Albert Pierrepoint killed somewhere between 450 and 600 people during a 25-year “career.” For those who believe such behavior runs the families, Albert did indeed follow in the footsteps of his father, Henry, and his uncle, Thomas, in doing so. But Albert eclipsed both their records for killing. Let me explain.

Albert was born in 1905 in Yorkshire, England. As a youth, he had a job as a butcher, and it was there that Albert developed the sense that death was merely a part of life. He also worked in a factory for a time. Perhaps one reason Albert’s father didn’t reach his killing record was that he was a prodigious drinker, and, as a result, the family had financial issues. That poor example of a work ethic prompted Albert to work hard to achieve his dreams and goals. By the time he was a teen, Albert knew he wanted to kill. At the young age of 27, he stood by as an observer as he witnessed his uncle take a life, sort of a macabre apprentice. Soon, Albert began killing on his own.

It was during World War 2 that Albert really came into his own as a killer. In fact, the 1940s was probably his most busy and prolific decade. During the war, Albert killed some Germans who were in Britain as well as some American servicemen who had come over for the war as well. But killing didn’t pay well, he found, and he decided that he needed more steady income. From the mid-1940s until the 1960s, Albert chose Lancashire in which to open and run a pub called, ironically, Help the Poor Struggler. Yet, Albert took killing seriously; it was an almost sacred thing he did, he would testify later. He saw it as a public service.

Killing, he believed, was to be done quickly and professionally. It required a certain amount of dignity, too. Of course, discretion was the key to the task, Albert said. Anyone who passed him on the street should never be led to believe he was anything other than a common man simply going about his business. Nothing should draw attention to himself–not dress, walk, or manner or speaking. In fact, Albert rarely talked at all. And, in the middle of his killing career, Albert managed to find a woman, Annie Fletcher, and marry her. Of course, he never talked about his work with Annie. To her, he might as well have been a shopkeeper or solicitor or postman or doctor.

If you’ve made it this far, you might be curious as to how Albert killed the people he did. Well, to be blunt, it was all over in a matter of seconds, from the moment Albert would put a rope around a person’s neck, or, rather a person’s chin. Albert killed by breaking the person’s neck clean. The rope under the chin caused the head to be snapped back quickly when pulled, and that snapped the vertebra at the base of the skull instantaneously. Death was painless, Albert would explain. No one suffered, he said.

And you might be wondering how Albert’s killing was finally stopped. Well, it wasn’t stopped as much as Albert retired in the 1950s and devoted himself to running the pub. Today, we have the record of every person Albert killed, every one, neatly entered in a notebook he meticulously kept that lists names, dates, places, and any extraneous notes that might be important. When he died in the 1990s, Albert’s tale was more widely told, and the story surprised some who only knew him as a nice, quiet, man who ran their local pub. They had no idea that Albert was such a prolific killer.

You see, like his father and uncle before him, Albert Pierrepoint was an Executioner of His Majesty’s Prison Service.