Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  Two years went by, and then a revelation came out of the blue; Jim Bradley, the man who had been responsible for the arrest and conviction of Will Purvis, now came forward to admit that he had doubts about his original accusation, in which he had identified Purvis as his brother’s killer. But freedom was just as far as ever from the outlawed man, for the state governor, instead of pardoning Purvis, commuted his death sentence to one of life imprisonment. Obviously weary of being a wanted man, Purvis gave himself up and was returned to jail, but not for long, for on 19 December 1898, four years after his narrow escape from death, he was granted a full pardon.

  But the story didn’t end there. A happy ending was in the offing, although it took nineteen years to come about, for a man named Joe Beard ‘got religion’, responded to the fervent appeals of the Holy Rollers, an itinerant Christian organisation, and cleansed his soul by confessing all his sins, one of which was that he, together with one Louis Thornhill, murdered Will Bradley. The Legislature of Mississippi then compensated Will Purvis by awarding him the princely sum of $5,000, and the New Orleans Item of 6 June 1920 published their version of that long-gone execution day. But had a certain methodically minded deputy sheriff not snipped the untidy-looking end of the rope protruding from the hangman’s knot . . .

  The choice of the tree on which they were to be hanged was traditionally left to the condemned felon, and Scotsman Jock Donald accordingly selected a small sapling. When the sheriff pointed out that it was much too small, Donald replied, ‘Och, but I’m in no hurry; I’ll just wait till it grows!’

  Thomas Reynolds

  Two robbers, Thomas Reynolds and James Bayley, were arrested in April 1736 for going armed and disguised in order to carry out street robberies. Both were sentenced to death but Bayley was later reprieved. Reynolds joined the executioner on the Tyburn scaffold on 26 July of that year. The hangman was John Thrift, the well-meaning but highly emotional executioner who shed tears when faced with having to use the axe. This time, however, it was the rope, and it was Thomas Reynolds who was also highly strung; following which, Thrift cut his body down.

  Whether the hangman, who had only been in the job for a year, was not concentrating when he positioned the noose, or if he just lost track of the time and failed to let the cadaver remain suspended for the regulation hour, will never be known; suffice it to say that when the undertaker’s men started to fasten the coffin lid down, they were somewhat taken aback when the corpse suddenly sat up! Thrift, knowing his duty, and fearing the wrath of the sheriff, seized him, with every intention of hanging him again, but the mob was having none of it; rushing the scaffold they attempted to attack poor Thrift, thereby diverting the attention of the constables on duty, while others spirited Reynolds away to a safe house nearby. There he vomited three pints of blood, and his rescuers, thinking that was a sign that he was recovering, promptly gave him a glass of wine. He died.

  In the days when surgeons had to rely on corpses bought from bodysnatchers to use as instructional specimens, a Professor Junkur of Halle University, Germany, had purchased two cadavers and, it being late at night, had stored them, still in the sacks in which they had been delivered, in a room adjoining his bedroom. During the night he was disturbed by strange noises and, somewhat apprehensively, went to investigate to find one sack still filled, the other torn and empty! Then he started as, in the corner of the room, he saw a ghostly pale and trembling figure of a naked man, who explained that he had been hanged but cut down while still alive; he had fainted, but on later reviving, found himself in the sack, which he had managed to tear open a moment ago. He went on to beg the professor not to report him to the authorities, because they would promptly hang him again, thoroughly this time, so Junker gave him some clothes and food, and assisted him to escape across the border into Holland. Twelve years later the professor was visiting Amsterdam when a well-dressed gentleman approached him and, calling him by name, explained that he was the ‘hanged man’ whose life the professor had saved, and that he was now a successful businessman, married with two bonny children. A rare happy ending to a hangman’s blunder!

  Joseph Samuels

  England had Half-Hanged Lee and Half-Hanged Smith; Australia, not to be outdone, had Half-Hanged Samuels. And just as many English hangmen were known colloquially as ‘Jack Ketch’, so in nineteenth-century Australia their scaffold counterparts were called Blackbeard. Always heavily disguised, they wore a large false black beard, bushy black eyebrows, doubtless home-grown, and were always clad in wide-brimmed black hats, knee-high boots and thick leather gloves. And it was a man of suchlike terrifying appearance who accompanied Joseph Samuels on to the Sydney scaffold one day in the 1800s.

  Whether completely intimidated or resigned to his fate, Samuels allowed himself to be positioned on the drop and stood meekly as Blackbeard capped and noosed him. The hangman pulled the lever, the rope tightened – then broke. Samuels fell into the pit, from where he was not too gently collected by Blackbeard and his cohorts, and returned to the drop to be re-noosed. Again the lever was operated – but this time the rope snapped at the overhead beam.

  The condemned man plunged downwards again, to lie dazed and bruised from yet another impact with the floor of the pit, only to feel himself lifted and half-carried back on to the scaffold. By this time the spectators were making their presence felt in no uncertain and decidedly Australian terms, the crescendo of abuse increasing as for the third time Blackbeard noosed his victim; and for the third time the rope gave way, this time breaking near Samuel’s neck. At that, officialdom had had enough. The governor was sent for and, in view of the catastrophic circumstances, issued an immediate reprieve.

  Many Sydney residents were convinced that the breaking of the rope was due either to Samuel’s innocence or to Divine Intervention, but those in the know were only too aware that Blackbeard stored his ropes in a leaky shed – and it had been a very rainy winter!

  It was a Tyburn tradition that ‘if, en route to execution, a strumpet should beg to have the condemned man as a husband, he would be reprieved and would then marry her, so that both sinful lives would be cleansed by such a holy act.’ But one felon, about to have the rope placed around his neck, happened to catch the lascivious eye of a particularly unattractive woman in the crowd; turning to the hangman he exclaimed, ‘Dispatch me quickly, before I am begged!’

  John Smith

  They should have called him ‘Lucky’ Smith for despite being a habitual criminal, he certainly lived a charmed life. In actual fact he was nicknamed Half-Hanged Smith because of a last minute reprieve on the scaffold, although it certainly failed to make him mend his ways thereafter.

  Unfortunately, Luttrell, the annalist and bibliographer (1637– 1732), did not record the reason for Smith’s reprieve, though he did describe what happened that day, 12 December 1705: ‘One John Smith, condemned lately at the Old Bailey for burglary, was carried to Tyburn to be executed, and was accordingly hanged up, and after he had hung about 7 minutes, a reprieve came, so he was cut down, and immediately let blood and put into a warm bed, which, with other applications, brought him to himself with much ado.’

  Another account continued:

  ‘When he had perfectly recovered his senses he was asked what were his feelings at the time of his execution, to which he repeatedly replied in substance, that when he was turned off, he, for some time, was sensible of very great pain, occasioned by the weight of his body, and felt his spirits in a strange commotion, violently pressing upwards; that having forced their way to his head, he, as it were, saw a great blaze or glaring light which seemed to go out at his eyes with a flash, and then he lost all sense of pain. That after he was cut down and begun to come to himself, the blood and spirits forcing themselves into their former channels, put him, by a sort of pricking or shooting, to such intolerable pain, that he could have wished those hanged, who had cut him down.’

  Smith not only forsook his earlier lawless career, but proceeded to denounce to the authorities c
riminals with whom he had been formerly acquainted. Records in respect of March 1706 show that:

  ‘Smith, who, sometime since was half-hanged and cut down, has accused about 350 pickpockets and housebreakers who got to be [became] soldiers in the guards, the better to hide their roguery; their regiments were then mustered [paraded] and they were drawn out and shipped off for Catalonia; and about 60 women, who he also accused of such crimes, were likewise sent away to camp there.’

  Nor did Smith stop there. The poacher turned gamekeeper obviously revelled in the limelight, for on 9 November of that same year ‘the officers of Her Majesty’s guards yesterday drew out their companies in St James’s Park and were viewed by Smith and two other fellows in masks, in order to discover [identify] felons and housebreakers; out of which two sergeants with six soldiers were seized as criminals and committed to the Marshalsea Prison.’

  However, his conversion to that of a law-abiding citizen was short-lived, for Smith, although having been given an unconditional pardon, was not able to resist the call of crime. Shortly afterwards he was arrested and charged with burglary, but was acquitted on a point of law. Caught again later, he was brought to court, but fortune still smiled on him, for the prosecutor died and the charge was dropped. Little was heard of him after that; either he retired to the country, or maybe spent his ill-gotten gains on a pleasure cruise to foreign parts, for it was rumoured that he drowned at sea.s

  En route from Newgate to the Tyburn gallows, the grim procession halted at St Giles for ‘The Bowl’, the traditional ‘one for the road’ drink of ale allowed to those soon to swing from the gallows. The victim, Captain Stafford, his morale undaunted, asked the landlord for a bottle of wine, saying that he had an appointment to keep, but would however pay the landlord on the way back!

  Alfred Sowrey

  Just as London had its Newgate Prison and execution site, so the city of Lancaster had its Castle and Chapel Yard. The Castle, with its ramparts and battlements, its towers and Norman keep, looms threateningly over the houses of the town surrounding it, and within its mighty walls is a superb courtroom and prison. The notorious Judge Jeffries once handed down lengthy and harsh sentences there, and Catholic priests and witches were condemned to death after being incarcerated in the grim cells situated deep below ground. It was also a royal residence at various times over the centuries, King John, Edward II, John of Gaunt, Henry IV and their cavalcades gracing it with their regal presence.

  Alfred Sowrey was a Preston man, and he occupied one of the Castle’s condemned cells, having shot and killed his fiancée. He would not have been in such a fearsome location had his original plan worked, for following the murder he attempted to shoot himself, but succeeded only in inflicting what was said to be merely a minor head wound.

  Whether it was the understandable dread of his approaching execution, or whether the wound had in fact been serious enough to unhinge his mind, Sowrey’s violent behaviour became almost totally uncontrollable. Even during his trial his guards and others around him felt apprehensive because of his wild gesturing and incoherent outbursts. After being found guilty, the inevitable sentence being that of death by hanging, he was returned to prison, but once there, even the administrations of the chaplain failed to calm his outbreaks of sheer panic.

  On the morning of his execution, 1 August 1887, the warders braced themselves for trouble, but even they were unprepared for Sowrey’s frantic resistance when James Berry, the hangman, entered the cell and attempted to pinion him, and eventually he had to be held down while the straps were tightened around his wrists. But even being thus restrained, he continued to struggle as he was half-propelled, half-carried along the corridor which led to the Chapel Yard where the scaffold awaited. As it came into view, his reactions became even more ungovernable: screaming and shouting, he went berserk, five warders having to carry him bodily up the scaffold steps and hold him while Berry approached with the intention of securing his ankles. Unable to use his arms, Sowrey lashed out wildly with his feet, one kick making contact with Berry’s shin. Ignoring the excruciating pain, the hangman desperately sought to get the noose round Sowrey’s neck as the distraught man, determined at all costs to thwart the gallows, shook his head from side to side, the crescendo of noise drowning the voice of the chaplain as he prayed for Sowrey’s soul. Eventually the nearly exhausted warders managed to hold the condemned man still, just long enough for Berry to position the noose; swiftly the hangman darted across the boards and pulled the lever. The trapdoors opened with a crash – and peace suddenly descended on the yard, the silence broken only by the chaplain uttering the last few words of the funeral service.

  And James Berry limped away to have his injured leg attended to, a wound which would leave a scar as a painful reminder of one of the most traumatic executions he had ever had to perform.

  After executing one criminal at Lancaster Castle, executioner William Calcraft was asked how it must feel to be hanged. He thought for a moment, then replied, ‘Well, I have heard it said that when you are tied up and your face turned to the Castle wall, and the trap falls, you see the stones expanding and contracting violently, and a similar expansion and contraction seems to take place inside your own head and breast. Then there is a rush of fire and an earthquake, your eyeballs spring out of their sockets, the Castle shoots up in the air, and you tumble down a precipice.’ An accurate assessment as near as anyone can get, coming from a man who performed the duty of hangman for no fewer than 45 years, 1829– 1874!

  Henry Spencer

  Practice makes perfect, especially for those taking up the profession of executioner, and this was never more obvious than in the case of Henry Spencer, hanged in America in 1914 for murder. The man in charge was the local sheriff who, regrettably, was a complete amateur, never having performed such a role before, especially in front of a crowd of such magnitude. On the scaffold he managed to place the noose in what he thought was the correct position about Spencer’s neck, compounding his error by then, for some unknown reason, ordering the victim to be concealed from view, not upwards, with a hood to cover his face, but downwards, with a full-length, cassock-like garment which, touching the boards, hid the man’s body completely. Had the sheriff positioned the noose correctly, death would have occurred much more quickly than it actually did, and the omission of the hood would not have mattered quite so much. As it was, its absence allowed the shocked crowd to watch the slowly rotating and writhing victim, gasps of horror coming from every side of the scaffold in turn on seeing his contorted features, his protruding tongue, his eyes staring and dilated, as he desperately fought for breath, ten nightmarish minutes elapsing before his body finally hung limp and lifeless.

  The only thing hangman Marwood had in common with Calcraft, whom he succeeded on the scaffold in 1874, was his first name: William. During his whole career, as mentioned earlier, Calcraft persisted in using a rope which permitted the victim a drop of a mere three feet or so, death coming slowly by strangulation. In marked contrast, Marwood perfected the ‘long drop’, the length of rope depending on the victim’s weight and other physical factors, dispatching him or her quickly by severing the spinal cord. Referring scathingly to Calcraft, he commented, ‘He HANGED them – I EXECUTE them!’

  James Stone

  This case concerns the loss of three heads; one metaphorically, when James Stone attacked his wife, and two actual decapitations, those of Mrs Stone and finally, of the murderer himself.

  It happened in Washington, USA, at a time when Stone’s marriage to Alberta, whom he had wedded four years before, ran into difficulties. After several rows in 1878 Alberta left him and went to stay with her sister Lavinia, a woman whom Stone vehemently blamed for the breakdown in the marriage, accusing her of influencing his wife against him, so when Alberta left the marital home, he sought revenge. Arming himself with a razor, the open, long-bladed type used daily by men in that century, he went to his sister-in-law’s house and, being unable to gain entrance, broke the door down. On
coming face to face with Lavinia he promptly attacked her with the weapon, inflicting severe cuts to her throat before she managed to escape into the yard. Meanwhile Alberta, who had been in an upper room, heard the commotion and came downstairs, only to find herself the target as Stone, grasping her with one hand and pulling her head back, swept the razor across her throat so violently that her head was almost severed. Dropping the razor on to her blood-soaked corpse he ran out, pursued by neighbours, who eventually caught him and handed him over to the police.

  No defence attorney in the world could have persuaded a jury to bring in a verdict other than guilty, and Stone was sentenced to death. In jail his behaviour seemed to fluctuate: at times he appeared to realise his crime and the awful fate awaiting him; at other times he behaved as if it were all a charade.

  A Mrs Browne, the wife of one of his previous employers, had given evidence in court, testifying that he was of good character except, she added, that at times he had an uncontrollable temper. Now she visited him in his cell, and promised him that she would ensure he was buried next to the wife he had so brutally murdered.

  On 2 April 1880 the Washington Evening Star cleared its front page ready for its reporter’s story:

  ‘Last night the condemned man, after prayers, lay down to sleep between 9 and 10 o’clock, but one of the lights in the rotunda was kept burning in such a direction as to show into his cell and for an hour or two he was unable to go to sleep. About midnight he dozed off and rested until the clock was striking four, when he awoke, but shortly afterwards he fell asleep again and slept until six. At 8.30 he ate his breakfast; pointing to his cup, a quart measure, he said to a visitor who asked sometime later how he had enjoyed his breakfast, ‘Why, I took that full of coffee, with a whole fried chicken and potatoes and other trimmings.’ After this he led off singing a hymn ‘I am Going Home to Jesus Tonight,’ and all the prisoners on the same tier joined in and the singing was very pathetic. They then sang ‘Wash Me and I Shall be Whiter than Snow,’ after which Stone spent some time in walking the floor in meditation and in reading his Bible.