Centenaries - whole and half

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50 years ago - 1961 March 30 - Jack Day is hanged in the U.K. for the slaying of Keith Arthur who he'd caught with Mrs. Day. During the Marriage, Day also had affairs but didn't take to the reverse and shot the victim.

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50 years ago - 1961 April 13 - In Kansas, Pvt. John Bennett is hanged for rape. He was, so far, the last person to be judicially executed by the military of the United States.

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100 years ago - 1911 April 29 - Outside the home she shares with her parents, 22-year-old Alice Isobel Linford is accosted by a man named George Baron Pateman, 33, a man who has essentially become her stalker. Miss Linford refuses his advances. In a rage, he slashes her throat with a razor. Isobel is able to stagger back into the house but is unable to speak before she dies on the kitchen floor. Pateman is found and admits to being at the home but claims that Alice was approached by another man as he was leaving. Blood is found on Pateman's clothing and is determined to be human. He was convicted and sentenced to hang but that was later commuted to a prison term. This was the first case in England based on human blood evidence. Before this, experts were only able to say that the blood was mammalian.

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100 years ago - 1911 May 3 - A Michigan man, Albert Sparling, 22, dies from a mysterious ailment. Suspicion will be further aroused in the summer when a younger brother will die under similar circumstances. Investigators will find arsenic in both their bodies. In previous years, another brother and their father had also died from a like sickness. Carrie Sparling, the mother and wife of the dead, who had profited from all the fatalities due to inheritance and insurance, was arrested but the charges were later dropped to the dismay of some. The attending physician at all four deaths, who had more than a professional relationship with Carrie, was Dr. John MacGregor. He had encouraged Mrs. Sparling to take out the life insurance policies on her sons. Dr. MacGregor was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced to life in 1912. During 1916, Governor Woodbridge Ferris pardoned the doctor because he said he thought MacGregor was innocent. The reprieved then got a job working as a doctor in the Michigan prison system and died in 1928 at the age of 52.

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100 years ago - 1911 May 7 - The body of five-year-old Chicago girl, Elsie Paroubek is found in a canal 30 miles southwest of the city. She'd been suffocated and was last seen 29 days earlier when she told her mother that she was going across the street to visit an aunt. The murder of the little girl was never solved. Avant garde writer Henry Darger fixated on the case and included a rendition in his work In the Realms of the Unreal.

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50 years ago - 1961 May 10 - Jeannace Freeman and Gertrude Jackson, who are lesbian lovers, are walking through an Oregon park with the latter's two little children. Freeman, without objection from Jackson, stripped and strangled the little 6-year-old boy before castrating him and throwing his body into a gorge. After that, Jackson then joined Freeman in the slaying of her little daughter who was also thrown off the bridge. Both women went to prison for life after Freeman's original death sentence was commuted.

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150 years ago - 1861 May 24 - U. S. Army Col. Elmer Ellsworth is killed coming down the stairs of the Marshall House Inn. He'd just removed a Confederate flag from above the Alexandria, Virginia building when the owner, James Jackson, murdered him with a shotgun. Corporal Francis Brownwell, one of the four men in Ellsworth's detachment, accordingly shot and killed Jackson. Ellsworth was one of the first casualties of the Civil War, although his death was not the result of enemy military action.

100 years ago - 1911 May 24 - A fight in a Denver bar results in the shooting deaths of Sylvester Von Phul and a bystander named G. E. Copeland. The killer was Frank Henwood, a man who'd been feuding with Von Phul over a married woman named Isabelle Springer. Henwood received a death sentence but that was eventually commuted to life and he was paroled after ten years.

[Mayerling]

150 years ago - 1861 May 24 - U. S. Army Col. Elmer Ellsworth is killed coming down the stairs of the Marshall House Inn. He'd just removed a Confederate flag from above the Alexandria, Virginia building when the owner, James Jackson, murdered him with a shotgun. Corporal Francis Brownwell, one of the four men in Ellsworth's detachment, accordingly shot and killed Jackson. Ellsworth was one of the first casualties of the Civil War, although his death was not the result of enemy military action.

Hi Stan,

Ellsworth was a friend of President Lincoln - he had worked as an office boy in Lincoln's law firm, and later had been on the 1860 election team. He also created the New York Zouavres, patterned on the French Zouavres. They were supposed to climb ropes with barrels strapped to their legs, and to be able to draw and fire guns from acrobatic positions. Ellsworth need not have gone on the mission to Alexandria, but he saw the rebel flag and saw it as an affront to the White House (from where he saw it). He had torn the flag down, and Jackson got out a rifle and shot Ellsworth as he was coming downstairs with the flag. Brownwell not only shot him but bayonetted Jackson as well. Support for the Confederacy was high in Alexandria, and a memorial for Jackson as put up outside his hotel (for defending his proper from an invader). But Ellsworth's death made him the first Norhern martyr of the war. Shortly, at the battle at Big Bethel, Virginia, another martyr was created for the North when the writer, Major Theodore Winthrop (yes I used his name for my name on the e-mail) was killed. Months later, at the battle of Ball's Bluff, Virginia in October 1861, Colonel Edward Baker was killed. He was a former Senator from Oregon. Hs death, like Ellsworth's, hit Lincoln hard, for like Ellesworth Ned Baker was a close family friend (his first son, Edward Baker Lincoln, was named for Ned Baker). As the war years progressed Lincoln would lose other family and friends, including his son Willie (in February 1862 to typhoid) and his favorite brother-in-law, Confederate General Benjamin Hardin Helm, at the battle of Chicamauga in September 1863.

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Thanks Jeff. I think I read somewhere that Brownwell might have been the first person in the country's history to receive the Medal of Honor.

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50 years ago - 1961 May 25 - An English hangman puts an end to Victor John Terry. Mr. Terry had shot and killed a sixty-one-year-old bank attendant named John Pull during a robbery.

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100 years ago - 1911 May 28 - A woman named Belle Walker is found slain with her throat cut and mutilated. Belle is the second victim of the Atlanta Jack the Ripper and he will go on killing for about another year. All the victims were, at the time, described as young, attractive, well-dressed mulatto women. The murder series will never be solved. One woman who escaped the presumed killer, described him as a well-dressed black man.

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50 years ago - 1961 May 30 - In Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic dictator Raphael Trujillo is shot and killed as he and his wife are out for an evening drive. Antonio de la Maza was reportedly the gunman but the assassination was the result of a plan hatched by a rather large group. The C.I.A. was even rumored to be involved.

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50 years ago - 1961 June 4 - The Sydney Mutilator commits his first known murder today. Alfred Greenfield's nude body was found under an outbuilding. He'd been stabbed about thirty times and sexually mutilated. After three more like murders in the next fifteen months, William MacDonald was arrested for the crimes and sent to prison. MacDonald asserted that the slayings were his retribution for a gay sexual assault that had been perpetrated against him when he was a teenager. He was eventually moved to a secure hospital for the criminally insane.

[Zodiac]

Hatchet Job!!!

Hi Stan,

I know that it is not a centenary or the like, but I do think that June 1st/2nd is the anniversary of Lizzie Borden's death in 1927. Hope that all is well with you.

Best wishes,
Zodiac.

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Yes Zodiac, I'm still plugging away.