About
There is no headstone bearing the name John McCaffary in Green Ridge Cemetery. Just a quiet stretch of ground marked only by a nearby historical plaque memorializing one of the most consequential graves in Wisconsin history. Beneath it lies the man whose death would end capital punishment in the state. On August 21, 1851, McCaffary became the first and last person legally executed under Wisconsin state law after being convicted of drowning his wife Bridgett in a backyard cistern at their home.
The execution itself was not swift. It was a spectacle. Thousands gathered in Kenosha to watch McCaffary hang, expecting a quick drop and a clean death.
Instead, the hanging went wrong. The rope failed to break his neck, and McCaffary was left suspended, struggling and suffocating for 20 minutes. Witnesses watched horrified as his body writhed, his death drawn out in full view of the crowd. What was meant to deliver justice instead hardened into something else entirely: a public reckoning. The brutality of that moment ignited outrage, fueling a movement led by figures like Christopher Latham Sholes that would push Wisconsin to abolish the death penalty just two years later on July 12, 1853.
While no one has been legally executed in Wisconsin since McCaffery, the lingering spirit of William Caffee at the Walker House is a reminder that just a few years earlier, the Wisconsin Territory still lived by frontier law.
Photos
John McCaffary Burial Site
