On this date in 1953, Earle Dennison became the first white woman electrocuted in Alabama history.*
The 55-year-old widow had a sort of Arsenic and Old Lace and Orange Drink thing going on: that sugary refreshment administered by kindly old Auntie Earle on a visit to her niece Shirley Weldon was the delivery vehicle for that venerable poison.
Puking her guts out, little Shirley was raced to the hospital where Earle Dennison had her day job as a nurse. But while the child lay dying, the aunt slipped away so that she could make a payment on a $5,500 life insurance policy she had taken out on the kid — a policy that would have expired the very next day.
This whole affair could hardly fail to cast an incriminating light on the death two years prior of Shirley’s older sister … whose body, upon exhumation, also showed traces of arsenic.
Dennison was indicted but never tried for that previous possible murder; Shirley Weldon’s case would more than suffice to secure the landmark visit to Yellow Mama. The main question was really whether Dennison had been, juridically speaking, plum off her rocker.
Not far enough off it to help her.
Shirley’s parents subsequently won a $75,000 judgment against the insurance company for issuing the policy to an in-law with no insurable interest in the young victim, thereby “plac[ing] the insured child in a zone of danger, with unreasonable harm to her and … the defendants in issuing the alleged illegal contracts.”
But that was a different era. As of today, vast tranches of collateralized policies among suspicious parties with no insurable interest, issued by bankers as rich as Croesus and implicitly guaranteed too big to fail, might well constitute a forward-thinking investment opportunity for troubled economic times.
* There had been only one woman of any racial category electrocuted in Alabama full stop, according to the Espy file of historical U.S. executions: African-American Silena Gilmore in 1930. Prior to that, Alabama had not executed a woman at all since the Civil War.
Part of the Themed Set: Americana.
On this day..
- 1574: Charles de Mornay, sword dance regicide
- 2013: Sushmita Banerjee, Escape from the Taliban author
- 1799: Ettore Carafa
- 1964: James Coburn, George Wallace's first death warrant
- 1821: Jose Miguel Carrera, Chilean patriot
- 1946: Leon Rupnik, Erwin Rosener, and Lovro Hacin, for the occupation of Slovenia
- 1822: Francisco Javier de Elio
- 1951: King Abdullah's assassins
- 1778: Patrick McMullen, repeat deserter
- 1896: Chief Chingaira Makoni, Rhodesian rebel
- 1942: Bishop Gorazd of Prague
- 1638: Three (of four) English colonists for murdering a Native American
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