It was Dec. 7, 1869, at 2 p.m. with snow flurries beginning to fall on the 100 or so morbid spectators waiting outside the Butler County jail hoping to get a glimpse through the prison windows of the execution about to take place.

The handsome, 21-year-old Zachary Taylor Hockenberry was beginning to take slow, tentative steps up the stairs of the wooden scaffold to meet his executioner inside the building. He was neatly dressed in a black broadcloth suit and sharing his neck with a hangman’s noose was a matching black silk tie.

The condemned man’s blue eyes stared toward heaven one final time while Butler County Sheriff Thompson adjusted the hangman’s noose tight around his neck. A black hood was placed over the sandy-haired condemned prisoner’s face.

Hockenberry, in just minutes, would become the first white man and the last person to be executed by Butler County in its history.

Life had not always been kind to the young farm boy from Franklin Township. Taylor, as he was called, was only 7 years old when his mother, Matilda McCandless Hockenberry, died in Center Township during the birth of her fourth child in 1855.

Taylor’s father, John Hockenberry, after returning from the gold fields of California to care for his four motherless children, died from injuries following a horse-riding accident in 1861.

The orphaned and oldest Hockenberry child was sent to live with his mother’s half-sister and her family. George and Hannah McCandless lived on a farm in Franklin Township on modern day Isle Road with three daughters, but no sons. The family welcomed their orphaned nephew into their red brick farmhouse just as the Civil War's first shots were fired at Fort Sumter.

Young Hockenberry had been treated as a member of the McCandless family when he left home in 1865 to try for riches in the Pennsylvania oil fields. The parting, according to his Uncle George, had been cordial. After an unsuccessful attempt to find black gold, the young prospector returned to Franklin Township on April 9, 1866.

The now 18-year-old took a job working on the nearby farm of Daniel Graham about 1½ miles away from his aunt and uncle. He continued a close relationship with the family by attending church with them on Sunday and eating dinner in the McCandless home following the religious service. But strange events began to occur.

One night in the spring of 1866, George McCandless was awakened by the sound of an intruder. He heard a voice ([Hockenberry) saying “boo woo woo” and in a blink of an eye saw the flash of two pistol shots outside the bedroom of his daughters, Mary and Nancy Ann.

The sisters had been sitting up talking, but after hearing the hiss of the first shot whiz by they immediately fell back upon their pillows, certain had they not reacted so quickly at least one of them would have been killed by the second bullet.

In July 1866, the McCandless barn was set on fire, and the next year Nancy Ann began receiving love letters from her cousin, Taylor, composed with an ominous tone. After reading these confessions of love, Nancy Ann burned all but two. Nancy Ann never replied to any of the disturbing letters, and it appears she never told her parents of their frightening content. Excerpts from the two surviving letters were read by Nancy Ann’s sister Mary at the murder trial:

“love thee or I will end thy life, and then myself with my own hand. Excuse me for the truth, had better be known before too late.” and “If you love me as I love you, I would be happy Ann, if not thy fate lies in the hands of the one who loves thee best … I love you mad”

Sometime in late February 1868, Hannah McCandless’ aunt, Eleanor Graham, came to visit.

According to her testimony during Hockenberry’s murder trial, she was sitting in the kitchen when “someone come in the back room (of the house) in their stocking with a black shawl over their head and fastened under his chin and hatchet in hand … he wore a black face and hands and wore blue stockings. Ann opened the hall door and then shut it. He pried open the door.”

What took place that day during this strange encounter between Hockenberry and Nancy Ann that day is unknown, but the intruder left, at least that day, without harming her.

According to his testimony and confession, Hockenberry’s plan had never been to kill Nancy Ann. He wanted to disfigure her by “shooting off the end of her nose so that no man would want her!”

On the last day of Nancy Ann’s life — April 7, 1868 — the family was late hauling a wagonload of apples back home. According to her family’s trial testimony the 22-year-old Nancy Ann said, “we better take them in (to the barn) before supper.” As they were carrying the last bags, the moon was up over the treetops.

It was between 7:30 and 8 p.m. and the family had sat down at the dining room table for their evening meal. On one side sat George McCandless and Nancy Ann and seated opposite them were Hannah, youngest daughter Mary and Aunt Eleanor Graham. The hungry family was unaware that lurking outside the window hidden by a 5-foot-tall group of bushes was their nephew and cousin Zachary Taylor Hockenberry holding a loaded rifle and taking aim through a pane of leaded glass.

Hockenberry dropped to one knee, gripped his shotgun, placed his finger on the trigger, sighted his cousin’s nose and fired. The bullet shattered the dining room’s glass windowpane and spun toward its intended target. The wavy glass shattered; George McCandless felt blood (Nancy Ann’s) on his forehead saying he “thought a shot had struck him on the top of his head.”

Mary yelled out “Ann has been shot!” Nancy Ann had fallen motionless onto the floor. George felt his wounded daughter’s head and determined that her “skull had been broke” then “seen the wound on the side of her head.”

Taylor’s aim had missed its mark. Instead of shooting off her nose, the assassin’s bullet struck her in the upper-left temple shattering her skull into pieces. She was not breathing by the time her mother pleaded with Mary to “get some water.” Hannah McCandless propped up her daughter in her arms and began to wipe the blood from Nancy Ann’s face with a wet cloth. Gripped by sheer terror, she screamed “Oh God, they have murdered my child!

That same night, an inquest was held by the justice of the peace with Nancy Ann’s body still lying dead on the floor. Most likely based on the statement. “if he did not get Nancy Ann no one would” made three weeks before to his employer Dan Graham, Hockenberry was brought to the murder site for questioning by the authorities the next morning.

They were eating breakfast in the dining room with the corpse when the suspect arrived. Hockenberry was asked of his whereabouts the night before. Unable to account for his activities at the time of the shooting and finding a carpet sack belonging to him containing the shotgun, lead, two pistols and some caps and cartridges, Hockenberry was taken to Butler and placed behind bars for the next year until his trial began.

The trial began on April 19, 1869, in the Butler County Courthouse with the prosecution team of former District Attorney William Henry Harrison Riddle, present District Attorney John Greer and attorney Ebenezer McJunkin seeking a first-degree murder conviction. Hockenberry was represented by attorneys John M. Thompson and Charles McCandless who entered their client’s plea of “not guilty.”

The courtroom was filled during the 10-day trial with curious spectators made up mainly of women. Many witnesses were called to testify, including the McCandless family, neighbors, friends, and the minister of the Baptist church.

On the 10th day at 11:40 a.m., the jury was sent to deliberate the fair-haired defendant’s fate. It did not take long for the jury to return a verdict. Hockenberry sat calmly as the verdict of “guilty of 1st degree murder” was read.

After denying a motion for a new trial on Sept. 10, 1869, Judge Lawrence McGuffin proclaimed the sentence to an emotionless Hockenberry that “you will hang by the neck until dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

During his imprisonment and especially after his sentence, several clergy members from Butler visited him, prayed with him and instructed him in the way of a Christian life. On Nov. 23, he asked to be baptized by the Rev. Fritiz assisted by the Rev. John Gailey and the Rev. W.D. Stevens.

The clergymen claimed Hockenberry expressed remorse for taking his cousin’s life. On Sunday Dec. 5, two days before his hanging, a religious service was held in the jail at 3 p.m. and Hockenberry received his first and last Holy Communion.

The hangman made one last adjustment to the noose around the neck of the black-hooded Hockenberry as he stood between time and eternity. The executioner then pulled the lever to release the floor under the 21-year-old’s feet. The floor fell away, and Hockenberry’s body abruptly dropped through the opening.

After 20 minutes, he was cut down, and his corpse was placed inside a pine coffin that lay next to the scaffold. Hockenberry’s guardian, James Wilson, took charge of the body.

He loaded the coffin into a horse-drawn wagon and drove to United Presbyterian Church of Prospect, where he had purchased a burial plot. But just as they were about to lower the body into the grave, a group of church officials arrived and stopped them from burying a murderer in their cemetery.

According to the Dec. 15, 1869, Butler Democratic Herald, burial also was denied at Emmanuel Lutheran Church Cemetery in Prospect.

Hockenberry’s body finally was transported a few miles east on modern day Isle Road to the home of a relative and local Franklin Township farmer Abraham Weigle. Services were conducted at 10 a.m., and at noon Weigle permitted Hockenberry to be laid to rest “1/2-mile northeast of his house along a fence near the corner with the woods.”

A hymn was sung and prayers said. The body was being lowered into the hole when a wagon drawn by two horses arrived carrying a doctor and several students from a Pittsburgh medical school. The doctor asked if they might take the head of Hockenberry back to the school and study the bumps on his cranium to determine the deceased’s psychological attributes as part of their study of the now-debunked science of phrenology.

So, with the head of Hockenberry in a burlap sack, the medical students climbed into their wagon and headed to Freeport to board a train to Pittsburgh. Those curious on the iron horse were told the sack contained potatoes. After arriving back at the medical school, the flesh was boiled away from the skull, studied, and displayed for many years in the office of a prominent Pittsburgh physician.

Thick brush and trees crowd the walk to the “Old McCandless Cemetery” in Muddy Creek Township, which is within the boundaries of Moraine State Park. A limestone tombstone chiseled with the name Nancy Ann McCandless stands tall above the overgrown grass and weeds.

The inscription below that name still can be read after 150 years. The few who stumble upon the small, hidden graveyard most likely have no idea of the incredible story behind the words “DEPARTED THIS LIFE OCT. 3, 1868 IN HER 22 YEAR.” The tragic tale of a young woman denied all the joys of a long life by her own cousin, the last man executed in Butler County.

Bill May is a local historian, speaker and tour guide.