That was his name: just John. No one seemed to know if he had a surname, so they hanged him as John at Salisbury (now Harare) Prison on Thursday, April 2nd, 1959. John was the servant of Mrs. Lettie Digby-Ovens, 29, who was a celebrated fashion model. He stabbed her to death when she was
Desperately poor and desperately worried about the future of his three young daughters, who were all under five, music teacher Edward Williams, 52, cut the childrens throats in their bedroom at his lodgings in Sydney and then went on the run. Several days later, on February 10th, 1924, he gave himself up. I did it
The lower deck situation on the Canadian Navy ship Naden at Victoria naval base in British Columbia wasnt exactly shipshape. Two sailors were sleeping together, and this at a time, in the summer of 1958, when gay sex was illegal in Canada and severely punishable under military law. Aaron Jenkins, 23, wanted to become a
Singapore made drug dealing a capital offence in 1975 and that law has been widely publicised ever since. The first man to die under it was Teh Sin Tong, 28, a Malaysian labourer, who was hanged at dawn on Friday, April 28th, 1978, at Changi Prison. In the next decade 20 drug-dealers were hanged in
Two Frenchmen who served as mercenaries in the old Rhodesian army turned to crime after the 1980 war that created Zimbabwe. In 1981 they shot dead a caf? owner, Erhard Kraft. For this Gervaise Boutanquoi and Simon Chemouth were sentenced to death and despite appeals for clemency from France they were hanged at dawn on
Indias Revolutionary Party branch in the Bengal region, dedicated to liberating India from British rule, was so impressed with the zeal of its new recruit, 18-year-old Khudiram Bose, that he was given a special mission to assassinate the local chief police magistrate, Mr. Kingsford. On April 30th, 1908, in the best tradition of assassins
An aboriginal tracker known as Jimmie was called in by South Australian police to hunt down the man who raped and strangled 12-year-old Elizabeth Nielson just 300 yards from her home in Monash in the outback. Jimmies tracking skills led him to the home of James Watherston, a 27-year-old labourer, who confessed to the crime
I have neither the desire to marry you nor the temperament to tolerate further your repeated importuning, declared 41-year-old Elizabeth Dowsette when Joseph Bergeron came knocking at her door for the umpteenth time. Small wonder she was cross. She knew Bergeron, a tinsmith, had abandoned his wife and five children to pursue her, and several
Forty-three-year-old Hattie Decker, a farmers daughter of Montville, New Jersey, had two suitors for her hand in marriage Samuel Monich, 45, a Hungarian immigrant, and John Bolk, a local grain and feed retailer, in whose store Hattie used to buy provisions for her fathers farm. Monich became so jealous of Bolk that he bought
Becoming tired of his family and wanting to go off and live with his young girl friend, blacksmith Karl Willmann, of Hagenburg, Austria, started a domestic row that ended with him using his hammer to beat to death his wife, child and mother-in-law. He was sentenced to death in November 1948 for the triple murder