Historical records briefly mention a case of bestiality in 16th-century France. According to a chronicler named Ranchin, an unnamed Montpelleir farmer was surprised “behind his mule” in 1565. According to the witness, the farmer was committing an “act that cannot be mentioned”.
The farmer was put on trial, convicted of buggery and bestiality and sentenced to be burned alive. The mule, despite its passive role, was sentenced to the same fate. But according to Ranchin, the mule refused to go without a fight and turned nasty, prompting brutal action from the executioner:
“Mulus… erat vitiosus et calcitrosus. In primis abcissi fuere quatuor pedes ipsius et demun in ignem projectus et una cum homine combustus fuit.”
(‘The mule was vicious and kicking. He was dealt with first, all four of his feet were removed and cast into the fire, after which he and the man burned.’)
In 1980, a 21-year-old South Carolina man, Michael Anderson Sloan, was charged with the murder of Mary Elizabeth Royem, 24. Miss Royem’s body was found in her West Columbia apartment. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death with an electric iron. Sloan, who also used the name Michael Anderson Godwin, was on work release from prison (for robbing a woman at knifepoint in 1977).
Sloan went on trial in 1981, was convicted of murder and sexual assault and sentenced to die in South Carolina’s electric chair. Sloan’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983 after a retrial cleared him of the sexual assault. But as fate would have it, Sloan was still destined to die on an electric chair, albeit a different one:
“Convicted murderer Michael Anderson Godwin… has died after electrocuting himself, authorities said. Godwin was seated on a metal toilet and was apparently trying to repair earphones to a television set, when he bit into the electrical cord, said State Corrections spokesman Francis Archibald.
‘It was a strange accident’, Archibald said. ‘He was sitting naked on a metal commode’… Richland County Coroner Frank Barron said Godwin was severely burned in his mouth and tongue. Barron said that an investigation is continuing but that it appears the electrocution was an accident.”
According to press reports, Sloan was a model prisoner who spent his final six years obtaining two college degrees in education. He had dreams of being released on parole and working with young people.
The Bald Knobbers were a vigilante gang active in southern Missouri during the 1880s. The group came together in 1883 to deal with bandits and cross-border raiders plaguing local farmers. By 1885, the Bald Knobbers had grown in size and become troublemakers as much as trouble-stoppers. They also adopted a crude but intimidating uniform: a black hood with eye and mouth holes removed and the corners tied to resemble ears or horns.
The lawless behaviour of the Bald Knobbers led to the formation of the Anti-Bald Knobbers, in effect a vigilante group formed to combat another vigilante group. In March 1887 Bald Knobbers in Christian County shot up the home of an opponent, killing him and another man. Three Bald Knobbers – Dave Walker, his son William and Deacon Matthews – were arrested, tried and sentenced to death.
Their hanging took place in Ozark, Missouri on May 10th 1889 but was appallingly handled:
“The trap was sprung at 9.53 this morning. Matthews went down while uttering a prayer. The stretch of the rope was so great as to let all the doomed men fall to the ground. The rope finally broke and William Walker fell loose and lay on the ground struggling and groaning. He was taken up by the sheriff and his deputies and again placed on the scaffold. Dave Walker was swung up and died in 15 minutes. John Matthews lived about 13 minutes and died with his feet on the ground. The scene was horrible in the extreme. William Walker was lifted almost insensible, helpless and groaning on the scaffold and the rope was again adjusted around his neck. The trap was again sprung and this time the poor wretch came to a sudden stop with his feet full 30 inches above the ground. He died without a struggle.”
A gunfight between Bald Knobbers, Anti-Bald Knobbers and lawmen in July 1889 ended most of the Knobber violence in Missouri. The Bald Knobbers later featured in the popular 1907 novel The Shepherd of the Hills and two film adaptations, including a 1941 release starring John Wayne.
On July 31st 1922, dozens of lunching New Yorkers crowded into the popular Shelburne Restaurant and Bakery at 1127 Broadway. For a few, it would be their last meal.
The Shelburne was famous for its peach and huckleberry pies but on this hot July day, the pies contained a deadly surprise: arsenic. As the afternoon unfolded, 60 of the Shelburne’s pie-eating patrons became seriously ill and required hospitalisation. Six of them did not survive. Four of the dead were young female office workers in their late teens or early 20s.
Police and city officials launched an immediate investigation, ordering a forensic examination of the leftover pie, the restaurant’s bakery and its stores. They found nothing amiss with the bakery’s flour and other ingredients, suggesting that the pie pastry had been tampered with by a mystery poisoner:
“According to [Commissioner of Health] Dr Monaghan, the ingredients from which the pie crust was made had been analysed and found pure, so that the arsenic must have been put in while the dough for the crust was being made. Dr Monaghan [was] also informed that the proprietors of the restaurant did not keep rat poison or any other insect powder containing arsenic about the place. Accordingly, he said the chances that the poison might have been mixed into the dough accidentally appeared to be very slight.”
Police attention turned to the three people employed in the bakery: the manager, the baker and his assistant. All denied any involvement, however, the baker falsely believed he was about to be fired while his assistant reportedly disappeared without a trace.
With no evidence, the New York police were unable to lay any charges. Unsurprisingly, the Shelburne’s clientele evaporated overnight and it was forced to close down the following year. The deaths also caused a slump in pie sales across New York:
“In spite of the fact that the poisoning was shown to be due to… food prepared only at the one restaurant, patrons of restaurants were reported yesterday to be eating only a small fraction of the pie usually consumed in this city. The demand for huckleberry and blackberry pie has fallen almost to nothing.”
The well-travelled head, purportedly that of Oliver Cromwell
Toward the end of his life, Oliver Cromwell – leader of the Roundheads and Lord Protector of the Commonwealth – was plagued by kidney or urinary tract infections. In the summer of 1658, he was also struck down by malaria and the death of his adult daughter. The ailing Cromwell was transported to Whitehall for medical treatment but died in considerable pain on September 3rd.
According to a contemporary account by English MP Thomas Burton, preparations for Cromwell’s funeral did not go well. The government planned a public viewing, a grandiose funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey. Given that all of this would take time to organise, they ordered that Cromwell’s corpse be immediately disembowelled and embalmed.
This preservation was carried out as instructed, however just three days after his death Cromwell’s corpse was already in a horrendous state:
“[The day after Cromwell’s death] his body… was washed and laid out; and being opened, was embalmed, and wrapped in a sere cloth… and put into an inner sheet of lead, inclosed in an elegant coffin of the choicest wood. Owing to the disease he died of… his body, though bound up and laid in the coffin, swelled and bursted, from whence came such filth [that] raised such a deadly and noisome stink…”
Another observer was George Bate, a physician present at Cromwell’s embalming. According to Bate, Cromwell’s corpse was wrapped tightly in four layers in cloth then buried in two coffins, one lead and one wood – yet despite this it still “purged and wrought through all”, or leaked from the outer coffin. Hence the decision was made to bury the putrid Protector, prematurely and privately:
“The corpse being quickly buried, by reason of the great stench thereof…”
Cromwell’s body was buried in Westminster Abbey several weeks before his funeral. In mid-October, Londoners were invited to view Cromwell’s ‘body’, though what they saw was an ornately-dressed wooden mannequin sporting a wax face. The funeral procession did not take place until November 23rd, eight weeks after Cromwell’s death. The coffin transported to Westminster Abbey was probably empty. Some £60,000 was spent on this elaborate charade.
Cromwell’s real body did not rest long. It was hauled out of the Abbey in January 1661 and later subjected to a posthumous execution and public humiliation. Cromwell’s head survived this mistreatment and was passed about by collectors for the next four centuries.
Clement L. Vallandigham, whose prepping for court didn’t go entirely to plan
Clement L. Vallandigham (1820-71) was a prominent Ohio lawyer and politician who served in Congress prior to and during the Civil War.
A pacifist by nature, Vallandigham made several inflammatory speeches against the war and those he deemed responsible for it, including Abraham Lincoln. In May 1863, Vallandigham was arrested and temporarily interned, before being deported to the Confederacy. The following year he sneaked back into the United States via Canada, with the aid of a new hairstyle and a false moustache.
After the war, Vallandigham returned to his native Ohio and to practising law. In June 1871 he was in the town of Lebanon, acting as lead defence counsel in a murder case. His client, a Hamilton ruffian named Thomas McGehan, was charged with shooting another man in the stomach during a bar room fight. Vallandigham’s line of defence was quite simple: the victim had in fact shot himself while trying to withdraw his pistol while rising to stand.
At breakfast one morning, Vallandigham showed his legal team how he intended to demonstrate this in court – but made a fatal error:
“Mr McBurney [another lawyer] had expressed some doubts as to the possibility of Myers [the victim] shooting himself in the manner described by Mr Vallandigham, when the latter said ‘I will show you in a half a second’. He picked up a revolver and putting it in his right pocket, drew it out far enough to keep the muzzle touching his body, and engaged the hammer. The weapon exploded and sent its deadly missile into the abdomen at a point almost corresponding with that in which Myers was shot. Mr Vallandigham immediately exclaimed that he had taken up the wrong pistol… There were two revolvers on the table, one loaded and the other unloaded. Unfortunately Mr Vallandigham seized the former.”
Vallandigham was carried to bed and doctors were summoned but they were unable to locate the bullet or stem his internal bleeding. He died some 12 hours later. His corpse was packed in ice and returned to his home in Dayton for burial. Vallandigham’s wife Louisa, who was attending her brother’s funeral at the time of her husband’s demise, was grief stricken; she died from a heart attack seven weeks later. Vallandigham’s client, Thomas McGehan, was retried twice and eventually acquitted.
In April 1779, a young Staffordshire woman, Miss Nangle, set out to walk from her Uttoxeter home to nearby Doveridge. A mile into her journey, Miss Nangle smelled smoke and discovered that the back of her skirt was in fire.
When her attempts to damp down this fire failed, she ran to douse herself in a nearby pond. But by the time Miss Nangle reached the water her clothing was fully ablaze, the flames reaching “an alarming height”. Severely burned, Miss Nangle was carried back to Uttoxeter and given medical assistance, though she was “without hope of recovery”. She lingered in agony for five weeks before dying on June 2nd.
According to Miss Nangle herself, the fire was ignited by a small spying-glass she was carrying in her pocket:
“It was a very hot day and it is supposed the reflection of the sun upon the glass set some part of her clothes on fire… She persisted to the last that the fire began in her pocket where the spying-glass was… Her death could not otherwise be accounted for, no lightning having been observed that day.”
Coronial records from the 16th century describe the death of Henry Pert, a gentleman from Welbeck, near Worksop in Nottinghamshire. Pert died a day after receiving an arrow to the head – apparently fired from his own weapon. According to the coroner’s finding, Pert was stood over his loaded longbow while attempting to release a jammed arrow:
“[Pert] went out to play at Welbeck and drew his bow so fully with an arrow In it that he lodged the arrow in the bow. Afterwards, intending to make the arrow climb straight into the air, he shot the arrow from the bow… Because his face was directly over the arrow as it climbed upwards, it struck him above his left eye, near to his eyelid, and into his head to the membrane. Thus the said arrow (worth one penny) gave him a wound, of which he immediately languished and lay languishing until noon on October 29th, when he died at Welbeck by misadventure.”
Welsh coronial records from the spring of 1801 contain a brief but thought-provoking summary of the death of William Hopkin. According to an inquest held in Cardiff, Hopkin succumbed after being hit in the groin by a flying loaf of bread:
“At the Coroner’s inquest taken at Cardiff before the Bailiffs, William Prichard and Henry Hollier, on a view of the body of William Hopkin, found that he met his death through injuries received at the hands of Morgan Hopkin of Cardiff, labourer, who threw a twopenny wheaten loaf at the deceased and thereby inflicted a mortal blow upon his private parts, resulting in death a few days after such assault.”
Sadly, further research was not able to uncover the nature of William Hopkin’s injuries, why or how the loaf was thrown and whether the perpetrator was brought to justice. The fate of the deadly bread is also unknown.
Elizabeth Sharper was an old woman living in Sidgate, Newcastle. In her younger years she committed fornication with a married man, carrying and delivering his child.
Despite getting on with life and being “well respected by her neighbours”, Elizabeth was deeply affected by her earlier transgressions. In her late 70s she fell into a “deep despair”, apparently caused by remorse and grief over the loss of her illegitimate child decades before. She confessed to “bearing a bastard” and told others that the child was snatched from her at birth and probably murdered.
In the summer of 1703, Elizabeth took her life in a particularly horrific fashion. According to local records she:
“..ripped up her belly with a pair of scissors and pulled her bowels out with her hand… her puddings came out and lay on each side of her… A surgeon put them in their place again and sewed up her belly.”
Elizabeth survived for several days with her “reason and senses” intact, though she was undoubtedly in agony. She was buried in the graveyard of St Andrew’s in August 1703.
