The Wrong Way to End a Career Trivia Quiz

Answer: North America

Leon Czolgosz shot President William McKinley in 1901 as he was standing in line to greet people at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY. McKinley was not instantly killed, but died of an infection as he doctors fished around inside his guts to get the bullet out. This was well before the germ theory of medicine was understood, and the doctors just used their unwashed hands to stick in the hole in his stomach to try and pry out the slug.

Czolgosz, an anarchist, claimed that he shot the president to "help save the working man". He was arrested, tried, and executed all within 45 days of the president's death.

One interesting note, Alexander Graham Bell created a primitive metal detector to try and find the bullet inside McKinley. It didn't work.

Answer: North America

Paul Rose, a Quebecois nationalist and a professor at the University of Montreal, was the head of a branch of the FLQ, a Quebecois terrorist group that kidnapped and murdered the Quebec Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte in 1970. Earlier, another branch of the FLQ had kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner, James Cross who was held for two months and released.

Laporte was not so lucky, with there being some convincing evidence that he was strangled immediately upon being kidnapped. Paul Rose made a jailhouse confession to his lawyer when he said that he had strangled Laporte with a religious medal that he always wore around his neck.

Rose was released on parole in 1982 and remained unrepentant until the end of his life, saying that he would have done it all again if given the chance.

Answer: Europe

Gavrilo Princip should need almost no introduction. His assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 was the touchpaper that started the First World War, which, in turn, led to the Second, and shaped all of 20th Century European History.

Princip was a poor Bosnian-Serb, a college dropout, and a Yugoslav nationalist, who wanted to free all of what he saw as Yugoslavia from the rule of the Austrian Hapsburgs. He and a few friends decided to kill the heir to the throne, and made contact with a Serbian secret society called the Black Hand from whom they got weapons. Then they went to Sarajevo where the Archduke was scheduled to give a speech.

When he arrived at the train station, Princip's confederates threw a few bombs at the Archduke's car, but failed to hurt him. Princip thought that the chance for the assassination had passed, and went to drink at a nearby deli. Imagine his surprise when an hour or so later the Archduke's driver, in an attempt to avoid the dangerous area where the bombing happened, got stuck in an alley right in front of where Princip was standing! Princip shot both the Archduke and his wife, killing both.

Princip was tried along with the other conspirators, but because he was under 20, he was given a 20-year sentence in prison rather than death, which most of the others got. However, within less than four years he had died a rather gruesome death in prison from tuberculosis.

Answer: North America

Sirhan Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles in 1968 right after he had given a speech thanking the California voters as he had just won the primary in their state the day before. Sirhan Sirhan was a failed jockey and obsessive compulsive man who seemed to have developed a fixation on RFK after the beginning of the Six-Day War.

Instantly held and disarmed by one of RFK's friends, the giant and frightening NFL defensive tackle, Rosie Grier, Sirhan Sirhan was tried and convicted for the murder. There have been several conspiracies, including a Manchurian Candidate theory surrounding Sirhan, given his glazed and weird appearance at the hotel right before RFK was killed. However, nothing has ever been proven.

Sirhan is still alive and in prison, as of 2023, and has been denied parole 17 times. He will most likely die there.

Answer: Rest of the World

Yigal Amir was a right-wing law student who killed Yitzhak Rabin, the fifth prime minister of Israel. Ostensibly upset about the Oslo Accords, which had sought peace and rapprochement between Israel and the PLO, Amir killed Rabin in what he claims was an act of religiously justified homicide. When he finally succeeded in killing Rabin, it was the fourth time he had tried.

He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Five years later, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed the Yigal Amir Law which prohibits the lessening of a sentence for the killing of a prime minister.

Answer: Rest of the World

Mumtaz Qadri killed Salman Taseer, the governor of Pakistani Punjab, for remarks that he made against the country's blasphemy laws. Taseer had earlier said that the sentence of death for blasphemy was too severe. In 2011, Qadri, a member of Taseer's own bodyguard, shot the governor 27 times with an AK-47 and immediately surrendered to police.

Tried, given the death sentence, and executed in 2016, Qadri's funeral was attended by over 90,000 of his supporters and a mosque was built in his honor. Taseer's funeral, by contrast, had only had a few hundred people show up.

Answer: Europe

Chérif and Saïd Kouachi broke into the offices of a satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, and murdered 12 people and injured 11 others. This was an assassination on a massive scale motivated by an extreme reading of political Islam which forbids any depiction of the Prophet Mohammad. Charlie Hebdo had printed satirical cartoons of the prophet and so was the target of Chérif and Saïd. Their crime echoes the murder of Theo Van Gogh and the attack on the Curtis Culwell Center in Texas by people motivated by this extreme reading of Islam.

Chérif and Saïd Kouachi went on the run for two days and were eventually shot and killed by the police.

Answer: Europe

Aleko Schinas was the bizarre assassin of King George I of Greece in 1913. Schinas appears to have simply been walking down a road in a fugue state (a state of temporary amnesia where a person has memory loss and ends up in an unexpected place) in Thessaloniki when the king walked past on his daily constitutional. Schinas pulled out a gun and fired, killing the king instantly.

He put up no resistance to his arrest and was taken into custody. Schinas was severely tortured in custody and "fell" to his death from a third-floor prison window six weeks after the assassination.

Answer: Rest of the World

Dipendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, known as "Dippy" to his friends at Eton, was the Crown Prince of Nepal. In mid-2001, "Dippy" took a gun to the Royal Palace and killed the King, the Queen, two princes, and five princesses, after which, he turned the gun on himself and shot himself in the head; however, it took him three days to die during which he became, albeit briefly, the king. Because shot himself and never regained consciousness, his motives remain unclear to this day.

In a King Ralph scenario, Dippy's uncle, Gyanendra, became king but would rule for only seven years. Deposed in 2008, Gyanendra was the last ever King of Nepal.

Answer: Rest of the World

Nathuram Godse killed Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 as he finished a multi-faith prayer meeting at his compound in New Delhi. Godse stepped forward as if to greet Gandhi, who is reported to have folded his hands to greet this young man, and then shot him three times in the chest. As he fell, Gandhi put his hands to his forehead in a gesture of forgiveness to his assassin.

Godse was immediately jumped on and nearly beaten to death by the new vice-council at the American Embassy, Herbert Reiner, who not only prevented the assassin's escape, but probably saved the lives of many others whom Godse would have shot while trying to evade arrest.

Godse was a member of a right-wing Hindu paramilitary group that was opposed to any reconciliation with the Muslims in India and they believed that Gandhi had gone too far in trying to include the Muslim minority in the new Indian state.
He was tried and executed in 1949 despite pleas from Gandhi's children that his life be spared.