Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 345: Hangmen and Headsmen

Episode Date: December 22, 2018

On today's episode, we're covering some of history's most tried and true execution methods as well as the men and women who have stood behind the noose and the axe throughout the centuries. 

Hey what's up everyone the boys from last podcast on the left here telling you about our new special we filmed it in Chicago and it was absolutely a wonderful experience and you can buy it now for six dollars and 66 cents if you just go to lastpodcastlive.com yeah that's it buddy help hail him in the year of 2019 watch other watch us our bodies jiggle upon the stage hopefully laugh with delight yeah this is a recording of one of our live performances so if you've never seen us live you've always wanted to this is your opportunity everybody can see us live now and next year we will have a

whole new show so you will not be seeing what you see on this live show again that's it you're watching something that will never happen again yeah thank you all so much for your support this past year 2018 was absolutely incredible and we are excited to bring you a new show in 2019 again last podcast live.com that's last podcast live.com go out there buy it for six dollars and sixty six cents and don't forget hail yourselves hail Satan again there's no place to escape to this is the last time on the left that's when the cannibalism started what was that man can you guys just feel the

magic in the air oh yeah can't you just feel it everywhere like tinsel yeah just tinsel waving on a fan absolutely in your armpits isn't it wonderful do you guys ever think about I don't know if the answer this in seminary school because I didn't get to go but how big do you think God's load I mean it made the whole world I think it created the whole world it's like the it's like what is it DuPont paint mm-hmm the paint covering the white paint duPont Sherman Williams DuPont doesn't even make paint what ever make paint I don't know they make chemical weapons well I'm sure they have to paint them but can you imagine that

right because I imagine it's it does sound like the first porn hub video of all time with Mary being like hey I'm married don't come in me like yeah sure and then sklir sklir sklir and then the fucking the savior slips out right and that manger out there you got the the lambs brain you got the camels barking and fucking it slips out and who appears out of the darkness but the king himself LeBron James wow picks up the baby licks the placenta scheme time don't Jesus Christ through the fucking this is a commercial now right yeah he slams into a barrel filled with spikes

the audience just goes kill the Christ oh right well that's I'm happy you know LeBron James's name that's good let's take away and well he's in the Lakers he's with the Lakers now LeBron is so that's very good welcome to the last podcast on the left everyone I am Ben kissle that's Marcus Parks and then we have Christ killer Henry Zabrowski kill Henry Zabrowski I'll do it again and again and again he keeps moving that rock I'm gonna buy more bullets today's episode the reason I'm so excited for this what's the reason for the season Marcus honestly Jesus is the reason for the season according to many

people millions of people yeah that's the billions that's the accepted answer yes you know I think the reason for the season is this year raining pure decadent blood well it doesn't really rhyme as well okay that's right we're just gonna cover it this is just gonna be a bunch of blood it'll be a blood bath yeah and it'll be nothing but fun because that's the world we live in we're talking executions yeah and really specifically today we're gonna be talking about hang men and heads men so when I was telling Ben about some of the stories that we're gonna tell today Ben you actually had a very good

question concerning execution and it's a question that I've actually asked myself many times over the years and the question is this why you just shoot them in the head shoot him in the head why you just slit the throat it's so much easier to just shoot him in the head yeah of course it's easier man a lot of things it's easier I can buy crescent rolls from the frozen the frozen section at the at the grocery store or I can make them by hand with the sweat of my brow getting slowly kneaded into them honestly blind test test no one would know the difference see in some cases it is in the best interest of the state

to have someone quietly and secretly killed Shoka Sahara yeah but for the most part execution isn't just about punishing the guilty it's also about showmanship and this was true especially in the days of public execution see if you just run a knife across a criminal's throat or you just shoot a guy in the head there's no build-up there's no ceremony it's just killing a guy I don't know I mean I think it's kind of exciting I've seen some videos on lively no you just think it's exciting because it's the only thing that gets your heart rate up once you've had nine BLs and it's three o'clock

in the morning but if there's a process and a kutramana go along with it like say a platform a rope or a big fucking axe all right then the whole thing gains a little bit of weight and a little bit of tension suddenly it show business I really wish they would remake the movie sing but have this be the show like this is what the little cartoon mouse producer is trying so hard to get off the ground so excited and then they get the cute hippo woman and everyone's you know excited about how she's finally gonna sing her song and then the fucking gallows drops your body just twitches in the fucking air man and the pig family

they're so cute well the tension built up in a public execution wasn't just about seeing a person die it also lied in the possibility that the person in charge just might fuck it up like improv and as we're gonna see again and again throughout this episode people have been fucking up executions for centuries one toss to I will I will do a toss to Dan Carlin's hardcore history episode of pain foetainment which a part of it talking about is that I like what you said here which is that it's about showing the state's power and how strong they are right being like this is what we could put into works to just kill one

man or this one group of people right but also there's sort of a ritual about it that not only purges people's need for their own guilt like you're seeing a thing in pain foetainment he talks about a little bit about this about the in the religious bent of executions that people would go and they get something out of it spiritually right by someone's basically watching somebody else commit an act of penance for them and then or it's also kind of it gives it a weird honor like and to death that gives it some kind of elevated status where they thought well you know if I happen to commit high treason against the king

I will also be treated with this amount of pomp and circumstance right and it's good for the rope industry it's good for steel for big steel that's good but that is an interesting point as Henry alluded to a little bit earlier in the show with his bizarre interpretation of the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ but that is what he did as he crew as he was crucified that's what people see that he paid for all of their sins before we get started today let's acknowledge our sources all these stories come from two books executioners by Phil Clark Liz Hardy and Anne Williams and the book of execution by Jeffrey Abbott

both of which are amazing and available on Amazon if you want to learn more about the wonderful world of executions because we're only covering a tiny bit of it today today we're covering the heading by acts hanging and drawing and quartering and as far as the region goes we're mostly gonna be focusing on English executions because while we here in America are undoubtedly the kings in modern times when it comes to executions England showed us all how it was done we don't we still don't do it right here we still don't have it perfectly worked out but we still do it because I mean we

got to keep the spirit of executions alive this country and we are we're more muscular than the English right and if they can do it 85 pounds so can wet with a bobbly Adams apple then we can do it with a fucking Ed Hardy shirt on in a backwards hat yeah that makes a lot of sense no as far as the people who actually did the deed went executioners have rarely been the most popular people in their community wait whoa hold on a second now no one likes the town serial killer what and as such the executioners identity was usually hidden from the public hmm this was partly because it gave the executioner a chance at a

second job because executioner was a notoriously low paying gig done on commission at least in England's case I see I gotta say I'm a little bit surprised by that I would think these people would have a little bit more respect in the city they're just fulfilling the final you know this is just the final statement of the state that isn't a far more modern idea because now we believe people that do hard jobs should be paid more like if you look at people garbage men make a fuck ton of money they didn't they deserve it yeah you can make a lot of money we especially with OT you're out

there you're covered in slime you will work in double time yeah Christmas hours you know I mean but these days they viewed it also with the sense of shame so it's almost like a double things like not only we're gonna hide your identity we're only gonna give you like a little bit of money because technically you're fucked up for even wanting to be an executioner interesting see in England executioner was not a national gig in the olden days executioner was a local post it was like a city job okay and the top of the game was of course London the London guy would travel around as needs demanded but cities like Manchester

and northern regions of England like Yorkshire had executioners all their own hmm now do they have their own tools like when a chef shows up and he unfurls all of his own knives and spoons only the scariest ones right okay but since people often like to shoot the messenger i.e. kill the hangman most times nobody knew the executioners real identity because say the executioner puts your brother to death you can't kill the king but you can kill the executioner he's like a superhero like a superhero in some way but what's your brother do well exactly that's the big question here yeah and there was a little

cognitive dissonance involved in that thinking one executioner griped that while people who kill for their country in war were lauded as heroes those who kill in the name of the law are seen as almost worse than the criminals they killed I would pay hundreds of dollars to see a roundtable of old-timey executioners griping I would love to hear the woe is me of the executioner you wouldn't believe the shoulder problems the CBD cream is really barely cutting it and the other guys like I can't even a hair I can't even look at strawberry jam without getting the shakes but that attitude towards

executioners of you know officers of the law versus you know soldiers right could possibly be that while wars were fought far away from the public in those days everybody showed up to watch the executioner take off a head alright this is the original big bang theory honestly it's way it's it's like a modern-day reality television shows everybody had to be a part of it because it was Gossip as well and speaking of taken off heads that's where we're gonna start our series today all right with the axe yeah all right see dimension-wise the English executioners acts had a three

foot long handle and a 16 inch single-sided blade which more resembled like an oversized wood chopping hatchet than the double-sided battle axe that we usually associate with public beheadings okay the thing about the axe was that it wasn't used for just any old thief on the street the axe was only used when people of noble birth were executed because its approximation to death on the battlefield was seen as more dignified than hanging at least for men huh interesting as far as the women went it was presumably seen as more lady like to be beheaded because when you're beheaded you're not hanging from a rope

with the contents of your bowels running down your leg and plopping at the ground not to say there wouldn't be a couple of nobles who wouldn't be happy being the little like catch-basin under oh yeah absolutely one Prince Philip just running around dresses as they flow what a most pleasant rain he's gonna be king one day yeah we know but the thing about the executioners themselves is that these guys were not precision axe swingers plucked from the King's army executioners were usually just regular dudes who volunteered and while they weren't necessarily the town drunks it was rare to find an executioner that wasn't at

the very least a functioning alcoholic you gotta drink a little bit honestly you can drink a little bit yeah I think you got to you gotta loosen up right and I think that dog meat ear is trying to throw a little shade towards functioning alcoholics when functioning alcoholics make up two-thirds of this podcast that's a lot of the podcast that's a lot of the podcast I'm not throwing any shade whatsoever I'm just saying that executioners were known as a fairly drunken lot I could see this though of course they are because if someone's going through town someone is it a town squire or something be like yo we need

an executioner if I had a couple of Bud lights maybe some peanuts good full tummy like an elephant I would be like I'll do it and the next thing you know I'm in the middle of I'm on the stage in front of 500 people being with an axe like I'm really gonna do this oh shit man I know I'm like all right where's the head put the butt through the wrong way well because the guys were usually drunk and because they were just regular dudes single swing beheadings in England were not necessarily the standard with most needing at least two and up to five chops to completely sever the spinal cord and usually it's

still have to bring out a knife to saw off the last remaining bits of necki sinew that's kind of nice that they at least cut off the sinew and just rip it off yeah I mean because that would be think about that the bat ending into a me like I snort and I'm sorry where's you know where's this where's the seven I put up on the wood stop trying to grab it with his hands pushing back with his legs good well the most infamous executioner in England's history was Jack catch who some thought botched his executions on purpose to make them as brutal as possible do you mean to tell me he was the equivalent of Jimmy Fallon

laughing at his own jokes yeah could be but most of the time though the executioner wanted to have the whole thing over and done just as quickly as the condemned did however this was not because he had a problem with taking a life mostly because these guys got stage fright really I could see that I could see stage fright being very real people are scared of public speaking right imagine get heaven to fucking a couple of thousand eyes on you with an axe while you're about to chop somebody's head right and you just realized oh I shouldn't have had that fifth Jaeger right cuz now I'm seeing two heads which

is the head so the person who was being executed I can imagine where they did they ever console the executioner and be like it's okay buddy we're getting into that story right now very good take for example the 1746 double execution of William Boyd the 4th Earl of Kilmurnock oh the 4th Earl of Kilmurnock yeah man that was a big loss and Arthur Elphinstone the 6th Lord of Balmarino the 6th Lord of Balmarino this is a big show you were caught in a spice red going to to a tradies so it was very difficult for them to catch it first you have to get through their skin suits I'm playing on their names I because they sound like

they're from Dune oh yeah well the executioner in this particular debacle was a guy named John thrift who had no business whatsoever being an executioner see as we said axe executions were only for noble birth so in the whole decade that thrift have been killing people for the state he'd only been tasked with hanging them huh but that's not to say that thrift was particularly competent at that either see John thrift was might was what you might call a high strong personality this fucking piece of shit reading reading about him I you know that one day at the finally the bottom of the

barrel Eddie Redmayne's dumb shit career he's gonna make a movie playing John thrift and they're gonna hand him five Oscars because he frowned in it so this guy so he was he had anxiety he had anxiety he was very high strong he was very nervous okay he wasn't like a bumbling Mr. Bean type okay he was he was he tried doing his job but he was just very anxious and very high strong and but as a consequence he fucked up a lot I would assume that would that make sense so did he now would there be an expectation of the executioner did they realize that they had to perform like did they did they do stuff like swing

the axe around their head a little bit I don't know about that some of them did some of them understood that it's like you got to give to get you know what I mean 110% but I don't know if they all did well actually one quick story about that one hangman was actually chided because he was super nervous for an execution he didn't know what it how well he was gonna do there were thousands of people there he goes up and he takes the head off with one swing of the axe and then without even thinking about it he turned to the crowd and he put one hand on his chest and he gave a bow as far as John thrifts fuck

ups went in one mass hanging he hung 13 men at once but forgot to put on their hoods before he did so both removing just that last little bit of dignity belonging to the prisoners and forcing the crowd to watch his eyes bulged out of sockets and tongues swelled out of mouth honestly I think that he just made a new genre of what of the see the face I don't know I think it's more like the seems to be so many handkerchiefs Eddie Redmayne in a tour to force performance captures the imagination in thrifty times I would love to see that film I'm sure some people in the crowd liked it yeah I'm sure of it most of

them were pretty revolted by it because they're going to a public hanging yeah but there's always a step too far yeah there's fucking propriety I don't know feeling I just I wanted to watch the 13 men die but I didn't want to see their faces this is offensive you're still watching people die then another time thrift hanged a dude but didn't let him swing long enough so when they took the dude down and put him in the coffin he sat up still alive cool and when thrift tried hanging him again the crowd damn near killed thrift instead because they thought one hanging was enough yeah because that's actually true is that if

you guys I've seen to have read that somewhere yes where if you survive the execution technically that's it like you get one execution well there's the reason why they say you shall be hanged from the neck until you are dead because there were people who survived executions honestly survived the hanging and they then and then they argued like well the law was carried out they were hung but they survived so they let him go and that's when they amended it to shall be hanged from the neck until he is dead there is one person I know for a fact on this earth that could survive multiple days three days the same as

Jesus Christ survived the rock if you tried to hang the rock his neck would just break the rope I think that if he goes five hours without a protein shake I think his muscles will just fall off of his body but hanging was nothing compared to what John thrift was gonna have to pull off with the axe oh and furthermore these two dudes that he was supposed to execute were a big deal because they'd risen up against the crown during the Jacobite uprising so this was nothing less than a treason beheading okay and just John thrift just listening to that one shot at the mic song I wish that the beats of this

song didn't make my body shiver oh this is far too distracting back to the silence of my room now no matter what the station of the criminal or the offense people always showed up for executions and it was thousands of people in that crowd wow the atmosphere could actually be compared to like a modern-day sporting event with complete with vendors who sold hot potatoes fruit gingerbread men and pies this is just the saddest time just not on a hot potato just waiting for someone to lose their head I hope to make the rope too long and his head boops it's so much fun technically this is smorgasburg it's like smorgasburg if

they kill the bunch of hipsters in a row which would be kind of fun to see absolutely if you're in Williamsburg Brooklyn enjoy smorgasburg it's very tasty yeah these guys they even had merch cuz sometimes the condemned would publish a last statement for the crowd to read before the execution commenced it was pretty much like a program like a playbill yeah playbill oh my god and with the beheading of these two Jacobites on the docket for this execution nobody was gonna miss it and since John Thrift had never performed a beheading and was kind of high strung to begin with he was hit with just about as bad a case of

stage fright as you could imagine oh this is what happens when you decide to hire emo Phillips so when John dressed in his white executioner suit walked up to the platform and heard the roar of the crowd and looked out at the thousands of people that were waiting for him to do his job he fainted like fucking goofy I just feel like at some point if you did show that kind of weakness at this time period you should have just fucking killed it you just went up and just smashed his head with the hammer I'm sure new executioner please I'm sure someone threw one of those hot potatoes at him I'm sure of that well they were

able to rouse him with a cup of wine but they're getting them hammered well just to wake up just to wake them up and to calm the nerves a little bit but when the fourth Earl of Kilmer knock walked up the steps John Thrift started crying Earl actually had to talk him down and then he gave him a few coins for his trouble oh my god so he's like your everlasting kindness oh this killed my knock and he's like yeah this whole thing will be a lot better for I wasn't about to get fucking murdered huh let's do this now the part

about the coins that actually wasn't out of the ordinary it was actually customary for lords facing execution to tip the executioner see if you gave a little extra coin you'd get better service if you didn't maybe things don't go as smoothly as they might have but maybe the axe doesn't go down I don't know my pockets are a little light right now maybe if my pockets we have it with some coin maybe I'd act to come down a little smoother I don't know but wouldn't you want it not to go perfectly because perfectly means your heads in a basket yeah but it's not then maybe you could survive you don't survive no never

keep going until your head's gone yeah it goes from a hopefully 30 second thing to a several minute long chop chop chop and you're just like it's not cool it's not fun I don't know at the same time make them work for it yeah you know this guy's probably pretty weak holding that I would well that's why I would start with you got to catch me catch me get that basket meal and they're like technically we have to give him his dignity cover him in Greece no what you wanted to do is you wanted to get down and you wanted to stay as still as possible because if you moved around that was only gonna make things take

longer because you wanted him to hit that axe you wanted him to hit that neck once and hit it true hmm and the case of the Earl of Kilmarnock the tip that he gave a good old John Thrift apparently bolstered his confidence a little bit once the Earl's head was rested on the block John Thrift composed himself and swung down the axe sending the Earl's head rolling with just one swipe oh my goodness the hot potatoes tasted good that day he finally did it he finally made good he's like Rudy he is like Rudy but unfortunately for the Lord of Balmarino John Thrift did not go two for two that day it's tough it's like

baseball yeah you know yeah two for twos real difficult see in order for the axe to come down the condemned had to give a signal that they were ready they had to raise their hand and that's when the axe would come down just seems like they have a lot of power over this situation well they're lords they they wanted to still be dignified because this is you know this is England so there's still but there's so much propriety of course they have so many rules yes but as John Thrift raised his axe he's waiting for the signal the Lord of Balmarino he gave a signal but when he did he wildly flung up his hand and he accidentally hit

thrift and thrift still tried to swing the axe true but since he was knocked off balance he just gave the Lord a horrific flesh wound Oh straight Monty Python yeah and since thrift was like kind of ravelled it took two more swings to take off the Lord's head oh right to make matters worse afterwards because thrift had killed Jacob I leaders their followers harassed him for the rest of his life even going so far as to throw bricks and awful at his funeral procession you know right before after he did it and he's they're

all booing and he's like no no wait no you don't understand the reason why I am so nervous is because I am gay and everyone applause any red main getting his Oscar being like I couldn't have done this if I didn't learn to frown 10 years ago thank you everyone for another perfectly earned award okay so now so they knew who he was they knew he was yeah no no no no no not all of more secrets some of them okay some of them were fully and totally known to the public but most of the time the identity was a secret there is some justice in the fact that he was openly mocked for the rest of his life yeah because of

course he does take so many lives it's a strange it's a strange side effect of the career because again I really thought that they would be seen as heroes now but people need to have the position almost to keep the gears moving if you're gonna have executors if you're gonna have executions you need executioners yeah it's almost like we've all decided on the system you can't blame the system that you decided that you want because we weren't doing executions I don't know how we would be holding control of these groups of society at this time period right well there was one upside to being the

executioner okay you got first dibs on the upper garments of whoever you killed yeah you get the clothes the blood-soaked clothes of the person recently deceased and in 1603 a fight almost broke out between a local sheriff and the executioner over this very custom hmm see the Lord who was being beheaded had gone to the block wearing a beautiful black satin gown oh and the sheriff figured he'd help himself but when the executioner heard this he told the sheriff you want the gown you chop off the fucking head you chop off the head yeah dude you do the fucking work you work for that gown mm-hmm and the

executioner of course won the particular argument and won the beautiful black satin gown so now do you just kind of slip it off the the neck there huh yeah yeah yeah you just pull it's like a tablecloth then I it would be kind of fun if one of them came up with a costume that included a big paper mache second head am I the cleverest Duke of all just fucking murder you even worse yeah probably all right so they wore their best clothes another thing I wouldn't have done it I would have worn my worst everybody who went to the gallows always wore their finest clothes and that includes the

common man the common man would always wear his finest clothes and usually you know because you wanted to do it with a little bit of dignity right yeah so after the heads were chopped off they would be sent to a place called Jack Ketch's kitchen where they would go through a process called par boiling oh this is that's got to be a strange kitchen to work yeah yes par boiling means that the head would be dropped into a pot of boiling water and partially boiled in a soup of sea salt and cumin technically they're turning it into carne asada hmm that way the still recognizable heads they were only

partially boiled remember could be displayed at one of the many entrances to London as a warning and since birds hate cumin or at least seagulls do the heads were safe from the pesky beaks I don't know man do we go for a fact they hate you very random specific spice to be blame it just seems like honestly what they need is some queer eye for the straight guy it seems like they're that's the name of that show right yeah sure see that's what it's called that is what it's called but it seems like I'm sure to your entire perspective okay well it's even they need to get a different interior designer this is exterior

design exterior this is the top this is the London bridge well I don't have a curb appeal you're talking about curb appeal I'm just saying it seems like men are creating this design yeah just a bunch of spikes yeah with a bunch of heads on them it's like a 13 year old boys perfect dream yeah that's what yeah my room was covered in shit like just like that when I was 13 this is why we had a lot of conversations I'm sure your parents had a lot of conversations about you oh no no they they just ignored it very good very good that's how you do it higher profile executees however would be displayed in windows on

a velvet cushion for all to see such as what was done with the head of Mary Queen of the Scots can you also imagine a magazine called executies their heads but just being like how dreamy is this head of Ryan Lord of the Brambleberries and it just all talking about like wouldn't it be cute if we could swap bodies with the other hot boys and that all that kind of fun stuff like a tiger beat but for dead royalty right I like it yeah but this actually had a reason beyond just deterrence see back in those days the state displayed the head to prove that those who hadn't been able to attend the execution in person that the

victim really and truly was dead so it's kind of like a rerun it's like a rerun or I mean they didn't have newspapers they weren't able to print photos or anything like that no TV right you had to prove to the people yes the person is dead okay and also in this next point the idea of preventing people from later showing up and impersonating the deceased to get their shit yeah collay claim to their titles in estates well I mean I don't think that you would want to impersonate a person that is obviously on death row because then wouldn't you just be on death row no you go to another area town where they the

news hasn't gotten to them that you are dead you show up as a fake noble you can go and get other shit I was it was in fucking Dan Carlin's king of kings which I'm now listening to where they talk about how the Persian throne was all thrown off by a dude showing up pretending to be the dead son of Cyrus the great and it's very interesting so I did all time so I would just need to hope that a six foot seven three hundred pounds right headed person committed a heinous crime and deserved to be be added yeah and then I could be him yes and then you could totally all about you but all that that was in England hmm in

England they used the axe okay in Germany they didn't use the axe they used the sword and as it is with most things German and especially with German executions the sword was precise efficient and instantly deadly yes see the Germans beheaded their criminals standing up with the executioner behind them the swordsmen would then raise the sword swing it three or four times in a circle to gain momentum and then strike spinning in a circle that's such a good way to attack somebody they wouldn't spin around like a five-year-old trying to make himself high or yeah like a

birthday I also didn't know I also didn't know that the Bonilla family had German ancestors Bobby Bonilla there it is the Germany's most famous sword executioner was a man named Frans Schmidt who kept a detailed diary of each execution he performed so German Frans Schmidt and it wasn't just murderers that he was tasked with killing here's an account from Schmidt's diary talking about a criminal he beheaded named George short oh what did short do he stepped in somebody's oatmeal quote here was a lecture guilty of beastliness this four cows two cows and a ship I beheaded him at a villain his body being afterwards

burnt together this a cow what did he do he fucked a bunch of cows and then they cooked him with the cow that's awesome dream come true for the guy isn't it no he's dead no well he likes to be with the cow so I'm saying he felt it necessary to put his stem in sushi flour every cow so what did we do oof we made quite a talk talk of his behind I do think it's important to note that the smell of that must have been very interesting because you've got that delicious cow cooking mixed with the human meat and it reminds me of when we were doing the Donner party and I was watching the show the terror on AMC

which is really good and they talk about the same thing about being so hungry the smell of the human meat cooking makes your mouth water well I think that's more of really that's that's that's a Henry thing that's interesting so he was a German cow lover yes he was a German cow lover and was beheaded for being a German cow lover but for it says he fucked four cows two cows and a sheep have surveillance footage back then so how many okay it sounds like a wood rocket parody of the animal farm yes um but if you see him having sex with one

cow you would think you would stop it right you think you have four cows a sheep and what else two calves and two calves so they had to let him continue yeah they just had to let him go and they're like make sure he finishes up like it's a dog I think George Sharp was like hey listen I know this is bad everyone's mad at me I'm going you be beheaded we know this so can't I just finish yeah yeah you fucking all I guess get it all out of your system and then we'll murder you every every sheep crosses their legs I mean this is horrible this is horrible what he did to those animals and this is what

Franz Schmidt said happened with George Shorps head before it was burned with the cow this is what happened right after the beheading quote then place on the stone his head turned several times as if it wanted to look about moved its tongue and opened its mouth as if it wanted to speak for a good half-quarter hour I have never seen the like of this put my nexus of mothers his final words so he was still I guess alive conscious at the very least for 15 minutes oh see that sort of thing usually only happen with such quick methods of beheading such as like the guillotine and by the way we're gonna be covering the guillotine in full

during our upcoming series on the French Revolution that's like a little bit farther in the upcoming but it will happen it will happen yes it is it probably later on the next year of the year after that but yeah we're definitely gonna be doing a French Revolution series but Schmidt was able to accomplish this with just a sword and another example of his precision take the case of Margaret Bakken whom Schmidt beheaded in 1645 Bakken was sentenced to death after killing a woman who would only asked Bakken to check her head for lice and as Bakken checked she grabbed a hatchet and sank it in her victim skull

that's a way to get rid of lice I guess I just get rid of the whole top app of the head I guess so yeah it's like I got some good news and some bad news turns out there's no lice but there's an axe in your head oh so when Bakken was on the platform and the signal was given to take the strike she raised her arms at just the moment that the sword sliced through her neck and Schmidt's strike was so true and strong that the sword took off both her head and her hands all in one swings man how fucking metal is that he swings it he knocks off the head in the hands and for a second that because you know the body kind of dances and

holds for just a second the hand squirting blood and the head squirting blood like it's like river dancing up there the whole audience is fucking clapping and unicing that must be so much fun right but it wasn't only the living that got beheaded such was the case with Oliver Cromwell who had briefly abolished the monarchy in England in 1649 by beheading Charles the first Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector of England until his death by urinary infection at the age of 59 and his Commonwealth died soon after can you imagine that dying of a urinary tract infection that would be like no

so he was an executioner and he beheaded the number was not an executioner you don't know who Oliver Cromwell is? Cromwell? I don't know what is he the sick kid from fucking a Christmas Carol? no Oliver Cromwell is an important part of history um whatever he was a real bitch okay well now I know well when the monarchy was reestablished the following year Oliver Cromwell was exhumed and posthumously executed by beheading that's what you get you piece of shit well what did this guy do? he essentially usurped the crown of England he led a revolution executed Charles the second and ran the Commonwealth of England but

he was a very intense Puritan yes he was a he was a moral majority kind of guy I see his body after being beheaded was buried under the gallows while his head was impaled on a spike and displayed on the roof of Westminster Hall for 40 years until legend has it got blown down during a big storm 40 years good lord that's hard man but had Cromwell not succeeded in his revolution he probably would have been subjected to the punishment that was reserved for the worst of England's traders uh-oh no tea for a year drawing and quartering yeah man this is this is fun dude you could have a lot of fun

with guts they don't care about killing people guts are fun now most people think because a brave heart that being drawn and quartered is having each limb tied to a horse and then those horses slapped on the ass and the body is torn into five pieces lemon torso now this was done but it was mostly a French thing and a lot of times the horses had to be helped along by again a little cutting of some of the more stubborn ligaments that hold our bodies together how fucking terrifying as that is you're sitting there you're all tied to the horses waiting for it to go and then you got the French

executioner run I've been like oh I'm sorry my good sir but I'm going to have to do how do I say a little bit of extensive tickling don't worry don't need we're hurt for a second and then it's just so on his fucking arm and his legs and he's like what's waiting there and then you die as a torso man but what being drawn and quartered actually was in England and what actually happened to William Wallace of Braveheart fame is far worse see I always thought drawn was just a fancy way of saying tied to a horse the drawing is actually the worst part of a five-step process did they put the hands inside

the butthole of the horse that would be bad the grand muffler I don't want to be a muffler I'm not a muffler I'm a man first the victim would be dragged through the streets to the place of execution then they would be hung by their neck just a little bit before being taken down and woken up with a splash of cold water to the face they'd then be strapped down to the table and the executioner would move to phase two this is when the drawing occurs taking a sharp knife the executioner would slit open the belly of the condemned then using a special instrument because guts are slippery things the executioner would

remove or draw out the victim's intestines and throw them into the flames sometimes with the guts still attached to the person's body sticky gloves that NFL receivers are using now I mean all these one-handed catches it's a little well it's a little easier nowadays with sticky gloves folks okay I am gonna say you have to be a pretty big customer of pampered chef to get all of this in one go like because these are you're talking about tongs yeah oh cuz these instruments gotta get in there you're gonna get a hold of the one app though it's gotta be hard to tangle them enough so you can get them all out cuz you

don't you don't probably want to pull them out because then the guy dies too soon yeah right and then you want to slap it on an open flame kind of like you're charring it like a chef's table weird so he can feel all of that this guy yeah he can feel oh yeah now this guy can feel all of it and if the guy was really unlucky that the whole guts pulled out thing right that was preceded by full castration which symbolized the no more traders will be sired by this guy right here well I think the guts the guts seems to spoil the erotic mood of the future I'm at sir could I just say the women got it they don't like me

anymore I promise you but the coup de gras came when as the victim watched his entrails and his dick and balls roast on a fire the executioner would reach up into the stomach wound and rip out the heart of the condemned Indiana Jones in the temple of doom style yeah then the executioner he'd take a little breather well naturally I understand that yeah I need a green juice yeah green juice in you have some carrots and then his assistant came in the assistant took care of the beheading and once the head was removed the executioner would return raise the head on high and declare to the cheering crowd behold the head of a

traitor and of course the head would be parboiled and put on a stake on London bridge of course I mean there's nothing else you could do with it you just throw it away or bury it like you're a human but you have to you have to boil it and put it on a spike you know actually sometimes they would give the head back to relatives that's nice yeah there was one woman who kept the head of her father for like 20 years and then when she died they put his head in a cage in her tomb they were buried together oh very nice that's really nice yeah it's always fun to be buried with a poltergeist but there was still one more step

the quartering oh this was done pretty much as a promo to the crown the legs and arms would be hacked off from the torso and they'd get tore it around the other cities showing people what would happen if they tried fucking with the king huh I wonder if anyone was like it doesn't look that bad you know I'm gonna go with that I come that's fine yeah it's cool it's got nice hands yeah it's kind of fun to see actually I'd never seen a hands without a guy I feel like we'll probably do the same thing with someone along the lines of the Kardashians where it's just their butt from city to city and then you can go

and for a quarter we're probably in this time period twenty five dollars you could stick your face in it oh my but one guy who was subjected to being drawn and quartered fought till the end as Major General Thomas Harrison sentenced for treason in 1660 was having his guts pulled out of his stomach he managed to sit up and he punched his executioner in the face then he died then he did then he did die and a real yeah it is had ended up on London Bridge all the same yeah I mean once you're in that once you're at that point I don't think there's a lot of turning back I'm gonna fight the entire kingdom right right I just miss

when treason was a real crime yeah seems like they really they really took it seriously back in the day it really really did yeah and it's not like there was just like one or two heads up on London Bridge Germany's Duke of Wurttemberg who thought the whole spectacle was quote-unquote quite splendid oh said that he counted 34 heads upon his entrance into the city well it is do you think we're just at the time period people are just more comfortable with death and bodies to begin with it seems to be the people see a lot more death there's a there's a lot more just open grave action seem to be

happening nothing much of rotting heads at the front of your city like you know welcome to the props Providence Henry please they were parboiled they were I know but this is before this is before Game Boy which is still peak video game technology I heard billboards you've got to count something on the road I feel like I nowadays it would just be more shocking than it was then yeah now it sounds really shocking but but then it was just more like a oh yeah one falls down you kick it around like a soccer ball for a little while it's kind of fun kids love it right but if they saw I mean if you replace those heads with a

Hooters billboard they would be like what kind of primitive Neanderthals live in 2018 that is disgusting sir you get a hot chicken a tube top right and you think she's got two kind of maybe weird shape and like wonderful breasts underneath her tube top and she pulls down the top and you're waiting to pop a bone and it's just two dead dukes but you know before we pass judgment we here in America drew and quarter people as well actually we only did it once and it was before America was even a country was back in 1676 we did it with a guy and it was still the English who did it yeah they they drew and quartered a colonist named

Joshua Teft who had fought alongside the Narragansett tribe against his fellow colonists fighting for beer rights Narragansett not a bad beer you know surprisingly Canada they actually tried it a couple of times really yeah yeah they tried it did they not succeed well the first time they succeeded they did it in Quebec in 1797 and they almost did it again in 1814 when they sent its 17 traitors to British Columbia after the war of 1812 he spit out the protein I knew he was not for us either which but they ended up backing out and only executed eight of them without quartering them and the rest they just gave

them a nice reprieve this fucking halfway bullshit come on Canada I mean come on Canada oh god it's like that mall that we went to in Toronto where none of the escalators matched up and you had to walk across walk across the whole fucking mall I love the Canadian people but it is it is true where everything is it's just there's I don't it's not planned like not it's not planned it seems really improvised and I just I'm scared of buildings that are improvised yeah I like buildings with like a lot of thought put it right well drawing and quartering was tried one last time in Derby Shire England in 1817 although the

public didn't really have the stomach for it anymore time's a taste of change taste changed yet three men were convicted of starting riots to protest high unemployment and unfair labor practices and were sentenced to drawing and quartering for the troubles so they had two very reasonable complaints extremely reasonable complaints they were trying to unionize yeah they were essentially trying to unionize and the government sentenced them to one of the worst executions possible oh my but when the time came to carry out the sentence it was decided just hang in beheaded you don't got to do the whole

guts thing or anything like that just hang them and then cut off their hat but even this was too much see after the body swung for an hour as was the custom the actual executioner wasn't up to performing the beheading you know what it is is that I like honestly I've really been extending myself so instead of doing the beheading I think I'm just gonna take a self-care moment and I'm gonna binge watch friends they got a duck so instead of the executioner doing it they just got a local coal miner to come out and do it just some do again you're properly drunk you just had the right shot at JMO I mean you're a

working man you got working man's rage although it is kind of sad because these people were fighting for workers rights they were just got a regular old worker to be had them they sure did and not surprisingly this guy had no idea what he was doing he didn't know how to behead a person thank God if he was super good I think they got a they got to like raid his house so he's just like swinging again and again at these guys next blood spurtin everywhere he's failing at every turn so the crowd freaks out and just runs away and disgust and horror people are puking and bombing everywhere and that brought the

era of bloody British execution to an end oh now these were extreme cases drawing and quartering was by no means a regular event nor was beheading for most cases in England state execution came down to nothing more than a good old-fashioned hanging okay in London the place for hangings was Tyburn aka scraggum fair oh the women are still beautiful there and the men they are plentiful scraggum fair this spot was originally chosen for two reasons one good trees strong branches okay this is beautiful trees imagine you see beautiful trees the first thing you think of me like hey bet we can hang a lot of

fucks on that and two it was on the main road into London from the north meaning everyone got a good look on their way in great so over the years the method of hanging in England evolved just like any other process used in a profession at first when they started formalizing the process they'd have the condemned stand on a ladder the noose would be tied around the neck and they just kick the ladder out from underneath them right right the person would swing and kick about 20 minutes because as we know strangling someone to death is much more difficult than the movies make it seem mm-hmm I think the movie

that made it seem as difficult as it is and as horrifying as it is the house that Jack built yeah Lars von Trier's new movie really shows what that process looks like the his strangling by hand in that movie is some of the more disturbing footage I've seen in a while and it takes a long time and a lot of effort absolutely but in the case of the English prisoners mercifully the condemned were actually permitted help oh someone was willing a family member friend or servant okay was allowed to reach up and pull down on the legs of the condemned as they were hanging adding weight and bringing the sweet

release of death that much faster this got one big fat guy who calls himself the anchor when you said they advanced I thought you were gonna be like and then they brought in the fog machine with the fog machine became strobe lights and there were all sorts of fun terms and like turns of phrase surrounding these executions in Scotland hangman were known as doomsters cool well in England they were commonly called scrag boys I like yeah I'm still a little bit better than scragg boy which sounds like someone who has to clean the text testicles of a king I love scragg boy scragg boy scragg boy is one of my new favorite words

scragg boy sounds like he picks dingle berries out of royalties ass honestly I scragg boy would be fun to give him a couple of dollars because you know a scragg boy will he'll ship me up a pipe if you if you lose a kite he'll go right up on a tree you know I mean he'll take a bullet for you because all he wants to be is dead these are expendable boys yes great boy versus doomster you want to be a doomster no to me the doomster sound like it's teamsters all dressed up as demons it's like all dressed up what was it the was an appetite for destruction what was the name of that weight that wrestling tag team with the

two guys with the legion of doom yeah it's those guys with their tramspo yeah that's awesome and there were of course all the weird old-timey customs that went along with hanging while the man was dying by the rope women would line up to press the man's hand to their face as a way to cure blemishes it was like an acne cure well I don't know how would that work I don't even know because Natalie's got this these creams that she puts on at night that I'm not all I can't kiss her when when she when it's on her face because that's what she just has these creams but I can't imagine the opposite where instead of covered in

creams you just cover it and scrag boy mess well you just you would have to have a bad boy mess it's not this a scrag boy is the executioner yeah you just have to have you would have to open up her drawer and out comes a severed hand like you're living in the Adams family house and then she dabs her face with that now what you're talking about Ben that's a hand of glory a hand of glory is something different all together isn't that when you sit on your left hand no no no that's called the ants over for dinner the hanging was also an opportunity to cure disease children with infected limbs would have their wounds rubbed against

the skin of the dying man as it was believed that the quote-unquote death sweat had healing powers who the hell said that well how did this happen some some doctor was yes Andy himself into oblivion he was like I've got to come up with something go rub on the course I think that this should come back I think kids should be taught to be more chilled to the very bone and as little kids they should be lowered into gaskets while their parents going don't worry you'll feel better after this I guess it could toughen up them toughen them up a little bit but in the 12th century capital punishment was getting to be more

popular so the English built an apparatus to accommodate the demand which is I mean the apparatus it was just a long cross beam okay but with that with the invention of a long cross beam they could now hang 10 men at once wow it's like how you can make what was it white castle burgers you can have you get you can make them real fast you know they do that they make you talking about like a the Henry forwarding of the gallows industry kind of kind of yeah the assembly line yeah and with the way that they can do the catch-up you can get three catch-ups you can get three burgers you can put ketchup on them with

one one push yeah sir sir your your bus is here sir you need to get on your bus that's why that's why they sold over a billion hamburgers well the condemned would stand on a long horse cart and once all the men were noosed someone would smack the horse and each man would fall one by one as the cart disappeared beneath their feet it's horrifying but the crime rate or at least the number of hangable crimes rose even further in the 16th century so the English decided 10 wasn't enough oh my god in 1571 they introduced the three legged mayor the triple tree which allowed 24 men to be hanged at once eight

from each beam I don't know if I'd go see it now but at the time you can feel how excited people would be about I'm sure yeah oh the crowds went nuts for it that is a lot of showmanship getting all of those guys up there getting essentially murdering an entire NBA team right so many people came out to the executions that the people who own the land around Tyburn they erected grandstands and charged prices commensurate with how famous the person being executed was how did anyone ever start watching baseball like if that is the competition is like hanging 24 people are like well they hit the ball

with a stick and they run what do you mean they don't die no no no they get celebrated no no they do die but it's of mouth cancer in their 40s but charge and hire prices for the grandstand almost backfired in 1758 the owner of the grandstands a one Mammy Douglas charged extra for the hanging of the treasonous Dr. Hennessy the hitch came when Hennessy was reprieved at the last minute so the spectators who had paid extra for a famous hanging right by God we're gonna get it damn near hanged Mammy Douglas instead we're barely stopped by the authorities but as all good things come

to an end the hanging grounds moved from Tyburn in 1759 after it was deemed bad for the surrounding businesses and homes I believe it sounds like all the people in Williamsburg now that are having kids they want to kick all the bars out because they're the ones not having a good time in Williamsburg Brooklyn it is a lot of children out here now yes it is yikes well pretty much you know that entire part of London would shut down during the executions because there'd be so many people coming and the people were pissed that the grounds had been moved this is what happened I was in San Diego for Comic

Con with all you all with all you all and talk don't talk to them about the Chargers who moved to LA they were their livid yeah well take for example this grumpy old man letter written by the highly respected English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson after Tyburn was moved the age is running mad after innovation all the business of the world is be done in a new way Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation it is not an improvement they object that the old method drew together too many spectators sir executions are intended to draw spectators if they do not draw spectators

they don't answer their purpose the old method was most satisfactory to all parties the public were gratified by a procession and the criminal was supported by it why is this all to be swept away also bring back pubic hair honestly the New York Post would publish that letter to the editor today that is like it's funny how things really don't change huh yeah they really don't I mean this guy's he's pretty much bitching about gentrification he's mad that he's he's just mad that his band finally got a gold record it's always how it happens it's up against popular everybody gets upset he wanted to go

watch his executions and now he can't do it yeah it's like when cats left Broadway for a little while before they brought it back it is it is just like that because I remember at the end of cats when they hang the whole fucking cat yeah and then they get the new cast the next day which I think is the only appropriate way cats should be performed nine shows nine lives but no matter where the executions took place the executioners did their job and the people who held this post over the years were not surprisingly fascinating men along with one woman oh Ireland was the only country with a female executioner

a middle-aged stout maid swore the complexion woman known as Lady Betty and if you've even dare calling me manly Betty I'll execute you with my vagina oh I'll hop on your shoulders and I'll snip your neck with the lips of me I like her Betty had actually been forced into the position after she'd murdered her son for money because she didn't recognize him after a long trip away from home she was very Irish yeah and she was given a choice hang or be hanged yeah I'll take promotion you got a promotion for killing her kid so she took over the job and worked as the local executioner all throughout the 1820s and 30s she

became so famous around Ireland that when kids were misbehaving the parents could be heard to say quote I got a book here's a lady Betty I don't even know what a got the book I mean what is it got the book I think it's gay like a got the book a got the book a got the book a hair's lady but he's a he's a he becky and then it's just a horse with a wick and a dress on and how bad does that make Lady Betty feel not at their ocean or like so did they it was a mostly hang ins it was it was all hang ins yeah yeah yeah yeah no lady Betty wasn't as far as the men went though England had a long tradition of

fascinating hangman John Hooper aka laughing jack was known as the funny guy he's the funny funny guy he shouldn't be laughing jack he should be joking Jack and the crowd should be laughing because they call them laughing Jack because he said it was said that he had quote an inexhaustible cache of humorous anecdotes if I tell you I tell you the only a day early today all right I was on the I was on a parkway there and my big thing is all right one might drive in on a parkway in this guy he was loved by the people he worked with as well so it seems like when now we've transitioned out of them being exiled yeah being

heroes yep this because like laughing jack is not well I wouldn't say necessarily heroes but begrudgingly respected okay where people know who they are now they can't really hide anymore because you know their names are on government records right once it moves past the shame part and it becomes this sort of like technically this is a role this is a celebrated thing you are now the character of laughing jack so I imagine that it does denote it's like once you make a bit out of it it's a different story right being a random chosen dude mm-hmm and his signature can still be found in the annals of the

barber surgeons on receipts for Christmas bonuses of seven shillings and six pints annually paid in appreciation of his prompt delivery of the bodies of hanged men and that bonus was a big deal in those days because as I said these guys worked on commission but that ended up biting jack's successor in the ass particularly hard as William Brunskell came into the job right after England started shipping criminals off to Australia instead of just hanging them all oh my goodness and it wasn't until the 19th century that the executioner got a base pay William Calcraft who took over in 1829 made 25 shillings a week on top of

one pound one shilling for every execution while simple floggings earned half a crown see it what's a half a crown I don't know okay it seems like that's a lot of money though 25 shillings a week that's like 25 cents it's a lot of money like a quarter yeah he gets a quarter and then he gets a dollar and a penny for every execution oh man it's all a cart yeah so they're still it they're still like freelancers well they do get as a base salary like he got a base of a quarter a week they gave them they flipped him a quarter a week and then kind of on a retainer type of thing but they'd really only get the big

payment if they did actual executions right and Calcraft actually holds the record for longest duration as a hangman he did 45 years on the job in London whoa before that he was a public execution pie salesman and in the course of the job he got acquainted with the hangman and started an apprenticeship and when old Tom the hangman retired Calcraft took over now I know there's a lot to it but an apprenticeship like isn't how how much do you have to really learn a lot there's a lot I do they make the news do they tie the news they tie the news themselves yeah and you get you know exactly how long it's gonna be you

gotta do upkeep on the lever in the spring all of this it's like you have all it's a whole industry they have to maintain all of this bullshit they are managers yeah right all right all right yeah and Calcraft he wasn't just the London executioner he also presided over Middlesex and he was the hangman at both Maidstone prison and horsemonger jail and in addition to that he took plenty of road gigs as well getting paid 10 to 15 pounds per execution and loving every second of it because Calcraft was said to be particularly fond of travel he's got his neck pillow that just made out of someone's actual

neck now Calcraft's reign truly was the end of an era though as he presided over England's last public execution on April 2nd 1868 he was forced to retire at the age of 75 but left proud of the job he'd done but the thing was Calcraft was actually pretty terrible at the job by later standards people were still taken 20 minutes to die and people were still having to pull on the legs to make death go a little faster oh it's fun yeah and Calcraft himself was actually known to do it himself when no one else would okay that's because the method of hanging

hadn't really changed in centuries the only improvement had been that the horse cart had been replaced with the hatch and lever hmm the hatch and lever is the method that most of us probably picture when we think about a state sponsored hanging yeah the old Wild West you think about it yeah yeah the person stands on the hatch the noose is slipped over the lever is pulled hatch opens person drops right at that big people are still hung and hanged in this time period right don't some states still have a hanging I'm not sure if some states still allow hanging I think most of them I know they said there are some

execution methods that we're gonna get into in a future episode that are still allowed that it's extremely surprising oh but I don't think you can still I don't think you can choose hanging anymore well why don't you just commit a horrible crime and see what happens no no no no I'm hope to go because if I'm allowed to it'll be death like chocolate well in executioner's terms when you get hung with the lever method that's known as the short drop and while it was effective in that it kills the person as I said it still took about 20 minutes of struggling in agony it wasn't until William Marwood took over in 1874 that

all that changed see Marwood was 56 years old when he became executioner so he'd seen a lot of public executions in his time right and he'd apparently been spending a lot of time thinking about better ways to pull it off so Marwood it's strange what a strange thing to just think about all the time but he really I mean professionally he's just see that's his job yeah it's his job so he wants to do it better and it comes down to it he knows that it sucks to wait for 20 minutes and I'm bet you it'll there's a probably a level of almost like laziness of being like I'm sick of grabbing a squirming guy's feet

and hanging on him from 20 minutes Lee fucking dies well Marwood was not an executioner when he came up with this method Marwood was just a regular dude he was just a spectator who went to executions maybe it's compassion maybe he thinks of it as compassion you know and he actually did I mean he was a lifelong churchgoer he was a Methodist they said he had a bit of a fondness for the gen all right so Marwood came up with what he called the long drop see the thing he realized was that there's a sweet spot when it comes to hanging too short of a drop and the person suffers mm-hmm too long and the velocity of the

body falling plus the weight of the body itself would cause the person's head to pop off in a geyser of blood but you know honestly doesn't that seem like the one you want if you're the person and the crowd the problem is though people like the kicking yeah yeah well but and this actually happened the head popping off actually happened more often than you'd like to think in one case a fruit farmer named Robert Goodale was sentenced to death for killing his wife with an iron bar and throwing her down the well but when it came time to hang him the rope was just a little bit too long for Goodale's 210 pound frame so when the

lever was pulled and Goodale dropped the executioner heard a snap and saw the rope rebound up through the hatch the executioner thought that the rope had broken but he noticed that the noose was still attached what wasn't attached was Goodale's head when the executioner peeked down into the pit he saw Goodale's twitching headless body laying in a pool of blood next to a bloody white bag containing the head and in the words of the executioner himself the rope cut through the neck as cleanly as wire cutting cheese okay well okay interesting but if you're the guy being executed again that's really no because you're

still conscious afterwards yeah your head is still kind of lives for a second going oh how much time do you have away from your body there they say anywhere from like maybe 10 may anywhere between 10 seconds possibly up to a minute honestly what you think what do you think about that where's my body where's my body but William Marwood devised a system that ensured that not only would that not happen but that the condemned wouldn't suffer either he devised a table that factored in the weight of the prisoner that would determine how long the rope should be then other factors such as age and

neck strength were considered okay because if you were an old man with a skinny neck your head's gonna pop off a lot quicker and say if you were a young guy with a strong neck but say you weighed the same like say of me and a 150 pound year old man that's you know 30 years older his neck's gonna be weaker than my neck absolutely and you can also tell that by like you should right before you get hung they should do a thing where they put like a weighted hat on you to see if your neck bends or not I'm just adding to math that is no longer relevant right absolutely unless it's unless it's one of those old men

some old dudes are the old man strike yeah that is true that's different though now once all that was calculated you were left with the exact length of rope you would need to drop the prisoner down just far enough with a neck would snap tearing the spinal cord from the brain killing the condemned almost instantly all right all Marwood needed now was to try it out yeah so he petitioned the city of London telling them that he had a new technique for hanging that was gonna blow the old one out of the water all right let me well let's hear them out because Jerry here has an idea he says hang them upside down what we should do

is we should hang them by their feet and spin them around the pole until the gravity of the earth whatever that is the ghost inside the earth have weight and you see like no no no so London figure and who gives a shit they gave my shot okay and with that Marwood whose day job was shoe cobblin changed the way hanging was done around the world forever be nice to everyone in any service industry because they're all plotting on ways to kill you better yes but that doesn't mean that Marwood was the end all be all his method was actually improved upon further by James Barry who took over in 1884 after marrying his

longtime sweetheart Anne Ackroyd like and she said they're like I heard I had a dream last night James about 12 hidden crystal skulls that were filled with boo see Barry determined the exact spot that the rope should be placed in order to guarantee the snapping of the neck making this method of hanging surprisingly by far the most humane out of all the methods of execution that I studied this week including more modern methods like the gas chamber a lethal injection if I were to choose to be executed hang hang me and really yeah and do it with the Marwood Barry method because it snaps your neck and like it's

just and you're done the rest of them there's a build-up you have to wait around there's some there's extreme amounts of pain involved yeah hanging in the Marwood method yep that's it well unfortunately in this country Marcus you don't get to choose how you die yo yeah you do no it's lethal injection or the electric chair basically yeah basically man I'd be kind of fun or bored to death to sit there and put on a bunch of what's that show with the twins that they'll live in the hotel together on Disney sister sister sister sister yeah that was a great one that's yeah put on like several hours of sister sister and

then I'll just fade away oh you'll love it that show it a lot a lot going on there well concerning Barry though he just like Marwood also in the shoe business really two guys in a row their cobblers wow but Barry almost didn't get the job when Marwood died 1,400 people applied for the position of hangman whoa whoa it's like the Apple store Barry was selected to be among the final 20 interviewed but got narrowly beaten up by a man named Bartholomew Benz I hate him I hate him what's the interview process like for this how do you I think it's you get a rope the first thing they hand your rope and see what you do if

you immediately tie into a noose you go to the second phase okay if you turn it into a belt they fire you because then a technical you're an actor means that you're a performer and then the second interview is about whether or not you can just you can identify what part of the body is the neck all right then it was discovered pretty soon that Bartholomew Benz was an undependable drunk and a burglar to boot oh so after a few botched executions by Benz Barry got called off the bench Barry hanged 131 people during his career but eventually became an opponent against the death penalty really this was not

because it was wrong for the state to take a life or because innocent people are sometimes killed but rather jobs too hard on the hangman yeah really it's too hard a job man they're working to that so it needs well whatever the excuse is I'm sure it is hard on the hangman I'm sure it is psychologically yeah but one hangman who seemed to do his job with Gusto was among the most famous hangman of all time much less just the 20th century and he was in fact the third man in his family to hold the hangman position long line of hangman mm-hmm that man was Albert Pierpont and he was the model of efficiency his father

Henry averaged about 13 seconds for each execution okay damn but in 1951 at strange ways prison Albert shattered his father's record by hanging murderer James Englis in seven and a half seconds from cell door to trap door whoa what what an accomplishment that you can't tell anyone about you remember you used to have so many Guinness World Record shows the specials like that'll be a cool thing to have a big setup of like for the fastest hanging where you have like all the judges there and how we Mandela's announcing it right and see the seconds countdown that'd be cool you want televised execution that's what

I'm not quote-unquote looking forward to them right I would watch them I'm actually pretty sure if I if my memory is correct when it comes to Timothy McVeigh they got pretty close to showing his execution line yes they got really close yeah they piped it in from cuz he was executed in Denver right at the superman sure I'm pretty sure he was executed in Denver at the Supermax prison but I do know that they showed it on closed circuit television and in Oklahoma City yeah yeah yeah they definitely brought that back but efficiency was not why Albert Pierpoint became famous his fame came from hanging

Nazi war criminals yes that was so fucking sweet that is that is fun yeah that is why I love playing those video games like Call of Duty World War two killing Nazis is just fun to do it's just fun yeah it's such a cathartic thing it really is and then every once in a while do you see a tall redheaded one deep in the pile of the ones you murdered and then is there an option for you to go close its eyes with it they're still open well put the coins down so we can pay car on on the river sticks my grandfather got out scott free scott free yes almost like he clean cuz he was clean good of heart yeah scott free is the

wrong because scott free implies that there was much wrongdoing no there was no whatever he was he was pure of heart he said I don't like these people well Pierpoint oversaw the execution of as many as 200 Nazis including Joseph Kramer the Beast of Belzen and Irma Gressa the bitch of Buchenwald we got to do an episode on her yeah we touched on her briefly in one episode I think maybe it was Ed Gein long long time ago because Irma Gressa was actually Ed Gein's dream woman yeah hey man would have been one of Ed Gein's dream jobs perhaps well he wasn't big in a killing I mean it the guy that took the

corpses over to the barber surgeons that would have been his dream job because he would have let a couple fall off the back of the cart you know I mean that's very true yes and since Pierpoint was getting paid for every trip to Germany to execute eight here 13 there he made enough money to buy the lease on a pub in Manchester called Help the Poer Struggler oh I want to still open not closed in 1990 that's a really good run yeah from 9 to about I think he opened it in like 48 49 and lasted until 1990 really good run I would love to go that would have been awesome but even though he was running this bar he still

performed executions and it couldn't you can do both yeah and it but in 1950 the pub and executioner sides of his life came crashing together when one of his regulars a man named James Henry Corbett murdered his own mistress that's got to be such a bummer yeah because can you imagine because you know like Norm comes in bitching about his wife just eventually you find out norm killed his wife yeah honestly cheers I could see Cliff Clavin being a killer yeah I could see it yeah and then imagine if Woody had to kill him oh my god such a nice bartender young handsome and Albert and James like these guys were

actually friends they'd get drunk and they'd perform songs for the bar patrons together they even had a couple's nickname people called them Tish and Tosh oh you got to kill Tish Tosh yeah man Tish gets mad sometimes you just can't once Tish is over the edge it's really really difficult to pull him back but when it was time Albert Pier point still pulled the lever on James Corbett but all you can hope is that maybe he just like poured poured a beer into his mouth and he's been like one of those go around a friend you go to Tish you got a Tosh yeah and then they fucking mouth kiss each other 20 seconds there

is drops him through there is something a little romantic you know because he used to pull another level lever the beer draft oh that's a good that's a good side wipe cut yeah in the movie exactly is yeah there well there was a movie made about this guy's life in 2005 I think it's just called pure point okay yeah I don't know if it's any good or not but it exists all right well pure point retired four years after the execution of his friend following 24 years of service having executed about 450 people I guarantee you no one misbehaved in his bar though no I'm sure no bouncer needed there when the executioner owns the damn

place you're well at the at this time the executioner had become a little bit more of a public figure and somebody that people wanted to hang out with cuz what's his name one of the boot makers but Barry people used to go to his boot making shop because they wanted to buy boots from the hangman super metal yeah and super metal yeah and people will go to help the poor struggler to go drink with Albert pure point I love the name of that bar it's a statement yeah rarely are they statements mm-hmm and pure point died 26 years after retiring in a nursing home at the age of 87 wow if I ever

start a bar it's definitely gonna be called eating a hamburger nude and as an ending to this episode we're gonna provide you with some bonus Greek and Roman executions bonus execution well the Greek dramatist Aristophanes recorded a rare execution in the 4th century BC called the siphon in this execution a man would be strapped into a pillory and covered in milk and honey to attract insects okay he'd be left there for 20 days and if he survived they'd take him out put him in a dress and throw him off a cliff final now you're a dead girl it is how does that feel straight out of like the

naked gun or something or Princess bride it is so stupid alright equally as stupid is in 256 BC when the Carthaginians have fixed a bunch of nails and spikes to the inside of a barrel put a guy named Marcus Regulus inside and just rolled it down a hill all right yeah see what'll happen then there's the time that Pompey the great decreed that a prisoner should be tied up in a gigantic leather sack with a dog a chicken a viper and an ape and threw him in the river I feel bad for the viper can probably survive yeah the viper might survive the dog didn't deserve it no definitely deserve it not the chicken not

the viper but he makes no sense at all yeah it's like a turducken of an execution and that's where well the end this episode on executions all right we're saving our favorite method for an episode all its own so stay tuned for the electric chair aka the yellow mama coming in March all right we're gonna keep coming back to executions oh yeah I think it's really fun we have an endless array of beautiful bull moats oh it's crazy and disgusting details we had a chance when we were in Naples to go to the to the torture museum and we saw a lot of these devices not pleasant thought the horse where you just kind of

sit on that try and Spanish donkey yeah Spanish donkey now we've talked about that in the past we've talked about the brazen bull in the past like there's yeah there's brutal stuff oh yeah all the space yeah especially the Spanish Inquisition stuff that torture stuff is pretty awful there's one where it didn't kill you but if you were too drunk all the time they just put a beer barrel on your body you need to walk around like a jackass like you wouldn't adapt to that yeah but my goodness all right executions well thank you all so much for listening happy merry Christmas happy holidays happy Hanukkah happy new year yeah

getting all of it in there sure there's always somebody celebrating something I don't know whatever you're celebrating this holiday season hope you had a wonderful time and we'll have a wonderful time we will next week we're taking some the week off because we're giving our employees the time off which is nice we're different than Scrooge which we watched last night them up at Christmas Carol we're gonna give them the week off so we'll be back for the new year with side stories and I'm really excited about the energy of 2019 we already have we have about the next six months of episodes planned but I'm very

fucking excited for them as Michael Jackson said you are not alone we will be with you we have a special yeah that you can purchase for six dollars and 66 cents and you can when you can buy this throughout the whole year of 2019 forever I guess yeah but if you want to watch us that was live in Chicago it's really awesome it's super fun and you can get our special on last podcast live dot com that's last podcast live dot com so we can't wait to for you all to see it oh yeah I do want to put one I want to put a little message there and I had a message sent to me and it's true because inside stories I said a thing about how

you got to look out women I look out for men that are pretending to be a single by taking off their ring at the bar and but you could still see the dent and then I had a listener who sent me a message it said it said unfortunately the same is true for the recently divorced man it is very difficult for me to find dates because I got the ring dent I don't want to say you're correct and I'm good and I'm sorry about even saying this because that's a brutal blow it's got to be very difficult right I think then for women out there if you want to just make sure that you know for a fact that the man is divorced is that I think you just look

into the the dead center of his eyes yeah because I think that if there's a six-month period where you could see into the flames of their soul if you look directly into their people and if you're a guy or a gal out there recently divorced bring the divorce papers also McKenzie and Ethan congratulations on being married and I'm sorry I couldn't be there in Phoenix but love Mackenzie and Ethan they're two good friends of mine yes congratulations they never have to take off the rings and and get that and have to show anyone their papers it's gonna be a wonderful new year yes

and I'm excited for it absolutely big tid energy this year man big tid energy I certainly got it and 2019 it's gonna be an exciting time for politics to we got to keep campaigns are beginning yeah so you can listen to abling and stop that for all that stuff very fun and this has been a great year with all of you so thank you all so much thanks for everyone who came out to one of our live shows mm-hmm it's always incredible meeting you next year we're gonna be going all over the globe yeah and of course right here in America as well so we can't wait to see you all in the new year it's gonna be fantastic it

absolutely will be and of course that book will be finished at some point too it's gonna be finished next year and then that'll be out in 2020 yep absolutely so it is got to be done it has to be done please contractually contractually just please let it be done please take it from us please please just take this book from us you could also give to the patreon if you want that's nice if you want to six flags is still on us for six bucks six fifteen thousand a month for sixty six point six months mm-hmm it's paid in one lump some just piss off your billionaire dad you know feel for it all right everyone

have a wonderful new year hail yourselves hail Satan may he return Elgin Magus deletions hail me one last time before I go have a great new year