The once normal practice of public hangings of convicted criminals gradually fell out of favor as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. Starting with New York's introduction of the electric chair in the 1890s, capital punishment was taken over by state governments in the United States and removed from the traditional public hangings outside local jails, which were often carnival spectacles that drew large crowds. Criminals would be executed in the closed environment of a prison instead of outdoors for everyone to see, although some states had dropped public executions early on--Pennsylvania was the first, in 1834. This practice was phased in gradually across the United States during the first three decades of the 20th century. Kentucky would be the very last state to phase out county-level public executions, in no small part due to a botched hanging that also carried racial connotations as the condemned was an African-American man.Rainey Bethea was a native of Roanoke, Virginia, where he was born in 1909. Both of his parents had died by the time he was 16 and he went to work as a household servant for a white family called the Rutherfords. After a year there, he moved to a cabin behind the home of a man named Emmett Wells. Bethea moved to Owensboro, Kentucky in 1933, worked as a laborer, and rented a room from a white woman named Ruth Brown.
In 1935, Bethea was arrested in Owensboro for disorderly conduct and fined $20. Shortly afterwards, he was caught shoplifting two purses from an apparell shop. As the theft exceeded $25 in value, he was charged with felony larceny and received a year in prison. Betheah served six months at the Kentucky State Penitentiary in Eddyville and was paroled in December. After release, he went back to working as a manual laborer in Owensboro and made $7 a week, a decent income in the middle of the Great Depression. Barely a month after returning to Owensboro, Bethea was arrested for breaking into a house while under the influence of alcohol. He managed to plea bargain the charge down to drunk and disorderly conduct and was fined $100. As Bethea could not afford the fine, he spent four months in jail and was released on April 18, 1936.Around 3:00 AM on the morning of June 7, Bethea broke into the home of 70 year old Lischia Edwards on East 5th Street in Owensboro. He climbed onto the roof of an outbuilding next door and then jumped onto the roof of a neighbor's servant's quarters and then walked down a walkway. Bethea climbed over the kitchen roof into Ms. Edwards' bedroom window. There he removed a screen from the window and entered the room. Edwards woke up whereupon Bethea leapt upon her, choked her unconscious, and raped her. He proceeded to search the room for valuables and took some of her jewelry. In doing so, he carelessly left his prison ring behind. Bethea then hid the jewelry in a barn near the house.
Later that morning, the Smith family, who lived downstairs from Lischia, noticed she hadn't gotten up yet. They wondered if the old woman was ok, so they knocked on her bedroom door but there was no answer. It was discoverd that the door was locked with a key on the inside that was still in the lock, preventing it from being opened from the outside with another key. A neighbor was summoned to help. He managed to knock the key loose but still couldn't get the door open. Mr. Smith got a ladder and entered through the transom over the door. Inside he discovered Lischia's battered, nude body.They summoned her physician, Dr. George Barr. Barr viewed Lischia, realized she was beyond all medical intervention, and summoned coroner Dr. Delbert Glenn, who attended the same church as him. They also called police. The bedroom was not disordered at all but the floor was covered in muddy boot prints and they also found Bethea's prison ring. It didn't take long to suspect him given his known criminal record; he had been seen in public wearing the black celluloid prison ring and had his fingerprints on file, so police dusted Lischia's bedroom for them. They identified several prints belonging to Bethea. A search warrant was issued for him.On June 11, a surveyor named Burt Figgins was working alongside the banks of the Ohio River and spotted Bethea hiding under some bushes. Figgins asked what he was doing back there and he replied that he was just cooling off from the hot June sun. Figgins informed his supervisor, Will Faith, who then called police. By the time Faith got there, Bethea had left and was hanging out at a grocery store. Faith went after him and found a police officer in a nearby drugstore but the two were unable to catch Bethea and he got away.
A few hours later, Bethea was seen trying to get on a river barge. Police confronted the suspect, who said he wasn't Rainey Bethea, but a man named James Smith. Not wanting to risk a lynch mob forming, the cops went along with him. After Beathea was arrested, the police noticed a scar on the side of his head that proved who he really was. Judge Forrest Roby decided to move him to jail in Louisville, again out of concern that Bethea might be lynched. During the drive to Louisville, Bethea confessed to raping and strangling Lischia Edwards. He also said he made a critical mistake by taking off his prison ring and leaving it behind. The next day he revealed where he put the victim's jewelry; police found it in the barn right where he said it would be. Due to some technicalities with Kentucky law, he was only charged with rape for the time being.Here was where things got complicated. The state had taken over capital punishment for murder from the county level back in 1911, when the electric chair was introduced to the Bluegrass State (the first person executed in Kentucky's "Old Sparky" was a black man named James Buckner for stabbing a Lebanon police officer to death). However, rape was also a capital offense in Kentucky at this time and state law still allowed those executions to take place the old-fashioned way, at the county level via public hanging. Since 1911, seven persons had been executed in the state for rape--six black, one white. Three took place in the state's electric chair, the others were county level hangings.
Bethea was quickly indicted on the rape charges by a grand jury. On June 25, he was returned to Owensboro for the trial, which took place that same day. Bethea asserted a Clyde Maddox would provide an alibi, but Maddox said he didn't know Bethea. The defense subpoenaed four witnesses--Maddox, Ladd Moorman, Willie Johnson (a supposed accomplice given Bethea's statements), and Allen McDaniel. The first three were served but the sheriff's office could not find a person named Allen McDaniel.On the night before the trial, Bethea announced to his lawyers that he wanted to plead guilty, doing so the next day at the start of the trial. The prosecutor still presented the state's case to the jury despite the guilty plea, requesting a death penalty for the suspect. In his opening statement, prosecutor Herman Birkhead said "This is one of the most dastardly, beastly, cowardly crimes ever committed in Daviess County. Justice demands and the Commonwealth will ask and expect a verdict of the death penalty by hanging."After questioning 21 witnesses, the prosecution closed its case. The defense did not call or examine any witnesses. After a closing statement by the prosecutor, the judge instructed the jury that since Bethea had pleaded guilty, they must "...fix his punishment, at confinement in the penitentiary for not less than ten years nor more than twenty years, or at death." After only 4-1/2 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a sentence of death by hanging. Bethea was then quickly removed from the courthouse and returned to the Jefferson County Jail. In all, his trial lasted just three hours.Five NAACP lawyers, Charles Tucker, Stephen Burnley, Charles Anderson, Harry Bonaparte, and Everett Ray, represented Bethea. On July 10, they motioned for a new trial but the judge refused on the grounds that a motion for one had to have been received before the end of the court's term, which had ended on July 4.
Bethea's team then tried to appeal to the state supreme court, which was on summer recess. On July 29, Justice Gus Thomas arrived back in Frankfort to receive the oral motion. refused to let them file the appeal, on the grounds that the trial court record was incomplete since it only included the judge's ruling. While the lawyers knew the Kentucky courts would deny the appeal, they filed it anyway as a formality in order to exhaust the state court remedies available to them before they filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in Federal court. Once Thomas denied the motion to file a belated appeal, Bethea's attorneys filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in the US District Court in Louisville.During that hearing, which took place August 5, Bethea said he pled guilty against his wishes and wanted to subpoena three witnesses to testify on his behalf, but his initial legal team forced him to plead guilty and did not have the desired witnesses testify. He also claimed that his five confessions had been made under duress and that he had signed one confession unaware of what he was signing. The Commonwealth brought several witnesses to refute these claims. Ultimately, Judge Elwood Hamilton denied the habeas corpus petition and ruled that the hanging could proceed.Bethea's execution then drew national headlines through a strange set of circumstances as Daviess County had a female sheriff, Florence Thompson. She had gotten the job when her husband, Sheriff Everett Thompson, died last April 10 and so she was tasked with hanging Bethea. Ex-Louisville police officer Arthur Hash offered to carry out the hanging pro bono on condition that Mrs. Thompson not publicly disclose his name.
On August 6, Governor Albert Chandler signed Bethea's death warrant and set the date of execution for the 14th. Florence Thompson requested that the hanging not take place in the courthouse yard as she did not want to spoil a costly landscaping job that had just been done there. Chandler was temporarily out of the state, so Lieutenant Governor Keen Johnson issued a new death warrant that moved the hanging to an empty lot near the county garage.After a last meal of fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream, Bethea was transported from the county jail to the hanging site and received the last rites from Father Lamers of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville (he had converted to Roman Catholicism two weeks before the execution). Arthur Hash, dressed in an all-white suit, was visibly intoxicated and he became confused when hangman Phil Hanna instructed him to pull the trigger to open the trap door beneath the prisoner. Instead a sheriff's deputy pulled the trigger and Bethea fell eight feet. Doctors confirmed that he was dead; although his last will had specified that he be buried next to his father in South Carolina, he was instead put in a pauper's plot in Rosehill Elmwood Cemetery in Owensboro.Some 20,000 people witnessed the hanging. Afterwards, Phil Hanna expressed his anger at Arthur Hash for coming to the execution drunk. He had overseen 70 hangings in his career and said this was the worst one he'd even been a part of. Due to the spectacle around the execution of Bethea, the state legislature considered abolishing public executions in Kentucky but the next legislative session was not until 1938. Two other black men, John Montjoy and Harold Venison, currently awaiting execution for rape, were ordered by a judge to be hanged out of public view--their executions took place December 17, 1937 and June 3, 1938.
A bill to ban public hangings was introduced and quickly passed almost as soon as the state legislature convened in January 1938. Governor Chandler signed it into law on March 12, but later said it was a mistake and he felt "our streets are no longer safe." Harold Venison would be the last person hanged in the Bluegrass State.Florence Thompson received a number of death threats for her role in Bethea's execution as well as marriage proposals. She remained sheriff of Daviss County until her late husband's term expired in January 1938. The new permanent sheriff, Simon Smith, offered Thompson a position as a deputy, which she held until 1947. She died in 1961 at age 68 after suffering from Parkinson's Disease for a number of years.
>>17428730>>17428733>>17428716N
I have no opinion one way or another on public executions but I feel like there should be some kind of a gruesome execution for extreme crimes committed by unrepentant criminals. Call it a "retaliatory" execution.
I bet the old lady called him the N word so he was driven into an uncontrollable rage, raped, and strangled her.
>>17428762a preventable tragedy, alas
>>17428761This is something I was thinking about too. Would also provide legal jobs for violently inclined.
I
>>17428743>but later said it was a mistake and he felt "our streets are no longer safe."Felt is the key word there. A lot of the time when people speak about the danger of crime they're speaking emotionally
>>17428716>Pennsylvania was the first, in 1834My state was also the first one to ban slavery. I see we were a bit progressive at times.
G
>>17428725>Inside he discovered Lischia's battered, nude body.>They summoned her physician, Dr. George Barr. Barr viewed Lischia, realized she was beyond all medical intervention, and summoned coroner Dr. Delbert Glennidk how things worked in the 1930s but nowadays if you found a dead body that appeared to have been murdered your first instinct would be to call the cops
>>17428743>as well as marriage proposalslol
