ET entry: three teenagers in Ohio

I had an ET entry posted today for three boys who were hanged in Ohio on this day in 1880: George Mann, Gustave Ohr and John Sammett. They were between the ages of fifteen years and eighteen years plus one day when they died. Mann and Ohr had run away from home and were riding the rails when they hooked up with a fellow tramp, robbed and killed him. Sammett had robbed a store with another boy who agreed to turn state’s evidence against him. Sammett shot and killed him to prevent him from testifying.

I noted that Mann and Ohr’s gallows ballads were suspiciously similar to the ballad published by another murderer whom I wrote about on Executed Today, Christopher Rafferty, who was hanged in 1874. And Rafferty’s ballad in turn appears to have been plagiarized from the 1858 ballad for James Rogers.

ET entry out of Belize

Got an Executed Today entry posted today: Kent Bowers, the last person hanged in Belize. He died in 1985. Honestly I don’t understand why he got the death penalty; it was a senseless murder, yes, but it doesn’t appear to have been premeditated and it may not have even been intentional. And on top of everything else Bowers was a minor.

ET entry for today

I’ve got an Executed Today entry posted: Tsutomu Miyazaki, a Japanese serial killer of little girls who was executed on this day in 2008. He was quite the sicko.

A mother-and-son ET entry

My second Executed Today entry of the month: May and Howard Carey, a mother and son hanged in Delaware on this day in 1935. They’d killed May’s brother, Robert Hitchens, for his insurance policy, worth $2,000 — the equivalent of 35k in 2017, sez this inflation calculator. One of May’s other sons, sixteen-year-old James, got life in prison for his role in the murder.

I’ve got two more entries this month, on the 17th and the 19th. (Unless I write some more. Which I might, who knows. I bet I could get some out of the books I bought at Auschwitz.)

Okay, I’m awake now (and have an ET entry today)

I’ll do a big writeup of what happened in Poland, with pictures, and post it in PDF format later. That way anyone who wants to read it can and anyone who does not can easily skip it.

I visited a milk bar, ate pierogies, ate kasha, got stuck twice in train station toilets (once having to climb over the top of the stall door to get out), and bought 18 books at the Auschwitz gift shop for just $140. The exchange rate is great. Having to lug the 18 books around (plus three others I bought elsewhere) for the rest of the trip was not so great. Michael magnanimously offered to carry them in his suitcase at first. But the Airbnb we stayed in on the last night before we left for home was a fourth-floor walkup (that was really the only thing wrong with it) and it took him fifteen minutes to haul his suitcase up the four floors, cursing me and the books the entire time. After that we put half the books in my suitcase and half in my backpack, and thus I was able to get them home.

A lot of things have inevitably happened in the missing persons world in my absence. That’s for my next entry. In the meantime, check out today’s Executed Today entry: Sally Bassett, an elderly Bermudian slave roasted alive on this day in 1730 after she tried to poison her master and mistress with “white toad” imported from Africa.

ET by me today: a perhaps unprecedented murder conviction

I posted an Executed Today entry today: William Pitman, who was hanged for murder in Virginia in 1775.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the only case of this kind in American history. Check out the entry to see what I mean.

ET entry by me on May 8

I had an Executed Today entry posted on May 8: one Charles Smith, who was hanged on that day in Oxford, England in 1887. It was a fairly typical, albeit horrific, domestic violence type homicide.