Hamida Djandoubi went to the guillotine in France on this day in 1977, the last person ever executed by the device and the last person executed in France at all. He had been convicted of the murder of 21-year-old Elisabeth Bousquet, a crime that closed out nearly two centuries of the guillotine’s use as the instrument of French justice.
His execution marked a quiet historical hinge: within a few years France would abolish capital punishment altogether, in 1981, making Djandoubi’s death the final chapter of a punishment first adopted during the French Revolution.
Close-up of a guillotine in dark foggy setting execution concept
Samuel Peters killed his wife Trevenna in their home at Leederville, a suburb of Perth, on the night of 3 July 1902. A neighbour heard a scream and Peters’s voice between 2 and 3am, but it was not until half past nine the next morning that the couple’s children raised the alarm. Mrs Peters was found lying in a pool of blood in her bedroom, badly injured, with no weapon in sight; Peters himself was discovered fully dressed and asleep in an adjoining room.
When the arresting constable woke him and told him his wife had been murdered, Peters answered flatly, “Me done it, and I am satisfied.”
At his trial, witnesses described a marriage marked by constant quarrelling. Peters had accused his wife of carrying on affairs with two men, Adams and Nicholas, and was said to have taken to calling her Mrs Adams in front of neighbours. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to death, later hanged at Fremantle Prison.
Old rustic bedroom with a metal-framed bed and rumpled blankets, sunlight streaming through an open door and a window in a stone-walled room.
John Thomas, a convict known as prisoner number 7279, escaped from a work party at Sutherland’s Bay in June 1863, taking a blanket, a carpenter’s axe and other items. He made his way to Peninsula Farm near Perth, where he entered the cottage of 70-year-old servant Duncan Urquhart and began helping himself to clothing.
When Urquhart returned and discovered the intruder, Thomas fled through a window armed with Urquhart’s own axe. He pursued the elderly man outside and struck him repeatedly, fracturing his skull. Despite his terrible injuries, Urquhart managed to make his way more than half a mile towards the farmhouse on his hands and knees, covered in blood.
Around noon, farmhouse owner Joseph Hardey stepped outside and saw a stranger walking up the cart road, coatless and carrying a bundle over his shoulder. The man calmly asked Hardey for directions to a property several miles further inland, apparently unconcerned that the man he had just attacked lay gravely injured nearby. Hardey later identified the stranger as Thomas.
Urquhart survived for more than two months, but died in the Colonial Hospital on 24 August 1863 from his injuries. Thomas was tried before Chief Justice Burt at the Supreme Court on 2 September and convicted of wilful murder. He was hanged in front of Perth Prison on 8 September 1863.
On the morning of 10 July 1904, Mrs Veitch, wife of baker A. C. T. Veitch, was found dead in the passage of the family’s bakery on O’Grady Street, Clifton Hill, a suburb of Melbourne. She still clutched a buggy whip in her hand, and a deep gash on one hand suggested she had fought desperately for her life. Whoever attacked her had locked the back doors, the front gate and the shop door beforehand, and had even tried to silence the family’s terrier tied up in the yard, evidence of careful planning rather than a chance intrusion.
The body was discovered by James Coleman Augustus Williams, an employee of the bakery who had been out on his delivery round. He raised the alarm after a boy came to buy bread and got no answer. Williams was soon charged with the murder, and at trial evidence pointed to a robbery gone wrong at the nearby office, though nothing suggested any personal grievance against the victim.
Williams was hanged at Melbourne Gaol on 8 September 1904.
The night before his execution, Williams wrote out a formal confession, insisting the killing was not for gain or lust but committed “in a fit of passion”, and that Mrs Veitch “was always kind and good to me”. He asked that the public not judge his family for what he had done and thanked the gaol’s governor and chaplains for their kindness to him in his final days.
