David Wallechinsky - The Book of Lists

In Ansbach, Germany, in 1685, it was reported that a vicious wolf was ravaging herds and devouring women and children. The beast was believed to be none other than the town’s deceased mayor, who had turned into a werewolf. A typical politician, the wolf/mayor was hard to pin down, but was finally captured and killed. The animal’s carcass was then dressed in a flesh-coloured suit, a brown wig, and a long grey-white beard. Its snout was cut off and replaced with a mask of the mayor. By court order, the creature was hanged from a windmill. The weremayor’s pelt was then stuffed and displayed in a town official’s cabinet, to serve forever as proof of the existence of werewolves.

There are ancient records of the hangings of bulls and oxen, but there is only one known case of the hanging of an elephant — it happened in Erwin, Tennessee, on September 13, 1916. The Sparks Circus was stationed in Kingsport, Tennessee, when Mary, a veteran circus elephant, was being ridden to water by an inexperienced trainer, Walter Eldridge. On the way, Mary spotted a watermelon rind and headed for this snack. When Eldridge jerked hard on her head with a spear-tipped stick, Mary let out a loud trumpet, reached behind her with her trunk, and yanked the trainer off her back. Mary dashed Eldridge against a soft-drink stand and then walked over and stepped on his head. A Kingsport resident came running and fired five pistol shots into the huge animal. Mary groaned and shook but did not die — in fact, she performed in that night’s show. The next day the circus moved to Erwin, where ‘authorities’ (no one is sure who) decreed that Mary should die on the gallows, to the great sorrow of her friends in the circus. She was taken to the Clinchfield railroad yards, where a large crowd was gathered. A 7/8-in. chain was slung around her neck, and a 100-ton derrick hoisted her 5 ft in the air. The chain broke. The next chain held, and Mary died quickly. Her 5-ton corpse was buried with a steam shovel.

Carl Miles exhibited Blackie, his ‘talking’ cat, on street corners in Augusta, Georgia, and collected ‘contributions’. Blackie could say two phrases: ‘I love you’ and ‘I want my momma’. In 1981, the city of Augusta said the enterprise required a business licence and a fee, which Miles refused to pay. He sued the city council, arguing that the fee impinged on the cat’s right to free speech. The judge actually heard Blackie say ‘I love you’ in court. However, he ruled that the case was not a free speech issue. Since Blackie was charging money for his speech, the city was entitled to their fee. Miles paid $50 for the licence and Blackie went back to work. He died in 1992 at the age of 18.

On September 30, 1982, Tucker, a 140-lb bull mastiff, ran into a neighbour’s yard and attacked the neighbour’s black miniature poodle, Bonnie. Tucker’s owner, Eric Leonard, freed the poodle from Tucker’s mouth, but the poodle had received critical injuries and died. A district court in Augusta, Maine, ruled that Tucker was a danger to other dogs and should be killed by intravenous injection. Leonard appealed to the Maine Supreme Court, but it upheld the lower court’s ruling. In 1984, two days before his scheduled execution, the ‘National Doggie Liberation Front’ removed Tucker from the shelter where he was being held. What happened to Tucker is unknown.

The long arm of the law almost took the life of a 110-lb Akita named Taro, who got into trouble on Christmas Day of 1990. Owned by Lonnie and Sandy Lehrer of Haworth, New Jersey, Taro injured the Lehrers’ ten-year-old niece, but how the injury occurred was in dispute. Police and doctors who inspected the injury said the dog bit the girl’s lower lip. The Lehrers said the child provoked the dog and that while protecting himself, Taro scratched her lip. Taro had never before hurt a human being, but he had been in three dogfights and had killed a dog during one of the fights. A panel of local authorities ruled that Taro fell under the state’s vicious-dog law and sentenced the Akita to death. A three-year legal nightmare ensued as the Lehrers fought their way through municipal court, superior court, a state appeals court, and finally the New Jersey Supreme Court. While the legal battle raged on, Taro remained on death row at Bergen County Jail in Hackensack, where he was kept in a climate-controlled cell and was allowed two exercise walks a day. By the time his execution day neared, the dog had become an international celebrity. Animal rights activist and former actress Brigitte Bardot pleaded for clemency; a businessman from Kenya raised money to save the dog. Thousands of animal lovers wrote to the Lehrers and offered to adopt the dog. Even the dog’s jailer and the assemblyman behind the vicious-dog law interceded on behalf of Taro. But when the courts failed to free the dog, the final verdict fell to Governor Christine Todd Whitman. Although the governor did not exactly pardon the Akita, she agreed to release him on three conditions: Taro would be exiled from New Jersey; Taro must have new owners; Taro’s new owners, or the Lehrers, must assume all financial liability for the dog’s future actions. The Lehrers agreed, and the dog was released in February 1994, after spending three years in jail. The Lehrers subsequently found a new home for Taro in Pleasantville, New York. When all the costs of the canine death-row case were added up, the total exceeded $100,000. Taro died of natural causes in 1999.

The conviction of a Jewish army officer for high treason in 1894 unleashed a tidal wave of anti-Semitism and popular unrest in France. Alfred Dreyfus, the son of a manufacturer who lived in Alsace, a region annexed by Germany in 1871, had achieved the rank of captain and was the only Jew on the general staff when he was accused of selling military secrets to the Germans. On the basis of forged and falsified evidence, he was court-martialled and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island, the notorious prison of French Guiana. His trial polarised French society into two groups — the ‘revisionists’ (liberals and anticlericals) and the ‘nationalists’ (the army and the Catholic Church). Friendship and family ties were broken over the case, duels were fought, strikes occurred, and street fights broke out, bringing France to the verge of civil war. Novelist Émile Zola was convicted of criminal libel for writing a newspaper article that accused the authorities of framing Dreyfus. Retried in 1899 — and again found guilty by the army — Dreyfus was pardoned by the president of France that year, but he was not restored to his former rank until 1906.

In July 1914, the wife of France’s minister of finance was tried for the murder of Gaston Calmette, the editor of Le Figaro . Lacking any legal means to stop Calmette’s personal and professional attacks upon her husband, Henriette Caillaux had purchased a pistol, presented herself at the editor’s office, and shot him to death. During her nine-day trial she wept copiously and was subject to fainting spells, especially when her prenuptial love letters from the then-married Caillaux were read in open court. After the verdict of acquittal was announced on July 28, pandemonium broke out in the courtroom and in the streets of Paris, reflecting the widespread feeling that power and wealth had subverted justice. Coincidentally, that very day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, swallowing up the Caillaux verdict in the general onrush towards WWI.