If Raphael Capone and Carmine Santore had shot and bludgeoned Paschual Coscia to dying in a patch of Brewer woods simply six months earlier, they’d by no means have been hanged for the crime.

However their timing was off.

As an alternative of life sentences, the 2 Italian immigrant railroad staff met their destiny atop a scaffold on the Maine State Jail for the bloody September 1883 homicide and theft.

Capone and Santore had been the primary two males hanged beneath Maine’s restored dying penalty, signed into legislation in March that very same 12 months. After a seven-year hiatus, the state was again within the execution enterprise.

The brand new capital punishment legislation stayed on the books for simply 4 years, however that was loads of time for Maine to hold Capone and Santore, then present their our bodies to the Bowdoin School medical faculty for dissection.

“A foul homicide,” blared a Monday morning Kennebec Journal newspaper headline on Sept. 10, 1883. “The sufferer an Italian workman — 3 times shot and the top crushed to a jelly.”

Coscia’s physique had been discovered two days earlier, on Saturday, in an space referred to as Burr Woods in Brewer. It was not removed from an encampment of railroad laborers, a lot of whom, just like the deceased, had been migrant staff from Italy.

In line with varied newspaper accounts, in a single day railroad staff distributing ties alongside the brand new prepare route on Friday night time heard gunshots, shouting, screams and a scuffle coming from the woods. However, being scared, they didn’t examine till the morning.

That’s after they discovered Coscia, shot twice, his face pummeled with a blood-stained fencepost.

“The assassin or murderers appeared to have been decided to verify their sufferer was lifeless,” the KJ wrote. “The lifeless man’s brains laid by his aspect.”

By the point the story ran, it was entrance web page information everywhere in the state and the Bangor police already had three Italian laborers in custody.

Of the trio of detained males, the Portland Each day Press named Capone and Santore the 2 probably suspects, already referring to them as “the murderers.”

It was believed, the Portland Press wrote, that Coscia had been killed for his cash, about $60 or $75 in all. A lot of the Italian railroad males in Maine on the time had been solely momentary staff who supposed to return residence with their wages and begin new lives.

“Looking out by the histories of varied Maine railroads and thru outdated newspapers confirms the presence of hundreds of Italians in Maine, and their disappearance after development accomplished verifies that these had been sojourners,” wrote Alfred T. Banfield in a 1992 article in Maine Historical past.

Newspapers speculated Coscia’s cash represented a number of months’ financial savings.

The Portland paper mentioned Capone and Santore had confessed to committing the crime whereas in police custody.

“One shot entered the again, simply to the left of the backbone, and the second entered the brains, simply in again of the ear,” the paper mentioned.

Coscia managed to run 90 ft after getting shot earlier than falling down. His killers then flipped him over, tore open his coat and shirt searching for his pockets and beat his head to a pulp with the publish.

Capone and Santore had been arrested on Saturday. They’d been seen close to the woods on Friday night time and police mentioned they discovered bloody garments on the Brewer shanty they shared. Authorities additionally discovered among the cash on Capone and Santore and the remainder hidden in a close-by culvert.

Police had been satisfied they’d the proper males and Maine’s newspapers agreed.

The Lewiston Night journal declared the case, “Solely solved.”

Likewise, the Portland’s Each day Press wrote the police had succeeded in, “Ferreting out all the small print.”

The Kennebec Journal mentioned, “Capone and Santore show to be the responsible ones.”

From then on — simply two days after the crime — the pair had been habitually known as the “Italian Murderers,” by the state’s main journalists, regardless that neither had gone to trial.

Maine’s xenophobic native newspaper protection was indicative of a bigger motion in the USA, as immigration from Europe and Asia reached its peak within the late-Nineteenth century.

“Immigrants had been blamed for taking American jobs,” reads a Library of Congress presentation on the topic. “On the similar time, racialist theories circulated within the press, advancing pseudo scientific theories that alleged that ‘Mediterranean’ varieties had been inherently inferior to folks of northern European heritage. Drawings and songs caricaturing the brand new immigrants as childlike, prison, or subhuman grew to become sadly commonplace.”

“Hemp for 2,” learn a jaunty headline within the Kennebec Journal when Capone and Santore had been discovered responsible after a two-day trial in February 1884. The jury deliberated for simply 75 minutes, and the decide sentenced them to dying on the spot.

Neither Capone nor Santore may converse or perceive English, and your entire trial needed to be interpreted for them on the fly.

Maine had outlawed the dying penalty in 1876 after a string of ugly hangings, however a restoration invoice had began making its means by the Legislature in early 1883.

Some politicians argued there had been no enhance in crime for the reason that dying penalty had been taken off the desk. However the state jail warden mentioned, with no worse punishment to concern than a life time period in his slammer, many prisoners had been then wholly occupying their time with planning for escape.

The talk raged in committees and on the pages of Maine’s newspapers for months. However, with the legislative session winding down in March 1883, lawmakers voted to reinstate the dying penalty. Gov. Frederick Robie signed it into legislation.

Six months later, Coscia was lifeless, and Capone and Santore had been doomed.

The responsible males met their destiny behind the jail partitions in Thomaston on April 17, 1885. As regular, Maine’s newspapermen had been there to cowl the nonpublic occasion.

“A vivid solar shone upon the scene, the inexperienced grass was displaying itself, the birds exterior the jail partitions had been chirping and every part spoke of life,” wrote the weekly Republican Journal. “These two males amidst the wonder stood upon the gallows within the full bloom of well being and life.”

The Kennebec Journal reported that, whereas the lads didn’t wrestle, their our bodies spun on the price of at the least sixty revolutions a minute after dropping by the spring-activated lure door.

“At 5 minutes previous twelve, they had been bloated, black ghastly corpses dangling on these swirling ropes,” the KJ mentioned.

Capone and Santore had been then lowered into coffins and despatched to Maine’s solely medical faculty for use as cadavers.

The state would execute another man, additionally a foreigner, that 12 months earlier than removing the dying penalty for good a number of years later.

The Republican Journal washed the state’s collective palms after its last double hanging. The paper assured Maine’s largely white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant inhabitants that they had been to not blame — the outsiders had introduced their destiny upon themselves.

“The crime of those Italians under no circumstances displays upon the morals of the folks of Maine,” the Journal wrote. “They’d been on this nation however a number of years, couldn’t converse our language, even, and no matter cussedness they’d, they introduced it with them from their very own nation.”

This story is a part of an ongoing sequence analyzing Maine’s historic use of the dying penalty.

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