Between them, the three men in the fearsome Pierrepoint dynasty executed over 800 people during a career spanning more than half a century. Henry, his brother Thomas, and his son Albert, dispatched some of the most infamous criminals of the 20th century, and in the process earned a public notoriety that followed them throughout their eventful lives.For years, the three men were faced with the task -- prestigious to some, horrific to many others -- of being the last point of contact for the guilty and condemned. The Pierrepoints executed criminals the nation over before travelling to many countries including Egypt and postwar Germany, where they hanged Nazi war criminals, and gained a reputation as the world's most deadly practitioners of the art of hanging."Pierrepoint: A Family of Executioners" recounts the intriguing stories of the three men and the effect that their macabre occupation had on their personal lives. This definitive guide is filled with shocking inside tales from the official records and diaries kept by the Pierrepoint family. With revealing insights into the intense rivalry between fellow executioners, new light is shed on the menacing world of years gone by.

Albert Pierrepoint became an executioner in 1931, at the age of 27, and resigned his office as Official Executioner in 1956 ... This autobiography now offers a documentary record of his experience, which in retrospect he summed up as follows "I do not now believe that any of the hundreds of executions I carried out has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge."--Jacket.

Judicial hanging is regarded by many as being the quintessentially British execution. However, many other methods of capital punishment have been used in this country; ranging from burning, beheading and shooting to crushing and boiling to death. This book explores these types of execution in detail. Readers may be surprised to learn that a means of mechanical decapitation, the Halifax Gibbet, was being used in England five hundred years before the guillotine was invented. Boiling to death was a prescribed means of execution in this country during the Tudor period. From the public death by starvation of those gibbeted alive, to the burning of women for petit treason, this book examines some of the most gruesome passages of British history.

William Watkins was executed in 1951 for the murder of his infant child. John Pugh, then a solicitor's clerk, was in court when the death sentence was announced and Pugh has never forgotten that experience. In Execution, Pugh undertook prodigious research to create this account of legal, political and public intrigue, and of indifference to the fate of a deaf bus driver. He goes on to argue that Watkins should not have been hanged and paints a picture of appalling injustice and policing. He also explains how the authorities have consistently refused to release the papers on this case.

Already part of a genre known for generating controversy, some true crime and scandal books have wielded a particular power to unsettle readers, provoke authorities and renew interest in a case. The reactions to such literature have been as contentious as the books themselves, clouding the "truth" with myths and inaccuracies. From high-profile publishing sensations such as Ten Rillington Place, Fatal Vision and Mommie Dearest to the wealth of writing on the JFK assassination, the death of Marilyn Monroe and the Black Dahlia murder, this book delves into that hard copy era when crime and scandal books had a cultural impact beyond the genre's film and TV documentaries, fueling outcries that sometimes matched the notoriety of the cases they discussed and leaving legacies that still resonate today.

This book relates a chapter of American military history which many people would rather forget. When the United States came to the aid of Britain in 1942, the arrival of American troops was greeted with unreserved enthusiasm, but unfortunately, wartime sometimes brings out the worst, as well as the best, in people. A small number of the soldiers abused the hospitality they received by committing murders and rapes against British civilians. Some of these men were hanged or shot at Shepton Mallet Prison in Somerset, which had been handed over for the use of the American armed forces. Due to a treaty between Britain and America, those accused of such offences faced an American court martial, rather than a British civilian court, which gave rise to some curious anomalies. Although rape had not been a capital crime in Britain for over a century, it still carried the death penalty under American military law and so the last executions for rape in Britain were carried out at this time in Shepton Mallet. Fighting For the United States, Executed in Britain tells the story of every American soldier executed in Britain during the Second World War. The majority of the executed soldiers were either black or Hispanic, reflecting the situation in the United States itself, where the ethnicity of the accused person often played a key role in both convictions and the chances of subsequently being executed.