He Cheated the Hangman…Four Times (1907)

Christ died on a Friday, and for years, convicted felons expiated their “sins” on “Hangman’s Friday.” For John E. Schuyler, however, Friday would prove to be his lucky day. On occasion in the history of capital punishment, some condemned men managed to cheat the hangman, although their respite was temporary and ultimately unsuccessful. Some managed to eke out a few more hours or even days when they received an eleventh hour reprieve, only to have their appeal denied. Others managed to obtain mere minutes when, upon the dreaded drop, the hemp rope snapped, only to sweat out a few additional, agonizing breaths while the executioner scrambled to tie a new noose. Schuyler is somewhat unique in that he successfully cheated the hangman not once, not twice, but four times…

Schuyler’s alleged crime was the murder of a farmer named Manning Riley, found beaten to a pulp in a patch of crimson-stained snow. The murder weapon, a fence board, was lying next to Riley’s body, and was fractured from the ferocity of the attack.

Suspicion immediately fell on Schuyler, who had a well-known grudge against Manning Riley that dated back a dozen years that had, in the past few years, escalated into fist fights.

A stonemason with a chiseled jaw and a barrel chest, Schuyler stood half a head taller than Riley, but each time the two traded blows, David bested Goliath. Miffed, Schuyler planned to bushwhack Riley in a barn, but the wily Riley sniffed out the plan and brought a friend. Once again, Schuyler left with all of the bruises.

Then, on the evening of January 19, 1907, the stonemason apparently evened the score when he waylaid Riley in Califon and bludgeoned him to death with a fence picket.

The long arm of the law nabbed Schuyler the day after the murder. The shirt he wore the night of the murder was mottled with spots of blood. Despite the bloody shirt, the prosecuting attorney offered to accept a plea deal: he would drop the first-degree murder charge if Schuyler confessed to manslaughter. Schuyler opted to take his chances in court despite the possibility of facing a premeditated murder rap and a possible death sentence.

Schuyler’s trial took place in Hunterdon County, where a horde of curious onlookers packed into the old courthouse. Schuyler’s lady friend, Minnie Sutton, tried to shield him when she testified that he suffered from a nosebleed that evening, but the jury didn’t buy the lame excuse, choosing instead to believe that the dots of blood on his shirt emanated from the savage beating.

Nor did jurors abide by Justice Reed’s suggestion that the evidence was purely circumstantial. They were particularly swayed by evidence that on the afternoon of the murder, Schuyler liquidated his bank account in an apparent overture to fleeing the jurisdiction. In a matter of minutes (a record in New Jersey at the time), the jurors unanimously voted to find the defendant guilty of premeditated murder. Their verdict subsequently triggered the state’s death penalty statute.

Despite his personal reservations, Justice Reed followed the law and sentenced Schuyler to death.

Since New Jersey’s legislature had recently passed a law replacing the gallows with the hot seat, reporters delighted in the morbid tidbit of trivia that Schuyler would have the dubious distinction of being the first convicted murderer to be electrocuted in New Jersey. The law, passed on March 1, 1907, contained a provision that anyone convicted of a crime committed prior to this date would still go to the gallows. Rather than being the first to go the chair, ironically, Schuyler would be the last in New Jersey to swing for his crimes. His execution was scheduled for Friday, June 28, 1907.

Hunterdon County Sheriff E.W. Opdyke and his Deputy Jacob Dilts now faced a dilemma: the county didn’t have a gallows. Since there was little point in constructing a now-outdated device, they decided to borrow one from the neighboring community of Mercer. The gallows—a simple construction with twelve steps on the stairway to Heaven, had a distinguished history in both Mercer and Sussex Counties. Board by board, the structure was dissembled and reassembled in the courtyard of the Flemington Jail.

Under the watchful eye of a carpenter, a crew rebuilt the structure while Schuyler sweated out the days under round-the-clock suicide watch. From his cell, he could hear the clinking of their hammers.

Community members, particularly members of the Fox Hill Presbyterian Church under the leadership of Reverend Baer Smith, eagerly awaited the date when justice would be served. But they would have a little longer to wait.

Friday, June 28, 1907, came and went as the Court of Errors and Appeals reviewed Schuyler’s case. They concurred with the verdict, and Justice Reed set the new execution date for Friday, August 30.

This second Friday also passed by without a hanging. Schuyler’s lawyers finagled a stay of execution as they took the case to the Court of Pardons. It was once again a futile effort. The court refused to stop the execution. While Schuyler’s lawyers argued his case, Governor Edward C. Stokes issued a reprieve with a terminus of Friday, October 4, which became Schuyler’s third scheduled date with the hangman.

By this point, the Reverend Smith became impatient. He led a flock of followers to Trenton, where they demanded that the Governor stop interfering with justice. They wanted an “eye for an eye” (the theme of one of Smith’s sermons). Their shouts fell on deaf ears.

For a third time, Schuyler would break the date. Based on the argument that they had discovered new evidence in the case, Schuyler’s lawyers managed to convince Stokes to issue a second reprieve, which postponed the hanging until Friday, November 1. Meanwhile, the Board of Pardons decided to stop the madness. They commuted Schuyler’s sentence to life in prison. He began his sentence at Trenton State Prison, but it would not be a lengthy stay.

In 1914, a fellow con named Frank Wharton Burd confessed to the murder of Manning Riley. Burd was a twenty-three-year-old tough who had spent his formative years in and out of juvenile detention facilities. He was discharged from the New Jersey State Home for Boys on January 7, 1907, and according to his confession, he murdered Manning Riley just under two weeks later. He was sixteen-years-old at the time of the crime. He chuckled at the news of Schuyler’s arrest and trial, snickering at the thought of his freedom while the gallows were erected. His freedom turned out to be more like a furlough. Found guilty of burglary, he began the first in what turned out to be a string of prison sentences. At some point, he was transferred to Trenton, where he rubbed elbows with fellow prisoner John Schuyler. Troubled by a heavy heart, he decided to set the record straight.

Illiterate, Burd dictated his confession to a scribe. “As long as they all want to put me away so badly I will confess to one of my wrongdoings which will put me away, which is a murder committed seven years [ago].You got another man for life for killing Manning Riley. He is innocent. I done it. I want to confess.”

Like Schuyler, Burd had a grudge against Manning Riley because, like Schuyler, Riley bested him in a fistfight and he swore to get even. He spied Riley that night and followed him, intending to bash him in the head with a rock. When he couldn’t find a rock in the snow-covered road, he pulled a plank off of a fence.

“I did not mean to kill him,” Burd explained, “but I just wanted to beat him up, and I did not know that I had croaked him.”

Upon hearing about Burd’s confession, Schuyler said, “I knew that some day the truth would come out and that would be vindicated.”

For a second time, Schuyler’s case became headline news as indignant reporters screamed about an innocent man incarcerated and nearly executed.

After serving seven years behind bars for a crime he apparently didn’t commit, John Edward Schuyler walked out of Trenton Prison a free man in January 1915. Minister Baer Smith, who so desperately wanted “Jersey Justice” to be done on the Mercer gallows and went so far as to petition the governor, had egg on his face.

Following his release, Schuyler became a country club caretaker. He retired from that job to live the rest of his golden years in peace, but his respite would be interrupted when his name re-emerged on newspaper front pages.

The Schuyler case became big news for a third time in 1937 in the aftermath of the Hauptmann trial. In one of the more celebrated cases in US history, Bruno Hauptmann faced a jury for the murder of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The trial—a media sensation—took place in the same century-old courthouse where Schuyler faced the music three decades earlier. The outcome was the same. Hauptmann was sentenced to die in New Jersey’s “Old Sparky.”

Schuyler, now nearing seventy, must have experienced an unsettling sense of deja vu. Like in the Schuyler case, Hauptmann missed his original date of execution due to legal wrangling by his defense team. Unlike Schuyler, though, the infamous slayer eventually took the long walk to the electric chair on April 3, 1937.

John E. Schuyler died on April 6, 1940, age the age of seventy.

The saga of John E. Schuyler is preserved in time in the most unlikely of places: on a rare real photo postcard containing a picture of the empty gallows standing in the courtyard of the Flemington Jail. The structure is remarkable in its simplicity: twelve stairs lead to a simple crossbar suspended over the drop. The AZO stamp box on the card’s reverse (four triangles facing up) indicates the card stock was manufactured sometime between 1904-1918, and a handwritten notation on the reverse bears the date May 1, 1908—six months after Schuyler cheated the hangman for a fourth and final time. As an innocent man, if Schuyler hadn’t cheated the hangman, the hangman would have cheated him!