ET yesterday

Yesterday I got another ET entry in, #196: Modiste Villebrun, the last person executed in Canada while it was still a colony. Villebrun lived in Quebec and he and his girlfriend, Sophie Boisclair, poisoned his wife and her husband so they could marry each other. They got away with the first murder but they were caught the second time. My guess is the lovers weren’t being terribly discreet about their affair.

Sophie Boisclair’s sentence was commuted to life in prison because she was pregnant. She was released after serving 20 years.

And that’s the last of my Executed Today entries for this month.

ET in 1875: William Hole

Executed Today by me (the entry not the hanging obviously): William Hole, who murdered his wife. It’s a pretty sad tale of drunken domestic violence by a mentally ill and probably brain-damaged individual.

Executed Today: five people lynched in Alabama

Another ET entry: five black people got lynched in Alabama on this day in 1895, after they murdered a white guy, the nephew of a former governor. A sixth man was lynched for the same crime about a week later.

Another ET: John Kelliher

On this day in 1886, John “Big Red” Kelliher was lynched in Minnesota for his murder of a popular village marshal. There isn’t much to this entry, but it does contain a pretty good photograph.

ET entry: Williams Haas & Wiley

Two murderers named William were judicially fried on this date in 1897. Both crimes were pretty typical and I wouldn’t have bothered to write this one up except that they were the first to be executed in Ohio’s electric chair.

Germantown Historical Society opens Charley Ross exhibit

This was sent to me by my cousin Dejah. (Hi, Dejah!) The Germantown Historical Society in Pennsylvania has opened an exhibit on the ransom kidnapping of four-year-old Charley Ross, for whom the Charley Project is named. It includes all the original ransom notes.

Why the exhibit is called “Kidnapped: Lost and Found” I do not know, seeing as how Charley was never found.

ET: Hester Foster and William Young Graham

A short entry, which I actually wrote years ago: the integrated double execution of Hester Foster and William Young Graham, who’d committed separate murders while in prison.

Charley Ross ransom letters have surfaced

From someone via the Charley Project FB page: the original ransom notes from the Charley Ross case have appeared in a school librarian’s desk drawer.

I’m quite sure they weren’t the first ransom notes in history, but they are very important documents.

And more by me on Executed Today

This time it’s Rebecca Smith, a 19th century Englishwoman who lived in dire poverty and poisoned eight of her eleven children because she couldn’t afford to keep them. Too bad they didn’t have the Pill back then; it could have prevented this tragedy.

Not that I’ll ever put it on Charley, but…

Sean Munger has written a blog post about John Lansing, Jr., a guy who disappeared a whopping 184 years ago. He was 75 at the time. He left his New York City hotel to mail a letter and never came back.