End of the Rope

After the House of Commons voted to outlaw the death penalty, Britain's Chief Hangman Albert Pierrepoint, 45, quit the job that has been in his family for 85 years and turned his strong, steady hand to his memoirs. Fleet Street, which has spiced many a grey Sunday with the death-cell memoirs of murder ers, bid eagerly for the chance to take their readers right into the execution chamber. The winner: Lord Kemsley's Sunday Empire News (circ. 1,961,230), which paid a reported -L-40,000 ($112,000) for Pierrepoint's own story of how, in 26 years, he took 433 men and 17 women to the gallows.

The hangman's memoirs brightened the Sabbath with intimate glimpses of the killers about to die ("He blinked bewilderedly, screwing up his eyes") and craftsmanlike pride in his humane efficiency ("I hanged John Reginald Christie, the Monster of Rillington Place, in less time than it took the ash to fall off a cigar I had left half-smoked in my room at Pentonville"). After an execution (fee: $42), Pierrepoint would go back to his cigar and his regular job (pubkeeper).

The Empire News series was such a coup in sensation-hungry Fleet Street that the Sunday Dispatch tried to run neck and neck by publishing installments from the diary of a second-string hangman named William Willis. But Pierrepoint was so far out ahead that the Dispatch had to fall back on a new serial called "Liana--the Blonde from the Jungle."

Then the shadow of the Home Office fell between Pierrepoint and his readers. The government, which still supports the death penalty, felt that the memoirs made grisly grist for foes of capital punishment, who are now pushing their bill in the House of Lords. Under the Official Secrets Act, the Home Office demanded the right to censor the stories. When the paper defied the censorship in one installment, the government threatened to prosecute at the next violation.

The Empire News waved the banner of "freedom of the press," and the World's Press News asked pointedly why the Official Secrets Act, if used against Pierrepoint, should not be applied to Sir Winston Churchill for publishing some of the "closest secrets of the war." Gamely, the Empire News carried on with the series, though "deleting . . . those passages which seem to arise from knowledge gained by Mr. Pierrepoint in the course of his official duties." That left Pierrepoint little of the noose fit to print. This week Pierrepoint reached the end of his rope. Announced the Empire News: "In view of the difficulties ... it has been decided to cancel the series."

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