Decidedly Grim

Today’s Self-Made Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The April 1937 issue of Front Page Detective magazine featured an article entitled “I Help Them Die,” an as-told-to confession of George Philip Hanna, “Humanitarian Hangman” from Epworth, Illinois.  Hanna was obsessed with nooses, gallows, hoods, and restraints as a teenager.  He spent his days binding, masking, and hanging dummies and sandbags from the hayloft of the family’s barn, teaching himself the proper ratios of body weight to rope length: Too short a drop led to strangulation; too long, to decapitation.  Hanna was “unexpectedly given the opportunity to show the world what [he] had learned” when, at age eighteen, he attended a hanging in a nearby county. Horrified by the sheriff’s bungling, he made his way through the crowd and walked to the foot of the gallows. “Could I lend you a hand, sir?” he asked. “You’re doing this the wrong way.” His perfect hanging that day became legend among sheriffs and wardens across the nation, and he carried on as a traveling hangman and execution adviser for forty years, touring the country with his ropes, handcuffs, and hoods, as well as a collection of weapons used by murderers he’d hanged – the only compensation Hanna asked.

Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row

Facts