Category Archives: Murder

2011: Leroy White

Posted on by

Leroy White received a lethal injection in the HuntsvilleAtmore, Alabama death chamber on this date in 2011.

White had fatally shotgunned his estranged wife but by now it’ll hardly be remembered beyond the people directly touched by this horror. Yet in its banality this case haas something to tell us about America’s shambolic death penalty system.

Although this rule changed in 2017, Alabama used to permit, and its elected judges very actively practice, overruling a jury life sentence recommendation with a harsher judgment from the bench. Something like a fifth of Alabama’s condemned prisoners were there on judge overrides.

White numbered among this misfortunate fifth, and the trial judge wasn’t the only authority in the process whose priors were stacked against Leroy White.

Post-conviction, a Maryland tax attorney who represented White pro bono withdrew from the case and neither he nor anyone else told White about it. That doesn’t even seem possible but attorneys who are overmatched, stretched thin, and even outright incentivized to screw their clients make up an essential component of the system. In this case, the secret withdrawal caused White to miss a deadline for filing an appeal.

The heroic Bryan Stevenson of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative took over the case once this damage was done, but his appeal for a mulligan on the missed deadline fell on deaf ears because he

didn’t have a persuasive argument on the key issue: given more time to appeal, could he win the appeal on the merits of his case?

Stevenson said about half of the roughly 200 prisoners on Alabama’s death row were represented by a lawyer who is not allowed to spend more than $1,000 on out-of-court time working on the case, unless given permission by the trial court under Alabama indigent defense rules. He said that inequity leads to problems with the quality of assistance defendants are getting.

“The death penalty is not just about do people deserve to die for the crimes they are accused of, the death penalty is also about do we deserve to kill,” Stevenson said. “If we don’t provide fair trials, fair review procedures, when we have executions that are unnecessarily cruel and distressing, or if we have a death penalty that is arbitrary or political or discriminatory, then we are all implicated.”

White still had one last hope: a clemency grant by outgoing governor Bob Riley. Riley’s term in office ended four days after this execution, and he has had no political career since. Did he, like predecessor George Wallace, find his conscience burdened by the executioner’s office? In this precious interval released from all political pressure or consequence did he make use of a free hit at the quality of mercy? Reader, he did not — spurning a plea by the surviving daughter of both victim and killer not to give her another dead family member to mourn.

On this day..

1868: Heli Freymond, the last beheaded by sword in Switzerland

Posted on by

Heli Freymond lost his head on this date in 1868 to an executioner’s sword — the last time that ever happened in Swiss history. (His is also the last death sentence enforced in the canton of Vaud.)

Freymond and his cousin and lover Louise Freymond conspired to murder the man’s pregnant* wife with arsenic.

They might have gotten away with this but avarice for the portion of the wife’s inheritance that had redounded to the wife’s sister led them to make a bid at murdering that sister’s beau. This man survived it, and accurately discerned the hand behind his brush with death; his lawsuit led to the literal and metaphorical exhumation of the late wife’s corpse, too.

Louise Freymond caught a 20-year prison sentence for this, but Freymond was doomed to lose his head. Switzerland had introduced the guillotine as an alternative beheading method some years before, but the old-school two-handed richtschwert blade still remained available for the hands-on touch you only get with hired goons. Twenty thousand souls turned out in Moudon for the occasion.

Heli Freymond was in fact the last person executed at all in Switzerland, for an era: he was still the last when the 1874 constitution abolished capital punishment full stop. However, a crime wave brought the death penalty back in 1879. The last Swiss execution for ordinary crimes occurred in 1940; according to CapitalPunishmentUK’s index of Swiss executions, there were 17 Swiss men (no women) shot during World War II for treason.

* Technically, an initial unsuccessful attempt to poison the pregnant mother Elise Olivier caused a miscarriage; subsequently, another poisoning brought off Elise, too.

On this day..

1959: Joaquin Casillas Lumpuy, Batista regime soldier

Posted on by

Joaquin Casillas Lumpuy, an officer of Cuba’s defeated Batista regime, died on this date in 1959 — either executed, or killed in a struggle trying to escape his executioners. (Both reports, amounting to the same thing, went abroad.)

Casillas most “distinguished” himself by carrying out the Batista dictatorship’s 1948 murder of trade unionist Jesus Menendez.* He served a token jail sentence for his trouble.**

Restored to his situation, Casillas was called upon to defend Fulgencio Batista once again in the last days of 1958 at the Battle of Santa Clara — what would prove to be the decisive battle clinching the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The battle was won on New Year’s Day, and Casillas captured that day by revolutionary commander Che Guevara.

“The sources contradict each other concerning names and numbers,” writes Paco Ignacio Taibo in Guevara, Also Known as Che, “but there is no doubt that in the hours following the liberation of Santa Clara, Che signed death warrants for several of Batista’s policeman whom the people accused of being torturers and rapists … including Casillas Lumpuy.”

Quoting Che now, Taibo continues: “‘I did no more and no less than the situation demanded — i.e., the death sentence for those twelve murderers, because they had committed crimes against the people, not against us.'” They would scarcely be the last.

Meanwhile,

the crowds in Havana were exacting a long-delayed justice. A sort of reasoned and selective vandalism took hold of the crowds, who attacked the gas stations belonging to Shell, which was said to have collaborated with Batista by giving him tanks. They also destroyed the casinos belonging to the American Mafia and the Batista underworld, trashed parking meters — one of the regime’s scams — and attacked houses belonging to leading figures in the dictatorship.

* Casillas carried out the murder in a law enforcement guise: sent on some pretext to arrest Menendez, Casillas shot his man dead when Menendez flexed his parliamentary immunity and told the cop to pound sand.

** Casillas’s defense lawyer in the Menendez proceeding was Jose Miro Cardona, who briefly became Prime Minister of post-Batista Cuba but had a much longer career as a prominent anti-Castro exile. As chair of the Cuban Revolutionary Council, he was the potential head of state had the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion succeeded.

On this day..

1866: John Roberson

Posted on by

From the Richmond (Va.) Whig, Dec. 28, 1866 …

… and the same source on Jan. 1, 1867:

On this day..

1845: John Burnett, failson

Posted on by

At the Fayetteville (Arks.) Court on the 8th inst., John Burnett was sentenced to be hung on the 26th inst., for the murder of Jonathan Selby.

-Newark (N.J.) Daily Advertiser, Dec. 29, 1845

John Burnett, the son and collaborator of murderers Lavinia and Crawford Burnett — a case we addressed in a previous post — belatedly shared his parents’ fate on this date in 1845.

On this day..

1865: Henry Wilson, shy subject

Posted on by

(Thanks to Robert Elder of Last Words of the Executed — the blog, and the book — for the guest post. This post originally appeared on the Last Words blog. Fans of this here site are highly likely to enjoy following Elder’s own pithy, almanac-style collection of last words on the scaffold. -ed.)

“I had made a request not to have my photograph taken, for fear my friends would recognize me. Somebody else made a request that it should be taken, and Chase [the sheriff] paid more attention to them than to me, and let them try to take it as I came out. You can see what kind of man this Chase is, and if I had a chance I would take his photograph d—-d quick. I don’t think they got a good one. So my friends will not know it. Perhaps my photograph will be the means of finding out who I am, but I doubt it d—-dly. I have nothing more to say, and you may go on as soon as you please, for it is no consolation to me to be kept standing here in the cold.”

— Henry Wilson, convicted of murder, hanging, New York.

Executed December 22, 1865 A career burglar, Wilson was executed for slaying of Henry DeVoe, whose home he had been robbing. Wilson admitted to killing two other New Yorkers — Burr Burton in Syracuse and Mrs. Lewis in Lancaster — and told police he was the man wanted for a host of unsolved crimes. He went to the gallows three days before Christmas. A reporter for the Rochester Democrat censored Wilson’s profanities, which appear to be derivations of damn.

On this day..

1929: Peter Kudzinowski

Posted on by

Peter Kudzinowski was electrocuted on this date in 1929 in New Jersey.

The son of Polish immigrants to Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal mining country, Kudzinowski made his way to the Atlantic seaboard as a young man and entered the executioner’s annals by luring seven-year-old Joseph Storelli from New York’s East Village. For the promise of some candy and a movie, the boy accompanied Kudzinowski onto a train out to the New Jersey Meadowlands. Kudzinowski walked the kid into the marshes and slashed his throat.

That was in November 1928.

It was his third homicide but evidently the worst of the lot for the murderer. A couple of weeks later he forced a confused Detroit traffic cop to take his confession. “I’m willing to pay the penalty, and the sooner it’s over, the better,” he explained later to Detroit detectives. “I had to confess. It was troubling me.” On trial back in New Jersey, he reiterated his willingness to die and the likelihood that his body count would grow if released. Jurors understandably spurned his attorney’s desperate insanity defense.

For a time he was a suspect in the cannibalistic destruction of a three-year-old Brooklyn boy named Billy Gaffney. Posterity has cleared him of that crime thanks to the later confession of a whole different caliber of mass-murderer who turned out to be operating in the same environs at the same time — Albert Fish.

On this day..

1890: Elmer Sharkey, wretched matricide

Posted on by

From the out-of-print The palace of death, or, the Ohio Penitentiary Annex: A human-interest story of incarceration and execution of Ohio’s murderers, with a detailed review of the incidents connected with each case by H.M. Fogle (1908):

The Terrible End of Elmer Sharkey

Exit Elmer Sharkey and Henry Popp. The night of December 18, 1890, [i.e., after midnight on the 19th. People are just egregious with dates. -ed.] witnessed the double execution of Elmer Sharkey and Henry Popp.

Elmer Sharkey, serial number 20,517, was the picture of physical manhood, young, handsome and accomplished; but his crime was the most diabolical one that ever disgraced the fair pages of Ohio’s history.

About nine o’clock on the fatal night of December 18, Father Logan appeared at the Annex and baptized Sharkey in the Catholic faith. Shortly after this the two murderers were taken out into the reception room of the Annex, where they remained until after the reading of their death warrants. It was just a few minutes after eleven o’clock when Father Logan came into the Annex to comfort the condemned men. He informed them that there was no earthly hope; that the Governor absolutely refused to interfere, and that they should prepare for the worst. Sharkey and his doomed companion were then taken back into the Annex proper, where they bade good-bye to those who were left behind. A little later Warden Dyer came down the corridor and entered the reception room, to which the condemned men were again taken. Facing them the Warden said: “Boys, I have a painful duty to perform; but the law requires it. Henry,” to Popp “this is your death warrant.” Popp shook as with the ague, and stammered, “Yes sir.” He then arose to his feet and listened attentively to the reading of the warrant. The reading of Popp’s warrant finished, the Warden turned to Sharkey who was leaning against the steam heater and read his warrant. Sharkey stood with his hands in his pockets, seemingly indifferent. This over, Chaplain Sutton and Father Logan each offered up a fervent prayer, and then the Warden left the Annex to make further preparations for the executions that followed a few minutes later.

Promptly at midnight Warden Dyer, Deputy Porter and Assistant Brady at his side, stepped into the guard room. A mad rush was made for the gate. But a careful separation of the sheep from the goats was made by the Captain of the guard room, who carefully scrutinized each passport. Noiselessly the procession passed down the long, dimly-lighted corridor to the Annex. Once inside the enclosure Warden Dyer promptly mounted the scaffold, and placed everything in readiness. But a moment thus, and the approach of the doomed man was heralded by appearance of Father Logan who stepped from the cage onto the scaffold, and took his stand on the right of the trap door. A hush fell as the pale and bloodless countenance of Elmer Sharkey appeared. He moved with a nervous, gliding motion toward the fatal trap, hesitated for a moment, and then stepped squarely upon it; and with downcast eyes and drooping head, stood there in waiting, a picture of silent despair and hopeless agony. Once, twice, three times he raised his eyes and cast a quick, sweeping glance over the throng of spectators, then resumed his downward look of misery, murmuring in a low tone: “My God, make quick work of it!” When asked if he asked [sic] anything to say, he raised his head slightly and said: “I ask God’s forgiveness, and all I have wronged; and I forgive everything.” The Father pressed the cross to his passive, bloodless lips and he kissed it fervently. The hood was then made ready and he was asked for his last words. “That is all I can think of now.”

As the hood was being adjusted he faltered and would have fallen backward in a faint, but was sustained by ready hands. Just as the noose was being drawn around his neck, he again lost control of himself, and started to fall; but the noose was slipped with a quick movement; the trap sprung, and down he went. As a result of his fainting he fell in a partially horizontal attitude, and the tightening of the rope produced a swinging motion of the body, thus breaking the force of the fall. The result was that the neck was not broken, and the poor, wretched matricide was left to die by strangulation. The sounds that floated out over the awe-hushed group as the dying man struggled for breath, is [sic] beyond description. The sickening sight and horrible sounds drove many of the spectators from the execution room.

The drop fell at 12:05, and for several minutes the terrible struggle lasted, then the sounds from the throat, and convulsions of the body grew less frequent. At 12:34 the quivering heart ceased to beat, just twenty-nine minutes after the drop fell. All within that narrow enclosure breathed a sigh of relief when the attending physician finally pronounced him dead.

His execution was one of the longest on record, and the longest in the history of Ohio.

Elmer Sharkey suffered death on the scaffold for the cold-blooded murder of the woman who gave him birth, a widow of Preble County. No wonder his death was such an ignominous and horrible one. Mrs. Sharkey had violently opposed his marriage to the woman of his choice, and threatened to disinherit him if the marriage was consummated. The unnatural son, in a spirit of revenge, butchered his poor old mother with a meat axe, mangling her almost beyond recognition. He confessed his guilt, and “died in the hope of a glorious immortality.”

[Popp, not dwelt upon by Fogle, was a Bavarian immigrant who fatally stabbed the barkeep who attempted to eject him while rowdy in his cups. -ed.]

On this day..

2010: John David Duty, the first pentobarbital execution in the U.S.

Posted on by

On this date in 2010, John David Duty reclined on an Oklahoma gurney with an apology for his victim’s family on his lips, and became a milestone: the first U.S. inmate executed using pentobarbital in the lethal injection process.

Already sure to die in prison via sentences from his 1978 convictions for kidnapping, rape, attempted murder, and robbery, Duty spared himself some time by recruiting the state to assist in his suicide.

His means of doing so was the murder of his new 22-year-old cellmate Curtis Wise, which Duty tried to tell Wise’s mother all about in a taunting letter that was confiscated before it hit the post:

Mary Wise,

Well by the time you get this letter you will already know that your son is dead. I know now because I just killed him an hour ago. Gee you’d think I’d be feeling some remorse but I’m not. I’ve been planning since the day he moved in last Friday. Tonight I finally pulled it off. Would you like to know how I did it? Well I told him I wanted to use him as a hostage. Hell he went right for it, thinking he was gonna get some smokes out of the deal. Well I tied him up hands and feet, then I strangled him. It’s not like the movies, it took awhile. But I really did him a favor as he was too stupid to live. I mean he didn’t know me 5 days and he let me tie him up like that, Please! Besides he was young and dumb and would’ve just been in and out of prison his whole life.So I saved him all the torment. I’ve been in 24 years, wish someone would have done me the same favor back then. I guess you’re thinking I’ll be punished for this. Well not likely in this county. The DA’s here are weak bitches and don’t give a damn about deaths of inmates. We’re all just scum to them. Besides I’m doing 2 life sentences so they can’t hurt me. But you can call them and tell them about this letter, but it wouldn’t do you any good. Well I’m gonna close for now and I’ll tell police in the morning about Curtis.

Even though Mary Wise argued against it in court, this horrific gambit secured him his desired death sentence — with the help of Duty’s credible vows to kill again if he didn’t get what he wanted. Perhaps entertaining second thoughts, Duty did pursue his appeals, however, and that meant that the legal journey of his case did not reach its end until almost a decade later — a new era in American lethal injection, as it turned out.

Ever since lethal injection debuted in 1982 it had taken over as the go-to execution method around the United States. But by about 2010, it was increasingly difficult to come by the first drug in the standard lethal injection “cocktail”, sodium thiopental.

The system has been adapting ever since, including switches to a variety of alternative drug combinations that sometimes have ghastly results.

And Duty’s was the very first execution* to so adapt.

To kill him, Oklahoma sedated him first not with sodium thiopental, but with pentobarbital — the very first use of this drug, which has gone on to become one of the most frequently deployed substitutes for thiopental in death chambers around the country. Although Duty fought the chemical innovation on appeal (again contradicting his original suicidal intent) pentobarbital wasn’t exactly experimental: it had been used for animal and human euthanasia for years.

“There were no apparent issues” with the execution, a Department of Corrections spokesperson said afterwards.

* Ohio on December 8 of 2009 conducted an execution using only sodium thiopental, deviating from the three-drug protocol while still using one of its standard constituents. Pentobarbital itself has also subsequently been used in single-drug executions; consult the Death Penalty Information Center for up-to-date information on the still-shifting landscape of lethal injection protocols in the U.S.

On this day..

1896: Patrick Coughlin, shot in the mountains

Posted on by

From the San Francisco (Calif.) Call, Dec. 16, 1896.

UTAH MURDERER EXECUTED

Patrick Coughlin, the Slayer of Two Officers, Shot to Death in Rich County.

SALT LAKE, Utah, Dec. 15. — Patrick Coughlin was executed in Rich County, this State, this morning, for the murder of Deputy Sheriff Dawes and Constable Stagg, in July, 1895. Coughlin chose shooting as the method of his taking off. [He could have opted for hanging -ed.] He was pinioned, blindfolded and seated on a stationary chair, and six deputy sheriffs fired simultaneously, aiming at the heart, over which a piece of white paper was fastened. Every shot pierced the mark and death was instantaneous.


Photo of the arrangement of Coughlin’s execution. Via the University of Utah, whose watermark appears in the center.

Coughlin was about 23 years of age, a native of Pennsylvania, and came to this State when quite young. For some years he was considered a hard character. In July, 1895, he and another young man, Fred George, stole a band of horses and were pursued by officers. For over a week they eluded capture, and several times when brought to bay fired upon their pursuers, escaping further into the mountains. They were surrounded in a little cabin, and when called upon to surrender fired repeatedly, killing the two officers named and wounding others before the posse retired.

Several days later they were captured, 150 miles from the scene of the killing. Both were tried on the capital charge and Coughlin was sentenced to be shot and George to a life term in the penitentiary.

Coughlin’s execution took place near the spot where the murders were committed, up in the mountains.

On this day..