6th October

Two men died today in the electric chair in Florida in 1941. Their names were Frizzel and Willburn.

In other news ...
You don't mess with Basil II, Holy Roman Emperor. Today in 1014 he trounced the Bulgarian Army of Tsar Samuel and ordered that the prisoners should be blinded. Every hundredth man was to have one eye spared so that they could find their way back to the Tsar. Ah, the good old days.

3rd April

Jesse James got his today in 1882. Known as 'Dingus' as a kid, he was one of the first psychopaths in history to blame his upbringing - in his case the Civil War. He and his brother Frank took to robbing trains after a killing spree with Quantrill's Raiders and he tried to go straight later, happily married with two kids and calling himself Thomas Howard. There was however a $10,000 reward out for him and that was claimed by Bob Ford who shot him in the back of the head while Jesse was standing on a chair straightening a picture on the wall. The result was The Assassination of Jesse James, probably the most boring film ever made. And as everyone knows, for me to find a Western boring, it has to be extremely boring indeed.

In other news ...
One of the greatest miscarriages of justice took place today in 1936 when Bruno Hauptmann went to the electric chair for the kidnapping of the baby son of Charles Lindbergh, the famous aviator. The police decided that Hauptmann was guilty largely because he was an immigrant and they may may have trumped up evidence against him.

Case closed? Don't you believe it!