Today’s Fined Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Pamphlets which were offensive were liable to extremely heavy penalties in 17th Century England, as Mrs. Elizabeth Cellier discovered when she published Malice Defeated in 1680. In it she exposed the treatment of prisoners in Newgate gaol and in so doing suffered a crippling fine of £1000 and three spells in the pillory.
Reading her pamphlet, it is easy to see why her sentence was so harsh. One of the prisoners’ stories which she related is that of Captain Clarke, “who being prisoner only for debt, was lock’d up in a little dark hole two days and two nights, having no other company but the quarters of two executed persons, the extreme stench of which had perhaps killed him, had he not took the miserable relief of holding a foul chamber pot to his nose.”
Culled from: Crimes and Punishment: The Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia, Volume 17
Religious Insanity Du Jour!
Of the many bizarre and bloody stories of the 50’s, none was stranger than the tale of the “whipping cult” in, of all places, the quiet St. Paul suburb of Lauderdale. It was the kind of story that even today would send the press into a state of collective salivation. In addition to accounts of murder and flogging, there were also allegations of unspecified “sex perversion,” adding yet another delectable feature to the story.
The tale actually begins in the late 1940s when a half dozen or so people coalesced into a quasi-religious cult that took corporal punishment—administered with heavy leather whips—to the extreme. Several of the cultists lived at a house in Lauderdale, where on October 15, 1951, a man named Curtis Lennander delivered such vicious whippings to his wife and another woman that both subsequently died. One of the women was all but flayed and had other injuries severe enough to shock even the county coroner. Lennander was arrested, and the media carnival, which included long interviews with some of the cult members, began.
Here’s Lennander, standing bare backed for the camera in front of a painting of Jesus, as he shows off wounds to Ramsey County Sheriff Thomas Gibbons. Lennander, who claimed he’d been beaten by another member of the whip-happy household, later denied any religious motivation in the fatal beatings. “I just had to do something,” he told police, claiming he’d whipped the women “in a frenzy.”
The crime so disturbed sensibilities that the Ramsey County attorney later felt compelled to announce, despite one victim’s testimony to the contrary, that the whippings had “had no connection with religious activities.”
Culled from: Strange Days, Dangerous Nights
I found some great quotes in the newspapers, but my favorite is this one from Lennander, while asking to be paroled in 1955:
“My attitude now is that I know I had gone too far. I didn’t intend to go that far. I didn’t intend to beat them so that they would die. I don’t know as if I thought it was my duty to beat them. It was a confusion on my part.
“I went into some sort of a frenzy. After I started beating my wife—I just couldn’t control myself. I didn’t have sex reaction from that. I never did when I beat people or when they beat me. I think it was all right from the original intention to drive out the sin. I think I overdid it.”
(Winona Daily News, July 14, 1955)
Here is Lennander’s poor wife Ardith shortly before her death:
If you need more info (well, who wouldn’t?), there’s a great article over at CultStories.com.
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
October 12th. My jaws are very sore. The entire camp was kept in line all the morning while the sergeants arranged the rolls, and the quartermaster arranged the camp into streets. A new deadline was put up.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost