When the Hangman Came to Galway: A Gruesome True Story of Murder in Victorian Ireland

Irish Times journalist Ruxton’s solid first book combines a biography of prominent British executioner James Berry (1852–1913) with a look into two murder cases. Berry had worked as a policeman and a shoemaker before he became a hangman. An innovator, he calculated how far a hanged person should drop to ensure an instant breaking of the neck, thus avoiding a slow death from strangulation—or being decapitated by the force of the drop. Ruxton provides the backstory to Berry’s executions of two men convicted of murder in Ireland in 1885. One is relatively straightforward—Thomas Parry’s gunning down of an ex-fiancée—where the only issue was Parry’s mental state. The second man, Michael Downey, was only convicted of shooting John Moylan, whom he’d cuckolded, after three trials. Berry eventually resigned his post, because he came to doubt the righteousness of his work, and became an anti–death penalty advocate in his later years. Though some of the details—such as a chart listing the annual totals of agrarian crimes for a decade—are superfluous, Ruxton does a masterly job of dramatizing the approach to crime and punishment in late 19th-century Britain and Ireland. (Aug.)