But back to Bathsheba. Who better, she decided, to rid her of Joshua, than the two deserters? Trained to kill and decidedly bribeable, they were the obvious choice, and she also cajoled her lover to join in. However, all three, lacking any finesse, simply attacked Joshua and, after beating him up, threw his body down a well. Unfortunately for the murderers, the cadaver was later discovered by locals while drawing water. The authorities were notified and the soldiers were caught spending their ill-gotten gains: the game was up.
All four stood trial on the date most befitting to their maladroit method of committing murder, 1 April 1778. In court Bathsheba claimed to be pregnant, and had she been in England and in that condition her execution would have been postponed until after the birth. However, the reverse procedure was applied; she was hanged first and then examined, the doctors discovering that she was carrying a foetus barely six months old.
Nuremberg executioner Franz Schmidt reported how, in 1604, Elizabeth Puffin, a maid, attacked her employer’s brother-in-law, striking his head eleven blows and nearly severing one of his arms. Then, stealing some money, she escaped, only to be arrested soon afterwards. In prison she pleaded a respite of 32 weeks because she said she was pregnant, and the committee of sworn women visited her no fewer than 18 times. They must have finally discovered that she was lying, for Franz wrote: ‘I beheaded her with the sword – she behaved in a Christian way.’
Sullivan, Mary (Australia)
If you had to be hanged at all, it was much better to have a professional doing it rather than a convict who had volunteered for the job in order to avoid quarrying rocks or building roads. But, unfortunately, Mary Sullivan didn’t have that choice.
Mary had been transported to the penal colony in Tasmania for committing a trivial offence in England, and was employed, as so many of the convicted women were, as a servant in a house owned by one of the more permanent settlers.
In 1852, for some unaccountable reason, she strangled one of the small children of the family, and threw the little corpse into a water butt before absconding. When caught, she showed not the slightest emotion, nor were there any psychological symptoms that could account for her crime. With hindsight and the present knowledge of what life was like for those transported thousands of miles away from their families, treated more like animals than human beings, with no prospect of ever returning home, it can only be assumed that hers were the actions of someone totally without hope.
Little time was wasted in sentencing her to death, and even on the scaffold she evinced no signs of fear. Worse was to come, however, for her executioner was Solomon Blay, a felon transported from England in 1837 for counterfeiting. During his new career as chief hangman in the colony he had never shown any indication that he intended to advance the art of hanging a condemned person by reducing the amount of pain they were experiencing, and obviously had no intention of starting with Mary Sullivan. He had previously dispatched Henry Jackson, whose struggles were reported as being ‘prolonged beyond the usual period of suffering’, and in 1844 he allowed Thomas Marshall to writhe on the rope for many minutes, so he saw no reason why he should modify his technique just because his victim was female. Even those in the huge crowd hissed and booed his deliberate tardiness as he left her standing on the trapdoors, hooded and noosed, for an unusually long time, then added insult to injury by ‘chucking’ (tugging) the rope to see that it was tight enough around her throat before finally operating the drop.
In 1787 the first batch of convicts, 736 in number, were shipped out to the penal colony in Australia. Elizabeth Beckford was the second oldest woman among them; seventy years of age, she had been sentenced to transportation for seven years for stealing 12 lb of cheese. Another Elizabeth among the human cargo was Elizabeth Powley, who not only stole some bacon and flour, but also 24 ounces of butter, valued at 12 pence. She was originally sentenced to hang but this was commuted to transportation. She never ate butter again.
T
Thompson, Ellen (Australia)
Yet another case of a dominant woman and a weak-willed man – and yet more bungled executions. Ellen, calculatingly ruthless yet with motherly affection for her children, fell in love with John Harrison, simple, selfish and, the cause of his downfall, madly in love with Ellen. The third member of the ill-fated triangle, the first of the three to die, was Ellen’s husband Billie. Billie was a man of integrity, hard-working and fair, albeit uncompromising and mean-minded. By labouring all hours on his farm he had become wealthy and prosperous, the only failure in his life being that of his marriage. He and Ellen quarrelled incessantly, the atmosphere becoming so heated that, unable to stand each other’s company, Billie built and lived in a cottage about a hundred yards away from the main farmhouse, where Ellen lived. Regardless of his attitude towards her, Billie still had his principles, especially in respect of his family, and so in 1885 he made a will in which he left the farm and all his property to his wife and children. Not a sensible thing to do under the fraught circumstances – but how was he to know?
On learning of the will, Ellen, aware that Billie was much older than her and so was likely to die first, worked even harder on the farm, determined to increase its ultimate value when she took over, but a woman could do only so much heavy work, and when, in 1886, harvesting time came round, extra hands had to be employed. One of the labourers was John Harrison, a demobbed soldier of the British Army looking for work. Scything and reaping together in the fields, Ellen got to know John and he became utterly infatuated with her, the affinity between them resulting in Ellen’s lonely nights in the farmhouse becoming a thing of the past. And it was then that Ellen realised where her future lay – and with whom – and exactly how to achieve it.
The first step was to circulate rumours that Billie had business troubles, cash-flow problems that were causing him to be severely depressed, to the point that he was even contemplating suicide. And the next step was to kill him.
On the night of 2 October of that year, a neighbouring farmer was wakened by Ellen who was hysterically shouting that Billie was dead, that he had blown the top of his head off with a shotgun. The police were sent for, the detectives quickly coming to the conclusion that suicide could be ruled out, and that murder had been committed. This decision was probably based on the fact that the murderers had placed the gun next to the body, whereas had Billie pointed the weapon at his own head and fired it, the recoil would have propelled it across the room, to land on the floor.
The lovers were arrested and in May 1887 appeared in the Supreme Court in Townsville, North Queensland. The trial was repeatedly interrupted by Ellen who, desperate to throw all the blame on her partner, shouted wildly, ‘This is no court of justice – all the world is working against me!’ and constantly hurled abuse at the prosecution witnesses. When the jury returned with a verdict of guilty, her furious protests reached a crescendo; when asked by the judge whether she had anything to say, she exclaimed:
Have I anything to say? I should say I have! I’d have had a lot to say before this if the police hadn’t stopped me! I have been completely ruined by losing my husband and I would not encourage murder for £1,000. Since early life I have struggled hard with Old Billie Thompson. I am a brick – every inch of me. But Old Billie was not a suitable husband, he was so jealous of everything that I could hardly live. He made a will and left me everything, but I would not disgrace him by having a fancy man. Old Billie often said that he would commit suicide, and all the evidence here is horrid lying. If it was murder at all, the Chinaman here did it, because he and Old Billie had a row over some land. Here am I in this dreadful North, disgraced and found guilty of murder; I have not got a shilling, and when I am gone you will find that I did not murder Old Billie Thompson.
Her frenzied protests went on for three-quarters of an hour, only stopping when the judge placed the black cap on his head and sentenced both the lovers to death. ‘Oh my God!’ Ellen cried, and slumped against John Harrison sitting next to her in the dock, then fo
ught the guards as they took her away.
Some days later Ellen and John were taken by ship to Brisbane, where they were imprisoned in the Boggo Road Gaol. The case attracted wide public attention, the newspapers reporting that in one of her outbursts Ellen had declared that she would never die at a hangman’s hands, that she would appeal to the State Governor for clemency. In one letter to him she wrote:
I have already made one appeal to you for the life of John Harrison, whom I believe is innocent. I have three demands to make: firstly, in the event of my innocence being proved, my children are to receive £500 [presumably as compensation]. Secondly, that all my statements will be returned to me so that I can destroy them, and thirdly that Pope Cooper [the trial judge] may be never allowed to sentence another woman in Queensland. If these demands are not granted, I will stick out for my rights at the foot of the gallows, but if they are allowed, I will die on the gallows like an angel.
This somewhat illogically reasoned appeal was rejected, and the execution was set to take place on 13 June 1887. Thousands of applications to witness the dual event were received from the public but only one was granted, that of a professor of phrenology who was to be permitted to measure the contours and dimensions of the corpses’ heads, and perhaps even take plaster casts of them after their bodies had been cut down.
At 8 a.m. on the fateful day, Ellen, wearing a black dress and a little black bonnet, carrying a crucifix in her hands, was escorted by two prison guards to the execution chamber. At first she seemed resigned to her fate, but on seeing the gallows her calm deserted her. ‘Ah, soon I’ll be in a land where people won’t be able to tell lies about me!’ she shouted, and as she set her foot on the scaffold steps she exclaimed, ‘I will die like an angel!’
At the top stood the extremely hirsute executioner, ‘Blackbeard’ (at that time, that nickname was given to all Australian hangmen, in the same way as English ones were dubbed ‘Jack Ketch’). Positioning her on the trapdoors, Blackbeard proceeded to bind her arms, although allowed her to retain the crucifix. Then came the white hood and the noose, her prayers being audible through the material. Then, as described by an eyewitness, ‘the hangman sprang back and pulled the lever. A dull and dreadful thud shattered the brooding stillness as the trapdoors flew open and the woman hurtled to her doom. But Blackbeard had made a frightful mistake! The drop had been too long and the woman’s skin was broken. She bled profusely.’
Harrison’s execution followed, with the same ghastly results, his throat also being torn open. Such horrific miscalculations resulted in that particular executioner declaring afterwards that he would never officiate at another hanging.
Editors of the local papers were later presented with the findings and subsequent character assessments diagnosed by the learned phrenologist, Professor Blumenthal. In Ellen Thompson, he said that he found combativeness and destructiveness in very large proportions. Domestic affections were fairly full, while selfish and animal propensities were large. In Harrison he found that combativeness was excessively large, and destructiveness was also full. From these observations, he declared, it would seem that the woman was the moving spirit in the plot, and her passion for Harrison probably inspired her. These scientific conclusions no doubt resulted in the newspaper readers anxiously feeling their own – and their spouses’ – heads for similar homicidal characteristics.
John Nicol, a seaman on one of the convict ships bound for Australia in the eighteenth century, married one of the convicts, a Sarah Whitlam. He wrote in his book, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner, published in 1822: ‘She was as true and kind a creature as ever lived. I courted her for a week and upwards, and would have married her, had a clergyman been on board. I fixed my fancy on her from the moment I knocked the rivet out of her leg irons upon the anvil [on being brought on board] and am firmly resolved to bring her back to England when her time is up, as my wife.’ Sadly, however, he had to return alone, leaving her and their young son behind in Australia.
Ticquet, Angelique (France)
In seventeenth-century Paris the focus of masculine attention was directed towards the ravishingly attractive Angelique Cartier, daughter of a rich printer and bookbinder. Yet despite every advance made by the young and wealthy noblemen who flocked around her, she surprised local aristocracy by marrying M. Ticquet, a magistrate and councillor of Parliament. But the union turned out to be a fiasco; her none too well-off husband soon realised that his income was totally inadequate to provide Angelique with the wherewithal needed to maintain her personal servants, her carriages, her lavish soirees and receptions, to which only the elite were invited. Among the latter was a certain M. de Montgeorges, a captain in the French Guards Regiment, and an affair soon commenced; indeed very far from discreet, for Angelique made no secret of it, with the result that her cuckolded husband became the laughing stock of the City.
Domestic matters went from bad to worse, and Angelique’s contempt for her husband degenerated into cold hatred, to the extent that she planned to have him murdered. Accordingly she induced her porter, Jacques Moura, to enlist some underworld hitmen who would be prepared to eliminate the unfortunate man. However, she later abandoned that idea and instead decided to add poison to his nightly cup of broth. Unfortunately for her, although fortunate for her husband, the manservant whose task it was to take the drink up to his master suspected her motives and ‘accidentally’ dropped the cup, spilling its contents. Thwarted, Angelique revived her original plan, and the hired killers went into action, with the result that a few nights later, as M. Ticquet was returning home, he was attacked and shot five times, but none of the wounds proved fatal.
Although the subsequent police investigations failed to identify the would-be murderers, Angelique and Moura were arrested and put on trial. On 3 June 1699 the judge pronounced sentence; the porter was to be hanged and Angelique Cartier to be decapitated in the Place de Grève; her property was to be confiscated for the benefit of the King, except for 100,000 livres, which would go to her husband.
As it was customary that those condemned to death should first confirm the court’s verdict by confessing to their crimes, Angelique was led by one of her former admirers, Criminal Lieutenant Deffits, to the torture chamber, where the sentence was then read out to her. A confession not being forthcoming, she was subjected to the dreaded Water Torture. Strapped down on a bench, a cow horn was inserted in her mouth, jugs of water then being poured in. Angelique needed little of such appalling persuasion, and soon admitted her part in the attempt on her husband’s life.
Some days later she was escorted to the scaffold where the executioner, Charles Sanson, awaited. As she arrived, a heavy thunderstorm broke over the city, scattering the enormous crowd that had gathered to watch and gloat over the execution of such a figure of high society. Sanson, not daring to proceed with the beheading – for to attempt to swing the heavy two-handed sword while standing on slippery wet boards could end in catastrophe – led his victim to shelter, a nerve-racking half an hour passing before she mounted the steps of the scaffold. After praying, she said, ‘Sir, will you be good enough to show me the position I am to take?’ Charles replied, ‘Kneel down with your head up; lift your hair away from your neck, so that it falls forward over your face.’ As she did so, he stepped back and swung the sword round in order to gain the necessary momentum before actually aiming it – only to lose all concentration as she suddenly exclaimed, ‘Be sure not to disfigure me!’ Too late to stop, Charles sought to direct the razor-edged weapon to its target, but only succeeded in slashing the side of his victim’s neck! Again he tried, the crescendo of violent abuse coming from the crowd only serving to distract him further, and it was not until he had delivered a third, more accurate stroke, was the woman’s head finally severed from her body. Justice had been done.
Mme Roland, mentioned elsewhere, faced death by the guillotine with dignity, and even felt compassion for the other doomed aristocrats accompanying her in the tumbril. As they arrived at th
e scaffold she noticed that one of them, M. Lamarche, was on the point of collapse and had to be helped down by an assistant executioner. Although women were usually allowed to be guillotined first, she said pityingly, ‘I can only spare you the sight of blood – go first, poor man!’
Turner, Anne (England)
Although it was Anne who was hanged, the real instigator of the murder plot was a poisonous woman who actually got away with it. Even at the age of fifteen, Frances Howard was a seductive young woman in the Court of James I, and the man who willingly walked into her spider’s web was Robert Carr, a fair-haired, ginger-bearded page whose very intimate friendship with the boy-favouring King was so much appreciated by His Majesty that he ennobled Carr, who then took the title of Viscount Rochester, and gave him a important position in court in which he dealt with State affairs. (James I’s generosity to those he favoured led one court critic to say, behind his hand of course, that ‘James hunted everything that ran, and knighted everything that crawled!’)
But pandering to James’ sexual tastes did not prejudice Rochester against women as gorgeous as Frances, and when he fell madly in love with her, his only problem was that he was not overly well-educated. In 1611 he persuaded a highly intelligent though penniless courtier, Sir Thomas Overbury, to help him deal with the official documents – and also to write passionate love letters to Frances on his behalf, even though at the time she was the wife of the equally youthful Earl of Essex. Overbury was quite satisfied to perform this task as long as he shared in the bountiful gifts and money lavished on Carr by the King.
Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen Page 20