DEFYING THE HANGMAN.

Taranaki Daily News, 2 April 1921, Page 5

DEFYING THE HANGMAN.

AMAZING ESCAPES FROM DEATH’. There is no man living to-day who luu actually been hanged, but tfhefre are many records of resuscitation after hanging. One of these belong to the yqju--1264. Mme. de Balsham was condemned to death for harboring thieves. She was hanged and left suspended on the gallows from Monday morning until sunrise on Thursday. Yet, on being taken down, she revived. Henry 111. granted her a pardon. In 1650 an Oxford servant girl was hanged for the murder of her child. When handed over to the doctors for dissection she revived. Inquiries were made as to her sensations during suspension, but she remembered nothing, saying her revival was just like waking from a deep sleep. A house-breaker named Smith was hanged at Tyburn in 1705, and a reprieve arrived after he had been suspended for fifteen minutes. On being taken down he revived.

A man named William Duell had a hard fate, he was lhanged in London in 1740, and was carried to Surgeons’ Hall to be anatomized. Before the doctors could start he came to life again. That ought to have won him another chance, but it did not. He was transported, a fate not always preferable. At Cork a man was hanged in 1737 for street robbery. On being taken down he was hurried to a surgery, where an incision was made in his windpipe. He recovered so rapidly that he went to the theatre the same evening. After Fauntleroy, banker and forger, was executed in 1824, a rumor got about that he had escaped death by the insertion of a silver tube in his throat. This prevented strangulation, and he was restored to consciousness. There is, how-

ever, no confirmation of this strange story. A prisoner was taken from Cardifl' Prison and placed in the dock in London on a charge, of murdering his wife. Till then he had never heard of her death, but before he could realise his position he was convicted and sentenced to death! . Then he implored the warders and. the governor to tell him the date of his wife’s death. “My good man,” said the governor, “you have only a short time to live. Don’t worry about sudh a detail.” Day after day. however, the prisoner asked this question, until he got the answer. “But I was safe in prison on that date,” he exclaimed. “Then why didn’t you say so at the trial?” “Because I was neither asked nor allowed to say anything;” He was released.