5 People Who Died During Sex: And 100 Other Terribly Tasteless Lists Paperback by Karl Shaw

Author:Karl Shaw [Shaw, Karl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780767920599
Amazon: 0767920597
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Published: 2007-02-13T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Five

Crime & Punishment

Har 10

d Ax to Follow:

Ten Famous Executioners

1

The chief executioners of Constantinople during the Ottoman Empire excelled in diverse methods of dispatching their victims, including drowning by slow degrees and forcing the victim to imbibe ground glass.

The most active of them all, Souflikar, the executioner during the reign of Mahomet IV, preferred simple strangulation. He personally throttled about five thousand people over a period of five years.

2

The Duke of Alva, the chief executioner to King Philip of Spain, was hired for his efficiency in wiping out heretics during the Holy Inquisition. His chosen method of execution was to seal the victim’s mouth with an iron gag that allowed only the tongue to protrude, then to brand the tongue with a hot iron so it became swollen and could not be withdrawn. The victim was eventually burned alive. At Antwerp, the duke executed eight thousand people in one session. King Philip passed the most ambitious death sentence of all time in 1568 when he declared that the entire population of the Netherlands—approximately 3 million people, was heretical and therefore should be executed. It was a tough nut to crack even for the Duke of Alva, although he did manage to kill 800 people during Holy Week.

3

Richard Brandon, son of the chief executioner Gregory Brandon, was destined to become England’s most famous executioner. Known in the trade as “young Gregory,” the boy put in hours of practice on his ax technique by decapitating cats and dogs and boasted that he never needed more than one blow of the ax to remove a 157

[Ten Famous Executioners]

victim’s head. The climax of his distinguished career was the removal of King Charles I’s head on January 30, 1649, although on that day Brandon was a reluctant executioner—he and his assistant insisted on wearing masks and false beards to avoid any possible repercussions.

4

The innovative nineteenth-century English executioner William Marwood invented the “modern” method of hanging. Until Marwood’s day, hanging usually involved a very short drop and slow strangulation at the end of a rope; the executioner often had to weight the victim by wrapping himself around his legs. Recoveries from hangings were commonplace. In 1871, Marwood perfected the long drop, a system that caused the victim to fall from six to ten feet through a trapdoor. The drop fractured the neck’s vertebrae, severing the spinal cord and medulla and so causing instant death and reducing the suffering of those hanged. Marwood didn’t always get it right; the long drop often resulted in accidental decapitation.

5

London’s eighteenth-century chief executioner, John Thrift, was considered the most incompetent man ever to have held that position. Thrift, a convicted murderer who was set free on condition that he did the government’s dirty work as an axman, was unsuited to the job: He was highly strung, unsure with the ax, and liable to burst into tears at inappropriate moments. His biggest problem was that he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. When he was called upon to execute the Jacobite rebel

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