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All three killers were very likely insane. None had a criminal past. But the national passions aroused by their crimes seem, in retrospect, a chilling echo of the assassinations themselves. Guiteau went raving to the scaffold, where a crowd that had paid as much as $300 each for the pleasure of seeing him hang heard him cry, Glory, glory, glory," as the door was sprung from beneath his feet. Czolgosz was electrocuted only 46 days after McKinley died, and a carboy of sulphuric acid was poured into his coffin afterward, by way of post-mortem punishment. Sergeant Boston Corbett, the soldier who claimed he had killed Booth, in defiance of orders that he be taken alive, explained that he had acted on God's authority. "Providence directed me," he said.