The Grim Fate of Assassins

By Lt. Thomas A. Taylor, Missouri State Highway Patrol

"If this is the outgrowth of nihilism, I am in favor of crushing it out by the prompt execution of the would-be assassins and their followers." -- President Ulysses S. Grant,
following the assassination of President Garfield in 1881.

". . . for murder, though it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ."
-- Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2

Assassins are often caught red-handed . . . literally, wearing the blood of their victims.
Few assassins in history have escaped their crimes unpunished. This would seem to discourage the act of regicide, as it was once called. This French term was derived from the words "regis" or king, and "caedere," meaning "to kill." It is understandable that those who kill government leaders should be dealt with more harshly than other murderers. After all, killing political leaders and public officials is an attack against society itself. In a society committed to due process of law and to orderly transitions of power, such criminals must receive severe punishment or the fabric of an orderly society would be torn. For the same reason, the murder of police officers, the enforcers of society's rules, must also carry the maximum punishment. "Assassination is a particularly horrible crime," stated Richardson Preyer, who served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations. "It arouses our deepest fears." Through history, hundreds of emperors, kings, presidents, premiers, prime ministers, governors, mayors, and diplomats have fallen victim to assassination, regicide, tyrannicide or coup detat. It would not be difficult to fill a volume with only the assassinations that occurred in the 19th century. What follows is a brief look at how some of history's most famous assassins and would be assassins were punished. With the exception of President Truman's, I have limited the cases to attacks by lone individuals, as opposed to those committed by criminal or terrorist groups.

Imprisonment
In assassination cases, there has always existed the dilemma of establishing the murderer's sanity. Authorities are uncomfortable to admit that sane people kill government leaders. At the same time, many feel that if the assassin is deemed insane, he

will escape "proper" punishment. It is much easier to lock upon the assassin as a steelyeyed, cold-blooded killer, who is a threat to society...and only half crazy. As publisher Henry Holt remarked, after the assassination of President McKinley in 1901, 'Ve are left sitting in the dark, still wondering how such a deed could have been done by a man in his sound and sober senses in fair and free America, and appalled at the possibility of a sane man murdering an American president." On his death bed, President Garfield talked about his assassin: "He must have been crazy. None but an insane person could have done such a thing." The truth is that if you apply the McNaughten Rule, which will be discussed later, few assassins are insane. Author Franklin Ford observed, "It might be convenient, but it would not be correct to conclude simply that they were all mad." Most of the recent assassins have been captured, tried and incarcerated for long periods of time in prison. Oscar Collazo survived the failed attempt on President Harry Truman's life in 1950. He was tried, found guilty of murdering a White House police officer, and sentenced to be electrocuted. His intended victim commuted his sentence to life imprisonment at the Leavenworth Federal Prison in Kansas. Twenty-eight years later, President Carter commuted his sentence to time served and Collazo returned to his home in Puerto Rico. James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to killing Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. He was sentenced to serve 99 years in the Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee. He tried unsuccessfully to escape in 1977. Under a 1985 law providing parole hearings for inmates held for more than 20 years, Ray is now eligible for parole. Sirhan Sirhan was sentenced to death for the murder of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. He was spared the gas chamber after California's death penalty was overturned in 1972. He remains in Soledad Prison and has unsuccessfully faced several parole boards since 1975. Arthur Bremer shot Governor George Wallace in 1972. Within three months he was tried, convicted and sentenced to 63 years in maximum security at a Maryland prison. He was eligible for parole in 1982. Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme was sentenced to life for attempting to kill President Gerald Ford in 1975. She was sent to the Alderson Federal Prison in West Virginia until her escape in 1987. She was captured after two days, sentenced to an additional 15 years, and sent to the more secure Lexington Federal Prison in Kentucky. She was the first person sentenced under a special federal law covering assaults on presidents, enacted after the assassination of President Kennedy. Nineteen days after Fromme's failed attempt, Sara Jane Moore fired a shot at President Ford, but missed. Prior to the attack, she wrote the following poem:

"Hold-Hold, still my hand. Steady my eye, chill my heart, And let my gun sing for the people. Scream their anger, cleanse with their hate, And kill this monster." She was also sentenced to life and sent to the Alderson facility Moore was able to escape for 30 hours in 1979 and, like Fromme, was transferred to Lexington. Mark David Chapman killed rock star John Lennon in 1980. He pleaded guilty and is serving a life sentence at Attica Prison in New York. Todd Gitlin, a University of California sociologist, stated, "In pop culture, people look at celebrities for a tribal identity. From that perspective, the killing of John Lennon was on the same order as the assassination of Lincoln or Gandhi." Mehmet Ali Agea is serving a life sentence for shooting Pope John Paul II in 1981. He is incarcerated in Italy.

Mental institution
While most assassins have deep, emotional problems, few are truly insane, unable to distinguish between right and wrong. Defendants are presumed to be sane and responsible for their crimes until the contrary can be proven. In order to establish insanity, it must be proved that, at the time of the offense, the defendant was laboring under such a defect or disease of the mind so as not to know the nature and quality of the act or did not know that it was wrong. This is referred to as the McNaughton Rule, and it is based on an 1843 assassination case. Edward Drummond, secretary to British Prime Minister Robert Peel, left 10 Downing Street and walked to the bank at about 3:30 p.m. on January 20, 1843. After 15 minutes he left the bank and was returning to his office, unaware that he was being followed. Daniel McNaughton quickened his pace as they neared Downing Street and closed the gap between himself and Drummond. McNaughton suddenly reached into his coat, pulled out a pistol, jammed the muzzle against Drummond's back, and fired. As Drummond lurched forward, McNaughton calmly pocketed the discharged pistol, pulled out another,and took aim. Constable James Silver rushed in and grappled with him before he could fire. With the aid of another passerby, Silver was able to disarm the assassin. At first Drummond didn't appear to be seriously wounded. He was sent home and there examined by three doctors. The bullet had entered his back next to the spine and lodged near his stomach. They probed the wound and removed the ball. At his hearing, McNaughton stated that he was driven to commit the crime by people who were constantly following and persecuting him. It soon became apparent that he was

crazy and that his actual target was the prime minister. He had mistakenly shot the wrong man. Drummond took a turn for the worse and died on January 24. Public outcry and press coverage cried out for the blood of McNaughton. His sensational trial began on March 3 in a packed courtroom. The spectators erupted when he entered a plea of "not guilty by reason of insanity." Medical experts testified that McNaughton was insane and cited his two-year history of mental illness. What occurred next has never happened in any courtroom. The weight of the medical evidence was so great that the prosecutor was unable to refute it. He admitted to the jury that he could not ask them for a guilty verdict. The jury did not ever leave the courtroom. Deliberating for about two minutes in the jury box, they announced their verdict: acquittal, on the grounds of insanity. McNaughton was transferred from the Newgate Prison to Bethlem Hospital for treatment. He was later transferred to the Broadmoor Hospital, where he died in 1865, seven days after John Wilkes Booth's death. In 1835, eight years before McNaughton's precedent-setting case, Richard Lawrence, a former house painter, became the first man to attempt to kill an American president. While President Andrew Jackson was attending a state funeral at the Capitol building, Lawrence attempted to fire two pistols at him, but both misfired. Lawrence suffered delusions of grandeur, including the belief that he was actually King Richard III of England (who had been killed on a battlefield in 1485). He was sentenced to a succession of asylums and died 25 years later in Washington's Government Hospital for the Insane. John Schrank was convicted of shooting former-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912. Roosevelt recovered from the wound and carried Schrank's bullet in his chest for the rest of his life. Schrank stated that the ghost of President McKinley ordered him to kill Roosevelt. By order of the court, Schrank spent the rest of his life incarcerated in mental hospitals, outliving Roosevelt by 24 years. Richard Pavlick was a 72-year-old mental patient from Belmont, New Hampshire, in 1961, when he decided to kill President-elect John Kennedy. His plan was to ram the president's car and set off a bomb. He was arrested in a car wired with 11 sticks of dynamite while stalking Kennedy in Palm Beach, Florida, and was returned to a mental hospital. John W. Hinckley Jr. was acquitted by reason of insanity for shooting President Ronald Reagan in 1981. He has been held in St. Elizabeth's Hospital since his trial and has petitioned the courts to win his release.

Death by retaliation

Surprisingly few assassins are killed during or immediately following their attack. The first assassination with any far-reaching consequences was in 336 B.C., when an assassin named Pausanius sprang from the shadows of a darkened passageway and delivered a single, fatal sword thrust to Philip II, the King of Macedon. Pausanius then turned and fled in the direction of his waiting horse with several royal bodyguards in hot pursuit, like a pack on enraged pit bulls. He might have escaped had his sandal not caught on a vine, causing him to stumble. The guards were on him in a flash, shouting, cursing and stabbing. When they were done, he had been cut to ribbons. Philip's death launched the career of his son, Alexander the Great. John Wilkes Booth fired one fatal round into the head of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and fled the scene on horseback. He was hunted down 12 days later and reportedly killed by soldiers while hiding in a barn outside Bowling Green, Virginia. His body was secretly buried in an ammo vault of Washington's Old Penitentiary. In 1935, Dr. Carl Weiss shot and killed Senator Huey Long outside the governor's office of the Louisiana State Capitol Building in Baton Rouge. Long's bodyguards opened fire on Weiss, killing him instantly. He suffered more than 50 bullet wounds. There is evidence that suggests Long was accidentally shot and killed by one of his own guards. Griselio Torresola was the First and only person to be killed during an attack on an American president. In 1950, he led the assault on Blair House, along with Oscar Collazo, in the failed attempt to kill President Truman. He was shot once in the head by White House Policeman Leslie Coffelt and immediately killed. In the most famous and, perhaps, disputed assassination in history, Lee Harvey Oswald shot and killed President John Kennedy in 1963. Two days later, while being led through the basement of the Dallas Police Department, Oswald was, himself, assassinated by Jack Ruby. Samuel Byck was shot by police in 1974 while attempting to hijack a commercial jet at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport. While lying wounded in the cockpit, he shot himself in the head with his own revolver. His plan was to force the pilot to take off, fly to Washington, and buzz the White House. At the last minute, he planned to shoot the pilot and crash the aircraft into the White House, in an attempt to kill President Richard Nixon.

Death by hanging
John Bellingham shot British Prime Minister Spencer Perceval through the heart as he entered the lobby of the House of Commons at 5:15 p.m., on Monday, May 11, 1812. On Friday, he was tried, convicted and sentenced to be hung. Bellingham dropped through the trap door at 8:00 a.m. on the following Monday, barely a week from act to execution.

On June 30, 1865, four of the nine prisoners involved, along with Booth, in President Lincoln's assassination were found guilty and sentenced to the gallows. Four others were imprisoned and one was exonerated. Six days later Mary Surratt, Lewis Paine, David Herold and George Atzerodt were hanged in a Washington prison yard. Paine, a stout man of incredible strength, slowly strangled when his huge neck failed to break. A few hours later, the gallows were torn down and sawed into short lengths for souvenirs. Charles Guiteau was tried and convicted of shooting President James Garfield in 1881. Garfield died after 11 weeks of suffering. Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882, singing a childish poem as he dropped through the trap door: "Glory Hallelujah, I am going to the Lordy!"

Death by electrocution
Leon Czolgosz was convicted in a one-day trial for shooting President William McKinley in 1901. The president lingered for nine days before dying. Czolgosz was electrocuted at the Auburn State Prison in New York, 53 days after pulling the trigger. In a remarkable display of revenge, acid was poured into his grave to hasten his destruction, and his clothes and belongings were burned. Giuseppe Zangara was sentenced to serve 80 years for shooting at President-elect Franklin Roosevelt in 1933. Though Roosevelt was missed, five bystanders, including Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, were struck. Three weeks after the attack, Cermak died of complications. Zangara's sentence was then changed to death sentence. Thirty-three days after the attack, Zangara was strapped into the electric chair at Florida's Raiford Prison. He glared at his executioners and declared, "Goodbye, adios to all the world." His unclaimed body was buried in an unmarked prison grave.

Death by beheading
The guillotine was invented during the French Revolution by J.I. Guillotine, a French doctor who felt that it was a more humane form of capital punishment than other methods. Charlotte Corday experienced this device a few days after killing Jean-Paul Marat, a powerful French revolutionist, in 1793. On a ruse, she gained entry to Marat's house and stabbed him with an ebony-handled kitchen knife while he was soaking in a tub. It was considered to be the most dramatic assassination of the 18th century. In 1975, Prince Faisal ibn Musad Abdel Aziz pulled a revolver from the loose folds of his clothing and shot his uncle, King Faisal, in the head three times. Four months later and only an hour after his conviction, he was led to the center of a square in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and forced to kneel before his executioner, who held a gold-handled sword. The razor-sharp blade sliced through his neck in one stroke, and his head thumped softly onto the hot sand. A long, sharpened stick was forced into the sand and the Prince's head was

impaled on the stick for 15 minutes, on display for the crowd to inspect His body and head were then removed and buried in a simple, unmarked grave.

Death by torture
Not surprisingly, many assassins are dealt with in a swift and merciless manner. There are few more graphic examples of this than the fate of two Frenchmen who made the fatal mistake of attacking their kings. In May 1610, King Henry IV left his palace in Paris, France, accompanied by a duke and several guards. His carriage came to a stop in a narrow street clogged with traffic near the public markets. Francis Ravaillac, who had been watching the palace all day for the king's departure, suddenly darted through the guards and stabbed the king twice in the chest. The second stroke delivered an almost instantly fatal wound. Ravaillac was a fanatic who announced that God had ordered him to kill the king. He insisted, even under torture, that no other mortals had helped him. The frustrated judges, anxious to prove a conspiracy, ordered that he be executed in a manner befitting his crime. His knife-wielding hand was burned off and his back was broken on a wheeled device. His body was then torn apart by a team of horses with assistance from spectators, but he never changed his story. The fact that the government of France would deal out such ruthless punishment is not surprising, considering the popularity of their dead king. However, the brutal treatment they dealt to a poor fool named Robert Francis Damiens is amazing. Louis XV, the King of France, was stepping into his coach on January 5, 1757, when Damiens rushed through his entourage, grabbed the king by the shoulder with one hand and stabbed him in the fifth rib with a pocketknife in the other. The startled king felt under his cloak and saw that he was bleeding. The fact that Damiens had approached the king without removing his hat is what first drew attention to him. He was quickly arrested for attempting to kill the king and taken to the jail in Versailles. During his interrogation, Damiens was evasive and implied that he had friends who also detested the king. In an effort to make him divulge their names, the guards placed him near a great fire and applied red-hot tongs to his legs, but he refused to talk. During the next week, Damiens attempted to kill himself, so he was moved under heavy guard to the prison in Paris, where he was to stand trial. He was questioned by several judges, but continued to give unsatisfactory answers. The attorney general demanded that Damiens suffer the same fate as Francis Ravaillac. He was sentenced to death by torture. In addition, the house in which he was born was destroyed and no other building was ever placed on that spot. His father, wife and daughter were banished from the kingdom for life, and his brothers and sisters were ordered to change their names and to never again use the surname Damiens.

Twenty-three days after his attack, Damiens was carried in a hammock to the torture room. A recorder read his sentence to him, and he listened without emotion. Raising up, he stated, "This day will be a sharp one." At 8:00 a.m., he was examined on a stool and questioned by six commissioners of the parliament, concerning his accomplices, but Damiens refused to cooperate. The executioners then strapped his legs into the Brodquin, a boot-like device that doctors agreed was the most acute of all tortures and "the least liable of depriving the criminal of sensation or life." It crushed the flesh and bones of the victim's legs, without killing him or causing him to lose consciousness. As the ropes of the devise were tightened, Damiens shrieked and appeared to faint, but a surgeon in attendance found that he was only pretending. They waited a half hour for his numbness to subside before driving in the first wedge. As Damiens screamed, he was again questioned and now implicated a man named Gautier and his landlord, Mr. le Maitre de Ferrieres. The commissioners ordered the men brought in and continued Damiens' torture. Fifteen minutes later a second wedge was applied. With each, his screams were renewed until an eighth and last wedge was driven in. He had now undergone two and a half hours of torture and the surgeon declared that Damiens was in danger of dying. He was untied and laid on a mattress to recover. Gautier was astonished by Damiens' accusation and strongly denied it, but the commissioners sent him to prison. Ferrieres provided a more believable denial and was released. A scaffold 3 feet high and 9 feet square was erected in a closed courtyard and Damiens was taken there in a dung cart. He begged the commissioners for mercy on his wife and daughter, and proclaimed that he had lied about having accomplices. Unfortunately, his credibility was now destroyed and they felt that he was still lying. A little before 5:00 p.m., Damiens was stripped, laid on the scaffold and tied down. An iron shackle was fastened over his chest, below the arms, and another over his stomach, above his thighs. His right hand, which had held the knife, was "plunged into the flames of brimstone, which caused him to give a very loud and continuous cry, which was heard at a great distance from the place of execution." The executioners then proceeded to pinch his arms, thighs and chest with red-hot pinchers, and Damiens screamed at every application. Then boiling oil and melted wax, rosin and lead were poured into all the wounds, except those on his chest. The executioners then proceeded to the next part of Damiens' sentence. They tightly bound his arms, legs and thighs with ropes and affixed them to four "stout, young and vigorous horses." For an hour the horses were whipped, each pulling in a different direction, in an effort to tear the limbs from his body, but they only succeeded in

stretching his joints "to an astonishingly prodigious length." The surgeon advised the commissioners that, unless Damiens' sinews were cut they could be there for a long time. The commissioners agreed, since it was getting dark, and ordered them cut. The horses were again whipped and, after several pulls, ripped one arm and a leg from Damiens' body. He was still conscious as his other leg was torn away. He did not die until his other arm was pulled out. Damiens' trunk and limbs were thrown on a large fire and burned for 12 hours. His ashes were then, according to his sentence, scattered in the wind.

Conclusion
Perhaps the most incredible result of these cases is the regicides continued to flourish. Clearly over history, the threat of torture, death or life imprisonment has had little effect in dissuading zealots from their "mission." They are invariably prepared, and often expect, to die or be incarcerated for their deeds. Dr. David Rothstein, who served as a consultant to the Warren Commission, explained, "The assassin or would-be assassin unconsciously selects a victim who represents what he himself wants to be but cannot. He wants to be a person who can receive attention and control events -- in other words, to be like the man he wishes to kill." The disturbing poem of a neo-Nazi leader, before his death in a shootout with an FBI SWAT team, portrays the swan-song of many assassins: "Give your soul to God and pick up your gun, It's time to deal in lead. We are the legions of the damned, The army of the already dead!" The brutal torture of Damiens, a mentally disturbed man guilty of poking the king with his pocketknife, was needlessly savage. The punishment of such criminals must be swift and severe, but also fair and just. In the late 1800s, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche described the risks of a society that carried out unjust retributions: "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."

Lieutenant Tom A. Taylor, Missouri State Highway Patrol, is director of the Governor's Security Division. He also serves as secretary to the National Governor's Security Association.