Author: Bill Lofquist

Christian Jacoby, his wife, Lena, their four children, and a servant, Anna Maria Suttler, arrived in Pittsburgh from Offenbach, Germany, on July 7, 1858. Upon arrival, they checked into the hotel of Daniel Herwig at Penn Avenue and Canal St., downtown, using the name Suttler.

Jacoby had lived in Pittsburgh and worked in a rolling mill for two years prior to his marriage and was returning with his wife and family en route to Chicago to start a life in the United States.

That evening, Christian and Lena Jacoby went on a long walk across the Monongahela River and to the west along the Ohio River to a remote area. There Jacoby shot and killed his wife. It was the first capital case involving a gun murder.

The next morning, with Anna Maria Suttler, who was pregnant, posing as his wife, the Jacobys continued to Chicago.

After Lena Jacoby’s body was found near Cork’s Run on the Ohio River on July 10, an investigation began that ultimately led to her identification and to Christian Jacoby’s arrest in Indiana on August 27. Investigators found that ammunition in his possession matched the gun and ammunition found with Lena Jacoby’s body.

Reports from Germany supported the understanding that was coming into focus; that Lena Jacoby was poorly treated by her husband, that Christian Jacoby was the father of the child Suttler was carrying, and that their illicit relationship was the cause of Lena’s death.

At trial, the state used the gun and ammunition evidence, including a bullet taken from the victim’s disinterred body, as well as his relationship with Suttler, to implicate Jacoby. In his defense, Jacoby claimed his wife committed suicide. Suttler testified in support of that argument, stating that Lena Jacoby had told her that she felt unvalued next to Suttler. After six days of testimony and twenty minutes of deliberations, Jacoby was convicted of first-degree murder on November 20, 1858.

After his motion for a new trial was rejected, Jacoby was sentenced to death on December 11. After his appeal (Commonwealth v. Jacoby, Volume VI, p. 177, 1858) was rejected on January 14, 1859, no recourse remained.

Christian Jacoby was hanged on May 20, 1859, side-by-side with David Evans, who had also murdered his wife.

In another tragic turn, Anna Marie Suttler’s baby died shortly after birth.

David Jewell was well-known around mid-nineteenth century Pittsburgh. Born and raised in the city, he worked as a painter and was the Captain of the Neptune Fire Company, a volunteer fire company and active social organization. In an era before organized policing, he had even served as a watchman.

Jewell was also known as a rogue character, “a desperado of respectable connections” frequently involved in fights and living rougher than his upbringing would indicate. At the same time, volunteer fire companies, once viewed as essential civic organizations, were devolving into little more than street gangs.

In a series of cases that foreshadowed greater violence to come, Jewell was twice arrested for stabbing another man during a street fight. The first assault occurred in 1848.

In a second assault, Jewell and a friend were arrested for an unprovoked assault on a soldier, William Doyle, on May 28, 1852.

Only six weeks later, during the Fourth of July celebration of local fire companies, James A. Cochran, a friend of Jewell’s, got into a fight with Samuel Mitchell, a fellow firefighter and former jail guard, who is alleged to have insulted Cochran. Jewell, who was free on bail in the Doyle case, and others joined in the fight, with Jewell stabbing and killing Mitchell.

The privileged white man, free despite a history of violence, served as a stark contrast to the message of Frederick Douglass’s famous, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro” oration, given that same day at Rochester’s Corinthian Hall.

The “cutting affray,” as such incidents were described at the time, was a growing source of concern as young, single men became more numerous in industrializing Pittsburgh. Volunteer fire companies, for all of the important service that they provided, were also notorious for the raucous and often violent behavior of their members.

In a closely watched trial, Jewell was convicted of first-degree murder on December 8, 1852, and sentenced to death. Cochran and William E. Gaw were acquitted.

Despite the strength of the case against him, concerted efforts to save Jewell’s life were undertaken by his many friends and supporters.  First was his appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which raised issues about the composition of the jury and the conduct of the trial (Jewell v. Commonwealth, 22 Pa. 94, 1853). That effort failed when the court concluded that overturning Jewell’s conviction on such narrow, technical grounds “would render justice impossible in many cases, and expose society unprotected to the danger of the worst crimes.”

Next was a pardon campaign that included petitions signed by numerous citizens. That effort also failed. An unprecedented effort to interfere in the judicial process by enacting legislation calling for a new trial was also undertaken. That bill failed by a single vote (Pittsburgh Morning Post, February 11, 1854).

Just prior to his execution, Jewell nearly escaped when friends smuggled him a saw. When he was taken to the gallows on March 24, 1854, poison was found in his cell.

After having exhausted all legal and other means to avoid execution, David Jewell spoke from the gallows to decry the process that convicted him and declare himself “a man in the full vigor of life, who is about to die.”

In the context of rising anti-slavery sentiment and approaching civil war, Jewell’s execution was taken up by anti-slavery advocates as a “barbarous practice” that accomplishes no public good.

James Galligo and Jacob (Jake) Rogers, both of whom were described as Black or mulatto, were involved in some way with the same woman, whose name is not recorded but who is described as white. Though Galligo and the woman were described as husband and wife, the men were rivals who used the legal system to punish the other while the woman moved between them.

Seeking revenge after having been jailed on Rogers’ complaint, Galligo went to Rogers’ home and stabbed him to death on December 12, 1837. His efforts to kill the woman were unsuccessful. Galligo then turned himself in to the mayor’s office and confessed immediately afterwards.

Public Ledger (Philadelphia), December 21, 1837

After pleading not guilty, Galligo was convicted of first-degree murder on December 20, 1837, less than three weeks after Rogers’s death.

Galligo’s motion for a new trial was rejected and his death sentence was imposed the following week, on January 8, 1838. A month had not yet passed since Roger’s killing.

In his pardon request, Galligo’s attorney noted that “a large portion of this community have manifested a considerable degree of sympathy in his behalf, and a decided disinclination to see the unfortunate man made the subject of capital punishment.”

That request was rejected by Governor Joseph Ritner, who was running – unsuccessfully – for reelection. James Galligo was hanged on March 30, 1838, before hundreds of witnesses.

This is all we know of the crime and punishment of James Galligo. Its veracity is impossible to determine. Official records have not survived to document the proceedings and the limited newspaper coverage available was little afforded to a crime involving a Black offender and a Black victim.

On April 10, 1834, Pennsylvania enacted an Act to Abolish Public Executions, becoming the second state to do so (following Rhode Island in 1833). Galligo was thus the first person executed inside the Allegheny County Jail, the first execution in the county in twenty years, and the first execution of a Black defendant.

In the fifty years since Mamachtaga’s execution, a period in which I have been able to identify twenty murder trials in Pittsburgh, seven cases resulted in a first-degree murder conviction and four resulted in executions. Despite a Black population of less than four percent on the city’s population, two Black defendants had been sentenced to death and one was executed.

John Tiernan and Patrick Campbell, fellow Irish immigrants, lived and worked together in Turtle Creek. Campbell had a contract to build a mile of the Pittsburgh and Greensburg Turnpike, the final leg of the first road linking Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. Tiernan, a middle-aged man who left behind a family in County Kildare (and, reportedly, another in New York and a third in Philadelphia), subcontracted from him.

On December 7, 1817, a year and a half after beginning their work together and a few days after Campbell received a large cash advance for his work, Tiernan killed him with an axe and buried his body under the floorboards of their cabin. Tiernan fled, taking Campbell’s horse and other of his possessions. He was arrested in Westmoreland County on December 11, after suspicious neighbors found Campbell’s body and began a search for Tiernan.

After being indicted on January 15, 1818, Tiernan was tried, convicted after fifteen minutes of deliberation, and sentenced to death on January 17, just six weeks after the killing. In the absence of eyewitnesses, the case against Tiernan was circumstantial, though the chain of events pointed clearly to his responsibility. His execution was set for March 25, 1818.

On that day, Tiernan was conveyed by cart to the gallows at Boyd’s Hill, guarded by city militia and with a long public procession in tow. A crowd estimated in the thousands watched an event so momentous in the city’s history that it was used for years to mark time. Almost exactly twenty-five years since Dunning’s execution, Tiernan became the second and last person to be publicly hanged in Allegheny County.

Already forgetting the short history of the newly formed city, the Pittsburgh Weekly Gazette wrote that “it was the first scene of the kind ever witnessed in this part of the country, since civilized men have occupied the soil” and that “eight or ten thousand persons were present.” Tiernan was buried under the gallows.

In the manner of the day, an abridged version of the trial and of Tiernan’s confession was published soon after the events.

The turnpike connecting Pittsburgh and Harrisburg, a much needed route over the Allegheny Mountains, opened on May 20, 1818.

Moved by the spectacle of large crowds and disorderly displays at hangings across the state but unable to achieve abolition legislatively, on April 10, 1834, the Pennsylvania General Assembly passed an “act to Abolish Public Executions.” This compromise, understood as a partial abolition, moved hangings from a public locale to within the confines of the jail in the county in which the sentence was imposed.

Pennsylvania was the second state to make this change.* Rhode Island had banned public executions in 1833. It would be more than a century before Missouri followed suit, ending public executions in the United States.

* Between 1682-1834, 252 public executions were recorded in Pennsylvania, including two in Allegheny County.