Before the electric chair gained preference in the United States, hanging was the most common way to get rid of society’s undesirables. Newspapers were full of lists of people who were hanged, mostly murderers, and usually reported that the hanging took place without incident (which was usually untrue).
The following two cases are those of botched hangings that took place in Vermont.
They Had to Hang Her Twice
Mary Rogers was an outlandish teenager. She liked getting reactions out of people, good or bad, and she liked getting attention. This may have been because her parents were alcoholics and the fact that her own father had attempted to kill her as a baby and again as a young child.
At age fifteen, Mary decided to escape her home life by getting married to Marcus Rogers, a man who was ten years older than herself. The couple moved from New York to Vermont and had a child together in 1901. The baby did not live long. According to Mary, she had accidentally dropped the baby and it died. No charges were filed against her.
Shortly after the death of their child, Mary and Marcus separated. Mary began dating other people and soon hatched a plan with Leon Perham to get rid of her husband.
In 1902, nineteen-year-old Mary and Leon invited Marcus to a game of dare. Marcus, not suspecting anything, agreed to allow the two to tie his hands behind his back. While Marcus was tied, Mary knocked him out with chloroform.
Mary then attached a suicide note to Marcus’s hat, set it beside the river, and both she and Leon untied Marcus and put his body into the river to drown.
While Marcus’s death was supposed to look like a suicide, law enforcement was not buying Marys story. Before long, Leon broke down and revealed the awful details of Marcus’s final moments.
Leon was given a life sentence, but Mary was sentenced to hang.
On December 8, 1905, Mary met with the gallows.
While the stories vary slightly on how exactly she met her end, a newspaper article published in 1912 stated that the rope used to hang Mary was too long. When she was dropped, her feet touched the ground. The sheriff and deputies rushed to the top of the scaffold and pulled up the rope, choking Mary. It took fourteen minutes to kill her this way.
The Rope Broke
When Elroy Kent escaped a Vermont insane asylum 1908, newspapers across the state reported on sightings. Strangers were accused of being the “escaped lunatic” and people reported seeing the man carve his initials on trees and rocks. Everyone was frantic.
While Elroy had landed in the asylum due to his compulsion to steal things, what he was to do after his escape was far worse.
Elroy began to spy on a deaf, mute woman, Delia Congdon, and became aroused. On July 24, 1908, he broke into her home and raped and killed her, according to the prosecutor. He was captured shortly afterwards and was sentenced to hang.
On January 5, 1912, at the age of either 33 or 34, Elroy was taken to the gallows.
According to rumors, he was hanged with the same rope that had been used on Mary Rogers years before. The rope was aged and so brittle that it snapped in two the first time Elroy went through the trap door. He crashed to the concrete ground below and writhed in pain as the gallows was reset. He died on the second attempt.
