He Killed 600 People LEGALLY | The Macabre Albert Pierrepoint

Summary

Camp Gagnon – “He Killed 600 People LEGALLY | The Macabre Albert Pierrepoint”
April 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode of Camp Gagnon, Mark Gagnon and co-host Christos explore the life and legacy of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s most prolific executioner of the 20th century. Combining historical deep dive with philosophical reflection, the hosts dissect Pierrepont’s family origins, methodology, famous cases—including executions of both notorious criminals and the tragically innocent—and the broader implications for the morality and efficacy of capital punishment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Albert Pierrepoint: The Reluctant Executioner

• Family Business: Born into a lineage of hangmen, Pierrepont followed in his father’s and uncle’s footsteps, becoming obsessed with the craft after discovering his father’s execution diary at age 11.
  [03:45] Mark Gagnon: “How do you even become an executioner? Well, for Albert Pierrepoint, he was born into it...”
• Professional Rise: Despite an unremarkable working-class background, Albert trained and qualified for execution duty in the early 1930s, eventually becoming the lead executioner in 1941.
  [06:22] Mark Gagnon: “Six months later, this invitation arrives and he trained for four days at Pentonville Prison in London, practicing on dummies.”
• Craft and Method: Albert approached executions scientifically—adjusting lengths of drops to minimize suffering, personally inspecting prisoners, and aiming for precision and dignity with every hanging.
  [09:07] Mark Gagnon: “Pierrepont basically tried to standardize this process and he refined it into what people have described as an art.”
  [12:04] “From the moment Pierrepont entered the cell to the moment that he open the trap door, it was 12 seconds. That was his standard...”

2. Moral Complexity and Psychological Strain

• Efficiency vs. Ethics: Pierrepont’s relentless quest for humane executions masked the deep psychological toll and existential questions about state-sanctioned killing.
  [12:36] Christos: “He wanted it to be quick. By his own account, he called the execution sacred.”
• The Paradox: Can killing be “good” if it’s done with care and by government mandate?
  [13:11] Mark Gagnon: “Is that something you could deal with as a human being? Like, Yeah, I killed 600 people... But I was the one that did it.”

3. Historical Context: Executing War Criminals and Regular Felons

• Post-WWII Hangings: Pierrepont oversaw the executions of Nazi war criminals convicted at the Bergen-Belsen trials, including Josef Kramer and Irma Grese.
  [15:00] Mark Gagnon: “On some mornings, more people would be hung in a single session than Pierpont would normally execute in an entire year.”
  [15:18] Christos: “Irma Graze, the 22 year old SS guard who had been convicted of selecting prisoners for the gas chambers...”
• Home in England: Pierrepont’s notoriety also stemmed from controversial domestic cases, especially the wrongful execution of innocent men and emotionally charged public trials.

4. Three Landmark Miscarriages of Justice

Timothy Evans (1950)

• Executed for a crime later found to be committed by his neighbor, who was also executed by Pierrepont.
• [19:42] Mark Gagnon: “Timothy Evans had almost certainly been innocent, and the state killed a dude for a crime committed by his neighbor... And then Albert Pierpont killed both of them.”

Derek Bentley (1953)

• A mentally challenged 19-year-old hanged for a murder committed during a burglary by his underage accomplice.
• [25:32] Mark Gagnon: “The full weight of the law fell on Bentley and the case provoked enormous public outcry... Yet Pierpont carried out the execution.”

Ruth Ellis (1955)

• Last woman executed in the UK; her trial and plea for mercy due to domestic abuse ignited public debate.
  [27:05] Mark Gagnon: “Ellis became the last woman to be executed in Britain, and she was hanged by Pierpont...”

5. The Executioner at Home: Compartmentalization and Double Life

• Ordinary Publican: Despite his work, Pierrepont ran a pub called “Help the Poor Struggler,” maintaining a warm, sociable persona unbeknownst to most of his patrons.
  [29:44] Christos: “And this double life that he led... kind of as like a friendly... pub owner by night to then waking up that morning and becoming like the most notorious executioner...”
• Compartmentalization: Showcases remarkable ability to separate professional duties from personal life, raising questions about the nature of moral and emotional detachment.

6. Shattering the Shell: Executing a Friend

• James Corbett: Pierrepont executed an old pub friend, bringing the human cost uncomfortably close. The emotional impact of this “Tish and Tosh” moment profoundly affected him.
  [33:05] “Their eyes met. And in that moment, that wall between the executioner and the victim completely collapses...”

7. Philosophical Reckoning: Did It Matter?

• Following a lifetime of service, Pierrepoint publicly questioned the efficacy and morality of the death penalty:

  [34:00] Mark Gagnon quoting Pierrepont: “I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out was in any way, has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder. Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.”

• Debate remains whether his memoir’s anti-capital punishment statements were shaped by post-career reflection or context (selling books in an abolitionist climate).

8. Legacy and Abolition

• Pierrepont’s actions—especially the high-profile miscarriages of justice—became central pillars in the abolition movement in Britain.
• The UK ultimately abolished capital punishment for murder in 1965, with full abolition only in 2003.
  [38:08] Christos: “It wasn’t until 2003 that the United Kingdom ratified... Protocol 13... which completely abolishes the death penalty in all circumstances with no exceptions.”

9. Contemporary Resonance and Reflection

• The hosts draw parallels with current death penalty practices in the US, China, and elsewhere, questioning the morality and necessity of state-sanctioned executions today.
  [41:05] Mark Gagnon: “But it’s like a thing that we do. That’s pretty crazy.”
• Pierrepont died in relative obscurity in 1992, his life continuing to inspire debate.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Art of Execution:

  “Pierrepont basically tried to standardize this process and he refined it into what people have described as an art.” – Mark Gagnon [09:07]

• On the Weight of Guilt:

  “Like, it’s the most intimate thing, killing another human being. Like, looking at them, putting a bag on their head, sizing them up, and then doing it and then getting it wrong and being like, you know, bad day at the office. Like, that’s crazy.” – Mark Gagnon [20:36]

• Pierrepont’s Famous Reflection:

  “I do not now believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out... acted as a deterrent... Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.” – Quoting Pierrepont [34:00]

• On Double Lives:

  “He completely lived a full on Hannah Montana-But-I’m-a-serial-killer life, like killing by day, you know, killing Guinnesses by night.” – Christos [30:58]

• On Responsibility:

  “He didn’t elect for those people to die. He’s not the judge or jury. He simply elected to carry it out, to trust the system...” – Mark Gagnon [31:11]

• On Moral Complexity:

  “Holding all these things in tension is extremely difficult. And trying to balance them all is maybe the most human experience ever.” – Mark Gagnon [35:44]

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Important Timestamps

• Background & Family: 03:45–07:49
• Execution Methodology: 08:00–12:36
• WWII War Criminal Executions: 14:22–17:09
• Notorious UK Cases: 18:08–28:19
• Pub Life & Compartmentalization: 28:39–31:34
• Executing a Friend, Corbett: 31:36–33:30
• Pierrepont’s Ultimate Reflection: 33:35–34:17
• Abolition and Legacy: 36:47–40:10
• Contemporary Context & Final Thoughts: 41:04–47:44

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Conclusion

Mark and Christos weave together the facts and the philosophical dilemmas of Albert Pierrepont’s extraordinary life, forcing listeners to confront uncomfortable questions about justice, revenge, and the cost of doing a “necessary” job. The story of Britain’s chief hangman is not just about the past—its echoes are felt in every modern debate about punishment, guilt, and morality.

“The legacy of Albert Pierpont is still contested now... Is he a necessary function of state violence... or a conscientious professional caught up inside a flawed system?... It’s complicated.” – Mark Gagnon [39:34, 40:03]

Transcript

[Amazon Narrator]

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[Mark Gagnon]

This man executed Nazi war criminals, serial killers, and even an innocent father. And then he said that the death penalty doesn't work. He executed over 400 people, possibly as many as 600. And at the end of his life,

[Christos]

he wrote that capital punishment had achieved nothing.

[Mark Gagnon]

His name was Albert Pierrepont. He was Britain's most prolific executioner of the 20th century. Death wasn't just his job. It was a family business. His father was a hangman, his uncle was a hangman. And as a schoolboy, when they asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, I want to be an executioner like my daddy. Albert got his wish. Then he spent the rest of his

[Christos]

life wondering if the whole thing was pointless.

[Mark Gagnon]

This is a fascinating episode and a really interesting deep dive onto a historical figure that you may have never heard

[Christos]

of, but you will never forget.

[Mark Gagnon]

So sit back, relax, and welcome to History Camp. What's up, people? And welcome back to History Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon and thank you for joining me in my tent, where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating, controversial stories from all time, from all history, forever. Yes, that's what I do in this tennis. I try to figure out everything that's

[Christos]

ever happened and, oh, man, there's a

[Mark Gagnon]

whole bunch of stuff just been non stop stuff going on ever since I got here.

[Christos]

So we got a lot of catching up to do.

[Mark Gagnon]

We have no time to waste.

[Christos]

But before we begin, I just want to say thank you so much to

[Mark Gagnon]

you for tuning in to this episode.

[Christos]

Truly, every time you click on an

[Mark Gagnon]

episode, every time you support the community, every time you join the, the, you know, the campsite, it helps everything work. It truly is. The reason that I do the show

[Christos]

is because I get to hang with people like you for, you know, an hour a day.

[Mark Gagnon]

It really means the world.

[Christos]

So thank you so much for, you

[Mark Gagnon]

know, keeping the lights on in the tent, keeping the fire burning, and I'm

[Christos]

indebtedly, I'm indebted to you and so is Christos. Right, Christos?

[Mark Gagnon]

Absolutely. All right, come on, dude, just.

[Christos]

You take a puff of your vape and then you just.

[Mark Gagnon]

It's just like, ah, come on, come on, we gotta be A little more

[Christos]

professional here in the campus.

[Mark Gagnon]

Oh, is it Bohemian Grove? You gotta be a little more serious.

[Christos]

All right. No, Christos, I want to say thank you to you as well. You're a great guy and I appreciate you always being here.

[Guest or Co-host]

I really appreciate that. Mark, that's really good.

[Christos]

All right, all right.

[Mark Gagnon]

Let's just.

[Guest or Co-host]

I'm just gonna say it's really sweet.

[Mark Gagnon]

Let's just jump into it. All right? Who is Albert Pierre Pont?

[Christos]

He's. He's a French last name. So first off, I'm gonna pronounce it Pier Ponce.

[Mark Gagnon]

His name is obviously like Pierre Pon

[Christos]

is how you would say it. But I'm going to say Pierpont because that's how the British said it. He's a fascinating character in history and

[Mark Gagnon]

I think someone that you probably have never heard of, but will change your

[Christos]

perspective on the death penalty, on execution, on life. And will has a real philosophy tied into his entire journey that is truly crazy.

[Mark Gagnon]

One little detail that I love to start with. Albert Pierpont was an executioner. He was a hangman. He killed somewhere between like 400 and 600 people.

[Christos]

He was the guy that did it, the executioner. The guy in the black hood that just made it happen.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, he died in 1992. That's. That's. He was running this whole thing from in the 1900s. He'd listened to Red Hot Chili Peppers.

[Guest or Co-host]

That's crazy.

[Mark Gagnon]

1992 is when he died. He heard Metallica.

[Guest or Co-host]

He got to drink Mountain Dew.

[Christos]

He drank Mountain Dew.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, think about that. Like, this was not like, oh, way back. This was a real guy that saw

[Christos]

World Cups and stuff.

[Mark Gagnon]

You know what I mean? Like, it's crazy. So let's set the scene.

[Christos]

Okay?

[Mark Gagnon]

How do you even become an executioner? Well, for Albert Pierre Pont, he was born into it on March 30, 1905, in the village of West Riding in Yorkshire, England. He was the third of five children, the oldest boy. And his family was poor and not like the romantic kind of like, you know, like, my mama milked the cows. No, it's the kind where like, father

[Christos]

kind of like drifts between jobs as like a butcher's apprentice, a clog maker,

[Mark Gagnon]

a mill worker, and, you know, drinks whatever money comes in. And just. It was terrible. Now, his dad was a guy named Henry Pierpont. Now, Henry had a secret. In 1901, he'd actually been on the official list of executioners for His Majesty's Prison Service. It was a part time job.

[Christos]

All right?

[Mark Gagnon]

It was something you picked up 1099, you know what I mean? And there's no salary, no pension, just a fee you get paid per execution gig work, and you're only paid and you only show up when you're called. So now the role requires discretion above anything else. Executioners were forbidden from attracting public attention or sharing details of their work with anyone. But here's the thing with old Henry.

[Christos]

Henry was a drinker, and a heavy one at that.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, one day he shows up to the prison a day before an execution

[Christos]

was scheduled, potentially under the influence of

[Mark Gagnon]

alcohol, and furiously berates the people that

[Christos]

had called him in.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, maybe it was the stress of supporting a family, maybe it was the guilt of being a hangman. Whatever it was, in 1910, Henry is removed. Now, his brother Thomas Pierpont, who had been. Who had joined the executioner's list in 1906, continued the work with a lot more professionalism and would go on to become one of Britain's most experienced hangman. Now, Albert didn't learn about all this until 1916, when Henry's memoirs were published in a newspaper, when that was the moment that Henry's true career was fully

[Christos]

revealed to his family. Albert was 11 years old. And rather than being horrified, he was fascinated.

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, when old Papa Henry died in 1922, Albert, then just 17 years old, inherited two small pamphlets, basically in which his father had written his story as a hangman. And in these books was his dad's execution diary. And the diary listed details of every

[Christos]

hanging that he participated in.

[Mark Gagnon]

And Albert studied them and obsessed over them. And through the rest of the 1920s, Pierpont worked as a delivery driver for a grocer. But he never lost sight of what he actually wanted to do. And then on April 19, 1931, he wrote to the prison commissioners and applied to become an assistant executioner. He was turned down.

[Christos]

There were no vacancies, no jobs. Come back later.

[Mark Gagnon]

Six months later, this invitation arrives and he trained for four days at Pentonville

[Christos]

Prison in London, practicing on dummies.

[Mark Gagnon]

And in September 1932, at the age of 27 years old, he was officially accepted into the list as an assistant executioner. And his first job came in December of 1932. He was actually assisting his Uncle Tom at a prison in Dublin, hanging a young Irish farmer named Patrick McDermott who

[Christos]

had murdered his brother.

[Mark Gagnon]

Pierpont's job as assistant was basically to

[Christos]

follow the prisoner onto the platform, bind

[Mark Gagnon]

his legs together and step back off

[Christos]

the trapdoor before his uncle pulled the lever.

[Mark Gagnon]

Pretty easy, right?

[Christos]

The entire Process from scaffold to death

[Mark Gagnon]

took less than a minute. And for the rest of the 1930s, Pierpont was basically, you know, a part time killer. He worked his day job and then

[Christos]

he took these execution odd job assignments as they came.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now most of them were alongside his Uncle Tom, and not that Uncle Tom,

[Christos]

it was just like an actual his.

[Mark Gagnon]

He just had an uncle, Uncle Thomas we'll call him. And he learned his uncle's approach.

[Christos]

He was, you know, dignified and like very precise. He wasn't hammered all the time, which is good.

[Mark Gagnon]

And Tom's advice to Albert was pretty clear. If you can't do it without whiskey,

[Christos]

don't do it at all.

[Mark Gagnon]

At the time, I guess, you know,

[Christos]

hangman had kind of a reputation of being drinkers because the guilt would get to them and it would stress them out. They get on the fritz, so they'd

[Mark Gagnon]

be hitting the bottle.

[Christos]

And Tom was like, no, no, no, you gotta be a pro about this. No drinking on the job.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now Albert earned his stripes for the

[Christos]

next like 10 years until October 1941,

[Mark Gagnon]

when Pierrepont finally conducted his first execution

[Christos]

as the lead hangman.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now he was only 36 years old

[Christos]

and he found his life vocation.

[Mark Gagnon]

The first assignment was executing the brutal

[Christos]

gangland killer, Antonio Babe Mancini.

[Mark Gagnon]

But Albert wasn't just going to do the job. He was going to reinvent the craft of killing. Now here's where things get a little

[Christos]

weird, so just roll with me.

[Mark Gagnon]

Albert Pierpont didn't just clock in, do

[Christos]

the job and leave.

[Mark Gagnon]

He perfected what he was doing. He approached execution with the precision of

[Christos]

like a surgeon or something.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that combination, right, like taking this morally gray thing and it's a little questionable and trying to find the best way to do it and how to do it, you know, humanely. It's one of the most interesting things

[Christos]

about this whole story, right?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, okay, you're going to go kill someone. You hope that they did something bad,

[Christos]

but you don't know all the details, you know, so you're kind of like rationalizing your mind.

[Mark Gagnon]

You want the death to be fast

[Christos]

because that's the most humane thing to do. You don't want this person to suffer anymore. I mean, this happens sometimes with hanging where like, you know, someone's hanging there, they break their neck, but they don't die. And then what? They're free. Can't let them go.

[Guest or Co-host]

Cut a chicken's head off. Still runs around a little bit.

[Christos]

Dang, that's Dark Christos.

[Guest or Co-host]

That's one of the Most popular examples.

[Christos]

Good.

[Mark Gagnon]

Wait, examples of what?

[Guest or Co-host]

Of a chicken not dying?

[Mark Gagnon]

No, I'm talking about a guy breaking his neck, but he doesn't die, so

[Christos]

then they have to kill him another way.

[Guest or Co-host]

Okay, that's quite different. Sorry.

[Mark Gagnon]

All I'm saying is that Pier Pon basically tried to standardize this process and he refined it into what people have

[Christos]

described as an art.

[Mark Gagnon]

So this is what he would do the day before an execution.

[Christos]

He would arrive at the prison and

[Mark Gagnon]

be given the condemned prisoner's height and weight. And he would look through what they called the Judas hole.

[Christos]

Now, this is a small, like, you know, like, peephole in the cell door to observe the prisoners build without actually being seen.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then he would go to the

[Christos]

execution chamber, which was typically right next to the condemned person's cell, and test the equipment using a sandbag of equivalent weight.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it's pretty wild that, like,

[Christos]

he would just have to, like, walk into the jail and look at a guy and be like, this guy's gonna die tomorrow. And then he was the one killing him.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, when it comes to hanging, the length of the drop is critical.

[Christos]

Too short and the neck doesn't break. And the prisoner would just strangle slowly for like 20 minutes. That's what I meant to say that. Yeah, you.

[Mark Gagnon]

You don't.

[Christos]

Not that they break the neck is that they just strangle and that they don't break the neck. You get what I'm saying?

[Guest or Co-host]

Yep.

[Christos]

From the earlier chicken point that you're

[Mark Gagnon]

bringing up now, if the drop is too long, then you could literally sever the head.

[Christos]

And that's extremely brutal and graphic and

[Mark Gagnon]

frankly, a mess bloody. Yeah. Now, in order to find the perfect length, Pierpont used the Home Office table of drops. This is a chart that calculated the

[Christos]

correct drop length based on the prisoner's weight.

[Mark Gagnon]

But he would make his own adjustments

[Christos]

to the chart based on what he observed through the spy hole.

[Mark Gagnon]

Literally, like, how thick is their neck, how muscular are they? And after a while, he was just

[Christos]

able to like, eyeball it. Like, literally, like how like an expert can, like, you know, look at your twisted ankle and be like, it's twisted ankle.

[Mark Gagnon]

He would just look at a dude and be like, yep, eight feet.

[Christos]

This type of rope, nylon, like, he was just, he.

[Mark Gagnon]

He knew how to do his job to a science. Now, on the morning of an execution, always at 8am Pierrepont, his assistant, and two prison officers would enter into the condemned person's cell.

[Christos]

Pierrepont would then strap the prisoner's arms behind his back with a leather strap.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then the group would walk through a connecting door into the execution chamber. The prisoner was then positioned on a

[Christos]

marked spot on the trapdoor.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then he would place a white cotton hood over the head.

[Christos]

And then the noose, a leather lined rope with this metal eye positioned under

[Mark Gagnon]

the left jawbone, designed so that when

[Christos]

the prisoner dropped, the head would be forced backwards and that the neck would break at the second cervical vertebra.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then he would push the lever. And by his own account, from the moment Pierrepont entered the cell to the

[Christos]

moment that he open the trap door, it was 12 seconds. That was his standard, and it's widely

[Mark Gagnon]

cited in popular accounts, though some historians

[Christos]

note that it's difficult to really verify

[Mark Gagnon]

whether that number is exact or slightly mythologized. What's undisputed is that Pierpont was exceptionally fast and he was extremely intentional about all of this. He wanted it to be quick. By his own account, he called the execution sacred. Not in a religious sense, necessarily, but like in. In the sense that he believes that the condemned person deserved to have their

[Christos]

death handled with absolute competency and respect.

[Mark Gagnon]

He didn't want to be fumbling around trying to get the rope, making a joke, being cruel, any unnecessary suffering, just speed, like, just get it over with. And that was his version of mercy. And that raises a lot of questions. And there's one that's, you know, you

[Christos]

can't talk about with Pierpont without really

[Mark Gagnon]

looking at, can you do something bad, like killing people, but make it good and redemptive in a way? Like, it's okay to kill 600 people if you're doing it for the government

[Christos]

and if you do it humanely.

[Mark Gagnon]

But could you do it? Like, is that something you could deal

[Christos]

with as like a human being? Like, Yeah, I killed 600 people.

[Mark Gagnon]

And they were terrible people, you know,

[Christos]

serial killers, Nazis, murderers, you know, sexual abusers.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I was the one that did it.

[Christos]

I don't think that's for me, just

[Mark Gagnon]

taking orders, I guess. I mean, but also, these are bad people. But I'm not a big death penalty guy.

[Christos]

I'm not like, I'm Catholic. And so we're kind of like against the death penal. It's like our whole thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it worked out one time, shout out Jesus.

[Christos]

But like, other than that, like, you can't.

[Mark Gagnon]

We're just not. Just lock them up, right? Like, the death penalty is almost like an easy way out.

[Guest or Co-host]

It's more about the. The intrinsic punishment of the whole thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

But to me, I'm like the punishment is that you got to spend the

[Christos]

rest of your life in prison, which is a tough place to be.

[Mark Gagnon]

And maybe there's a redemptive element, or

[Christos]

maybe, you know, you turn 80 years

[Mark Gagnon]

old and maybe you've done some good

[Christos]

in the world and you got to redeem yourself.

[Guest or Co-host]

Was prison all that bad back then?

[Mark Gagnon]

Back then? What do you. I mean, back then you'd probably be easy to break out, but yeah, it sucked.

[Guest or Co-host]

No, you're living in squalor anyway. Kind of.

[Christos]

If this guy was poor, Come on, a prison. In 1930 in England and in the

[Mark Gagnon]

late 1930s, moving into the 40s, you

[Christos]

know what's going on. World War II.

[Mark Gagnon]

And in the late 19, like late 1945, early 1946, following the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp, the British military

[Christos]

conducted war crime trials for the camp staff.

[Mark Gagnon]

And our boy Albert Pierre Pont was the one that they called up to do the honors. So they brought him out to Hameln Prison in Germany. And the scale of what awaited him there was unlike anything he had ever seen before. I mean, multiple gallows were erected in the prison yard.

[Christos]

Executions were conducted in batches, meaning that several prisoners were hung in rapid succession, one after another after another.

[Mark Gagnon]

On some mornings, more people would be hung in a single session than Pierpont would normally execute in an entire year. On December 13, 1945, Pierpont hanged 13

[Christos]

people convicted of war crimes at Bergen

[Mark Gagnon]

Belsen, including Josef Kramer, the camp commander known as the Beast of Belsen, and

[Christos]

Irma Graze, the 22 year old SS

[Mark Gagnon]

guard who had been convicted of selecting

[Christos]

prisoners for the gas chambers and of sadistic physical abuse.

[Mark Gagnon]

Graves was the youngest woman sentenced to

[Christos]

death under British law in the entirety of the 20th century.

[Mark Gagnon]

But the executions for Bergen Belsen was really just the beginning. Over the next several years, Pierpont would repeatedly travel to Germany and Austria, executing around 200 war criminals, many of them former concentration camp staff from Belson, Ravensbrook

[Christos]

and other camps, as well as individuals who were convicted of various other atrocities during this occupation.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, the work was carried out with, again, the same mechanical precision, which I'm

[Christos]

sure the Germans appreciated. You know, they like good engineering. Absolutely. This guy was like the BMW of killing people. He's like, we're gonna do it, you know, the right way business.

[Guest or Co-host]

Like, no nonsense, just, you know, just get this guy out of here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Brass tacks, you know what I mean? Now, the context here is very strange because, you know, he's actually dealing with,

[Christos]

you know, regular murderers and, you know,

[Mark Gagnon]

sadistic Freaks in Britain. And then now he's dealing with, like, war criminals, right? And the people that he's facing are genuinely, you know, like, evil. Like, it's a part of, like, this

[Christos]

industrialized, you know, genocide evil.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, Pierpont never spoke publicly in detail

[Christos]

about what it felt like to execute war criminals, especially at the scale.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, imagine you just go home

[Christos]

and you're like, Yeah, I killed 13 people today.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, of course, what those people did was wrong, but also, like, dealing with

[Christos]

the weight of blasting 13 human lives off the earth is.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, it just got away on you, right? Now, in his memoirs, he maintained the

[Christos]

same professional detachment that he brought to every execution.

[Mark Gagnon]

But the sheer volume. I mean, 200 hangings in the aftermath of World War II placed him at

[Christos]

this unique intersection of history and morality.

[Mark Gagnon]

And he was the embodied instrument through

[Christos]

which Allied justice, you know, was basically carried out.

[Mark Gagnon]

The hand that pulled the lever, day

[Christos]

after day, name after name.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, yeah, in a way, I

[Christos]

guess he was like a military attache to, like, the British military, you know,

[Mark Gagnon]

because that's what the British were doing.

[Christos]

They were also shooting at the Germans.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, what really shook Britain, though, wasn't how Albert killed.

[Christos]

It was who.

[Mark Gagnon]

So back home, several of Pierpont's executions

[Christos]

became like historical landmarks in their own right in British legal history.

[Mark Gagnon]

Not because of him, necessarily, but because of what happened afterward, because of the Hameln hangings and the industrial sort of

[Christos]

justice brought to this wartime trial at a massive scale.

[Mark Gagnon]

These domestic cases that Albert were dealing with were, in certain ways, more intimate, in some ways more devastating. So there were individual miscarriages that could

[Christos]

call the entire system into question.

[Mark Gagnon]

So, you know, when it comes to

[Christos]

capital punishment, obviously the first thing people think is, well, what if you kill an innocent guy? Right? Like, that's like, kind of the whole thing.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, imagine people arrest you one day,

[Christos]

and they go, you did this crime. They go, you go, no, I didn't. And they go, yes, you did. And then you go to trial, and

[Mark Gagnon]

they're like, you're guilty of the crime,

[Christos]

and the sentence is death.

[Mark Gagnon]

And you go, I'm getting killed now

[Christos]

for something I didn't do.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, is there a more atrocious way to die?

[Guest or Co-host]

Especially if one of them is, like, particularly convincing. Yeah, I did not do this. And you see it in his eyes.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, sucks. And then he's. And then Albert Pierpont's the one that has to kill him, and he's looking

[Christos]

at you like, bro, I. I'm on my life. I didn't do this, and he just has to be like, I mean, how

[Mark Gagnon]

do you live with that? Well, this has happened. His name was Timothy Evans, and he was convicted for the murder of his infant daughter. Evans had also been accused of murdering

[Christos]

his wife, though he was only tried for the death of his child.

[Mark Gagnon]

Evans maintained his innocence throughout the hearings, insisting that his neighbor, this guy named John Reginald Christie, he was the real killer. But no one believed him. So Evans was hanged by a Pierpont

[Christos]

on March 9, 1950. But three years later, in 1953, that

[Mark Gagnon]

neighbor dude, that guy Christie, he was arrested and confessed to murdering six women, including Evan's wife. Their bodies were found hidden throughout his

[Christos]

house at Rillington Place in London.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then Pierre Pont hanged Christie, too. But the terrible truth was obviously impossible

[Christos]

to, you know, overlook.

[Mark Gagnon]

Timothy Evans had almost certainly been innocent, and the state killed a dude for a crime committed by his neighbor, the same neighbor who testified against him at the trial. And then Albert Pierpont killed both of them. I mean, crazy.

[Christos]

Evans was even posthumously pardoned in 1966.

[Mark Gagnon]

I mean, just like, oh, my. I mean, crazy on all counts. Like, if you're an executioner, you just

[Christos]

have to quit that day.

[Mark Gagnon]

You're like, I put a guy to death.

[Christos]

That didn't do.

[Guest or Co-host]

Says the neighbor confessed to killing six women. Didn't say anything about the baby, though.

[Mark Gagnon]

That's a fair distinction. Yeah, but, I mean, according to British

[Christos]

law, he was pardoned after his death. So I'm assuming that there's probably more to that case than I even know about off the top of my head.

[Mark Gagnon]

But, I mean, just like, he went on and did this for a couple

[Christos]

more years after this. After he's like, oops.

[Mark Gagnon]

But I don't know how you can

[Christos]

be so, like, detached. You know what I mean?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, it's like the most intimate thing,

[Christos]

like, killing another human being. Like, looking at them, putting a bag on their head, sizing them up, and then doing it and then getting it wrong and being like, you know, bad

[Mark Gagnon]

day at the office. Like, that's crazy.

[Guest or Co-host]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

What's up, guys? We're going to take a break real

[Christos]

quick because I got to tell you something kind of embarrassing. All right.

[Mark Gagnon]

I've been working out pretty consistently for a while.

[Christos]

I love working out. I think it's super important part of

[Mark Gagnon]

my daily routine, and I don't really eat garbage, and I'm doing all the stuff you're supposed to do, and I got in pretty good shape. But at some point, I noticed the

[Christos]

results kind of just stopped. Like, Matching my effort.

[Mark Gagnon]

Kind of around the time that I had a kid, you know, I'd put in like the same amount of work, but like, I wasn't getting the same

[Christos]

results at the gym. I would get like a little bit more belly fat. My energy was kind of inconsistent, recovery was taking a little bit longer.

[Mark Gagnon]

And I assumed like I was just getting older, which makes sense, right?

[Christos]

You know, guys, when they hit their

[Mark Gagnon]

30s, testosterone not like naturally goes down. And you know, when that happens, your body literally starts storing more fat and

[Christos]

you start losing muscle faster.

[Mark Gagnon]

But here's the thing that messed me up. The more body fat you carry, the more your body actually converts testosterone into

[Christos]

estrogen, which makes it even easier to gain this fat. And it's a cycle that keeps on

[Mark Gagnon]

going around and, and so I started taking Mars Men. And honestly, I've been on it for a while and I've actually noticed a difference. This is going to sound crazy. This is real 20, 24. I did blood work, my testosterone was like fine. It was like on the lower side of normal. And I did blood work recently completely unrelated to this. And I've been taking Mars Men for,

[Christos]

I don't know, maybe like four or five months.

[Mark Gagnon]

My testosterone went up. Now I don't know if it's from Mars, I'm not going to say it's only them. You know, maybe I've been eating a little cleaner, I've been sleeping better, who knows? But, but my testosterone actually got an increase. I mean, I couldn't believe it. My energy feels steadier throughout the day, my workouts have been better. And going into summer, I'm actually like

[Christos]

leaning out in a way that I feel better about now.

[Mark Gagnon]

Mars Men is a natural supplement.

[Christos]

I don't even have it in the studio because it's at my house. There's no synthetic hormones, no sketchy stimulants,

[Mark Gagnon]

just actual ingredients like Tonga Ali shilajit, zinc boron, and they're designed to actually

[Christos]

support healthy testosterone levels.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now look, you can just go buy

[Christos]

all of these supplements yourself. You can go buy Tonga Lee shilajit,

[Mark Gagnon]

but you gotta make sure they're from the right place.

[Christos]

You gotta make sure they're the right quality.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it can get expensive to actually

[Christos]

like parse it all together.

[Mark Gagnon]

But with Mars Men, it's just all of it in one already done for you. It's made in the USA, it's third party, tested in every batch, and over 91% of users actually report higher energy. Now here's the crazy thing with Mars men. There's a 90 day money back guarantee. 90 days, three months of trying it out and if it's not for you, you get your money back. Zero risk. And for a limited time, the people are listening to this program, you're going to get 50% off for life.

[Christos]

I don't know how often this offer comes around. I don't know why they're doing this.

[Mark Gagnon]

50% off for life. Free shipping and three free gifts@ Mengotomars.com that's Mengotomars.com for 50% off and three free gifts when you check out. It's also available on Amazon. It really worked for me. I like it.

[Christos]

I still take it because, you know, I like natural supplements and it makes me feel good.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now when they ask where you heard

[Christos]

about it, tell them the good people at Camp Gagnon sent you. It really helps the show more than you know. Now let's get back to it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Hey guys, we're gonna take a break

[Christos]

real quick because I gotta tell you something that I'm actually stoked about now.

[Mark Gagnon]

If you know me, you know I

[Christos]

love coffee, I love caffeine. I was also ripping nicotine pouches all the time, like sometimes going through like a pack a day.

[Mark Gagnon]

And honestly I started to notice I was like a little wound up.

[Christos]

Like my heart was racing. I was like kind of on edge, not sleeping right. I was like kind of anxious.

[Mark Gagnon]

And if you're into, into like, you

[Christos]

know, wellness and biohacking like I am,

[Mark Gagnon]

I that's your body trying to tell you something. And that is why I love Ultra pouches. I reached out to them because I love the product. And before you ask, no, these are not a nicotine product. There's zero nicotine, technically no caffeine. What they are is a pouch loaded

[Christos]

with nootropics and adaptogens.

[Mark Gagnon]

Stuff like Alpha GPC for mental sharpness, L theanine for this calm focus and Infinity px, which gives you this clean, smooth energy that doesn't make you feel

[Christos]

like you're going to explode.

[Mark Gagnon]

I still get like the ritual that I love.

[Christos]

Like I just love taking a pouch out and trying it. Watermelon is actually my favorite flavor.

[Mark Gagnon]

But you don't get the anxiety spike

[Christos]

or the withdrawal like you do with nicotine.

[Mark Gagnon]

And my sleep was actually, it's gotten a lot better.

[Christos]

Which, if you know anything about recovery is the most important thing. I mean, these are legit. I keep them on the desk. I actually have one in right now.

[Mark Gagnon]

And if you've been thinking about, you know, maybe using a little bit Less nicotine or you just want like a cleaner energy source than nicotine.

[Christos]

You got to check out Ultra.

[Mark Gagnon]

And you're going to do it@take ultra.com and you're going to use the code camp C A M P for 15% off. That's take ultra.com/camp. And when they ask you about how you heard about us, tell them the

[Christos]

good people at Camp Gagnon sent you.

[Mark Gagnon]

It really helps out the show.

[Christos]

Now let's get back to it. Derek Bentley was hanged on January 28, 1953.

[Mark Gagnon]

He was 19 years old and he

[Christos]

had learning difficulties and he had been

[Mark Gagnon]

involved in a botched burglary with a 16 year old accomplice named Christopher Craig. Now during the arrest, Craig shot and

[Christos]

killed a police officer.

[Mark Gagnon]

Bentley was already in police custody when

[Christos]

the shot was fired, but because Craig was under 18, he, he couldn't be executed.

[Mark Gagnon]

So the full weight of the law fell on Bentley and the case provoked like enormous public outcry. Over 200 members of parliament signed a motion for clemency. They were like, hey, this young kid killed a cop, take put it on him. But like this other kid with learning

[Christos]

disabilities, he was just there, he was already arrested and he didn't have anything to do with murdering this cop. But the motion was denied and Pierre Pont carried out the execution. And once again, Bentley received a posthumous pardon in 1998.

[Mark Gagnon]

So this is the craziest one because Pierpont kind of knew that he was innocent. Like the whole general public knew, like members of Parliament knew, they all knew that this whole thing was a fugazi, that it was actually Craig that did it. Bentley was the one that was completely in it. Like he wasn't completely innocent.

[Christos]

He was involved in a burglary, of course, like know punish him for that.

[Mark Gagnon]

But he didn't kill the cop. And Pierpont knew it and still sized him up through the peephole and said,

[Christos]

I'm working for the government, they want me to kill this guy, I'm going

[Mark Gagnon]

to go do it. They put him on, executed him. And the actual killer, this guy Craig, he lived. But then you have Ruth Ellis. Ellis was a 28 year old nightclub

[Christos]

hostess and she shot her abusive lover outside a pub in London. Ellis never made any attempt to deny what she did or even flee.

[Mark Gagnon]

And at trial when they asked her

[Christos]

like what she intended to, you know, happen when she fired the gun, she said, I intended to kill him.

[Mark Gagnon]

She was convicted and sentenced to death

[Christos]

in under 25 minutes. I mean it's a pretty clear cut case.

[Mark Gagnon]

Ellis became the last woman to be executed in Britain, and she was hanged

[Christos]

by Pierpont on July 13, 1955.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, the Ellis case generated a massive public sympathy, not because anyone doubted her guilt.

[Christos]

Everyone was like, yeah, you probably killed your, you know, boyfriend.

[Mark Gagnon]

But because of the circumstances around domestic

[Christos]

violence and abuse and desperation, it made

[Mark Gagnon]

giving her the death penalty feel, like, disproportionate. You know, by all accounts, it's like,

[Christos]

okay, this woman's, like, being abused by her, you know, by her partner, and there's no recourse for it in the state. Getting a divorce is difficult.

[Mark Gagnon]

And, yeah, she did it, but it's a wrong thing that she did.

[Christos]

But now she's also going to get put to death. Like, she's getting abused, tries to find a way out. It's the wrong way, and now she has to die.

[Mark Gagnon]

Part of you just goes like, ah, all right, that's tough. Like, these three cases, right? You got the Evans case, you got the Bentley case and the Ellis case. They became the pillars of the campaign

[Christos]

to abolish capital punishment in Britain. The wrongful execution of an innocent guy, that's atrocious.

[Mark Gagnon]

The execution of a teenager with learning disabilities for a murder that he didn't commit, that they knew in the moment that he didn't commit, and then the

[Christos]

execution of a battered woman.

[Mark Gagnon]

And together they made this sort of patchwork, abstract argument against the death penalty into something that was very real and

[Christos]

tangible that you could put faces to.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the man who pulled the lever on all of them, who was at the center of the whole thing, was none other than Albert Pierrepont. Now, while all of this was happening,

[Christos]

war crime, executions, controversial hangings, the growing sort of public anxiety around the death

[Mark Gagnon]

penalty, Albert Pierpont was living a truly ordinary life. So from the mid-1940s, he and his

[Christos]

wife Annie ran a pub in the village of Hollinwood, near Oldham in Lancashire.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the pub was called Help the

[Christos]

Poor Struggler, a name that was darkly ironic that it's, like, hard to believe that that was really Help the Poor Struggler.

[Mark Gagnon]

And how are you going to help a poor struggler and give him a drink, you know? But this was a real pub, and most regulars had little idea that, like,

[Christos]

the nice little landlord, the dude behind the taps, you know, was actually the chief executioner of Britain that had killed hundreds of Nazis, a couple innocent people here and there, and a lot of other bad people.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, Pierpont was by all accounts, a pretty social guy.

[Christos]

He sang in the pub, he told

[Mark Gagnon]

jokes, he was in the language of

[Christos]

the time, as people would call it, a good sort.

[Mark Gagnon]

And this double life that he led,

[Christos]

kind of as like a friendly, kind

[Mark Gagnon]

of like pub owner by night to

[Christos]

then waking up that morning and becoming like the most notorious executioner, like the most notorious killer, perhaps the most deaths

[Mark Gagnon]

maybe of anyone in England ever speaks to.

[Christos]

Something genuinely fascinating about Pierrepont's mind is

[Mark Gagnon]

that he was like the textbook case study of compartmentalization. Now, this is a hugely important thing

[Christos]

when looking at, you know, the psychology of serial killers.

[Mark Gagnon]

And it takes a special kind of person to be able to function really

[Christos]

well in society and be very pro social and, you know, hold down a

[Mark Gagnon]

job and then be also able to

[Christos]

simultaneously hide this dark side of themselves.

[Mark Gagnon]

So while Pierpont is technically a serial killer, meaning, you know, he killed a

[Christos]

lot of people in, you know, series,

[Mark Gagnon]

he's not a serial killer in the

[Christos]

way that most people would understand that, right? There are no accounts and no evidence that he ever took pleasure in what he did.

[Mark Gagnon]

It was never hidden.

[Christos]

It was always with the consent of the state.

[Mark Gagnon]

We do know, however, that he approached

[Christos]

each of these executions with a lot of respect and care and dignity.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then he went home, poured some

[Christos]

pints for, you know, his neighbors and his customers.

[Mark Gagnon]

And because of the discretion rule, he never told anyone what he did at the daytime. Like, he completely lived a full on Hannah Montana.

[Christos]

But I'm a serial killer. Life, like killing by day, you know, killing Guinnesses by night.

[Mark Gagnon]

And the question of responsibility still is kind of like up in the air. He didn't elect for those people to die.

[Christos]

He's not the judge or the jury.

[Mark Gagnon]

He simply elected to carry it out, to trust the system, that the system is telling me to do this, so I'm going to do it.

[Christos]

And he trusted that the court was actually going to uphold their standards and that the person that he was killing is dangerous and needs to be removed from society.

[Mark Gagnon]

Does it make him guilty?

[Christos]

Probably not.

[Mark Gagnon]

Does it make me feel weird?

[Christos]

Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then, after years of maintaining this

[Christos]

delicate balance, executioner by day, bartender by

[Mark Gagnon]

night, in 1950, something happened that finally

[Christos]

cracked his shell of professional detachment.

[Mark Gagnon]

He was called into strange ways.

[Christos]

Prison in Manchester, United States, to execute a man named James Corbett.

[Mark Gagnon]

And James Corbett, this is an interesting story because Corbett was a guy that Albert Pierpont knew personally. You see, Corbett was a regular at the pub. Corbett and Albert would put their arms around each other and sing songs together. They were like legit friends. Now, Corbett had a crime.

[Christos]

He had a little bit of secret

[Mark Gagnon]

he banged a pub owner's wife.

[Christos]

Now imagine he'd be like, dude, I would love to kill this guy.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, Corbett strangled his girlfriend in a

[Christos]

jealous rage and had been sentenced to

[Mark Gagnon]

death for murdering his girlfriend. Which you're like, all right again, I'm not a pro death penalty guy, but I can see why they're like, all right, a life for a life, yada yada. Now, Pierrepont is meticulous with his process.

[Christos]

He always peers into the, you know, door to actually see the victim and the holding cell to make sure that there's, you know, proper calculations for the execut.

[Mark Gagnon]

So you can imagine just the blood draining from his face when he looks through the peephole and he sees his friend.

[Christos]

And then the next morning, he enters the cell at 8am like always.

[Mark Gagnon]

And according to Pierpont's memoirs, their eyes met. And in that moment, that wall between

[Christos]

the executioner and the victim completely collapses, Right?

[Mark Gagnon]

Like Pierpont reportedly greeted his friend by

[Christos]

his nickname at the the pub, he

[Mark Gagnon]

looks at him and goes, ah, tish.

[Christos]

To which Corbett responded, tosh, which was Albert's nickname.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that was it.

[Christos]

Then Pierrepont did his job, 12 seconds, went home, killed a man that he knew for years at that point.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, Pierrepont never publicly talked about what

[Christos]

this execution did to him.

[Mark Gagnon]

But in a 1974 memoir, Executioner, Pierpont basically wrote a passage that became one of the most quoted statements in the history of the death penalty debate. And he says this. I've come to the conclusion that executions solve nothing and are only an antiquated relic of a primitive desire for retribution which takes the easy way and hands

[Christos]

the responsibility for retribution to other people.

[Mark Gagnon]

The fruit of my experience has this

[Christos]

bitter aftertaste that I do not now

[Mark Gagnon]

believe that any one of the hundreds of executions I carried out was in any way, has in any way acted as a deterrent against future murder.

[Christos]

Capital punishment, in my view, achieved nothing except revenge.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, this quote has been cited by

[Christos]

abolitionists around the world ever since he wrote it down.

[Mark Gagnon]

But here's where the story gets even more complicated. Because Pierpont's views were never quite as clean as that one single passage. You see, throughout his career, even after retirement, Pierpont consistently emphasized that he was doing his duty. He spoke of the role with pride.

[Christos]

He described execution as, you know, this sacred sort of ritual.

[Mark Gagnon]

Some biographers, including Lenora Klein, had argued that Pierpont's anti deterrent stance was genuine, but very narrow. He believed hanging didn't prevent future murders, but he doesn't necessarily mean that he

[Christos]

believed that the state had no right

[Mark Gagnon]

to carry it out and that there's a difference between, you know, this doesn't

[Christos]

work as a deterrent and that this, you know, should never happen in any circumstance whatsoever.

[Mark Gagnon]

In interviews later in life, Pierpont was kind of cagey around this subject.

[Christos]

He sometimes, you know, defended his work even while still questioning the results.

[Mark Gagnon]

And some scholars actually think that the memoir that he wrote was partly shaped

[Christos]

by the political climate of the time.

[Mark Gagnon]

You see, Britain had already abolished the

[Christos]

death penalty, and an abolitionist framing made

[Mark Gagnon]

him, you know, look a lot better

[Christos]

and was a lot more, you know, a better context for selling a book.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, the truth is probably that Pierpont

[Christos]

held contradictory views the way that a lot of people do when they spent a lifetime within, know, any specific job.

[Mark Gagnon]

And he could believe that the work was sacred and also that it achieved nothing.

[Christos]

He could take a lot of pride

[Mark Gagnon]

in what he did, but then also kind of regret what it was being used for. And it was probably complicated and confusing, right? To be a person responsible for killings for so long and then at the end of it, at the end of all of it, basically wondering, like, am I even doing anything? Am I doing the right thing at all? Holding all these things in tension is extremely difficult. And trying to balance them all is maybe the most human experience ever. You know, like, you can think about anything. Like, okay, I'm. I'm, you know, punishing my kid, but, like, it's the right thing to do, but it's also difficult.

[Christos]

Or like, you know, my.

[Mark Gagnon]

I work at a, you know, massive international corporation that, you know, deforest trees somewhere. But also I like my job and pays well, and I try my best

[Christos]

to help the people around me. And it's like, yeah, both these things are happening.

[Mark Gagnon]

I have an iPhone, and I'm like,

[Christos]

I love my iPhone. I like scrolling on Instagram and looking at tick tocks.

[Mark Gagnon]

But also, like, there's probably a decent amount of exploitation that went into that.

[Christos]

And I kind of hold both of them at the same time, just like, yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

So after, you know, all of this,

[Christos]

you know, after, you know, Pierpont's entire life, right, like, all the hangings, killing

[Mark Gagnon]

really bad people, but also killing innocent people. Albert Pierpont kind of looked back and

[Christos]

basically had to ask, like, was it worth it? Did I do anything?

[Mark Gagnon]

Well, Britain formally abolished the death penalty

[Christos]

for murder in 1965, with the last executions carried out in August of 1964. Which is a little bit funny to be like, the last guy to be

[Mark Gagnon]

hanged and being like, really? I'm not making the cutoff. I'm, I'm dying now because of the election cycle, being the last guy to get hanged.

[Christos]

And like, they're all kind of coming in like, one more time, boys. It'd be a kind, it'd be a funny sketch. Might be worth looking into.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, that was eight years after Pierpont's retirement.

[Christos]

He retires, and then eight years later, you know, the death penalty is basically done.

[Mark Gagnon]

There's no death penalty without Albert Pierpont.

[Christos]

You know what I mean? That'd be like if they dissolve the NBA after MJ retired, you know, be like, hey, how are we gonna go on?

[Guest or Co-host]

It only took 8, 000 executions, but yeah, exactly.

[Christos]

Right?

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, abolition wasn't instant or, you know, completely total.

[Christos]

Capital punishment remained on the books for

[Mark Gagnon]

treason and certain military offenses until 1998.

[Christos]

And it wasn't until 2003 that the United Kingdom ratified what they call Protocol 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which completely abolishes the death penalty in all circumstances with no exceptions.

[Mark Gagnon]

It is funny that the one that

[Christos]

they held on to, they were like,

[Mark Gagnon]

look, if you murder another human being, you can't be murdered. But if you still tell a secret, like, really, if you tell our secrets,

[Christos]

we're gonna kill you.

[Guest or Co-host]

It is considered treason. And treason's worse than murder, is it? Because it could lead to a lot more murders.

[Mark Gagnon]

Look, I'm on the stance of don't kill people, okay? Someone does something horrible, put them in prison. I would rather die than be in

[Christos]

prison for the rest of my life. Hot take.

[Guest or Co-host]

Same.

[Mark Gagnon]

So, like, if you really want to punish someone, like, what are you talking about?

[Christos]

Like, I don't know. Now I'm getting on my high horse. Sorry. I, I, I'm just a guy, you know, we're all trying to figure it out. I'm not, I got a little too fired up there.

[Mark Gagnon]

Now, these cases that Pierpont had been

[Christos]

involved in, right, the Evans case, Bentley Ellis, those, like, significant ones that really created the tapestry for kind of what, you know, pulled back the death penalty

[Mark Gagnon]

in the uk, they, you know, they kind of made the steps possible in a way. Like Albert Pierpont, like, contributed to the abolition of.

[Christos]

He contributed to the abolition of the death penalty in a way, because he was the one that carried out these,

[Mark Gagnon]

like, landmark historical legal cases. Now, the legacy of Albert Pierpont is

[Christos]

still contested now, right? You have anti death penalty death penalty

[Mark Gagnon]

people that cite his memoir as proof that even the executioner himself knows that

[Christos]

the system is messed up.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then you have other people that

[Christos]

point to his lifetime of dutiful service and argue that his late in life

[Mark Gagnon]

doubts were, you know, they, they don't

[Christos]

erase the fact that he carried out his work willingly for decades. You know, like, hey, you killed all these people and now you feel bad about it too late.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then of course you have like

[Christos]

true crime people and historians that are debating like, who.

[Mark Gagnon]

What does he really represent? Is he a necessary function of state violence? Is the, you know, is this like

[Christos]

a conscientious professional that's caught up inside like this flawed system? Was he a sadistic guy that, you know, did all this stuff because he really wanted to kill people?

[Mark Gagnon]

They actually made a movie about him

[Christos]

in 2005 they called Pierre Ponce, and it stars this guy, Timothy Spall.

[Mark Gagnon]

And he proclaimed his story to the world and leaned into the psychological toll of the work.

[Christos]

And, you know, a lot of documentaries and podcasts still kind of like, look at this topic and really try to like, put themselves in the shoes of this guy that had to deal with like so much like pressure and guilt

[Mark Gagnon]

and pride and all sorts of stuff, you know. And what's crazy is that this still goes on to this day.

[Christos]

You know, Britain, you know, stopped the death penalty a long time ago, but

[Mark Gagnon]

United States, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia still kill their citizens to this day. They still carry out these executions. Making his testimony not like a historical

[Christos]

thing, like way back in the day,

[Mark Gagnon]

but it's like a thing that's going on right now.

[Christos]

Now, Albert Pierrepont died on July 10, 1992 at the age of 87 in Merseyside in England.

[Mark Gagnon]

And his death was pretty quiet, natural, unremarkable. The most prolific executioner in modern British

[Christos]

history, living out his final years in this peaceful kind of seaside town. No mask, no trap door.

[Mark Gagnon]

And one thing that I keep on thinking about is like, how much you,

[Christos]

you know, thought about his death, like his, like the people that he was executing, like their death and how deliberate he was and how he tried to show them mercy.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that was kind of his attempt

[Christos]

at his own death.

[Mark Gagnon]

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is an abridged history of the life of the

[Christos]

most notorious and final executioner of England, Albert Pierpont. I mean, a very strange story, like,

[Mark Gagnon]

truly a difficult one to wrap your

[Christos]

head around where you're like, like, I guess someone's got to do it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like someone in America is doing this right now, right? Like they're doing a lethal injection on people. It's A little different.

[Guest or Co-host]

Lethal injection versus hanging.

[Mark Gagnon]

Sure it's different, but like someone's still

[Christos]

gotta like do it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Multiple people gotta do it.

[Christos]

They gotta like walk them into the

[Mark Gagnon]

thing, put them into the chair. I don't really know how it all works, but like it's a thing that we do. That's pretty crazy. Now again, I understand both sides.

[Christos]

I'm not here to like dissuade people, but I just, personally I wouldn't want to be the guy doing it. And it's just crazy to think there's a guy out there right now that does do it.

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't know. It's interesting because Pierpont did have like

[Christos]

some general idea of what the crime was. Like when he would talk to the prison officials, like he would size them up, he saw like what their name was, height, weight, and then he saw the crime.

[Mark Gagnon]

And then if it was a big

[Christos]

publicized case, like obviously like, you know, Nazi trials, like he would know what happened.

[Mark Gagnon]

But still he kind of treated everyone the exact same.

[Christos]

Come in, do my job, walk out, go to my pub. Like pretty crazy. I don't know, there's. There's an element of it that's like

[Mark Gagnon]

so morbid and like dark.

[Christos]

But also like if something terrible happened to someone in my family, you know what I mean? Like, and they were gonna get executed, I'd be like, I wonder how my tune would change. But I don't know, there's just a part of me that's like, I just,

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't know if the state should

[Christos]

have a monopoly on violence, you know,

[Mark Gagnon]

like, you can't kill people, but we can kill people.

[Christos]

It's like, I don't want to live. I don't, I don't like that. This feels weird to me.

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't know. This. It's a wild life though. Like this guy lived a full on

[Christos]

life being an executioner and just kind of died like this quiet death. And he, I, I bet you I,

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't know, the guilt would eat

[Christos]

me alive knowing that I like this guy. Specifically, like the, what is it, the Bentley case? Like that's the, the kid that had nothing to do with it and he knows that he's innocent.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like the one case of the guy that he was accused and convicted of

[Christos]

murdering his kid, and then we find out that maybe it was probably the neighbor that did it, yada yada.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like at least in the moment, you're like, I did what I had to do. I did what the court told me

[Christos]

it was the right thing. And then I moved on fine.

[Mark Gagnon]

Being like, I know this kid's innocent.

[Christos]

I saw the news reports. I saw the protesters.

[Mark Gagnon]

He wasn't there when it happened.

[Christos]

But the state wants revenge and the courts and the cops wanna get back for a guy that took one of their own. So we're gonna kill his friend.

[Mark Gagnon]

It just feels like gang.

[Christos]

Like, it's crazy.

[Guest or Co-host]

Like, but again, it was from above. It was nothing you could do about it. What's it gonna say? I'm not gonna kill him. They'll get someone else.

[Mark Gagnon]

Yeah, sure. But at the very least, you protect

[Christos]

your own conscience and, like, you protect your own moral code. You're like, like, objecting and just being like, yeah, I'm not down with this one. I'm sorry. I'm not gonna do it. You can find someone else to do it. I'm sure there's a bunch of other people. You can fire me forever. I'm not doing it.

[Guest or Co-host]

One thing we kind of glossed over the James Corbett, his buddy that he had to execute. Do you remember the nicknames Tish and Tosh? Isn't that crazy? That sounds like a sick op.

[Christos]

Tish and Tosh.

[Guest or Co-host]

Tish and Tosh.

[Christos]

Two buddies at the bar singing old sea shanties. Yeah. So you go off and strangle it.

[Mark Gagnon]

Part of me is also like, that's almost easier. I'd rather kill an innocent man than, no, no. I'd rather kill my friend that's a

[Christos]

criminal than kill an innocent man that I don't know. Yeah.

[Mark Gagnon]

Like, there's part of me that's like, yeah, dude, you're my buddy.

[Christos]

But also, you did something atrocious. You strangled your wife. You can't kill your wife. That's crazy. And again, I'm not big on the

[Mark Gagnon]

death penalty, but if you got to

[Christos]

do one, I'm like, that one.

[Mark Gagnon]

I'm fine with killing an innocent dude. I don't know.

[Christos]

Come on. And he's looking at you like, I can't believe this is it. I cannot believe this is how I go out. Just wrong place, wrong time, dealing with the death of my child, and now I'm getting killed.

[Mark Gagnon]

I don't know. Kind of morbid. What do you guys think?

[Christos]

Like, what's your. What's your take, dude, you. Let's listening back at home, working right now on the job, probably driving UPS or something. Maybe working in a warehouse.

[Guest or Co-host]

Amazon delivery driver shout out to you

[Christos]

Yep, Amazon and the Amazon boys shout out to y' all I saw an

[Mark Gagnon]

Amazon guy get into a fight outside

[Christos]

of the apartment recently. A Guy, like, backed into his truck and tried to flee. And the Amazon guy was like, yo,

[Mark Gagnon]

what are you doing?

[Christos]

And they had a whole thing while I was eating dinner. I just watched it. The guy eventually got out of his car and it was the whole thing. But I feel bad for the Amazon guys.

[Mark Gagnon]

They got to deal with all this

[Christos]

BS all the time.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I appreciate you guys always getting

[Christos]

my packages on time and just generally being pretty cool when I see you in the neighborhood.

[Mark Gagnon]

But anyway, that's beside the point. What do you think about Al Repont?

[Christos]

Would you. Could you be an executioner?

[Mark Gagnon]

Could you deal with that? Like, I guess there's the flip side,

[Christos]

which is like, yeah, I get to

[Mark Gagnon]

give all these families peace and, like,

[Christos]

take out these bad people from society that could potentially go and offend again. You know, it's like, who's to say they're not going to, like, hurt people in prison? And, you know, say what you will about prisoners, like, I think they should also be treated with respect and they shouldn't get hurt by some crazy maniac.

[Mark Gagnon]

So I don't know. I think it's complicated.

[Christos]

I see both sides, but the fact that this guy, Albert Pierpont, actually had to live it. I would love to know your thoughts. Please drop a comment. YouTube, Spotify, read all of them.

[Mark Gagnon]

Furthermore, if you want to see me

[Christos]

on the road, Mark Agnon Live, if you want to hang in the, you

[Mark Gagnon]

know, inner sanctum with the boys and

[Christos]

actually post up with the squad, great news. We have the Patreon. That is the campfire. That's where we all gather. You know, we do episodes every single

[Mark Gagnon]

month that are exclusively on Patreon.

[Christos]

We do zooms that are live with the whole squad, and we put out episodes that are ad free. If you're one of those people that's like, hey, I hate the ads. Great news. For the price of a cup of coffee, you're going to get, what is it, 16 episodes a month, completely ad free. I mean, not a bad deal.

[Guest or Co-host]

Plus the bonuses.

[Christos]

Plus the bonuses. I mean, it's like an insane value. We should probably bump that up. No, I mean, I'm saying it.

[Mark Gagnon]

No, but seriously, jump in while you can. And yeah, I appreciate you guys dearly.

[Christos]

If you like history stuff, great news.

[Mark Gagnon]

We're doing history camp all the time.

[Christos]

That's what, that's what we do here. If you like religion content, we have religion camp. You can check that out.

[Mark Gagnon]

And of course, if you like conspiracy

[Christos]

rabbit holes and deep dives and all things going on right now, well, that is where we have Camp Gagnon, where I sit down with actual experts way smarter than me.

[Mark Gagnon]

But if you just like to rock

[Christos]

with history vibe, we're here.

[Mark Gagnon]

Thank you so much for tuning in. I appreciate you all dearly. God bless. And I will see you in the

[Christos]

future to talk about the past.