"Brokeback Mountain" star Heath Ledger made headlines with some cranky comments about a Utah theater choosing not to screen the star-crossed cowboy lovers' movie. But in the same sentence Ledger managed to diss West Virginia: "I heard a while ago that West Virginia was going to ban it. But that's a state that was lynching people only 25 years ago, so that's to be expected." We wondered about Heath's math (he's a star so his figures must be accurate, right?) and also when it was that we West Virginia bottom feeders in the gene pool stopped stringing up them folks what crossed us. Turns out there is indeed a "hanging" entry in the forever-forthcoming "West Virginia Encyclopedia," (the one that doesn't have an 'X').Debby Sonis at the W.Va. Humanities Council was kind enough to send the entry on. This settles the question of the last, shall we say, 'society-endorsed' lynching. What about the last reported extra-legal lynching in the state? Joe Morris's article in today's Gazette tackles that one: that date was December 1931, though you have to wonder what the Klan was up to in the decades after that. Below is how the last public hanging went down:

Last Public Hanging (from the "West Virginia Encyclopedia") John F. Morgan was the last man hanged publicly in West Virginia, on December 16, 1897, after he was convicted of murdering Chloe Greene and two of her three children in the Grass Lick area of Jackson County. The execution drew more than 5,000 spectators, including a New York Sun special reporter assigned to cover the spectacle. The chain of events that led to the hanging began less than six weeks earlier on November 3, 1897. Morgan, a local handyman and friend of the Greene family, hid in the pre-dawn darkness with a hatchet in hand. One by one he attacked his victims, delivering fatal blows to Mrs. Greene, Jimmy Greene, and Matilda Pfost. Another daughter, Alice Pfost, was attacked but survived. It was she who alerted neighbors to the crime. Morgan was arrested within hours and incarcerated in Ripley. He was indicted on November 4, tried and convicted the following day, and sentenced the day after that. Two weeks before the hanging, Morgan escaped. He was at large two days before he was finally captured. Excitement was aroused by Morgan’s repeated oaths that he would never hang, at least not on the scheduled date, but the execution came as scheduled on December 16. Shortly after the sensational event, the West Virginia state legislature passed a bill prohibiting public executions. It was among the first states to do so.