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History’s Top Executioners of All Time

Khalid Elhassan June 5, 2020 34 min

32. End of the Road

John Lynch, styling himself John Dunleavy, got away with literal murder for years. Then in 1841, a cattle herder came upon the bludgeoned corpse of a local last seen a few days earlier having dinner with a farmer named John Dunleavy. A police investigation was launched, and Dunleavy’s story about having “purchased” his farm from the Mulligans in 1835 began to crack.

Finally, a barmaid came forward and identified John Dunleavy and John Lynch as being the same person. Lynch was charged with murder, and at the end of his trial, it took the jury less than an hour to find him guilty. He was sentenced to death, and hanged in 1842.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.