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This length of sturdy rope was used in 1921 for the last execution in Montgomery County (all subsequent Maryland executions were held at the state penitentiary beginning in 1922). Someone tied this noose with an incorrect knot; it is not the noose used to execute Guy Vernon Thompson in the courtyard of the county jail in Rockville on April 25, 1921. Thompson was tried by a three-judge panel which convicted him of a triple homicide near Germantown, where he dynamited the miller’s house of the Waters Mill, killing not only his intended victim John Bolton, but also the housekeeper’s two children.
Although the donor of this hangman’s rope was a retired deputy sheriff, his wife was the daughter of George R. Nicholson, the sheriff in 1921, which presumably solidifies its provenance.
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