Category: Uncategorized
-
On This Day in 1924 – Howard Hinton, Georgia’s first electrocution.
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
The former Central State Prison Farm at Milledgeville, since demolished. It’s common to find ‘Peachtree Bandit’ Frank Dupre, armed robber and murderer executed on September 1, 1921 with Luke McDonald, listed as the last man to hang in Georgia. He wasn’t. That was Arthur Meyers, a murderer hanged at Augusta on… -
On This Day in 1953 – France’s last inmates return from Devil’s Island.
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
“The Bagne is a charnel house, a mass grave, running from syphilis to tuberculosis, with all the tropical diseases one can imagine (carrying malaria, ankylosis, amoebic dysentery, leprosy, etc.), all destined to work hand in hand with an Administration whose task it is to diminish the number of prisoners consigned to… -
On This Day in 1965: Joel Singer and Jack Franck, the real-life ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.’
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
If you’re a fan of Clint Eastwood then ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is probably in your DVD collection. Not one of his better-known movies and perhaps not one of his best, but well worth watching all the same. Nor were Joel Singer and Jack Franck the original Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, that dubious… -
On This Day in 1963: New York State’s Last Execution, Eddie Lee Mays.
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
Eddie Lee Mays, his Death House file at Sing Sing Prison. August 15, 1963 was an historic day in New York’s penal history, although nobody involved knew it at the time. New York’s lawmakers didn’t know it. the Warden of New York’s infamous Sing Sing Prison (now the Ossining Correctional Facility)… -
On This Day in 1936 – George ‘Diamond King’ Barrett, first to die for murdering a Federal agent.
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
Barrett is certainly a criminal curiosity. His life was one of crime and allegedly several murders. The murder for which he finally died gave him an unwilling place in the chronicles of American crime, though he was hardly appreciated becoming one of history’s footnotes. So why did he hang in a… -
On This Day in 1890; William Kemmler – The World’s First Legal Electrocution.
Originally posted on Crimescribe:
William Kemmler and the world’s first electric chair. August 6, 1890 saw the dawn of a new age for criminal history. At Auburn Prison in upstate New York there was the execution.of one William Kemmler, condemned for murdering girlfriend Matilda Ziegler with a hatchet. There was nothing remarkable about Kemmler (an… -
Lloyd Sampsell, California’s ‘Yacht Bandit.’
A free chapter from my latest book ‘Murders, Mysteries and Misdemeanors in Southern California,’ out now online and in bookstores. “I don’t know why this should bother me, but why in the hell should people be interested in what the condemned man ate for breakfast?” – Sampsell just before his execution. Lloyd Sampsell was […]
-
Professor James Howard Snook, Ohio’s ‘Gold Medal Murderer.’
This is a particularly rare case, singular in fact. The case itself, a philandering husband murdering his illicit lover to protect his reputation, isn’t that unusual, unfortunately. An outwardly-respectable married man deciding to end an illicit affair, and then killing his mistress when she threatens to expose hit, is sadly all-too-common. It shouldn’t be, of […]
-
South Carolina and the electric chair, a brief history.
With a shortage of lethal injection drugs and no lawful way to get them (using so-called ‘compound pharmacists’ is somewhat frowned on by the Food and Drug Administration), South Carolina has resorted to a choice between the firing squad and dusting off its electric chair. Still commonly called Old Sparky, the chair itself is over […]
-
Charles Benjamin Ullmo, redeemed on Devil’s Island.
The dreaded ‘Penal Administration, French Guiana’ is far more associated with cruelty, inhumanity and death than with survival and redemption. That said, there were exceptions to the rule and disgraced French naval officer Charles Benjamin Ullmo is one of them. Condemned to Guiana for life after trying to ransom stolen military secrets, Ullmo didn’t look […]
Crimescribe 