According to the Portland Oregonian, Kosta Kromphold mellowed to a phonograph in his jail cell on the eve of his execution — including “If I Had a Thousand Lives to Live.”
A Russian native, the forgettable Kosta Kromphold had left his dear mum in New York City and chased his fortune to the Pacific coast, where he found it at gunpoint in the money-box of a Chinese restauranteur in Marysville.
Kosta really got himself into the egg drop soup during the subsequent chase by two bicycle (of course — this is California!) cops. Firing back at his pursuers, he shot officer John Sperbeck dead, right through the mouth.
According to April Moore’s Folsom’s 93: The Lives and Crimes of Folsom Prison’s Executed Men, “A Mrs. A. Meyers of New York City wrote to Governor Hiram Johnson on behalf of her housekeeper, Johanna Kromphold, the condemned man’s mother, saying that Mrs. Kromphold had already lost two of her three children. Mrs. Meyers’s message continued, ‘By taking this young boy’s life, you not only take one but two, as I am positive she will never live through this terrible ordeal.'”
This appeal didn’t work, and on September 1, 1916, Kromphold imparted a dying plea to the Folsom Prison chaplain: “Write my mother. I haven’t the heart to do it.”
On this day..
- 1938: Nikolai Bryukhanov, hung by his balls - 2020
- 1662: Claude Le Petit, dirty poet - 2019
- 1999: David Leisure, mob war veteran - 2018
- 1914: Frédéric Henri Wolff, the first Frenchman executed during World War I - 2017
- 1876: Hillary Page, the Chesterfield fire fiend - 2016
- 1944: Jacques Stosskopf - 2015
- 1942: Henryk Landsberg, Lvov Judenrat - 2013
- 1987: Moses Jantjies and Wellington Mielies, after the Langa massacre - 2012
- 1863: Peyton Farquhar, in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge - 2011
- 1714: Maria Mouton and her slave Titus, lovers - 2010
- 1851: Narciso Lopez, filibuster - 2009
- 1538: Cratwell, a hangman - 2008