American Hangman

In the 1890s, Amos Lunt served as the San Quentin hangman, tying the nooses that brought the most dangerous criminals in the Wild West to their deaths. A former police chief who became the hangman of San Quentin due to an unfortunate turn of events, Lunt stood on the gallows alongside bank robbers, desperadoes and assassins for five years. This book follows Lunt's trail from the Santa Cruz police department to the State Prison. Covering his interesting friendship with a series of death row inmates and the gradual deterioration of his sanity, it is a one-of-a-kind biography that details an American executioner. Also profiled are his subjects--20 of the West's most heinous criminals--as well as Lunt's preparations for their hangings and their final moments on the gallows.

John C. Woods, the US Army's hangman during World War II, is known for his role executing ten senior Nazis in 1946. For the first time, learn about Woods's early life in Kansas and his dishonorable discharge before World War II. Discover how volunteering as a military executioner would lead Woods to his career as a hangman. Award-winning author Colonel French MacClean separates fact from fiction of the enigmatic executioner, whose botched executions and mysterious death by electrocution have left him shrouded in mystery and infamy.

A grisly tour of hangings, electrocutions, beheadings—and other state-sanctioned deaths that are part of the long history of the death penalty. In Lord High Executioner, award-winning writer Howard Engel traces the traditions of capital punishment from medieval England and early Canada to the present-day United States. Throughout “civilized” history, executioners employed on behalf of the kingdom, republic, or dictatorship have beheaded, chopped, stabbed, choked, gassed, electrocuted, or beaten criminals to death—and Engel doesn’t shy away from the gritty details of the executioner’s lifestyle, focusing on the paragons, buffoons, and sadists of the dark profession. Packed with all-too-true stories, from hapless hangings to butchered beheadings, this historically accurate look at the executioner’s gruesome work makes for a thoroughly gripping read.

In 1776, the rebellion of the American colonies against British rule was crushed. Now, in 1777-the year of the hangman-George Washington is awaiting execution, Benjamin Franklin's banned rebel newspaper, Liberty Tree, has gone underground, and young ne'er-do-well Creighton Brown, a fifteen-year-old Brit, has just arrived in the colonies. Having been shipped off against his will, with nothing but a distance for English authorities, Creighton befriends Franklin, and lands a job with his print shop. But the English general expects the spoiled yet loyal Creighton to spy on Franklin. As battles unfold and falsehoods are exposed, Creighton must decide where his loyalties lie...a choice that could determine the fate of a nation.

The Oise-Aisne American Cemetery is the last resting place of 6,012 American soldiers who died fighting in a small portion of Northern France during the First World War. The impressive cemetery is divided into four plots marked A to D. However, few visitors are aware that across the road, behind the immaculate façade of the superintendent’s office, unmarked and completely surrounded by impassable shrubbery, is Plot E, a semi-secret fifth plot that contains the bodies of ninety-four American soldiers. These were men who were executed for crimes committed in the European Theater of Operations during and just after the Second World War. Originally, the men whose death sentences were carried out were buried near the sites of their executions in locations as far afield as England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, and Algeria. A number of the men were executed in the grounds of Shepton Mallet prison in Somerset – the majority of whom were hanged in the execution block, with two being shot by a firing squad in the prison yard. The executioner at most of the hangings was Thomas William Pierrepoint, assisted mainly by his more-famous nephew Albert Pierrepoint. Then, in 1949, under a veil of secrecy, the ‘plot of shame’, as it has become known, was established in France. The site does not exist on maps of the cemetery and it is not mentioned on the American Battle Monuments Commission’s website. Visits to Plot E are not encouraged. Indeed, public access is difficult because the area is concealed, surrounded by bushes, and is closed to visitors. No US flag is permitted to fly over the plot and the graves themselves have no names, just small, simple stones the size of index cards that are differentiated only by reference numbers. Even underground the dishonored are set apart, with each body being positioned with its back to the main cemetery. In The Plot of Shame, the historian Paul Johnson uncovers the history of Plot E and the terrible stories of wartime crime linked to it.

"Describes the small group of men and women who sought out former Nazis all over the world after the Nuremberg trials, refusing to let their crimes be forgotten or allowing them to quietly live inconspicuous, normal lives."--NoveList.

The Life and Times of Dahn Batchelor My father returned to Canada in the early spring of 1944 and took a train across Canada, and when his train stopped at Quesnel, a mere twenty-six miles from Wells, he changed his mind and got on a train heading south toward Vancouver, with the intention of returning to Toronto, where he previously lived. By a strange coincidence, my aunt who was living in Wells and had been heading south on the same train saw my father get off the train in Squamish. She convinced him to go to Wells. She told him that his family was anxiously waiting for him. He took the next train heading north toward Wells, but my mother knew what he had done after my aunt phoned her and she wasnt pleased at all at his attempt to abandon us again. I and my brother didnt know what he had done. I only learned of it many years later from my aunt. He got a job in one of the towns two gold mines, and this was the first time since my birth that he actually personally gave my mother money to pay for the rent and food. In the spring of 1944, he bought a large two-story, three-bedroom log cabin in Wells for $500. In 2013, that amount of money would be equivalent to $6,215. The houses in that small town were sold for very little money then. That average house in a city in 1944 would cost $8,870, and in the 2015 market, the average house of that size would sell for at least four hundred thousand dollars.

Niklas Frank was just seven years old when his father, Hans Frank, Hitler's legal adviser and Governor General of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg as a Nazi war criminal. Throughout his life, Niklas has attempted to come to terms with the enormity of the crimes his father committed, and this remarkable book traces how after years of research he uncovered the extent of the horror unleashed by the man who was known as the butcher of Poland. The Father is an extraordinary account of a scarred son struggling to comprehend the depravity of the acts that were committed by his father. Whereas other descendants of Hitler's henchmen and co-collaborators have tried to explain or to forget the crimes of their forebears, Niklas's disgust for his father's actions is unremitting. This book is his attempt to seek revenge. Featuring forewords by Philippe Sands and Sir Ian Kershaw, The Father is by turns shocking, twisted and heart-rending; a devastating settling of accounts written by a son addressing his father as he pictures him burning in the eternal fires of hell.