On this day, Oct. 22, in 1903, Tom Horn, cowboy detective and assassin, was hanged in Wyoming for the murder of a 14-year-old boy in a case that is still debated today. Horn also has the distinction of being one of the few people in the Wild West to have been hanged by an automated process.
Horn was a hired gunman who hunted down cattle rustlers or settled land disputes. Prosecutors used a drunken and vague confession to convict him of killing the boy.
Authorities executed Horn with a “self-hanging” device called a Julian Gallows, a contraption that used a series of levers, a barrel of water and a noose. The device was useful when nobody wanted to be the hangman, but sometimes it took a torturous 30 minutes for the contraption to do its thing.
— Scott McCabe
