Photo: Louis Kenneth Neu
by Hank Nuwer
One casualty of shrinking newspapers is the disappearance of wonderfully weird stories that once filled their pages.
When a murderer named Louis Kenneth Neu went to the gallows in Louisiana in 1935, the Indianapolis Star reported his last moments.
He performed a tap dance on the steel trap door and sang a song he’d written: “I’m fit as a fiddle and ready to hang.”
Neu then said his goodbyes to hangman Henry Meyer, comparing himself to a parachute jumper: “It is not the falling, one fears–It is the sudden stop.”
Author Kurt Vonnegut had a favorite joke about the gallows. A condemned man was asked if he had any last words. “Not at this time,” he said.
By the way, the hangman Henry Meyer was sure he was dying later that same year and called an undertaker to come get his corpse. In his career, he hung one woman and 38 men*, Neu included. All told, he earned $2,825 for yanking open the steel traps.
“I’d hang my own brother if I had one, and he committed a crime,” he once famously said.
Nonetheless, for years he tried to keep his name out of the papers. He created an alias, “Hangman Duffy.” His wife Julia died many years before he did, and he never shared his occupation with her.
A reporter, after Julia’s death, did a story on him, and Henry’s privacy was no more. Henry said he always tried his best to have his victims die with as little struggle and pain as possible.
Sure enough, Meyer died later that day at Charity Hospital. Before calling the undertaker, he had shaved, dressed in a clean suit, and made one final request.
“I want to be laid out proper.”
*Another put the number at 40.