John Arthur Bennett (April 10, 1936 – April 13, 1961) was a U.S. Army soldier who remains the last person to be executed after a court-martial by the United States Armed Forces. The 19-year-old private was convicted of the rape and attempted murder of an 11-year-old girl in Austria. Despite last minute appeals for clemency and pleas to President John F. Kennedy by the victim and her family to spare his life, Kennedy refused; Bennett was hanged at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1961. Early life Bennett was the fourth of eight children born to a family of sharecroppers in Chatham, Virginia. His schooling finished in the fourth grade. Despite being epileptic, he managed to enlist in the U.S. Army when he was 18. Military career Although he dropped out of the Ordnance Corps for academic deficiency, he became an ammunition handler and a truck driver with the U.S. Army's 11th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion (11th AAA Battalion) at Camp Roeder near Salzburg in Austria. Crime and court-martial In 1954, just days before Christmas, a heavily intoxicated Bennett left Camp Roeder to find a brothel. Witnesses reported seeing him wandering around, entering random civilian homes asking for a girl (or according to some, for a woman) named Margaret or Margot. He even entered one house asking the local occupants if they had chickens. Later that evening, at Siezenheim, he met an 11-year-old girl returning from an errand for her parents. In a confession he gave to U.S. Army Military Police, he said: I walked part way into the field with her and then I carried her the rest of the way about 25 yards. She appeared as though she wanted to go with me. The reason I carried her was because we were too near the road and I wanted to go further into the field. I sat her down in the field ... I laid down on top of her then and inserted my penis into her vagina. My penis was too big for her vagina and she started kicking. I put my hands under her buttocks and forced my penis into her vagina the rest of the way. I had intercourse with her for about 5 minutes. She screamed twice ... I didn't hit her, slap her or anything like that. After we started to have intercourse she tried to get up but she wasn't strong enough ... and I