EXECUTIONERS (True Crime) by Anne Williams, Phil Clarke, Liz Hardy Read Free Book Online Page A

taste for the exotic when it came to torture and execution.
     
    T HE  B RAZEN  B ULL
     
    As ruler of Sicily, Phalaris commissioned Perilaus, a well-known bronze-worker from Athens, to invent for him a new form of punishment. The result has gone down in legend as the Brazen Bull of Phalaris, and is still included in countless on-line lists of ‘the most horrible way a human being can die’. Perilaus cast a life-sized brazen bull with a door in the side. The victim was forced to climb into the contraption, and then the bull was locked up and a large fire was built around its base. The fire was lit and continuously fed while the prisoner slowly roasted to death. Perilous indeed!
    In a stroke of sheer engineering genius, the nostrils of the bull were so contrived with acoustic mechanisms that the groans of the sufferer resembled the bellows of a mad bull. Phalaris commended the invention, and then ordered Perilaus to be the first to test it out. When the bronze-worker climbed inside the Brazen Bull, Phalaris is said to have slammed the hatch shut behind him and lit a fire. Some stories claim that Phalaris took pity on the half-dead artisan and removed him from the bull, throwing him off a nearby cliff to finish the job in a quick and efficient manner. Others end this harrowing story with Phalaris enjoying the death-cries of Perilaus as he roasted alive within the white-hot walls of his own design.
    It is quite likely that the Brazen Bull was used by Phalaris to sacrifice prisoners to his gods. It is true that human sacrifice was not uncommon in Carthage and Western Sicily. Sicilian rivers were often represented as bulls with human heads, so it would follow that Phalaris used his brazen bull to sacrifice people to a local river god. It is also true that the Pheonician Baal (Zeus Atabyrius), was sometimes worshipped in the form of a bull.
    The fate of Phalaris was much like that of other tyrants such as Saddam, Adolph and Vlad. He was eventually overthrown in an uprising headed by Telemachus and put to death. He was apparently roasted alive in the very contraption that would make him so infamous.

Buried Alive

     
To die is natural; but the living death
Of those who waken into conciousness,
Though for a moment only, ay, or less,
To find a coffin stifling their last breath,
Surpasses every horror underneath,
The sun of heaven, and should surely check,
Haste in the living to remove the wreck,
Of what was just before, the soul’s fair sheath,
How many have been smothered in their shroud!
How many have sustained this awful woe!
Humanity would shudder could we know
How many have cried to God in anguish loud
Accusing those whose haste a wrong had wrought,
Beyond the worst that ever devil thought.
percy russell, 1906
     
    D EAD  R INGERS
     
    Many more live burials have occurred quite by accident than intentionally. In the days before the wonders of modern medicine, when victims of disease or injury could easily slip into an undiagnosed coma, it was relatively common for people to be buried too hastily by friends and relatives, concerned about the spread of deadly infection. It was not unusual to find deep scratch marks on the inside of exhumed coffins, evidence that the unsuspecting victim had struggled desperately in a bid to free themselves from their premature resting place.
    In order to reduce the frequency of such accidents, Victorian coffins were occasionally buried with a rope attached to a bell above ground. If the deceased miraculously ‘awoke’, he or she could then pull on the rope, thus ringing the bell and alerting the gravediggers to their plight. The effectiveness of such a device is a matter for debate, since the idea that a gravedigger could hear a bell ringing, decipher the position of the ‘dead ringer’ and muster enough help to dig up the coffin and free the victim before they ran out of air, is a