On this date in 1960, a goon went to the San Quentin gas chamber for his violent retort.
On the evening of December 30, 1958, George Albert Scott was exiting a Melrose cafe with his partner in crime Curtis Lichtenwalter, having profitably held up the joint with a sawed-off shotgun.
A Samuel Goldwyn Studio executive with very poor timing named Kenneth Savoy just happened to be walking in the door as the robbers were walking out, and Scott decided to augment their takings en passant.
“Just a minute, mister,” Scott hailed Savoy (according to this Los Angeles Times blog retrospective). “Give your wallet.”
Savoy upped the ante with a bravado that he might have regretted seconds later when Scott’s shotgun blasted him in the stomach: “I’m single and have no responsibilities — no one will miss me. If you want my wallet, you will have to shoot me first.”
This was the first casualty in the course of several Los Angeles stickups the pair had perpetrated that December. Lichtenwalter, who had no previous criminal record, bailed out of the duo’s Jesse James act after this but the parolee Scott went on to knock over a couple more places before he was cornered in a hotel with a woman named Barbara White, picturesquely described via a lax Eisenhower-era Times copyeditor as “a former woman wrestler.”
Scott made multiple suicide attempts during his death row stint, ranging from a gory throat-slashing at his sanity hearing to (according to the Associated Press wire dispatch*) three tries on the more desperate end of the spectrum on the literal eve of his execution:
First he smashed a light globe and stuffed glass in his mouth. A doctor said he was not harmed seriously.
Two hours later, guards reported, he stood on his cot and dived against the wall with his head.
Restrained, he eluded guards and began ramming his head against the cell wall.
He went to his death calmly, and with a skull-splitting headache.
* Quoted here from the Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle of September 9, 1960.
On this day..
- 1833: Nils Narumseie, terror of Kanten
- 1619: Melchior Grodziecki, Istvan Pongracz and Marko Krizin, Jesuits
- 1952: Mustafa Khamis and Muhammad al-Baqri, Egyptian labor activists
- 1736: Captain John Porteous, riotously lynched
- 1732: Pompey, poisoner of James Madison's grandfather
- 1914: Seven retreating Frenchmen, with surprising results
- 1849: Elisha Reese, suitor
- 1929: Constantine Beaver, Alaskan native
- 1768: Isaac Frasier, three strikes offender
- 2000: Lu Cheng, possible wrongful Taiwanese execution
- 1984: Ernest Dobbert, child abuser
- 1943: 186 prisoners at Plotzensee Prison