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..

• 1739: Elizabeth Harrard
• 1782: Patrick Dougherty, robber
• 2014: A day in aborted death penalty moratoriums around the world
• 1689: William Davis
• 1875: Henry Wainwright, Whitechapel murderer
• 1893: Frederick Wyndham, unrepentant patricide
• 1692: A batch at Tyburn, escorted by the Ordinary of Newgate
• 1838: The first hangings of the Lower Canada Rebellion
• 1936: Aberra Kassa and Asfawossen Kassa, Ethiopian royalty
• 1624: Marco Antonio de Dominis, posthumously
• 1855: The slave Celia, who had no right to resist
• 1995: Kimura Shujish