This is Part V in a five-part series. The earlier parts of this series can be seen here: Part I (the shooting), Part II (Bergin’s disastrous Civil War years), Part III (eyewitness to the aftermath of Custer’s Last Stand.), and Part IV Bergin’s shooting of McBride defied explanation.
MOUNT VERNON — When Will Bergin was sentenced to the hangman’s noose, it created a problem.
In 1877, capital punishment in Ohio was still carried out locally. The Knox County sheriff and his deputies had never hung a man, and they only had a short while to learn what was bound to be a terribly difficult task, for Bergin and the sheriff were old friends.
After Bergin’s conviction in August, his lawyer, General Morgan, had filed an appeal, but it was soon rejected. The execution date was set for December.
Part I: Billy Bergin earns an appointment with the Knox County hangman
Sheriff John Ferguson Gay set about finding out what was needed to hang a man. That meant finding building plans for gallows, and calculating what distance a man of Bergin’s size would have to drop through the trap door on the gallows platform to break his neck.
Too short of a drop and the offender would be left to slowly strangle to death. Too big of a drop and the noose could literally sever the offender’s head. Either one would be a gory spectacle, which was what the authorities wished to avoid. Justice was sought without the event turning into something as monstrous as what the criminal himself did.
Gay ended up seeking help from Sheriff Beebe of Dayton, as well as several other regional sheriffs with hanging experience. Sheriff Gay had only been elected to the position that year. He was just 32.
He went from learning on the job to being thrust into the position of being the only sheriff in county history tasked with hanging a man in less than one year. Gay started his adult life as a dry goods store clerk in Fredericktown, only moving into law enforcement later.
He had just lost his father, John Gay Sr., in 1876. He and his wife had a baby daughter. The sheriff was about to be thrust into the spotlight by Bergin’s execution.
Construction of the wooden gallows began on Wednesday, Dec. 5, in the courtyard between the Knox County Courthouse and the jail, which at that time sat north-northeast of the courthouse. The scaffold was visible to Bergin from his cell in the jail. It was 12-feet tall, to provide a 6-foot drop, and a high fence was built around it to control the number of spectators.
Gay handed out 150 tickets. Along with space reserved for reporters, staff, and officials, this gave the gallows a capacity of 200 people. To emphasize the somber task, the whole thing was painted black. A crew of guards was stationed to keep curiosity seekers out.
Thursday evening, Will said goodbye to his mother and other family members. He asked his old friend Sheriff Gay to sit up with him and keep him company. The sheriff did so, remaining in Bergin’s cell talking with him until he fell asleep around 5 a.m.
Hoping for a final reprieve from the governor, Bergin family members appealed personally to Ohio Governor Young in Columbus. Different sources say that it was either Bergin’s mother or his sister who appealed for a stay of execution the morning of Friday, Dec. 7, at Young’s office, but considering that Bergin’s mother, Philena, is documented to have purchased Billy’s clothes for the hanging on Friday morning and delivered them to the jail, it seems almost certain it was his sister making the appeal in Columbus.
It was reported that she broke down in tears when Governor Young said that there was nothing that he felt he could rightly do to stop the sentence and refused to leave his office until the deed was done. He allowed her to stay through the execution, and offered her consolation as she cried. But he did not stop the execution.
Part III: Mount Vernon’s William Bergin was witness to Little Bighorn battlefield
Friday morning broke clear and cold, with a brisk wind out of the north. By daybreak, people were already gathering in town to attend the hanging. Despite the required tickets and limited space available, the crowd around the courthouse was estimated to have swollen to 5,000 by the time the execution was due.
Bergin awoke around 8:30 a.m. and was served his last meal at 9 a.m., a feast from the Curtis House hotel restaurant: raw oysters, fried oysters, quail on toast, tenderloin, beefsteak, veal fricassee, buckwheat cakes, brown and white bread, and coffee. Bergin ate heartily while meeting with his lawyer, General Morgan.
Bergin expressed no displeasure at the lack of a reprieve from the governor, saying that he had courted his sentence. He added that he’d go with a cleaner conscience than the prosecuting attorney.
After two ministers had met and prayed with Bergin, Sheriff Gay came to his cell to read the official death warrant, as required by law. This turned out to be a heavy duty for the sheriff, as he had known Will Bergin for years and considered him a friend.
He asked Bergin if he planned on speaking to the crowd before the hanging, but the prisoner declined, asking for just a few moments of privacy to talk to his old friend without an audience. The ministers and deputies stepped out of the cell so the two men could talk. The two talked a long time, both ending up in tears.
The sheriff finally embraced his old friend, holding the embrace for a few long minutes. Sheriff Gay finally broke away and opened the cell door, calling on Sheriff Beebe from Dayton, who had come to assistant. Beebe tied Bergin’s arms in front of him and told him it was time to prepare to die.
At noon, Bergin was escorted out of the jail and into the gallows complex as bells sounded. He was dressed in black and appeared gaunt, with dark circles under his eyes. He was startled by the crowd.
“John, this ain’t right,” Will said at the doorway into the jail yard, “Such a crowd of people in here.”
“Never mind, Billy,” Sheriff Beebe interrupted. “Don’t mind them.”
Bergin shook his head. He walked firmly across the 30 feet to the scaffold. Sheriff Gay prepared to brace him as he went up the stairs, but Bergin declined. He walked up the stairs on his own. On the platform, he looked around at the crowd, then stopped at the table of reporters and again shook his head.
Bergin was placed on the trap door and glanced up briefly at the rope before Sheriff Gay pulled the black hood down over his head, followed by Sheriff Beebe putting the noose around his neck.
Bergin’s knees were tied together to ensure that his body would make a clean drop through the trap.
Sheriff Gay asked the condemned if he had anything to say. “No, nothing at all,” Bergin replied.
Reverend Thompson read the Episcopal prayer for condemned prisoners, and Bergin shook his head once more. Sheriff Gay pushed the foot lever with his heel to drop the trap door.
Reports vary about exactly what happened next, though all agree, the hanging went awry.
Apparently, the rope stretched then unraveled. As Bergin’s body fell through the hole, the rope was already coming loose. As it unfurled, his body spun back and his head hit one of the cross beams supporting the scaffold. He landed beneath and slumped back against the structure.
“Oh God, oh God,” Sheriff Gay said, “The rope broke.”
It actually hadn’t, but it only unfurled after partially doing its job. When Gay climbed down to the prisoner and peeled the hood back, onlookers said that the angry red mark of the rope was clear around Bergin’s neck.
The crowd was aghast at the failed execution attempt. One person fainted. As the sheriff and his deputies were hauling Bergin back up through the trap door, one crowd member was alleged to have said “This is too bad!”
“Oh, I can stand that,” Bergin muttered.
Another crowd member said that the prisoner should be released. Sheriff Beebe attached a backup rope to the gallows and made sure it was tied more carefully than the first one had been. The prisoner stood silently, waiting, as the crowd murmured uncomfortably.
Bergin finally spoke to the sheriff.
“Hurry it up, Johnny,” he said. “Choke me off quick, this is worse than murder.”
Part IV: Bergin’s shooting of McBride defied explanation
Reverend Thompson was asked to again provide the benediction, but he declined. Sheriff Gay told him to at least say something, and Thompson gave a short prayer. It was 12:14 pm. Sheriff Gay triggered the trap, and this time Bergin’s body dropped cleanly, and the rope held.
Unfortunately, the calculation had still been off, perhaps because Bergin had dropped 30 pounds in weight since coming to the jail. The drop had not been sufficient to break his neck, and the doctors in attendance monitored his slow strangulation at the end of the rope.
Eighteen minutes later, the doctors said Bergin’s heart had stopped beating. They let him hang another 20 or so minutes, to make sure that he was, indeed, dead. A doctor examined the body and officially pronounced William Bergin dead at 12:56 pm.
One of the ministers in attendance, Reverend Burrows, was appalled.
“This is all wrong,” Burrows said. “It is against the law of God and man.”
He wanted to know if Sheriff Gay was not responsible for the debacle. It soon came out that the first knot had been tied in Dayton by Sheriff Beebe’s assistant, an experienced hangman. Sheriff Gay’s only mistake appeared to be overestimating the weight of a prisoner who had gradually been losing mass as he awaited the date of his execution.
Several of the people who witnessed the hanging announced their opposition to capital punishment afterward. General Morgan called the double-drop execution “judicial murder.”
The Governor wired the sheriff, asking for a confirmation of Bergin’s death, otherwise his sister would not leave his office in Columbus. Sheriff Gay had the governor wired that the sentence had been executed. The body was taken inside the courthouse and placed in a coffin, then removed to a nearby family home.
Bergin was buried in his family’s plot in Mound View Cemetery. His stone was broken off at some point long ago and never repaired, though it’s easy enough to find the family’s other headstones.
It wasn’t long after the botched execution — in fact, it is likely that this hanging influenced the decision — that the duty for carrying out executions was shifted to the state level, at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus.
Bergin was held up as an example of bad living in newspaper editorials.
“His friends sought to win him away from evil company,” the Summit County Beacon said, “but empty promises or sarcasms were their only pay.”
While Gay may not have been entirely at fault for the botched execution, it did him no favors in terms of public opinion. When it was later found that he charged the county $500 for his services in the affair — a very large sum of money in those days, equivalent to $14,000 today — public opinion turned against him for good.
It was alleged he had overcharged for many services throughout his tenure as sheriff, and he lost his reelection bid in 1880.
In such an epic tragedy, there are, in the end, no winners. A boy too eager to experience the drama of the great event of his youth ended up maimed by it. Coming from a family with documented difficulties with depression, the boy was also psychologically maimed.
Restless, shiftless living, and a freakish chance encounter with the carnage of Custer’s Last Stand, only made Bergin’s internal chaos worse.
Simmering resentment projected onto an innocent bystander led to a shockingly pointless murder, which in turn led to Bergin’s hapless execution.
The lesson to learn from all of this?
It simply isn’t possible to “man up” or “deal with” trauma by one’s self. It’s a long, slow process of untangling twists of excruciating chaos that takes work and patience by the subject, their family, their friends, and the professionals offering guidance.
Why bother retelling this story in long, painful detail?
Because, as far as I can tell, most of us have yet to learn the lesson.
