CLEWS Your Home for Historic True Crime

Toni Jo Henry’s Date With Death

Historically, women have always had to do something particularly awful to be convicted of a serious crime, and to sentence a woman to death – oh! That didn’t happen all that often. Especially when the female in question was good looking. The law has always made an ass of itself when there’s a beautiful woman in the dock.

And don’t argue with me about it. I’ve been trying to prove it to you, see.

One of the most beautiful, indeed absolutely stunning women ever convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the United States of America was a gal by the name of Toni Jo Henry. That’s her, photographed in her cell on the morning of her scheduled execution. Her jailers opened up a telephone line to the governor’s office, and Toni Jo waited on her last hope in life, mindful that women – especially unusually attractive women – and especially in the South – were not generally put to death, no matter what they’d done.

And she was a looker. Nearly every description ever printed of her focused on her eyes. Toni Jo was “slim, hard-faced, flint-eyed,” “smouldering-eyed,” with her “snapping black eyes, and her long, wavy blue black hair.”

After three trials, three convictions, and three pronouncements of the awful sentence, she probably expected to die. But still she was light-hearted about it. As the photographer fussed with his camera, Toni Jo said, “I’ve smiled twice, mister. You haven’t shot yet. Have you any idea how much talent is being wasted here today?”

It was one of many jokes she cracked as she waited for the phone to ring, chain-smoking and making small talk. “That lighter is guaranteed for a lifetime,” she said at one point. “You know one person whose lifetime lighter lasted a lifetime.”

Alas, Toni Jo wasn’t always quite so funny.

Her real name was Annie Beatrice, but that was a little too frou-frou for a girl whose mother died when she was four. Raised by an aunt, she dropped out of grade school and started running away and ramming the roads when she was a teenager. By the time she was 17, she was known all over her home town of Lake Charles, Louisiana as a “lewd woman.” She fell into prostitution and drugs and all the other disgusting things implied in “lewd.” She was arrested several times for assault, larceny, and vagrancy. She snipped a man’s ears with a pair of scissors and went to jail for awhile. “Lots of men have loved me – but I hate ‘em,” she said. They called her “the most ornery gal east of the Mississippi” and the “bad girl of the bayou” and “tiger girl.”

But when she met Cowboy, a/k/a Claude Henry, she managed to turn herself around. That’s his photo. He doesn’t look like anything extraordinary, but Toni Jo was all over it. Cowboy called her a swell kid. He got her off cocaine. He said he loved her, and so she married him.

But even when they met, he was on bond for a murder charge for the murder of a police officer. After they were married, Cowboy drew 50 years for murder and went to the big house in Huntsville. Toni Jo went crazy and vowed that the law could not come between them. She decided she would break him out of prison if she had to do it with her own two hands, because she’d do anything – she’d “hang four times” for Cowboy.

Love makes you do crazy things.

Like steal some guns and ammo. Like set off on foot to get from Louisiana to Texas with some wiry good-for-nothing half-boyfriend slash accomplice in tow, a punk named Harold Finnon Burkes.

Like pull a pistol on some traveling salesman dumb enough to stop to give you both a ride. Like make the poor automobile owner strip naked and beg for his life before you shoot him.

After Toni Jo murdered J.P. Calloway, her squeamish companion made a remark she didn’t like and she called him a yellow rat and cracked his head with the butt and left him behind. That, of course, turned out to be a big mistake, because he was a rat, and before she knew it she was in a jail cell.

She wouldn’t talk, so they brought her husband from prison to wring a confession from her. “Please honey tell them the truth,” he said, over and over. So she did, admitting they bumped the guy off. “I let him say his prayers and then gave it to him right between the eyes,” she said.

Toni Jo Henry went on trial in Lake Charles, where her reputation preceded her. The judge let a huge crowd into a courtroom so packed sometimes the defense lawyers couldn’t see all the jurors. The flashbulbs sometimes drowned out the arguments of counsel. And all in attendance let their wishes be known. During the trial various audience members made the hanging sign by drawing their fingers across their throats while looking at the jurors. When jurors went to lunch, they heard men and women alike cry out, “hang her,” “hang that bitch.”

On the first appeal in State of Louisiana v. Henry, the Supreme Court of Louisiana said:

The populace clamored for the death penalty. They demanded the life of the accused and clearly manifested their desires to the jury by signs and gestures which could not be misunderstood. The trial was attended by throngs. Hundreds more than could be seated crowded into the courthouse. The courtroom was literally packed and jammed with spectators. The judge says that more than 150 either stood or were seated within the railing which separated his stand from the space reserved for spectators. The record clearly shows that they were present not merely through interest, but for the purpose of letting it be known that they demanded the death penalty…. public sentiment against the accused was at fever heat…. no punishment inflicted upon the accused except that of death would appease the wrath of the throng.

She got a new trial. The same result followed, so they gave her a third trial. But they ran out of excuses and finally set a date in 1942 for Toni Jo to sit in the Chair. Cowboy escaped from a prison farm a few days before she was supposed to be electrocuted in a desperate effort to reach her; he was captured two days later.

In a jailhouse interview just before she was supposed to die, Toni Jo decided she might as well “kick the lid off.” She talked about Cowboy.

“I was a bad girl at 13, a drug addict at 16,” she said. “Nobody ever cared about me before him. That guy is the king of my heart. He gave me a home and he got that drug monkey off my back.

“I remember the day I told him I was a cokie and the look on his face. He thought I just smoked marijuana and grinned. But when I told him my train went a lot further than marijuana he took me to a hotel room and I lay there in bed for a week and he would come in now and then and ask me how I was doing. He’d slap my face with iced towels and we’d both laugh.

“I think condemned persons fret more about losing contact with human beings than anything else. You feel so out of it. It’s more than these bars: it’s more like a hellish battle with long distance when she won’t give you a number – anybody’s number—not one friendly human being’s number. You get so cold and pretty soon you’re a freak even to yourself.”

The reporter asked about the man she killed, the man who left behind a wife and daughter. “I’ve asked myself a thousand times and I don’t know why I killed that man,” she said. “I’m willing to walk down to the chair and I’ll take my medicine.”

Toni Jo said her dying wish was to talk to Cowboy, and though it violated the rules, they let her call him. She did all the talking and he did all the crying. ”I know it has to come and I’m ready for it, honey,” Toni Jo told Cowboy. “I’m glad to have known you for the short time that I did. I’m sorry that things had to turn out this way. But you’ve got to live right, Claude.”

Toni Jo hung up after the call with Cowboy.

The governor, by the way, never did call.

Toni Jo promised to go quietly, except she squawked when they shaved her head. They promised to hunt up a scarf for her to put over her bald head, knowing the photographers were lined up outside to see her taken to the death room. One of those photos, at right, shows her jailer looking more sad than Toni Jo.

Toni Jo Henry was electrocuted November 28, 1942. The wire services all reported that Cowboy Henry screamed and thrashed and destroyed his cell in his grief.

In a final awful coda, Cowboy was released from prison a handful of years after his wife's execution. The decade didn't end before Cowboy Henry was shot and killed and raced into the dark to be with his bad girl from the bayou.

***

There are a number of books about Toni Jo Henry.

In Dutch:  De Tijgerin van Louisiana, http://www.antiqbook.nl/boox/vin/17814.shtml

STONE JUSTICE written by Deborah McMartin & Evelyn Morgan was published by AuthorsHouse and is available on addall.com.

New in 2009: A new fictional treatment of Toni Jo Henry has been penned by Dr. Norman German, , professor of English at Southeastern Louisiana University. You can download the Kindle version from http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0028AD3C2 or order a hard copy from http://www.asavagewisdom.com/.

A New Chapter in Michigan's Death Penalty History

It takes a real ignoramus to get the death penalty in a state that doesn't have the death penalty and has never executed anyone.

Michigan resident Marvin Gabrion killed another Michigan resident in Michigan. Gabrion, furious with a young woman for accusing him of rape, kidnapped her and her infant. Gabrion transported Rachael Timmerman to the Manistee National Forest, handcuffed her to cement, and threw her alive into a lake. Her infant Shannon has never been found.

If Gabrion had any sense at all, he might have noticed the national in "Manistee National Forest." That's how the feds got hold of him -- he committed a capital crime on federal land.

In the federal court in Michigan, Gabrion was sentenced to stretch hemp, or however they do it these days. Last week the sentence was upheld.

Note to defendants undergoing the penalty phase of a capital trial: do not beat your lawyer in the head in front of the jury.

Photo: Marvin, from his whiny plea for pen pals. Do not write to this shit. That flower belies an evil mind. He has taunted his victims' families by implying that the baby is still alive, and he is suspected in several other deaths.

He is brutal. Dumb. Most of all dumb, bestially stupid; the executioner is a most appropriate remedy.

Though I don't think too many folks would mind if they strung him up in, oh, say, Indiana.

***

For more on Michigan's death penalty history see this post.

Thanks to Robert Waters for the link.

Mrs. Place's Execution

Electricity. Whenever you sit down to count your blessings, count it among them. Who knows how many lives have not been lost to house fires thanks to the regulation of this phenomenon. When electricity first came into widespread use, it was hailed as a cure-all -- useful to eliminate darkness, treat frigidity and impotence and all manner of disease, and, -- let's get to it, execute murderers. One of the first electrical executions, witnessed by Thomas Edison himself, was not of a human but of an elephant. Apparently the elephant had killed a man who'd fed it a lit cigar. The execution was pretty awful per the account I heard -- the unfortunate animal "made a whole lot of smoke." (I heard this story from my husband; Mr. James is a walking encyclopedia of Edison lore; he insisted that we give our first child the middle name Edison; I told him that it was awful to think about killing an elephant this way, and it sounded to me as though the elephant was guilty of manslaughter at most, and the story disturbed me; he rolled his eyes and said something sarcastic about my taste in true tales.) But the development of state-sponsored death by electrocution was seen as a vast improvement over the method that preceded it, death by hanging. Botched executions resulted from misjudgment of the required counterweight, strength of rope, specific knot, or length of drop, and any number of people were accidentally beheaded or slowly choked to death when their necks failed to break. In the state of New York, prison officials were so upset when they witnessed the execution of one woman who took fifteen minutes to die that they resolved to find a better way. Electrocution promised to be a neat and tidy and hands-off way of ending life that would keep the body intact for Christian burial. Executions by electricity came into regular use in the 1890s; on this date, March 20, in 1899, the first woman was put to death in an electric chair in Sing Sing prison in New York State. Her name was Martha Place. She had very little to recommend her; she was described in the newspapers as "homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband." The crime that sent her to the chair was the murder by smothering of her stepdaughter Ida. She begrudged the young girl the attentions of her father, William Place. "It was a murder so shocking," said one journalist, "that nothing worse could be thought of -- that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and that was the electric killing of the old woman."  New York is a liberal state and the death sentence imposed on the woman was not supported by public sentiment, and there was loud clamor for a reprieve. No woman had been executed in New York for many years because the governors who ruled there wouldn't allow it.  But when it came time to make good on the sentence for Mrs. Place, the conservative Teddy Roosevelt occupied the governor's office, and he refused to be swayed by what he called "mawkish sentimentality." There are particulars about her death that are interesting, aside from the new method. She was not informed of the exact time; instead, a few days before the event, she was told that all hope of pardon was lost and she was to prepare herself to go at any moment. She spent the last several days of her life eating at the warden's table and exhibiting a calm demeanor. The actual execution seems to have gone alright, as these things go. She died very quickly. It was, per the prison doctor at Sing Sing, "the best execution that has ever occurred here." *** For more interesting reading along these lines, see The Penalty is Death: U.S. Newspaper Coverage of Women's Executions by Marlin Shipman.

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The Cuckold’s Wife

A colonist by the name of Mary Latham is mentioned in the journal of Massachusetts’ first colonial governor, John Winthrop, which in itself is an ominous portent, for Winthrop’s writings detailed, among other things, the early criminal history of the colony.

Mary’s father “had brought her up well,” Winthrop noted. And yet the young woman, rejected by her preferred suitor and on the rebound, married an old man -- an “ancient man,” Winthrop notes, “who had neither honesty nor ability.”

Mrs. Latham did not love her husband. But she had the appetite of a woman of her age, which was eighteen, and, unencumbered by Puritan inhibition, she began to entertain “divers young men” who “solicited her chastity.”

This had a predictible effect on her marriage. At one point, she accosted her husband with a knife, “threatening to kill him, calling him old rogue and cuckold.” And if that wasn’t proof enough that she was an adulteress, she fell into what Gov. Winthrop calls “a drunken revel,” and during her revelry she was caught “upon the ground” with a young man named James Britton.

Had Mary Latham paid more attention to current events, she may have exercised more prudence before placing herself in a situation she couldn’t get out of. Eleven years before, the authorities had passed and published an act making adultery punishable by death. A year or two before, another woman came close to being hanged for the offense. Mrs. Sarah Hales, wife of William, was suspected of committing adultery. She became pregnant but miscarried. Apparently the authorities could not quite prove the crime in whole, so Mrs. Hales found herself punished in this manner:

[She was] carried to the gallows with a rope about her neck, and to sit an hour upon the ladder; the rope's end flung over the gallows, and after [she was] banished.

Perhaps these events escaped Mary Latham’s notice. Or perhaps she knew the law but was unable to comply. In either case, she was caught in flagrante delicto with a man who was not her husband. The law’s answer to this was a sentence of death. Mary is reported to have accepted this sentence with the “hope of pardon by the blood of Christ.”

The repentant sinner and her paramour were hanged together for adultery on March 21, 1643, in the Plymouth Colony. Hers was the fourth recorded execution of a female in the New World. James and Mary are the only persons known to have paid the highest price for adultery in the colonies. Today, one must classify adultery as its own punishment.

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For more information, see John Winthrop's City of Women, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for the Massachusetts Historical Review and Woman's Life in Colonial Days by Carl Holliday.

For an excellent overview of colonial death penalty laws, see this excerpt from "The Death Penalty: An American History" by Stuart Banner.

An Old, Bloody Postcard from Detroit

So I guess 130 million people or thereabouts watched the Superbowl in Detroit yesterday; I had the game on while my nose was stuck in a book about early settlers who civilized the wilds of Michigan in the 1830s.

I couldn't help but contrast the picture on TV with the picture painted by the letters describing early life in Detroit and in particular, the stories of two Native American men who faced frontier justice and the death penalty.

In the 1830s, settlers who passed through Detroit described it as an old town, with old, rotten buildings and muddy streets (at least that much hasn't changed). In 1835, it was a rough town filled with lowly French fur traders and Indian men drunk on firewater. One woman who came from New York State would later say she could walk the entire place and not see anyone dressed in decent clothes.

From Woodward Heritage

Then, one day in 1825, an old Indian named Chief Kishkawo, leader of the Saginaw Ojibwa tribe, drunk and/or ill, attacked a white man on the streets of Detroit. According to the pioneer who recorded the story, "just in pure wantonness, without the least provocation, he had thrown a tomahawk at a white man who was walking peacefully along, and struck him down."

Chief Kishkawo was arrested, tried, and condemned to hang. But when word reached the Saginaw Ojibwa, they assembled a great number of Indians in full war paint and dress, muskets, knives and tomahawks in their belts, to rescue Chief Kishkawo from the white man's jail.

On their arrival in Detroit, the Ojibwa found that the white man's government was too strong to permit a rescue. Yet they could not let him be "hung like a dog," which was to them an overwhelming disgrace. So they gave Chief Kishkawo some poison. This he took on the morning of his execution, and thus the chief eluded the death penalty.

In 1839 would come news of another white settler murdered by an Indian. In Kalamazoo County, a white family by the name of Wisner allowed an Indian named Joseph Muskrat (or Sin-ben-nim), his wife and two children to take shelter from the harsh winter in their cabin. But one day Joseph Muskrat got drunk, began wrestling with Mr. Wisner, and, when bested, stabbed him in the temple in a fit of pique. Wisner's neighbors arrested Muskrat.

Joseph Muskrat was certain that the white men would burn him to death for his crime, and he was desperate to avoid such suffering. To one white woman who showed him sympathy he said, "Good squaw, good squaw, you tell white man to kill me quick; no burn me, but kill me quick." He also tried to anger the white woman so she would strike him down, so he told her that he murdered one of his own children. "Me very bad Indian," he told her. "You kill me quick, me very bad, me kill papoose, put him under ice in swamp."

Joseph Muskrat was tried in Kalamazoo, found guilty of murder, and condemned to be hanged. But at that exact moment, the newly formed territorial legislature in Detroit abolished capital punishment. Muskrat was the very first beneficiary and was resentenced to a term of life in the newly constructed state prison in Jackson. He served two years before he died and was said to have ended his days heartbroken, docile, and a sincere Christian.

It was actually quite rare for an Indian to kill a settler in those days, but the crimes of Chief Kishkawo and Joseph Muskrat fueled a dread of Indians, though in the end Chief Kishkawo and Joseph Muskrat both managed to cheat the hangman.

___

Source: Birchbark Belles: Women on the Michigan Frontier by Larry B. Massie, Ed. (Priscilla Press, 1993).

For more on Michigan's early death penalty cases see Michigan and the Death Penalty -- A Brief and Horrible Experience

Mad As Ophelia

Dorothy Talby is chained to a post at the corner of Prison Lane, with the hot sun blazing on her matronly face, and all for no other offence than lifting her hand against her husband....

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, in Main Street

....see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia....

--Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Medical Essays

We simply don't know what to do with the Medeas of the world, mothers who are as "mad as Ophelia," who suffer from psychosis and murder their own children. Execution? Life imprisonment? Commitment to a psychiatric hospital?

It's a question that Americans have wrestled with for nearly 400 years. Before Andrea Yates drowned her children, before Darlie Routier stabbed her children, before Susan Smith drowned her children, before Deanna Laney stoned her children, before Maggie Young drowned her five children in a bathtub in 1965, there was Dorothy Talby, the first woman in North America known to have murdered a child while in the throes of delusion. And the date of the event is very early indeed.

Dorothy Talby and her husband John came from England to settle in Plymouth in colonial Massachusetts. The painstaking records kept by the colonists offer a full picture of their life together. After obtaining an allotment of land, Dorothy and John had several children; the last was a daughter named Difficulty, who was baptized on Christmas, 1636.

The Talby marriage was a tortured one. After the birth of her last child, Mrs. Talby "became melancholy and possessed of delusions." Dorothy quite evidently suffered from a severe mental illness and often threatened her family. Dorothy's husband complained of her bizarre behavior to authorities in Salem, who sentenced her in 1637 to be chained to a post for "frequently laying hands on her husband, to the danger of his life."

The treatment was ineffective, and she was excommunicated. This was also ineffective. When she became increasingly violent, she was publicly whipped. Then in 1638 "her mind again became more clouded." The rest of the story comes from the original records:

She believed that God revealed to her the necessity of taking the life of her baby, in order to save the child from future misery.... she was led to take the child's life, by breaking its neck. She made no secret of the murder, and when apprehended confessed the deed.

In the [Salem] court, on this day, upon her arraignment, she, however, stood mute a good while, -- until the governor told her that if she did not plead she would be pressed to death. She then confessed... she was duly sentenced.... 

Mrs. Talby asked to be beheaded, but the sentence imposed by borrowed English law was hanging in Boston two days after her conviction in December, 1638. At the time of her hanging, she had to be forcibly detained. When her face was covered with a cloth, she ripped it off and stuffed it in the rope that had been placed around her neck. She was then "cast off, and, after a swing or two, she caught at the ladder."

Dorothy Talby was one of the first women executed in the colonies; two females had been executed earlier -- Jane Champion and Margaret Hatch -- but their crimes are lost to history. And thus the history of the death penalty in the United States can be said to begin with a Medea, a woman "mad as Ophelia," and four centuries later we still face the dilemma of what to do with them.

....see poor Dorothy Talby, mad as Ophelia, first admonished, then whipped; at last, taking her own little daughter's life; put on trial, and standing mute, threatened to be pressed to death, confessing, sentenced, praying to be beheaded; and none the less pitilessly swung from the fatal ladder.... The cooper's crazy wife -- crazy in the belief that she has committed the unpardonable sin -- tries to drown her child, to save it from misery; and the poor lunatic, who would be tenderly cared for to-day in a quiet asylum, is judged to be acting under the instigation of Satan himself. Yet, after all, what can we say, who put Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," full of nightmare dreams of horror, into all our children's hands....

--Oliver Wendell Holmes

"I shouldn't be alive"

The Discovery Channel has a fascinating new show called "I Shouldn't Be Alive." The program profiles people who found themselves in do-or-die situations and somehow managed to survive: a man who crashed his small airplane in an African desert... a family stranded in a blizzard in a remote area... travelers who got lost in the Amazon jungle.

But these stories pale in comparison to the tales of those people who managed to survive their executions.

One such story was recently relayed by The Scotsman, which tells the tale of "Half Hanged Maggie Dickson." She was found guilty of "concealment of pregnancy" in 1728 (and presumably committed infanticide as well). After she was hanged in the customary fashion and her body was on its way to the churchyard, she managed to return to life in her coffin. Under Scottish law, Maggie was considered dead, so she was free to go about her business thereafter. (Thanks to P.J. for the link.)

In a similar vein, author James Farr relayed a story in his recent book A Tale of Two Murders (which I recently reviewed and highly recommend). In a fascinating aside to his main story, Farr tells the tale of Helene Gillet, who was also convicted of infanticide but this time in 16th-century France. Since she was of noble blood, her fate was beheading and not hanging. But the executioner, trying to accomplish the bloody deed with a broadsword, swung -- and missed. He struck her shoulder. A second blow went high and slashed her head. The crowd went crazy. The executioner's wife leapt forward and tried to end Gillet's life with a garrotte, but by then the crowd was throwing stones in protest. The executioner's wife tried slashing Gillet's throat with a pair of scissors. Still the girl would not die. Finally the crowd -- sensing a miracle in the making -- rescued Gillet and rushed her to a surgeon. The capitally condemned woman eventually managed not only to survive her execution but to obtain a pardon from the king and retire to a convent.

Anne Greene was yet another woman condemned for infanticide who somehow managed to survive her hanging in Oxford in 1650. And the tale of another person half-hanged appears in a newspaper account from Bristol, 1736; Joshua Harding was hanged for an undescribed offense but miraculously came back to life only to be condemned to being "transported for 14 years." (Thanks to Sharon Howard for these links).

It's one thing to survive an awful situation when Mother Nature wants you dead. But when it is man who is determined to end your life -- and yet you somehow come out of it alive -- now that is an impressive story of survival against the odds.

Women and the Death Penalty in Alabama - Part II: Why No One Wept for Miss Dennison

The number of murderers put to death since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1976 has now topped a thousand. Since journalists like to have a "news hook," the occasion has resulted in a plethora of stories about the death penalty in theory and practice in the United States. It seems that public opinion is slipping a bit; polls show that support for the death sentence has dropped from four in five Americans to two in three... but that's still a clear majority.

And it's stories like the murder of Shirley Dianne Weldon that engender such support.

It's hard for the mother of a little 2 1/2-year-old boy to write about a murderess such as Miss Earle Dennison, the sixteenth woman executed by the State of Alabama. The very fact that she was the first white woman ever executed in Alabama tells you she did something perfectly awful and horrible to contemplate.

Miss Earle Dennison was a widow and a surgical nurse; she worked at the Wetumpka General Hospital for more than 25 years. Her late husband had a sister who also had a husband and a little girl named Shirley and a boy named Orville.

Shirley was a little over two years old when Aunt Earle paid an early afternoon call to their humble farmhouse in rural Elmore County on May 1, 1952. During the visit, Aunt Earle gave little Shirley an orange drink that included a substance that is very bad for little girls. When Shirley began to vomit, Aunt Earle gave her a bottle of Coca-Cola that was also laced with something. Shirley became terribly sick, and her mother insisted on rushing her to Wetumpka General.

When it appeared that the little girl was gravely ill and would die, Aunt Earle left the hospital. She drove twelve miles to the home of an insurance agent. There she paid the premium for a life insurance policy she had taken out on her niece's life -- the policy was about to lapse. Aunt Earle, you see, had insured little Shirley for $6,500.

In 1952, that was about enough money to buy three nice new cars.

A few hours after the policy on her life was renewed, Shirley Weldon died. An autopsy revealed the presence of arsenic, which was also found in the cup and Coca-Cola bottle out of which the little girl drank. Arsenic was also found on the dresses worn by the girl's mother and aunt, where Shirley had vomited.

The existence of the insurance policies was discovered in a matter of days. Earle Dennison took an overdose of sleeping pills and was unconscious when arrested. Her life was salvaged at the hospital and thereafter she confessed on several occasions and in writing to having murdered her niece.

Dennison was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. The Alabama Supreme Court unanimously affirmed the decision (Dennison v. State, 259 Ala. 424 (1953)). She was executed in the electric chair on September 4, 1953. Her last words were "Please forgive me for everything I did. I forgive everybody."

From the date that Earle Dennison murdered Shirley to the date of her execution, one year, four months, and three days elapsed. Justice was swift for confessed child murderers in 1953. Much more swift than it is today. And if every case were as clear as the Dennison case and as awful to contemplate, one has to wonder whether public support for the death penalty wouldn't be even stronger.

Women and the Death Penalty in Alabama - Part 1: The Rare Victorian Hanging

The story of Pauline McCoy is a bothersome one. The young woman (aged 19 or 22, depending on the newspaper) died on the scaffold in Union Springs, Bullock County, Alabama, in 1888. At the time, it was extraordinarily rare for a woman to be executed, even a black woman in the deep South (as McCoy was). She was the first woman put to death in Alabama since the Civil War (1864) and that state would not execute another woman until 1930 -- and certainly not for want of murderesses. It was quite the interval, a couple of generations, that McCoy's execution interrupted.

The story of the murder she purportedly committed is also quite unusual. In February, 1887, a white girl from Montgomery named Annie Jordan, 14, wandered away from home. She was a "half-witted" girl, "demented," in the language of the times. A few days later, her unclothed body was found in a pine thicket. Someone had choked her to death.

The incomplete accounts available today suggest that "circumstances" led the authorities to question Pauline McCoy, who was allegedly discovered with the dead girl's clothes. Curiously -- very curiously --Pauline initially pointed the accusing finger at her own father. But it was Pauline who was convicted and sentenced to death. The governor was called on to intercede, but he refused.

McCoy was executed on October 12, 1888. By one account, the hanging was private and only the "necessary persons" were admitted. By another account, five thousand people of all races attended her hanging just outside the colored cemetery, and the sentence was "approved by all classes as just."

She was carried to the scene by a two-horse wagon, riding atop her own coffin. At the top of the wooden steps she gave her last statement: "Tell my mother not to mourn for me, for I will be skipping around in heaven in the morning." With that, she broke down completely and had to be held up as the rope descended. Her neck was broken in the drop.

The modern student of crime frowns at this one. What on earth was the motive for a young woman to kill a half-witted girl? Was Annie Jordan murdered solely for the dress she was wearing? It's possible but hardly seems probable. The available details of the crime seem to suggest a sexual murder: the unclothed victim, the manner of her death, the location of the body....

As a very general rule subject to occasional exception: young women do not go around choking young girls to death. To do so requires some degree of upper body strength -- some strength in the hands -- which young women generally lack. In addition the fact that the body was found in a thicket seems to suggest the killer may have brought the victim there... spent some time doing God knows what. It is also quite troubling that any woman accused of a terrible killing would point to her own father as the culprit.

But one is forced to concede that it is far too late to raise these sorts of questions if the powers-that-were in Alabama didn't think of them when it might have mattered.

Women and the Death Penalty in New Mexico, An Historical Review: The Twice-Hanged Angel

It's not clear today how old she was -- nineteen, maybe, or twenty-six, or twenty-seven -- the reports all differ. It's not even clear what her true name was: Paula Angel by most accounts, but she was also called Pablita Martin. But the most pressing questions, still unanswered nearly 150 years after her execution, are why she was hanged in the first place and how the sheriff managed to bungle the job so badly.

Paula Angel was the first and last woman ever executed in New Mexico (while it was yet a territory). Her crime: she stabbed her married lover, Juan Miguel Martin, to death when he tried to end their affair. Her execution was on April 26, 1861, in San Miguel, now Las Vegas.

Anyone familiar with historical crimes and trials, particularly those involving women, will marvel at such an outcome. A capital conviction for stabbing a lover, a crime passionel? That's certainly not the outcome one would expect for that era (or this era, for that matter; today we'd label it second-degree murder at worst).

One explanation for Miss Angel's hanging is that the newspapermen never got the story. Decades later, the wire services circulated very brief accounts of her trial and execution under headlines such as "The Story The Newspapers Missed." So she may well have lacked the greatest champion anyone facing a murder charge can have: public opinion -- the verdict of the greater jury. Throughout the nineteenth century,  there was a universal revulsion for the execution of women, no matter what their crime, and judges and juries were anxious to find a reason to acquit a woman.

But the authorities in New Mexico Territory were eager to see her hanged. The accounts that survive today report that the jailer taunted her every day leading up to her execution -- "I'm going to hang you until you're dead, dead, dead," is the quote attributed to the sheriff.

What was her social status? Was she a prostitute? Was she a violent menace to the community? Had she committed other terrible acts? Was she unrepentant? Did she sullenly testify at her trial and put in a poor appearance on her own behalf? Most importantly,  was she ugly? The accounts available today don't say.

When it came time to launch Angel into eternity, the sheriff did not build a gallows. He selected a sturdy cottonwood tree outside of town. Paula Angel was driven there on a wagon, forced to ride on her own coffin to the site of her execution, which was witnessed by ranchers and townsmen. The sheriff fixed the rope to the tree, garlanded her with hemp, and then resumed his seat on the wagon and hawed the horses. But he'd made an error. He forgot to tie her hands behind her.

Paula Angel managed to get her fingers underneath the rope in a last pitiful effort to save her own neck, and she struggled on the end of the rope. It must have been an awful sight to see. The crowds surely voiced loud complaints. The sheriff was forced to put the wagon beneath her a second time, to cut her down, retie the rope amid the jeers and catcalls, properly secure her hands and feet, and to repeat the process. She did not survive her second hanging. 

And there hasn't been one woman executed in New Mexico since. Rarely has any woman from that state even faced the possibility, though a few years ago Linda Henning nearly became the second woman executed there -- and she certainly deserved it. Fans of Court TV will recognize the name, since Court TV has rebroadcasted Henning's bizarre trial more than once. She was tried for the cooly planned and bloody murder of Girly Chew Hossencofft, the estranged wife of her boyfriend, in one of the weirdest trials of the century. But the jury rejected the death penalty. The reason Henning agreed to involve herself in the murder of a woman she had not even met: Henning was convinced that Girly Chew was a reptilian alien queen from another galaxy.

You read that right: an alien queen from another galaxy. You can't make this stuff up.

***

Recommended reading: Death on the Gallows : The Story of Legal Hangings in New Mexico, 1847-1923 by West Gilbreath (High Lonesome Books, 2002).

For the stories of the men executed in New Mexico see the excellent compilation by Mark Allan of the Angelo State University Library.

For more on the Hossencofft case see the website of author Mark Horner.