1888: The Last Public Execution in New York State

1888: The Last Public Execution in New York State

by Thomas Adcock

Oscar F. Beckwith died at the end of a rope in the blustery mid-morning of March 1, 1888, six years after killing his partner in a hapless gold mining venture—and allegedly eating him—whereupon he fled to Canada.

The “Cannibal of Austerlitz,” as the media tagged him, was the last man hanged in New York State. At age seventy-eight, he was also the oldest.

Beckwith’s family history, according to his attorney, Levi Longley of Kinderhook, New York, was one of estrangement, poverty and, often, insanity. Beckwith fit the pattern by first abandoning a wife and young daughter in western Massachusetts, then walking to Illinois in search of undetermined riches. During this long journey, so read the citizens of Hudson, Beckwith sustained himself by feeding on Indian women. Also, the notion of a deep vein of gold on the slope of a hill back in eastern New York somehow crept into his mind.

According to the statement of facts accompanying a January 1888 decision by the New York Court of Appeals:

The partners were at odds, with Beckwith mulling a lawsuit against Vandercook, whom he accused of cheating him out of revenues from the sale of timber rights to failed mine property. On the morning of his death, Vandercook was seen walking uphill toward Beckwith’s cabin. When Vandercook was late in returning to his own rented room in a house downhill and to the east, his landlord went searching. The landlord detected what “smelt like burning” from the interior of Beckwith’s cabin, and “therein found Beckwith tending a large fire in his stove… from which came…a sizzling noise.” Beckwith explained that he was “burning pork rinds and was preparing to bake” and that Vandercook had left, departing down the western side of the hill toward Green River.

That same night, the landlord enlisted the sheriff’s help in returning to the cabin. Beckwith was missing. So were parts of a disemboweled corpse: portions of a skull, fingers, and feet were found among ashes inside the cook stove, along with charred human organs in a skillet on top.

Nowhere in legal briefs or court transcripts is cannibalism mentioned.

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