Historical Crimes

July 9, 2012

John Wesley Hardin

John Wesley Hardin was one of the most violent and heartless gunslingers of the Old West. He was also a narcissistic braggart, a pathological liar, and an unrepentant racist. Most of all he was a coldblooded killer.

June 4, 2012

John "Babbacombe" Lee

After three attempts to hang John Lee at Exeter Prison in Devon, England, the hanging was called off. Years later he was paroled.  

by Robert Walsh 

It is February 23, 1885. The place is the coach house of Exeter Prison, Devon, England. The time is 8 a.m. 

Outside the prison, a large crowd has gathered to await the execution by hanging of convicted murderer John Lee, condemned for the brutal murder of his employer, Miss Emma Keyes, the previous year. When the execution has been successfully completed a bell will toll for 15 minutes and the dreaded black flag will be hoisted over the prison. 

At 7:55 a.m. the execution party, consisting of the prison warden, the chief guard, the prison doctor, the prison chaplain, several guards, the executioner and representatives of the press, assembles outside the condemned man’s cell. 

At precisely 8 a.m., Britain’s chief public executioner, James Berry, receives a signal from the prison governor and enters the condemned cell. He swiftly straps Lee’s arms by his sides and places a white hood over his head. Accompanied by the rest of the execution party, Berry swiftly leads the pinioned and hooded convict on to the gallows, straps his legs together and tightens the noose around his neck. Berry steps quickly off the trapdoors and approaches the lever. He swiftly pushes the lever over as he has done so many times before.

And nothing happens. 

The doors drop approximately a quarter inch, jam solid and will drop no further. Berry is slightly flustered by this, but because it has been known to happen before, he continues with his grim duty. He unstraps Lee’s legs, removes the noose and takes off the hood. He leads Lee into an adjoining room and quickly returns to examine and test the trapdoors. They are reset and the lever is thrown. 

They work perfectly. 

Berry goes into the adjoining room and brings Lee back on to the gallows. Again the hood and noose are applied and Berry throws the lever a second time. 

The doors jam solid again. 

May 28, 2012

George Metesky

For six years during the early 1950s, “The Mad Bomber” terrorized New Yorkers by planting 32 pipe bombs all over Manhattan. Bombs were left at Grand Central Station, Penn Station, The Port Authority, at subway stations, at Radio City Music Hall, at Macy’s, at various movie theaters, at the New York Public Library, at the RCA Building and at the Con-Edison building.  Bringing Con-Ed to “justice” was the reason for them all. 

by Mark Pulham

It was Monday, May 23, 1994 when the old man died. He passed away at the age of 90 in his home town of Waterbury, Connecticut. It was not a huge news event, probably only mentioned in the local newspapers, in the obituary section. Among the general media, his death went unnoticed. There was no reason why it would be noticed, after all, the death of a 90 year old man was not news, it happens all the time.

But at one time, this man had been in the newspapers with an alarming regularity, though not by the name his family knew him by, and it is partly due to him, and a second man, that a new and powerful weapon was added to the crime investigation arsenal.

It began quietly, not with a bang, over 50 years earlier, in 1940.

The Consolidated Edison Company had been around for well over a hundred years, since 1823, when it was still known as the New York Gas Light Company. In 1884, it combined with five other gas suppliers to form the Consolidated Gas Company, and later acquired the new electrical companies as well.

Eventually, on March 23, 1936, the company renamed itself and became the Consolidated Edison Company of New York.

By 1940, Con-Ed was the main supplier of energy to New York City. Several thousand people worked for the utility, and their customers numbered several million people and businesses.  

Con Ed’s huge offices were at 170 West 64^th Street in Manhattan. On November 16, 1940, a man entered the building. With hundreds of employee’s working there, the man didn’t stand out, and no one noticed him among the all the others. 

“F.P.” Leaves a Pipe Bomb

He carried with him a wooden toolbox which he placed on a window sill. No one took any notice of the man as he walked away, leaving the toolbox behind. No one took any notice as the man quietly left the building.

How long the toolbox sat there is unknown, but eventually, someone saw it and went to examine it. Inside, they found a short brass pipe that had been filled with gunpowder, probably taken from bullets. There were flashlight batteries and sugar, which made up the mechanism that would set it off. Wrapped around this crudely constructed pipe bomb, hand written in neat block letters, was a note. It read: “CON EDISON CROOKS. THIS IS FOR YOU.” It was signed “F.P.”

May 14, 2012

Franklin Benjamin Gowen

Patrick H. Campbell makes the case that the death of industrialist Franklin Gowen was a murder, not a suicide. His long investigation into this case was detailed in his book Who Killed Franklin Gowen?  Copies of that book may be purchased by sending $20 to P.H. Campbell, 82 Bentley Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07304 ($25 in Canada, $30 for any other country).

by Patrick Campbell

On June 21, 1877, a group of 10 Irish union activists named the Molly Maguires (Mollies) were executed in Pennsylvania in a mass execution of trade union members and their sympathizers. One of those executed was Alec Campbell, the author’s grand uncle.

These executions were organized by Franklin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad and Coal Company. Gowen sent 10 more union members to the gallows in the two years that followed. All of the Molly Maguires were members of the Workers Benevolent Society (WBA), the miners’ union.

After publishing a book entitled A Molly Maguire Story, which focused on Gowen’s war on the Workers Benevolent Association, I decided to investigate the death of Franklin Gowen, who was found dead in 1889 in a Washington D.C. hotel bedroom with a bullet in his head and a gun by his side. The investigation was published in a book entitled Who Killed Franklin Gowen? The following is an excerpt from this book.

Who Killed Franklin Gowen is an analysis of the death of Franklin Gowen, whose death in a Washington D.C. hotel room in December 1889 was characterized by James Wormley, owner of Wormley’s Hotel where the body was found, as a suicide. Robert Linden, the manager of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who investigated the death of Gowen, agreed with him, and so did Francis Innes Gowen, Franklin’s nephew and business partner. William Patterson, the Washington coroner, who had been out of town when the death was discovered and had not examined the body at the scene of the death, went along with the conclusion of the other three men and pronounced Gowen’s death a suicide.

But Gowen’s wife and daughter claimed that Franklin Gowen would never have committed suicide, and the deputy coroner and senior members of the Washington Police Department stated that the circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to murder, and demanded a full investigation. The coroner, however, still insisted that the death was suicide, and the suicide verdict stood in spite of the public dispute with the police and the huge media coverage which was claiming that the Molly Maguires had got even with Franklin Gowen.

Nov. 14, 2011

Marie Besnard

In France, in the 17^th Century, alchemists became wealthy grinding arsenic rock into a colorless and odorless powder and selling the powder to their countrymen who wanted to do away with a wealthy old parent, grandparent, uncle or aunt. There was even an “epidemic” of arsenic poisonings in the year 1670 so that the substance became known as the “succession powder.” Three centuries later, kind and homely Marie Besnard amazed her female friends when she described arsenic as an excellent substitute for divorce. They thought she was joking. But was she? 

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

Illness and death were no strangers to Marie Antigny, yet, cradling Auguste, her dead husband, in her arms she sobbed uncontrollably.

Marie was 31 years old and she and Auguste, who was two years her senior, had been married for seven years. The two were first cousins – her mother was his father’s sister – and Marie had fancied Auguste since she was 17 years old, but it was not until she was 18 that her parents allowed the two to step out together, and another six years had to pass before they’d given their consent for the two to walk down the aisle. By then Marie was 24 and Auguste 26, and what doctors had described previously as his weak constitution had been diagnosed as tuberculosis. It was 1920 and tuberculosis was an incurable, even untreatable illness, but in Marie’s own words, “We were in love!”

Marie was born Marie Josephine Philippine Davaillaud in the village of Saint-Pierre-de-Maillé, 200 miles south-west of Paris, in the Vienne department close to the beautiful Loire valley.  Her parents, well-to-do farmers, adored her because before she arrived, they lost two infant sons to long illnesses. Her father Pierre Eugène used to cuddle her when he came in from working his fields, and her mother Marie-Louise never failed to tell her that she loved her “for three,” including the girl’s two dead brothers in her affection.

March 6, 2011

Mata Hari

To protect its deep infiltration into French intelligence during World War I, German intelligence conned the British and French into believing that Mata Hari was its superspy.  

by Robert Walsh

Dawn, Vincennes Barracks, October 15 1917.

Brought from her cell at the Saint-Lazare Prison less than an hour after hearing that her final appeal had been denied by the President of France, alleged superspy Mata Hari faced her firing squad seemingly calm and unafraid. She may well have led a somewhat ethically questionable life, but in death she seems to have shown considerably greater courage, fortitude and integrity than those who had conspired to place her there.

Mata Hari has long been the stuff of legend and myth, the glamorous, sexy superspy effortlessly using her feminine wiles and her physical charms to extract the highest level secrets from foolish, lecherous and indiscreet Allied officers through pillow talk before daringly passing the stolen secrets on to her German handlers. But how much spying did she actually do? What level of secrets, if any at all, did she manage to extract? Was she really the stuff of legend, a female James Bond with an equal talent for high-level espionage and flagrant promiscuity? Did she really cause the deaths of 50,000 Allied soldiers as her prosecutors claimed? Was she really, as has long been believed by so many, deserving of a place in the Pantheon of espionage legends?

Sept. 23, 2010

William Hare and William Burke

William Burke and William Hare are the most famous grave robbers of 19^th century Scotland, but none of the 16 fresh corpses they turned over for dissection in the anatomy classroom of Dr. Robert Knox at 10 Surgeon Square in Edinburg, came from any graveyard.  

by Mark Pulham

Up the close and down the stair,
In the house with Burke and Hare.
Burke’s the butcher, Hare’s the thief
Knox, the man who buys the beef. 

Children's rhyme

It is dark, and the only sound is that of someone digging. As quietly as they can, the grave robbers remove the earth from the newly interred and remove the lid of the coffin. Fearful of capture, they remove the corpse and hurriedly get away before someone discovers them. It is a profitable and fast growing business. And the most famous body grave robbers of all are Burke and Hare. In films and stories, they are shown committing this dreadful act. But the films and stories got it wrong, Burke and Hare never dug up a body.  No, they were far worse.

In Britain, the Murder Act of 1752 made it illegal for any doctor to perform a dissection on a corpse, unless the corpse was that of an executed criminal. In the 1700’s, any number of crimes could result in the death penalty. Even petty crimes such as cutting down trees, pick pocketing more than a shilling, stealing a horse or a sheep (hence the phrase, “may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb”) or being out at night with a blackened face could result in an execution.  As a result, there were hundreds of corpses available each year.

By the 1800’s, as the number of medical students began to grow, the demand for cadavers increased, but by now laws allowing more lenient punishments were on the books and the number of criminals executed had fallen to as low as 50 to 60 a year.

As always, with demand outstripping supply, someone would provide the bodies. Anatomists would turn a blind eye when the resurrection men came around with a recently interred corpse. Body snatching became a lucrative business and was so common that many graveyards built high walls and railings around them and erected watchtowers.