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Last person executed for espionage in the us
Last person executed for espionage in the us












last person executed for espionage in the us

When Hill arrived at the meeting place later that day he “appeared to have at once pulled out a hammer and attacked her savagely.” Read More Related Articles He claimed that they would be married the next day and he was going to show her the home they would live in – he told her to make sure to bring their son with her. With the field being close to Newhouse Farm where he worked. On Sunday, July 4, 1875, George Hill had been to church that morning with his former flame Miss Thrussell and had arranged to meet her in the evening in a field “two miles from the town”. Miss Thrussell had taken a “bastardy summons against him as the putative father of the child”.

last person executed for espionage in the us

Hill was successful “in seducing the girl”, who was also from St Albans, and in February 1875 she gave birth to a son – who they named William George Hill. He worked for Mr Charles Edwards at Newhouse Farm in St Albans and for “some time past” has been courting Sarah Thrussell, a hat sewer. Prior to murdering his own son Hill, who was 21 at the time of his execution, was described as being a “young man respectably connected”. With the reporter writing: “A very distressing murder has taken place at St Albans and has caused great excitement in the neighbourhood.” Who was George Hill? In the Jedition of the Hertfordshire Mercury the headline cried “Shocking Murder at St Albans”.

  • The Hertford Horror murder so revolting it brought sweeping reforms of the county police force and left a 'blot upon the fair name of this town'.
  • He was given the death sentence after being found guilty of the ‘wilful murder’ of his five-month old son almost a year earlier. George Hill, a 21-year-old man from St Albans, was the last prisoner to face the noose in the county town in the spring of 1876.Ī crowd of around 20 people gathered to watch his execution in the courtyard of the old Hertford Prison on Baker Street. To steal US atomic secrets for the then-Soviet Union.The death penalty was not abolished in Britain until 1965 but by that time in Hertford it had been almost 90 years since an execution had been carried out. The last Americans to be executed for spying were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were put to death in 1953 for conspiring Several of those agents were subsequently killed. In 1994 former CIA officer Aldrich Ames was also sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia from 1985 to 1991.Īmes told investigators that he had betrayed at least a dozen Russian and Eastern European agents recruited by the CIA, for which he received $2m.

    #Last person executed for espionage in the us full

    In that case prosecutors dropped their attempt to seek the death penalty in exchange for the former agent's full co-operation in disclosing his spying activities. These include last year's well-publicised case of former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to selling secrets to Moscow for $1.4m in money and diamonds. In other high-profile cases defendants were spared the death sentence and instead given life in prison. The Regan case is unusual in that the government has sought the death sentence in a case in which sensitive material was never actually handed over to another country or agency.Īmes betrayed at least one dozen recruited agents He was also allegedly carrying in his shoe the encrypted coordinates of a surface-to-air missile site in the "no-fly" zone in northern Iraq and coordinates of a missile site in China.

    last person executed for espionage in the us

    When he was arrested at Dulles International Airport near Washington, police allegedly found addresses for the Chinese and Iraqi embassies in Switzerland and Austria in his wallet and secreted in the sole of his shoe. The letter, which was allegedly found on his home computer, demanded $13m in exchange for the secrets. In it he offered information that could have helped Baghdad to hide anti-aircraft missiles. Prosecutors had said that Regan, a US Air Force sergeant who had worked for the National Reconnaissance Office, a military intelligence agency that builds and operates America's network of spy satellites, wrote a letter to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. He was found not guilty on another charge of trying to spy for Libya. If executed, Regan would be the first person to be sentenced to death for espionage in the US since 1953. The 12-person federal jury must now decide whether his efforts to sell top-secret defence information to Iraq merit the death penalty. Regan allegedly demanded $13m for intelligence materialĪ former US intelligence analyst has been found guilty of trying to spy for Iraq and China.īrian Regan, 40-years-old and a father of four, showed no emotion as a jury returned its verdict after five days of deliberation.














    Last person executed for espionage in the us