Executed 185 years ago yesterday: Charles Wall

Charles Wall was executed on July 30, 1830 for the murder of his fiancee’s daughter. He supposedly pushed her down a 240-foot-deep limestone pit. Me, I’m not convinced this was a murder at all. Certainly, in my mind, there’s room for reasonable doubt: the pit was unfenced, the child had been seen playing near it alone, and Wall had no discernable motive for killing her.

July 30, incidentally, was the five-year anniversary of the day I first started posting on Executed Today. My entry for the First Defenestration of Prague ran on July 30, 2010. (Does anyone else think “The Defenestration of Prague” would make a great name for a band?) I also had Thomas Alva Edison’s Newfoundland electrocution run on July 30, 2013.