This week in 1878

“I bid you farewell, my sister, likewise to this
world of sin.
But ’tis hard, ’tis hard, my sister, to part from
friends and kin.
To be led like a brute to the slaughter, to die
by the hangman’s hand.
To perish like a guilty felon, condemned by
the laws of the land.”

— George Sherry, convicted of murder, hanging, Illinois.
Executed June 21, 1878

After a night of drink, slaughterhouse co-workers Sherry, age twenty-one, and accomplice Jeremiah Connolly, nineteen, assaulted four people before hitting a young girl, Rose McConville. When her uncle Hugh McConville intervened, the men attacked him. One stabbed him just beneath his heart, and the assailants proceeded to kick him. He died. Arrested two days later, each man blamed one another, and they were hanged together. The murder was called by the Chicago Tribune “the most cold-blooded in the criminal annals of Chicago.”