On January 6, 1881, Mrs. Margaret Meierhoffer and her alleged paramour, Frank Lamens, were hanged in Newark, New Jersey, for the murder of Margaret’s husband, John. Two years earlier, the Meierhoffers hired Lamens to work on their farm, but Lamens’s presence put further strain on their already troubled marriage. John was dissatisfied with Lamens's work and wanted him gone, but Margaret insisted that he stay.
On October 9, 1879, the police found John Meierhoffer’s body at the foot of the cellar stairs with a gunshot wound in his throat. Upstairs they found Margaret Meierhoffer in bed with Frank Lamens. Neither confessed to the murder; they each accused the other. The state found them both guilty and sentenced them to death.
The illustration is incorrect. The New Jersey gallows was not configured to hang two at a time. Margaret was launched into eternity at 10:25, an hour later Frank Lammens followed her.
David J. Wood and his wife Rhoda lived happily in Dansville, New York until David's younger brother Isaac came to live with them. In 1855, David died of a mysterious illness. Rhoda died the same way a few days later, and Isaac took control of their estate. When the coroner determined that the Woods died of arsenic poisoning, Isaac was arrested and convicted of Rhoda's murder.
The newspapers called Isaac L. Wood's hanging in 1858 a "theatrical
execution." Sixty witnesses viewed the hanging inside the Genesee jail,
while 500 spectators waited outside. Two military companies maintained order,
and a band was playing. Wood's long-winded, self-righteous last words added to
the drama.
David J. Wood owned a thriving leather and shoe business in Dansville, New York, in the 1850s. He and his wife Rhoda were busy raising two children but found time to be active in church and civic events, always willing to donate their time and money to better the community. They were wealthy, prominent, and well-liked citizens of Dansville, living a perfect life—until the arrival of David’s brother Isaac.
Isaac L. Wood was 34 years old in 1854, when he left his home in New Jersey, hoping to start a new life with David’s help. Isaac was only eight years old when David left the family home in New Providence, New Jersey. The two brothers had not been close, but David was happy to give Isaac a helping hand, loaning him money to buy a small piece of land. Isaac began farming, making payments to his brother when he could.
But Farming did not suit Isaac, and within a year, he gave it up and went to live in his brother’s house. He embarked on a career speculating in fruits, butter, eggs, and other produce. It was widely known in Dansville that David was still helping him out with loans and endorsements.
Emil Lowenstein was a barber in Brooklyn, NY who had persuaded his neighbor, John Weston, a one-armed Civil War veteran, to withdraw his life savings and travel upstate with him. The body of John Weston was found in a ravine in Watervliet, NY, soon after Lowenstein returned to Brooklyn, flush with cash.
Lowenstein denied being in Watervliet with Weston and professed innocence to the end. Nevertheless, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and on April 10, 1874, the sheriff cut the rope to drop the counterweight and launch Emil Lowenstein into eternity.
Every day since Halloween 2007, the blog ExecutedToday.com has posted a story of an execution that took place on that date in history somewhere in the world. While this certainly says something about the human condition over time, it also says something about the determination and thoroughness of the blogger of ExecutedToday.com, who goes by the epithet Headsman. As someone who has scrambled to do one post a week, I find the Headsman’s work heroic.
There is a natural overlap between murder and execution, and over the years, Murder by Gaslight and ExecutedToday have guest posted on each other’s sites several times. Today’s ExecutedToday guest post is from June 7, 1895, a day when six American men were hanged, including one who inspired a novel.
On this date in 1895, the hangman noosed for the cycle with single, double, and triple executions in three different U.S. states.
Arkansas
In Morrilltown, William Downs or Downes for criminally assaulting a woman called Pauline Bridlebaugh.
“On the scaffold Downs declared that he was guilty of part but not all he was charged with,” according to multiple newspaper reports. The eight-foot fall failed to snap his neck, and Downs strangled to death over 15 agonizing minutes.
Alabama
“Lee Harris and Abe Mitchell, colored murderers, highwaymen and thieves, were hanged here [Birmingham] today before 2000 people for the murder of Grocerymen Merriweather and Thornton. Both bodies were turned over to the undertakers, who purchased them several weeks ago for $18 from the men themselves.”
From the Oakland Tribune, June 7, 1895.
California
Three Californians hanged, sequentially, at San Quentin prison on the morning of June 7 in an affair timed to ensue the arrival of the 7:40 train from San Francisco, carrying about 100 official witnesses.
Emilio Garcia stabbed and slashed to death a San Bernardino old timer whom he believed to possess a hoard of gold.
Anthony Azoff fatally shot a Southern Pacific detective in the course of a botched robbery of that railroad firm’s offices; he was balked of a suicide attempt in the hours before his execution.
And Patrick Collins acquired more lasting infamy than any of his scaffold brethren by sensationally stabbing to death his estranged wife at the kindergarten where she worked when she refused his demand to hand over her wages.
Collins’s guilt was very apparent, so his trial gave the horrified public ample rein to sketch the brute in terms of the era’s crackpot racist typologies. In one Examiner article tellingly titled “He Was Born for the Rope,” it was postulated that “if a good many of Patrick Collins’ ancestors did not die on the scaffold then either they escaped their desert or there is nothing in heredity … Seeing him you can understand that murder is as natural to such a man when his temper is up as hot speech is to the anger of the civilized.”
Be they ever so headline-conquering in their time, such crimes are like to fade speedily from the public memory. Collins, the man who slaughtered his tightfisted wife, and Collins, the savage ethnic archetype, have improbably survived his moment of notoriety, by imparting to literature the inspiration for San Francisco novelist Frank Norris‘s 1899 offering McTeague.
In McTeague, a vicious husband murders the wife he has abandoned when she refuses him money. The murderer here presents as an overpowering ancestral beast within — attributable, says Christopher Dowd, to Norris’s “study of criminal anthropology, particularly the school of thinking developed by Cesare Lombroso regarding atavism, hereditary criminality, degeneration, and criminal physiognomy. According to Donald Pizer, by the time Norris wrote McTeague, he had developed a ‘preoccupation’ with the themes of atavism and reversion, and ‘particularly with the role of heredity in causing either an obvious physical or mental devolution or a return to an earlier family condition’. Suddenly, Norris had a way to explain the behavior of his murderous protagonist — he was born a criminal, having inherited the degenerate traits and predilections of his Irish ancestors. Combined with the newspaper reports of the Collins murder, criminal anthropology gave Norris all the tools he needed to write, what Pizer calls, ‘that mythical creature of literature, a naturalistic tragedy'”. For example, Norris zooms through the disordered mind of McTeague as he struggles to control himself on one occasion.
He was disturbed, still trembling, still vibrating with the throes of the crisis, but he was the master; the animal was downed, was cowed for this time, at least.
But for all that, the brute was there. Long dormant, it was now at last alive, awake. From now on he would feel its presence continually; would feel it tugging at its chain, watching its opportunity. Ah, the pity of it! Why could he not always love her purely, cleanly? What was this perverse, vicious thing that lived within him, knitted to his flesh?
Below the fine fabric of all that was good in him ran the foul stream of hereditary evil, like a sewer. The vices and sins of his father and of his father’s father, to the third and fourth and five hundredth generation, tainted him. The evil of an entire race flowed in his veins. Why should it be? He did not desire it. Was he to blame?
McTeague does not exit upon the gallows as did his real-life inspiration; instead, having murdered and robbed his wife, the fugitive flees to the scorching desert of Death Valley where he faces a fight to the finish with a friend/rival who has pursued him. McTeague overpowers this foe, but the man’s dying act is to handcuff himself to McTeague — condemning the latter to sure death.
McTeague has long been in the public domain; it can be perused here; a Librivox audio reading of the book is available here. It’s also been adapted to at least two films in the silent era — including one of the genre’s greats — plus a more recent PBS radio drama, an opera, and miscellaneous other media.
In January 1881, Adolph Sindram was a boarder at the home of Mrs. Catherine Crave on Charlton Street in New York City. Catherine was the second wife of a Frenchman named John B. Crave and gladly took over the responsibility of mothering his five children. She was a kind woman, loved by the children and esteemed by all who knew her.
The house on Charlton Street was larger than the family needed, so they took in boarders and lodgers. Adolph Sindram, one of her boarders, approached Mrs. Crave to ask if his brother William could share his room. Adolph was an amiable and agreeable young man, well-liked by the other tenants of the house. He told her that William worked as a printer as he did. She thought Adolph’s brother would be a welcome addition to the house and agreed to let him share the room with an appropriate increase in the rent.
But William’s temperament was the opposite of his brother’s. He was irascible and sullen by nature with a tendency to become irrationally violent. He had once assaulted his father with a knife, and later, after his father’s death, he broke into his mother’s house and stole some money. He was completely self-centered, spending most of his time concocting schemes to make money without working. At Charlton Street, he was surly and disagreeable to all who lived there.
John and Margaret Meierhoffer had a small farm in West Orange, New Jersey, about seven miles from Newark. They had been married many years, had two sons—28-year-old Joseph and 14-year-old Theodore, who still lived at home—but by 1879, John and Margaret were not on friendly terms. They no longer slept together or had meals together; John slept in a small room in the barn and picked up his meals in the house when no one else was around.
Margaret said the fault was John’s; she called him “a fretful, hard-to-please man” who badly mistreated her. Others, though, said that 40-year-old Margaret, who was nearly six feet tall, had long ago subdued John who was ten years her senior, slightly built and in poor health. He found it easier just to avoid her.
Albert E. Hauntstine had been a fugitive for nearly two weeks before being apprehended on November 22, 1888, in Columbus, Nebraska, by Platte County Sheriff Bloedorn. After his apprehension, Haunstine was described as “a harmless, innocent looking young man of about twenty-five.” But Haunstine’s mild appearance belied the brutal nature of his crime, he shot Hiram Roten and William Ashley in the head and tried to hide their bodies in a haystack on his farm in Broken Bow. A reward of $900 had been offered for his capture. When he was arrested Haunstine was armed with two Navy revolvers, a Winchester rifle, a derringer, and plenty of ammunition but was overpowered before he could make a move.
Haunstine admitted his guilt when captured and said that Roten had been one of his best friends but could offer no reason for the murders. The story came in from Broken Bow that Roten and Ashley were school officers in Custer County who went to see Haunstine on November 9, regarding their suspicion that he had stolen a clock and some furniture from the schoolhouse. Three days later Roten and Ashley had still not returned, and their friends began a search which ended in the haystack at Haunstine’s place. Both men had been shot through the head and Roten’s face had been badly eaten by hogs.
Elmer Sharkey, still wearing his night clothes, ran to his neighbor’s house, the morning of
Saturday, January 11, 1889, calling for help. His house had been broken into and his mother had been murdered in her bed. Elmer, distraught over the death of his widowed mother, Caroline Sharkey, persuaded county officials in Eaton, Ohio, to offer a reward of $1,000 for the apprehension of her killer.
As soon as the reward was announced, Herman Hughes, a well-known young man of Eaton, had himself appointed special officer, and put Elmer Sharkey under arrest for the murder. Sharkey denied the charge and remained stolid until after his mother’s funeral the following Monday, when he finally broke down. Hughes had a talk with him after the funeral and Sharkey confessed to killing his mother, though he had not remembered the details until after her burial.
Greed, jealousy, revenge, obsession – the motives of America’s gas-lit murders are universal and timeless. Yet their stories are tightly bound to a particular place and time; uniquely American, uniquely 19th Century.
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