In the five state region of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri, 1027 men and women are known to have been legally hanged, gassed or electrocuted for capital crimes during the century after the Civil War. Drawing on thousands of hours of research, this comprehensive record covers each execution in chronological order, filling numerous gaps in a largely forgotten story of the American experience. The author presents each case dispassionately with the main focus given to essential facts.
While the Midwest may be known for salt-of-the-earth folks, it's also home to murder and mayhem. In Murderous Acts: 100 Years of Crime in the Midwest, Keven McQueen explores a century of true crimes committed in 10 Midwestern states, from the 1840s to the 1940s. With a touch of gallows humor, McQueen relies on original research to recount infamous transgressions—including Michigan's Robert Irving Latimer case, the serial murders of Nebraskan Jake Bird, and the bloody deeds of Kansas's Bender family—as well as gruesome tales that are less well known, such as the Wisconsin man with a penchant for swinging an axe at the necks of men he didn't care for, the Hoosier who killed his sweetheart in the midst of a Halloween ball, and the French nobleman who wreaked havoc in a St. Louis hotel. Murderous Acts will intrigue and delight fans of true crime and will send a shiver down the spine of any reader fascinated by the dark history of America's Heartland.
Before 1850, all legal executions in the South were performed before crowds that could number in the thousands; the last legal public execution was in 1936. This study focuses on the shift from public executions to ones behind barriers, situating that change within our understandings of lynching and competing visions of justice and religion. Intended to shame and intimidate, public executions after the Civil War had quite a different effect on southern Black communities. Crowds typically consisting of as many Black people as white behaved like congregations before a macabre pulpit, led in prayer and song by a Black minister on the scaffold. Black criminals often proclaimed their innocence and almost always their salvation. This turned the proceedings into public, mixed-race, and mixed-gender celebrations of Black religious authority and devotion. In response, southern states rewrote their laws to eliminate these crowds and this Black authority, ultimately turning to electrocutions in the bowels of state penitentiaries. As a wave of lynchings crested around the turn of the twentieth century, states transformed the ways that the South's white-dominated governments controlled legal capital punishment, making executions into private affairs witnessed only by white people.
Presented in chronological order, this book provides essential details about the 1,152 men and women who were legally put to death in North and South Carolina during the century after the Civil War. Each entry contains information about the criminals themselves and the deeds which cost them their lives. Based almost entirely on original archival materials such as court records, contemporary newspapers, prisoner files, appellate reports, gubernatorial correspondence, etc., a newer picture of the historical record emerges that students of Southern justice will find both revealing and disconcerting.
In the state of Georgia, 1025 men and women are known to have been hanged or electrocuted for capital crimes in the century after the Civil War. Based on more than twenty years of investigative research, this chronological record of these legal executions was pieced together from diverse sources in and outside of the state, with many details never before made public. The author documents the facts as they occurred without delving into the politics of capital punishment.
