David/Wikipedia

By Tim Queeney

In mid-April 1885, two men stood on the gallows at the state prison in Thomaston amidst the splendor of a Maine spring morning. A newspaper reporter present recorded that, “A bright sun shone upon the scene, the green grass was showing itself, the birds outside the prison walls were chirping and everything spoke of life.” For the men on the scaffold, however, the day would prove a short one.

Neither Raffaele Capone nor Carmine Santore, two immigrant railroad workers from Italy, spoke English and so the proceedings of their two-day trial for the shooting and bludgeoning murder of Paschual Coscia, a fellow immigrant, had been translated for them by “a man from Camden.” The state’s newspapers had trumpeted the details of the case and following Capone and Santore’s speedy conviction, the Kennebec Journal ran the ghoulish headline: “Hemp for two.”

At the appointed time on that spring morning the executioner threw the lever that released the trap door. For the briefest of moments, the men fell free in the April air — until the coiled slack of the two ropes ran out and the twisted hemp fibers brought the two convicts up short.

Legal procedures for trying and convicting murder suspects in Maine evolved from the 17th century and the jurisdiction changed from Massachusetts to the new state of Maine in 1820, but one aspect of capital punishment remained the same: rope. Every convicted criminal in state history, from “Goodwife” Cornish in 1644 to Daniel Wilkinson in 1885, was dispatched by the noose.

We don’t know the first name of first person to be hanged in Maine for murder. She was only listed in the records using a common term for married women in that period: Goodwife. Married to a man named Richard, Goodwife Cornish and her husband lived in the prosperous town of York, one of the larger Maine towns in the 1640s. It was not a happy marriage, with the couple said to argue in public and with Goodwife known to engage in affairs. One day Richard was found floating in the river. His abdomen had been pieced by a wooden stake, his skull was bashed in and his canoe sunk under a pile of rocks. Suspicion first fell on native Americans, but they pointed out that no native man would destroy a perfectly good canoe. Goodwife and her lover Edward Johnson became the next likely suspects and were brought to trial. During the proceedings they were forced to touch Richard’s remains under the mystical (and not a little bit crackpot) theory that if they were guilty, their touching of the body would make it bleed. Apparently at the laying on of hands, Richard’s rotting corpse effused blood. As a result, Goodwife was convicted and hanged in York in 1644 (in a sadly classic case of patriarchal sexism, Johnson was acquitted).

It’s unlikely that Goodwife Cornish ever trod a purpose-built gallows for her execution. It was probably done using a rope and a few local men. The concept of hanging as a short, sharp shock resulting in immediate death via the “hangman’s fracture” of the neck vertebrae is a surprisingly recent development. For most of history, hanging was not thought of or administered that way. Most hangings resulted in a gruesome, twitching dance of strangulation by the rope. At Tyburn, the famous execution place in London, it was common for the executioner and a few others he’d enlist from the overflow crowds, to hoist the convicted into the air as the condemned kicked and swung in eye-popping agony. Friends of the condemned would often grab the poor soul’s legs and pull, adding their weight to speed the deadly process.

By the mid to late 19th century, however, the idea of a more “humane” instant death began to be adopted. In 1866 an Irish doctor named Samuel Haughton published a formula, based on the condemned’s height and weight, for calculating the right length of drop to induce the hangman’s fracture. A British executioner named William Marwood took the idea further by publishing tables for finding the right length rope to achieve a quick death. This approach was dubbed “the long drop.” In the U.S., the long drop caught on more slowly. Eventually, the idea was accepted and an executioner strangling a condemned person was considered a bad day at the office.

Between 1644 and 1885, 21 people were hanged in Maine. Twenty of those were for murder or for the combination of murder, rape and/or robbery. Included in the 21-person total were two women, two native Americans and three black men. One young man, Jeremiah Baum, accused of aiding the British in 1780 during the American Revolution, was the only one hanged for treason.

An early case of crime scene forensics occurred in October 1834, when Joseph Sager’s wife Phoebe died after eating a mixture of eggs and wine (!) given to her by her husband. A doctor called in to administer to Phoebe noticed white powder smeared on the egg and wine pitcher. He took a sample of the powder and later analyzed it: arsenic. Sager swung the following January.

Probably the most incongruous of the hangings was that of Samuel Hadlock in Dresden in 1790. On the first attempt, the noose slipped off Hadlock’s neck and he fell to the ground. The executioner, perhaps feeling a little hangdog at the miscue, promptly repositioned the rope and the second time was the charm.

The last person hanged in Maine, a British immigrant named Daniel Wilkinson (seen at left in an 1883 photo), was dispatched in Thomaston in November 1885, only a few months after Capone and Santore.

Wilkinson was a habitual criminal who had been arrested for robbery early in 1883 but he managed to escape from the Bath city jail. On the night of September 4, 1883, a Bath policeman named Kingsley was on foot patrol along the waterfront when he saw Wilkinson and an accomplice named John Ewitt breaking into the D.C. Gould ship chandlery — inside of which were many valuable items, including, ironically, numerous spools of rope. Officer Kingsley shouted at the pair to stop but they took off at a dead run. Blowing his whistle, Kingsley drew his revolver and fired a lone shot at the fleeing duo.

Another policeman, William Lawrence, was on patrol on nearby Front Street as the two robbers emerged from an alley. Alerted by his colleague’s whistle and the gun shot, Lawrence was able to grab hold of Wilkinson. The criminal, however, was armed with a .32 caliber revolver and had it at the ready. Wilkinson brought the gun up into Lawrence’s face and fired. Lawrence collapsed to the street, a bullet in his brain. Wilkinson and Ewitt split up, disappearing into the night.

Wilkinson was later apprehended in Bangor by a Boston private detective hired by the Bath Police Department to hunt down Lawrence’s killer. After his trial and conviction, Wilkinson took his place on the gallows at the state prison at Thomaston. Once again, as it seemed so often was the case with hangings, things went awry. The noose was poorly tied and the rope slipped from behind one of Wilkinson’s ears, leading to a slow, choking death.

Although capital punishment was outlawed in 1876, the Maine legislature later reversed itself, reinstating the practice in 1883. In 1887, however, a bill was passed that once again ruled out the death penalty. Despite numerous attempts, that bill has never been overturned.

For more on the history of rope and its development as one of humanity’s greatest tools, see my book Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.

Author’s note: One valuable source for this piece was Portland writer Troy R. Bennet’s excellent 20-part series on the death penalty in Maine, published from February to December 2022 in The Bangor Daily News.

Sources:

Bennet, Troy R. “Maine Death Penalty,” Bangor Daily News, https://www.bangordailynews.com/topic/maine-death-penalty/?_ga=2.63800108.24668731.1657053362-236464136.1654195228 Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Executions in Maine – 1644-1885 – DeathPenaltyUSA, the database of executions in the United States. deathpenaltyusa.org. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Hearn, Daniel Allen (2015-08-13). Legal Executions in New England: A Comprehensive Reference, 1623-1960. McFarland. pp. 11–12. ISBN 978-1-4766-0853-2. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Queeney, Tim. Rope – How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025.

Schriver, Edward. “Reluctant Hangman: The State of Maine and Capital Punishment, 1820-1887.” The New England Quarterly 63, no. 2 (1990): 271–87. https://doi.org/10.2307/365802. Retrieved February 24, 2026.

Wikipedia contributors, “Capital punishment in Maine,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Capital_punishment_in_Maine&oldid=1338469670 Retrieved February 24, 2026.