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Thread: Notable Kentucky Executions

  1. #1
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    Notable Kentucky Executions

    Rainey Bethea Last Public Execution In The United States


    Monday, Aug. 24, 1936



    Kentuckians convicted of every capital crime except criminal assault die in the electric chair. For rapists the penalty is hanging in the county where the crime was committed. Last year 1,500 sightseers packed Smithland to see William Thomas De Boe become the State's first white man hanged for rape (TIME, April 29, 1935). Last week in Daviess County, which has not had a hanging since a private one in 1905, a Negro outdrew white William De Boe nearly 7-to-1 as a gallows performer.

    Added attraction at the execution of 22-year-old Rainey Bethea, who raped and strangled a 70-year-old white woman, was Kentucky's only female sheriff, plump, matronly Mrs. Florence Thompson. When her husband died four months ago. Governor Albert Benjamin ("Happy") Chandler passed his job on to her. It thus became her duty to spring the trap under Bethea. A devout Roman Catholic, Sheriff Thompson consulted her priest, learned from him that nothing in canon law prohibited her from sending the blackamoor to his legal death. Protestant churchmen concurred. Nevertheless, soft-hearted Sheriff Thompson sighed: "I suppose I will spend the rest of my life forgetting—or trying to forget." Would she lose her nerve at the last minute was the big question last week at Owensboro, scene of the hanging.

    Night before the execution, Owensboro was host to the greatest crowd in its history. Cars poured in from neighboring counties, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri. Every bar was packed to the doors. Down the main street tipsy merrymakers rollicked all night. "Hanging parties" were held in many a home. Sheriff Thompson's 17-year-old daughter sneaked out against her mother's orders to attend one. As before the execution of Rapist De Boe, one motorist was in such a hurry to get to the scene that he cracked up, killed himself.

    The hanging was scheduled for dawn (5:12 a. m.). By 3 a. m. the lot near the Ohio River where the scaffold was erected overflowed with 10,000 men, women and children. Hawkers squeezed their way through the crowd selling pop, hot dogs. Telephone poles and trees were festooned with spectators. By 4:30 a. m. the crowd crushed through the wire fence around the scaffold. Police had a hard time getting Phil Hanna from Illinois, whose knowledge of knots has made him a distinguished necessity at 80 hangings, to the gallows. Businesslike, he tested the trap three times, found it good.


    At 5 o'clock the sky was dove grey. The crowd grew impatient, began to yip: "Let's go! Bring him out!" At 5:20 a.m. Bethea, his stomach bulging with chicken, pork chops and watermelon, was pushed through the crowd to the base of the platform. "I don't like to die with my shoes on." he said, sitting down on the bottom step and taking them off. Up the 13 steps to the platform he walked. Then for the first time the crowd learned that Sheriff Thompson could not nerve herself to her job. Fingering the trap lever instead was Arthur ("Daredevil Dick") Hasch, a pensioned Louisville policeman, deputized by Sheriff Thompson. The Sheriff miserably sat in her automobile 50 yd. away. Assistant Hangman Hanna adjusted the noose. Unlike Rapist De Boe, who was permitted to quarrel for an hour with his victim, Negro Bethea had nothing to say. "Man, he's there!" whispered an admiring spectator. The hot-dog sellers fell quiet.

    At 5:25 a. m. everything was ready. At 5:28 there was a swish, a snap. Doctors climbed through the supports, felt Bethea's pulse. The spectators closed in. At 5:44˝ a. m. physicians pronounced Bethea dead. With a yell the spectators charged from every side, eager hands clawed at the black death hood. In a moment it was torn to shreds. The lucky ones stuffed the bits of black cloth proudly into their pockets. Slowly the crowd straggled away.


    Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz157iLvb99

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    Nation’s last public execution, 75 years ago, still haunts town

    OWENSBORO, Ky. - Bob Howe points to an overgrown, muddy patch of land in a cemetery in Owensboro, gesturing to where the grave of the last man publicly executed in the United States may be.

    “I think it was over there,’’ said Howe, an 81-year-old lifelong Owensboro resident and retired county coroner. “I used to pass it on the way to school. That’s what I was told. It was over there somewhere.’’

    The grave is anonymous and unmarked, like other places associated with Rainey Bethea’s hanging on Aug. 14, 1936. On the 75th anniversary of the execution, it is an event some in Owensboro would like history to remember differently.

    Bethea, a farmhand and sometime criminal, went to the gallows near the banks of the Ohio River before a throng estimated at as many as 20,000. The execution drew national media coverage focused on a black man being executed by a white, female sheriff with the help of a professional hangman.

    “It was not a carnival in the end,’’ insisted 85-year-old James Thompson, the son of then-sheriff Florence Thompson.

    Still, Kentucky lawmakers cited the negative publicity surrounding Bethea’s hanging in ending public executions in the state in 1938. Kentucky was the last state to do so. Later, Governor Albert B. “Happy’’ Chandler expressed regret at having approved the repeal, saying: “Our streets are no longer safe.’’

    By the time Bethea went to the gallows, most states had closed executions to the public and used the electric chair because hangings were “ghoulish events’’ said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University professor who studies the death penalty.

    “There was a feeling that with the pain and botched hangings . . . it was inviting the worst in human behavior,’’ Denno said.

    That’s certainly the way Bethea’s death was viewed nationally.

    Headlines from across the country screamed the news. From Chicago - “Death Makes a Holiday: 20,000 Revel Over Hanging.’’ From Evansville, Ind. - “Ghostly Carnival Precedes Hanging.’’ From Louisville - “’Did You Ever See a Hanging?’ ‘I Did,’ Everyone in this Kentucky Throng can now Boast.’’ Newspapers described vendors selling hot dogs, popcorn, and drinks.

    “Every bar was packed to the doors. Down the main street tipsy merrymakers rollicked all night. ‘Hanging parties’ were held in many a home,’’ Time magazine reported in an Aug. 24, 1936, article.

    Sheriff Thompson consulted with a priest before deciding to go through with the hanging, the magazine said: “Nevertheless, soft-hearted Sheriff Thompson sighed: ‘I suppose I will spend the rest of my life forgetting - or trying to forget.’ ’’

    “It was quite a burden on her,’’ her son said.

    Bethea, convicted of rape, was 26 or 27 at the time (records listed only his year of birth, 1909), and he appears young and thin, wearing a cross on a chain around his neck, in a photo of his last meal.

    Pictures taken the morning of the hanging show a large crowd - men and women, some holding children - standing in downtown Owensboro, some on the rooftops of brick buildings. They watched as the execution team put a black hood over Bethea’s head. Then, they saw Bethea fall through the trap door. Doctors pronounced him dead about 10 minutes later.

    Perry Ryan, a Kentucky assistant attorney general who wrote a 1992 book on Bethea’s hanging, “The Last Public Execution in America,’’ said witnesses didn’t recall a rowdy atmosphere.

    “I think it was an event they found to be kind of scary,’’ Ryan said. “They just stood there.’’

    The crime for which Bethea was tried had played as big news in Owensboro: A wealthy, white, 70-year-old widow, Elza Edwards, was raped and strangled in her bed. After less than five minutes of deliberation, a jury convicted Bethea of rape.

    Under the law at the time, the maximum penalty for a rape conviction was hanging in the county where the offense occurred.

    Bethea’s hanging was handled by an execution team led by professional hangman Phil Hanna of Epworth, Ill. A former Louisville police officer pulled the trip lever.

    Had Bethea been convicted of Edwards’s murder - prosecutors never pursued that charge - the sentence would have been a private execution in the electric chair at the state penitentiary. And since his death, executions have been done in private, following a precedent set by New York when it switched to the electric chair in 1898.

    Bethea made a final request in a note to his sister, Ora Fladger, in Nichols, S.C.: to take possession of his remains and bury them with other family members. “So good by and paray that we will meet agin,’’ Bethea wrote. His remains were not sent east, and there is no record of why.

    Bethea’s body went to a pauper’s grave in Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery in Owensboro, according to Howe, the retired coroner.

    http://www.boston.com/news/nation/ar...g_haunts_city/

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    This is completely untrue!

    The reaction of Brian Williams and the mainstream media to Republican cheers for presidential candidate Rick Perry's execution record suggests they've never heard of Rainey Bethea or, for that matter, have little understanding of the American character and history. Whites, especially southern whites like the Texas governor, kill blacks, especially when times are tough. And they revel in it.
    The last public hanging in America
    An estimated 15,000 watched 1936 execution in Owensboro

    http://www.bloomingtonalternative.com/node/10782

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    Moss execution was last in Kentucky for 35 years



    J. Kelly Moss calmly walked to the electric chair 50 years ago this week and his "restless spirit" was "stilled" 14 minutes after midnight on March 2, 1962, according to The Gleaner of the same date.

    "I wasn't guilty of the crime and you know it," he told the prison warden shortly before the switch was pulled.

    No one would be executed in Kentucky for another 35 years, not until Harold McQueen died July 1, 1997, more than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.

    Moss was what you'd call a career criminal. In 1933, when he was only 19, he was caught kicking bags of coffee and automobile tires out of an L&N Railroad boxcar. He got two years in the big house at Eddyville for that escapade.

    But he doubled down instead of cleaning up his act. Eight months later he and two other men were unloading a truck outside the prison walls when they overpowered their guard and ran. They were quickly recaptured. But the die was cast; Kelly Moss had made a reputation as a bad man.

    He was certainly a big man, well over 6 feet fall and topping 220 pounds. By the time his step-father was found beaten to death — a 110-pound fellow named Charles Abbitt, who was 74 years old — Moss had a long string of crimes to his credit.

    He had been arrested at least 10 times between 1950 and 1953, mostly for breach of peace and assault and battery. Former Henderson Police Chief Charles West was a city patrolman during Moss' heyday, and he shared his memories with former Gleaner staff writer Sharon Wright back in 1997:

    "Kelly Moss, when he was sober, was a real gentle person," West said. "My recollection is that he was a real good man. But when he got drunk, he was a holy terror. When (Moss) was coming at you, he looked like a raging bull. When you got a call to Kelly's house, you sent every car you had."

    In January 1954 Circuit Judge Faust Simpson ordered Moss to leave the county or face the music for an incident that had occurred after he refused to leave his mother's house on Ninth Street. Police shot tear gas into the house. Moss came charging out with a butcher knife, and made a grab for an officer's gun.

    When they got him to the police station, he broke two of the police chief's ribs while grappling with practically the entire police force. Moss accepted banishment, but was quickly arrested in Webster County on a robbery charge, which once again landed him in prison.

    He was released Sept. 22, 1957 — and six weeks later Charles Abbitt was dead. There had been bad blood between the two men. According to court testimony, a taxi delivered a drunken Moss to Abbitt's house at 1220 Cumnock St. about 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 6, 1957, and Moss began pounding on the door, demanding Abbitt give him the 35-cent taxi fare. The taxi driver eventually left in disgust.

    Abbitt's fifth wife, and Moss' mother, returned from a church meeting about 10 p.m. to find the house locked. Edna Abbitt called police, who entered with a skeleton key, and discovered a grisly scene in the kitchen, according to The Gleaner.

    "His face was pulverized by blows, and many of his ribs had been broken." Police later determined Moss had broken six of Abbitt's ribs, beaten his face with a galvanized pipe so he was unrecognizable, and smashed his head against the edge of the kitchen table.

    Police launched an immediate search for Moss, and discovered him in the outhouse of a church in Robards the next day. "How is the old man?" he asked as he came out of the privy at gunpoint.

    It wasn't until he was at the county jail that he learned Abbitt had died. "We had a little fight but I certainly didn't intend to kill him," Moss sobbed. "This is the worst thing I have ever had happen to me. This means a long term for me."

    Moss fought a hard legal battle against execution, with his case going to the U.S. Supreme Court three times, but it refused to hear the matter. Toward the end he acted as his own attorney, using jailhouse lawyer skills he had picked up during earlier stints. "Not an educated man, he was credited with having a good mind and he prepared many of his writs himself," The Gleaner reported March 2, 1962.

    Moss' mother had expressed her defiance in The Gleaner the day before the execution. "Why should you be so worried about Charles Abbitt?" she asked. "He was nothing to you.... They have threatened Kelly Moss' life a long time, but the angels are more in number than the forces working against us."

    Four days after the execution the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals turned down Moss' last legal maneuver. He had sued the state for using tear gas to roust him from his cell. One of his arguments against execution was that the tear gas attack had been an attempt to execute him, thereby barring another execution attempt.

    The Gleaner's last word on the subject was a letter from his mother published March 18, 1962, in which she asked people to help her cover the $45 she still owed on his burial in Crittenden County.

    http://www.courierpress.com/news/201...-for-35-years/

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