“ EXECUTIONER—I AM GUILTY! ”

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume XXXII, Issue 4310, 29 August 1921, Page 1

“ EXECUTIONER—I AM GUILTY! ”

DRAMATIC CONFESSIONS IN

FACE OF DEATH.

When sentence of death was passed on Franz Muller, the brutal murderer of Mr. Briggs in a North London railway carriage, he heard it without a tremor. He declared he was an innocent man, the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice; and this attitude he maintained until within a few seconds of his death.

He was standing pinioned and blindfolded on the drop; the executioner’s hand grasped the lever that was to launch him\into eternity, when the chaplain leaned forward and sitid, “Mullbr, in a few moments you will stand before God. I ask you for the last time, are your guilty or not guilty?” “Not guilty!” came the prompt and emphatic answer. “You are not guilty?” asked the chaplain. “God knows what I have done,” lie replied. “God knows what .you have done? Does He also know that you committed this crime?”

PROUD OF MISDEEDS. “Yes, I have 11 done it,” faltered from Muller’s lips. And at the same moment the l lever was pulled, and where Muller had stood was a quivering rope. No less dramatic was the' confession of Joseph Fee, who murdered John Flanagan at Clones in 1903. The hangman was stooping to pinion his legs, when Fee shouted, “Executioneer!”

“I made up my mind,” said the “to ignore his ejaculation, and to carry out the execution with all promptitude. But as I regained my feet and adjusted the noose he spoke again, sharply and decisively. ‘Guilty, executioner!’ he called out clearly; and as the words left his lips I swung round. and threw back the lever.” When Samuel' Herbert Douglas was condemned to death for the murder of Miss Camille Holland, and realised he could not hope, to escape the gallows, he not only confessed his guilt, but gave, with evident pride and enjoyment, a detailed and dramatic account of his crime.

Still more brazen waS Holmes, the wholesale murderer of Philadelphia and Chicago, who, after he had been sentenced to death, Wrote and sold for £l5OO a full confession, in which he claimed to have committed no fewer than 27 murders in the course of his fiendish career. When Charles Peace was under the shadow of. the scaffold he made a confession which set an innocent man free., William Habron had been condemned 1 to death for the murder of Constable Cook at Whalley Range, a sentence which had been commuted to one of penal servitude for life; and Peace, who had himself commit ted the murder, had actually travelled to Manchester to attend his trial. Face To face with death, however, a tardy penitence sqjzed him. “Now that I am going to forfeit my own life,” he wrote, “and feel that I have nothing to gain by any further secrecy, I think' it is right in the sight of God and men to clear this innocent man.”

The execution of Mrs. Pearcey for the brutal'murder of Mrs. Hogg and }ier infant daughter was marked by a dramatic incident. From the moment of hex' arrest to the last minute of her life she had remained almost contemptuously calm, declaring again and again that she was innocent. To the chaplain’s pleadings not to go before hex' Maker with a lie upon her lips, she replied: “I should only do that if I said I was guilty when He knows I am not.” In this obstinate • and impenitent frame of mind she walked with unfaltering steps .to the scaffold. • The hangman’s hand grasped the lever. In anothei' second she would be dead. Then she uttered the words which acknowledged her guilt: “The sentence is just, but the evidence was false.”