IT would seem that they used to hang 'em two at a time in Liverpool.

A faithful follower of this page, recognising my nose for odd facts from the past, kindly sent in evidence of this macabre fact in the shape of a cutting from a St Helens local paper of 1874. And it's got him wondering whether any local historian can say when the last hanging took place on Merseyside.

The clipping describes how, together on a September morning of that year, Henry Flanagan and Mary Williams, earlier sentenced to death at Liverpool Assizes "suffered the extreme penalty of the law within the precincts of Kirkdale Gaol". (Anyone know exactly where in Liverpool this was?).

Flanagan had denied that he intentionally killed his aunt; while Williams protested, right to the end, that she hadn't fired the pistol shot that killed a certain Nicholas Manning. She blamed it on her husband who was reported to have "since disappeared".

A vanishing act which, given the circumstances, sounds a trifle fishy to me!