Centenaries - whole and half

[sdreid]

The firing squad was used in a 2010 execution here in the U.S. and is still an option in at least one state.

[Mayerling]

G'Day Jeff

I realized that it was legal for Cleveland to hire a replacement for the War. And I found it interesting when I stumbled across him as

A hangman

A Governor deciding if executions should proceed or not than

A President [the only one to serve non-consecutive term I believe]

The other President that I find interesting is the one who didn't run for a second term and is considered to have fulfilled every election promise he made [can't remember his name off hand].

Hi GUT

Cleveland was the only President to serve two non-consecutive terms. Benjamin Harrison, after his 1892 re-election defeat, was approached to run again in 1896 but declined. Cleveland (believe it or not) was re-approached to run in the 1904 election against his old friend (despite different parties) Theodore Roosevelt. Having had the office he smartly declined (Cleveland died in 1908). The reason behind asking Grover to run a fourth time for the office was that the Democratic conservative wing did not want William Jennings Bryan, leader of the Democratic Progressive wing, to run for a third straight after Bryan lost to McKinley in 1896 and 1900. They also did not like that the person with the most delegates at the 1904 convention was then Congressman William Randolph Hearst (better recalled as a newspaper empire builder and one of the creators of "yellow journalism"). Hearst was considered too liberal too. They finally chose the Chief Justice of the New York State Court of Appeals, Alton Brooks Parker. Parker was snowed into total obscurity by the Roosevelt landslide of November 1904 (a two million vote majority - really big at the time).

The other President, who accomplished everything he promised in one term, is James Knox Polk, the eleventh President (1845-1849). The only Speaker of the House of Representatives ever to be electied President, Polk was a dark horse candidate because the Democrats had three leading contenders in the 1844 race for the nomination (former President Martin Van Buren, Senator James Buchanan, and Senator Lewis Cass) who all stymied each other at the convention. Polk was nominated as a compromise. He told one of his friends he wanted an independent Treasury bill (no further Banks of the United States problems), a lower tariff, the settlement of the Oregon territory question with Great Britain (then ruling what is now Canada), and acquisition of the Southwest from Mexico (he hoped to negociate a sale). He got all four, and had promised he only wanted one term in office. But a total control freak and a workaholic, Polk wore out his stamina. He left office in March 1849 (succeeded by General Zachary Taylor), and died of cholera in June 1849 - the shortest period an ex - President had after leaving the White House.

Jeff

[GUT]

Thanks Tom.

Thus US system is so different from the Westminster system established n Great Britain.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 January 31 - Louis Allen, a civil rights advocate, is murdered in Mississippi with two shotgun blasts to the head. The case is still officially unsolved but it is thought that Allen, who was black, was slain to keep him from giving testimony regarding and earlier incident that involved a prominent white man killing an African American gentleman. Mr. Allen was murdered the day before he planned to move to Milwaukee.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 February 1 - Vladimir Ionesyan, a Moscow serial killer, is executed by gun. He'd attacked at least 5 people by ax from late 1963 through January of this year. The killer's practice was to go into victim's apartments claiming to be a meter reader for the state gas company. Ionesyan was an ex convict and former entertainer.

[sdreid]

Delete double post

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 February 2 - A prostitute named Hannah Tailford is discovered nude, except for stockings, in the Thames. Her briefs were in her mouth but none of her other clothing was ever found. Hannah was the first canonical victim of the serial killer known as the Hammersmith Nudes Murderer or Jack the Stripper. She was pregnant, had some teeth missing and had apparently been strangled. Ms. Tailford had been missing for about a week. The Jack the Stripper murders, which totaled at least six, have never been solved.

[MayBea]

Thanks for noticing my earlier comment. There is, by the way, a homicide connected to the last Peary - Hanson North Pole Expedition. A party led by Ross Marvin, a young man working with Peary, returned and Marvin was said to have died in the journey. Subsequently it was found he was killed by the Inuits who were with him...

I can't believe I forgot Ross Marvin...

Thank you, Mayerling. This is another example of a situation where there is a mystery within a mystery. Shades of Whitechapel, I presume.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1914 February 20 - Michael Gilligan dies from poison that had been administered by his wife, Amy Archer-Gilligan. The woman similarly murdered patients in her unlicensed Connecticut "nursing home". Mrs. Gilligan killed between 5 and 50; mostly for the purpose of gaining financially from insurance and inheritance. She was first sentenced to death but eventually wound up in an insane asylum where she died in 1962.

[Mayerling]

I can't believe I forgot Ross Marvin...

Thank you, Mayerling. This is another example of a situation where there is a mystery within a mystery. Shades of Whitechapel, I presume.

I don't know if I could go as far as "Shades of Whitechapel" but why not.

If you want to consider a really interesting Arctic mystery (one of many) consider that of the death (in 1871) or Arctic traveller and explorere Charles Francis Hall in Greenland on his "Polaris" Expedition (the "Polaris" was his ship). Hall's corpse was exhumed by Chauncey Loomis in 1969, and was in a remarkably good state of preservation. It had large amounts of arsenic in it.
Hall may have doctored himself with patent medicines containing the arsenic, or may have been poisoned by someone else out of jealousy. Dr. Emil Bessels,the science officer on the expedition is usually considered most likely the killer, but second in command, whale boat Captain Sidney Buddington is also a possibility.

And of course there is also the fate of the 1845-1848 "Franklin Expedition" to find the Northwest Passage.

Jeff

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1914 February 26 - George Ball is executed by hanging for the murder of 40-year-old Catherine Bradfield, his workplace supervisor. According one account, he killed the spinster during a sexual assault. Ball had dumped her body into a Liverpool canal but it was found before it washed out to sea.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 February 27 - While on a bicycle ride in South Carolina, John Robinson, 7, vanishes. His skeletal remains are found in Florida about a month later. The FBI was able to find motel records that indicated that Joseph Francis Bryan Jr., a sadistic pedophile, was in the area at the time of the disappearance. He was later arrested and wound up with a life sentence. Bryan was also a suspect for more murders.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 February 29 - Annie May Johnson, a NY housewife, is gunned down. The assailant then raped the corpse of the 24-year-old woman and set fire to it in her home. A confessed serial killer named Winston Moseley later admitted to murdering Annie. Moseley was sent to prison for life after being convicted of a later more famous murder and is still incarcerated at age 79.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1914 March 5 - In France, Paul Jacques is gunned down by his wife Marie, a romance novelist who goes by the pen name Hera Myrtle. She was able to pass the act off as a suicide despite the facts that two of her lovers from before the marriage had also died of gunshot wounds. Marie said the first man had also died from suicide and that the second lover had been killed by unknown intruders. She later married for a second time and, in 1920, beat that spouse to death with a hammer. Marie claimed that Charles Bessarabo had run off with another woman but that story fell through when his battered body was discovered jammed into a trunk. In 1921, she was found guilty of this final murder and sent to prison for 20 years. She died 9 years later while still incarcerated.

[sdreid]

150 years ago - 1864 March 10 - Killer Jack Slade is hanged by vigilantes in Virginia City, Idaho Territory, now Montana.