Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 March 1896 — His Own Executioner. [ARTICLE]

His Own Executioner.

At St. Pierre-le-Palud, in the Canton of Abresle, near Lyons, lived, says a Paris correspondent, a handy man, halt carpenter, half mason, and 42 years old. His wife died seven years ago, and he had lived alone ever since. Some time ago he said an idea he was going to work out would astonish the whole country. His idea, it now appears, was to construct unaided a guillotine and to be his own executioner. He had got two vertical beams nine feet high. The knife was a hatchet carefully sharpened, and a mason’s sledge-hammer, weighing a stone, was adapted to it. Nothing could be neater than the grooves, pulleys and adjust : ments. A semi-circular groove was arranged to keep the head well under the hatchet. Deparcieux lay on his back with his neck in the semi-circular cutting in a cross plank. He set a heap of straw on the place where he calculated the small of his back would be and placed his feet against a wall. This done, he let go the knife by means of a cord that he held. In the fall it severed his head clean from his body. The strange suicide was not discovered for some days after it was committed. Neighbors began to wonder what had happened to Deparcieux. As his dog howled fearfully, they determined to enter the house. Going from one room to another they discovered nothing unusual, but when the dog was liberated from the kitchen it rushed down to the cellar and again began to howl. The neighbors following, found there the guillotine and the guillotined.