barbaric than those methods of execution employed elsewhere in the world. Austria, Portugal and The Netherlands hanged their felons in public, while within the United States hanging and electrocution took place in private. Guillotining in public was the fashion in France, Belgium and Denmark, though it was performed in private in Bavaria and Hanover, Germany. In Brunswick, Germany, the axe was wielded within the prison walls, as were hanging and the sword in other regions of Germany. Of the 19 cantons of Switzerland, 15 executed their criminals publicly by the sword, two similarly by the guillotine, the remaining two cantons guillotining in private.

Prussia employed the sword out of sight of the public, but Spanish criminals were garotted before large crowds of spectators. China preferred the sword or strangulation by the bow-string, in public, and although capital punishment in Russia was inflicted only for political crimes, such executions, by firing squad, hanging or the sword, were all held in public.

In the days before Dr Guillotin’s device was adopted, French criminals suffered death by the rope, the Sanson family of executioners being deeply involved as a matter of course. And just as London had its Tyburn, so Paris had its Montfaucon. Far more elaborate than that of the triple tree, the French venue was described
par excellence
by Lacroix in his
Manners, Customs and Costumes of the Middle Ages
:

‘For several centuries and down to the Revolution, hanging was the most common mode of execution in France, consequently in every town and almost in every village, there was a permanent gibbet which, owing to the custom of leaving the bodies to hang till they crumbled to dust, was very rarely without having some corpses or skeletons attached to it.

These gibbets were generally composed of stone pillars, joined at their summits by wooden beams, to which the bodies of criminals were tied by ropes or chains. The gallows, the pillars of which varied in number according to the will of the authorities, were always placed by the side of frequented roads, and on an eminence.

The gallows of Paris, which played such an important part in the political as well as the criminal history of the city, were erected on a height north of the town near the high road leading into Germany. Montfaucon, originally the name of the hill, soon became that of the gallows itself. This celebrated place of execution consisted of a heavy mass of masonry composed of ten or twelve layers of rough stones, and formed an enclosure of forty feet by twenty-five or thirty feet.

At the upper part there was a platform which was reached by a stone stairway, the entrance to which was closed by a massive door. On three sides of this platform rested ten square pillars about thirty feet high, made of blocks of stone a foot thick. These pillars were joined to one another by double beams of wood which were fastened into the pillars, and bore iron chains three and a half feet long, from which the criminals were suspended. Half-way between these top beams and the platform, other beams were placed for the same purpose.

Long and solid ladders riveted to the pillars enabled the executioner and his assistants to lead up criminals or carry up corpses destined to be hanged there. Lastly, the centre of the structure was occupied by a deep pit, the hideous receptacle of the decaying remains of the criminals.

One can easily imagine the strange and melancholy aspect of this monumental gibbet if one thinks of the number of corpses continually attached to it, and which were feasted upon by thousands of crows. On a single occasion it was necessary to replace 52 chains which were useless, and the accounts of the City of Paris prove that the expenses of executions were more heavy than that of the maintenance of the gibbet.

Montfaucon was used not only for executions but also for exposing corpses which were brought there from various places of execution in every part of the country. The mutilated remains of criminals who had been boiled, quartered and beheaded were also hung there in sacks of leather or wickerwork. They often remained hanging there for some considerable time, as in the case of Pierre des Essarts, who had been beheaded in 1413 and whose remains were handed back to his family for Christian burial after hanging on Montfaucon for three years.

The criminal to be hanged was generally taken to the place of execution sitting or standing in a waggon with his back to the horses, his confessor by his side, and the executioner behind. He bore three ropes round his neck, two the size of a little finger, called ‘tortouses’, each of which had a slip-knot, and the third, the ‘jet’, was used only to pull the victim off the ladder and so launch him into eternity.

When he arrived at the foot of the gallows the executioner first ascended the ladder backwards, drawing the culprit after him by means of the ropes, and forcing him to keep pace with him. On arriving at the top of the ladder he quickly fastened the two tortouses to the arm of the gibbet and, by a jerk of his knee, turned the culprit off the ladder, still retaining his hold of the jet. He then placed his feet on the tied hands of the condemned and, clutching him, by repeated jerks, insured complete strangulation.’

As in France, so German cities had their own execution sites. That at Nuremberg resembled Montfaucon, the Hochgericht, or gallows, consisting of a massive stone platform on which rose the gibbet. The gallows themselves, built originally in 1441, were composed of several wooden uprights fitted with cross-beams, one of which, projecting considerably, was used to hang Jews. In 1749 the whole structure was completely decayed and was rebuilt in six days, being then consecrated with great ceremony.

As in Britain and France, common criminals were hanged, the sword or axe being reserved for those of noble birth, though in Germany those due to be hanged were sometimes granted execution by the sword ‘as a favour’. The condemned were taken by cart and then led up on to the scaffold. The diary kept by Franz Schmidt, public executioner of Nuremberg from 1573 to 1617, describes how ‘Jews were not only hanged from a special beam, but a cap lined with hot pitch was also put on their heads before they swung. It was customary to hang a dog alongside such criminals. One Jewish felon had been condemned to hang by the feet until he were dead, but was graciously spared this punishment and was strung up in a Christian fashion.’

The arguments against hanging as a deterrent were much the same as those of today, it being pointed out that those who eventually perished on the scaffold had been among the most regular and vociferous spectators at such performances. Just as at Tyburn and Montfaucon, brutal mobs flocked to watch executions in Nuremberg, creating scenes of coarse revelry and debauchery. Drinking- and eating-booths were set up for the occasion, and the stallholders paid high rents to the council for the pitches. It is reported that so great were the crowds at times that 200 waggon-loads of victuals were barely sufficient to feed the spectators, and occasionally the city gates had to be closed in order to limit the concourse.

On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, thanks to the British colonists, hanging quickly became established as the means of dispatching criminals. But as to be expected in a country as large as the United States, the basic method became diversified, not all states being content to remain faithful to the simple gallows and hinged trapdoor, though all retained the rope knot rather than a metal ring.

By the 1920s Connecticut had developed an ingenious contrivance for dispatching its criminals. Basically, the noose was formed at one end of a 50-foot length of rope which passed up through the ceiling of the capacious death chamber and down into an adjoining room, where it passed over a drum and ratchet mechanism.

At its end was secured a weight equal to that of the condemned man, which was retained 3 feet above the floor, its release being operated via steel rods to a foot pedal. When all was ready, the pedal was pressed, allowing the trigger to release the weight. Immediately, the body would be propelled upwards to a height of about 12 feet, the abrupt jerk usually resulting in the victim’s neck being broken instantly. The body would then be lowered by operating the drum mechanism, and the corpse taken down.

In order to absolve any one person from being personally responsible for the execution, an earlier method in Connecticut involved the victim having to stand on a small hatch in the floor. His weight released a quantity of lead shot which rolled down a slope until its weight operated the release trigger. This method, virtually requiring the felon to commit suicide, was declared illegal and so was replaced by the one described above.

In nineteenth-century New York the trap was held English-style, by a bolt, this being released by a spring lever operated by the sheriff. Unlike England, however, this official was screened from the sight of the prisoner, a practice also adopted in San Quentin, California, where three guards out of sight in a separate cubicle each operated a lever, only one of the controls releasing the drop.

Nashville, Tennessee, used a rather more primitive release method, the rope holding the drop simply being severed with a hatchet, while in an impromptu execution in Virginia City, Montana, the prisoners stood on boxes beneath the beam, these being kicked away on the signal being given.

Cutting the ground from under the victim’s feet, causing the drop to drop, was always a problem. In Washington DC in 1865, it was solved without recourse to bolts, levers or anything so technical, when four conspirators, three men and a woman, guilty of complicity in the assassination of President Lincoln, were hanged.