On a day late in September 1630, John Billington -- an original Plymouth colonist, a landowner, a father to two sons, a signatory of the Mayflower Compact -- stood with a noose around his neck. He was sentenced to hang. When he died that day, John Billington left behind a legacy of grim historic firsts for the New World.

John Billington was the first person to commit a crime in the colony. He had the dubious honor of being the first European to be convicted of murder in this new place. And he was the first to be executed by the state in the New World.

Earlier that same year, John Billington shot a young man named John Newcomen, who had recently migrated to Plymouth. Billington “waylaid” the man and shot him in the woods. Governor William Bradford, in his historical treatise “Of Plymouth Colony 1620 - 1647,” doesn't mention the reason for the shooting.

The hanging death of Billington was a result of a long, tense history between his family and the Puritan leaders. The Billingtons (John, his wife Eleanor and sons, John and Francis) were part of the Strangers -- a group of people who came to America on the Mayflower with the rigidly pious Separatist Puritans. Billington is believed to have been a Catholic, the branch of Christianity that the Puritans disliked the most.

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