Billington died at home from emphysema in the early hours of 13 December 1901, ten days after having executed Patrick McKenna, a man he knew well.

[4][5] Billington had a "lifelong fascination" with hanging, and made replica gallows in his back yard on which he practised with weights and dummies and, it was rumoured locally, stray dogs and cats.

[3] Wooldridge, known as "C.T.W" in the poem, was a trooper serving with the Royal Horse Guards in Windsor who had killed his wife Laura with a cut-throat razor during a fit of jealous rage.

The pair knew each other because McKenna was a regular at the Derby Arms public house in Churchgate, Bolton, at that time Billington's home.

Although Billington was suffering badly from chronic emphysema, he managed to perform the execution, but immediately returned home to Bolton, where he died ten days later, at the age of 54.

William was removed from the list of official executioners after he was sentenced to serve one month in Wakefield Gaol for failing to maintain his wife and their two children, who had been admitted to a workhouse in Bolton.

His brother John died of pleurisy in October 1905, brought on by injuries he had sustained two months earlier at Leeds Gaol when he fell through the open trapdoor of the gallows.