Each of these ten executions followed a conviction, a death sentence and, in most cases, years of appeals. Beyond that, they have little in common. A federal prisoner went to the gallows at Leavenworth in 1930 after writing to the president to ask that no one save him. A house painter died in the electric chair at Sing Sing for the murder of a twelve-year-old girl. Two of Hitler’s senior officials were hanged at Nuremberg on the same morning. A New York couple were electrocuted for espionage in a case historians still dispute. Three American murder cases of the late twentieth century ended in the death chamber, one of them in an argument over the electric chair itself. A bombing in Oklahoma City brought the first federal execution in thirty-eight years, and a court established in Iraq after the American invasion sent a former president to the gallows. In many of them judges, governors, survivors and critics spoke on the record about the sentence.
Carl Panzram was born on June 28, 1892, in East Grand Forks, Minnesota, according to the papers he left behind, now held by San Diego State University. His father left when he was about eight. At eleven he robbed a neighbor and was sent to the Minnesota State Training School, the first of a long series of reformatories, jails and prisons in Montana, Oregon, Kansas and New York. He used aliases including Jeff Davis and John O’Leary.
In 1928 he was held in the Washington Asylum and Jail on a burglary charge. A young guard there, Henry Lesser, encouraged him to write the story of his life. Panzram wrote a few pages at a time, and Lesser carried them out of the jail. He claimed to have killed 23 people. His prison records, according to the university’s archivists, show convictions only for burglary and larceny, and later for one murder.
That murder took place at the U.S. Penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, where he had been sent to serve twenty-five years. On the morning of June 20, 1929, he attacked Robert G. Warnke, the prison’s civilian laundry foreman. Warnke was forty-seven, a Cleveland man who had served in Cuba with Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders and had worked at Leavenworth since 1921. The Federal Bureau of Prisons, which honors him among its fallen staff, describes him as quiet and well liked, and records that Panzram refused to make any statement about the killing. The psychiatrist Karl Menninger examined Panzram and found him sane. He was convicted of Warnke’s murder and sentenced to hang. He then wrote to President Herbert Hoover and to the Society for the Abolishment of Capital Punishment, urging them not to seek a reprieve. He was hanged at Leavenworth on September 5, 1930. His manuscript was published in part in 1970 as Killer: A Journal of Murder.
On June 3, 1928, a twelve-year-old girl named Grace Budd disappeared in New York City. More than six years passed before investigators, following a letter written in November 1934, arrested Albert Fish, a sixty-six-year-old house painter, on December 13, 1934.
He was tried for her murder at White Plains, New York, from March 11 to March 22, 1935, before Judge Frederick P. Close, who said at the outset that he intended to have "a quiet orderly trial." The defense, conducted by James Dempsey and Frank J. Mahony, argued that Fish was insane. Its central witness was the psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who testified that Fish could not tell right from wrong. The jury found him sane and guilty of murder, and he was sentenced to death. Albert Fish was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing on January 16, 1936.
The International Military Tribunal opened at Nuremberg on November 20, 1945, six and a half months after Germany surrendered, with one judge each from the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and France. On October 1, 1946, it convicted nineteen defendants and acquitted three. Twelve were sentenced to death.
Ernst Kaltenbrunner had become Chief of the Security Police and SD, and head of the Reich Security Head Office, on January 30, 1943, succeeding Reinhard Heydrich. The tribunal acquitted him of crimes against peace, finding no evidence that he planned aggressive war beyond the 1938 operation in Austria. It convicted him of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Under his command, the judges found, his office directed the murder of Soviet prisoners of war and of Jews, the Einsatzgruppen continued their killings, and the Gestapo fed forced laborers into the concentration camps. Kaltenbrunner told the court that he had been confined to foreign intelligence and seldom knew what was happening. The tribunal rejected that. It called it "inconceivable" that his signature could have appeared so often on such orders without his authority, and found that he was "an active participant" in many of the office’s crimes.
Alfred Rosenberg had been the party’s ideologist, the editor of its newspapers and, from July 17, 1941, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. The tribunal found that he helped plan the invasion of Norway and the occupation of the Soviet Union, that the task force bearing his name plundered museums, libraries and private homes, and that his directives provided for segregating Jews into ghettos and for meeting labor quotas by any means necessary. It noted that he sometimes objected to the excesses of his subordinates, but that he "stayed in office until the end." He was found guilty on all four counts.
Both men were sentenced to death by hanging. On October 16, 1946, ten of the condemned were hanged at Nuremberg; Kingsbury Smith, the pool reporter for the International News Service, recorded Kaltenbrunner as the third to die and Rosenberg as the fourth. Hermann Göring, also sentenced to hang, killed himself the night before. Alfred Rosenberg was no relation of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed in New York seven years later.
The chain that led to the Rosenbergs began in Britain. The physicist Klaus Fuchs was arrested there on February 2, 1950, and admitted spying for the Soviet Union. His American courier, Harry Gold, confessed to the FBI on May 22. In June, David Greenglass, a machinist who had worked on the atomic bomb project in New Mexico and had passed information to Gold, was charged. Julius Rosenberg, his brother-in-law, was arrested on July 17, 1950. Greenglass’s sister, Ethel Rosenberg, was taken into custody on August 11.
The trial opened in the Southern District of New York on March 6, 1951. On March 29 the jury found Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their co-defendant Morton Sobell guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. On April 5, Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced the couple to death and Sobell to thirty years. "I consider your crime worse than murder," Kaufman told them, and he held their conduct responsible for the Communist aggression in Korea and its casualties. Greenglass, who pleaded guilty and testified for the prosecution, received fifteen years and was released in November 1960. His wife, Ruth, who also testified, was never indicted.
Two years of appeals and protests followed. On June 19, 1953, the couple’s wedding anniversary, Julius Rosenberg was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing at 8:05 p.m. and Ethel at 8:15 p.m.
The evidence released since has divided the case in two. The Venona decrypts, Soviet intelligence messages broken by American code breakers and made public in 1995, show Julius Rosenberg, under the cover names ANTENNA and LIBERAL, as the most active agent in the traffic, gathering weapons information from engineer friends in government work. The National Security Agency’s own history of the case says the decrypts show Ethel as a loyal communist who knew of her husband’s work and may have run errands, and that they "do not suggest she committed any crimes worthy of capital punishment." The same account says the couple passed weapons-related information but nothing about the atomic bomb, which undercuts the premise of Kaufman’s remarks about Korea.
At trial, Greenglass testified that his sister had typed his notes for the Soviets. His grand jury testimony, held back at his request until his death in 2014 and released by the National Archives on July 15, 2015, says nothing of the sort; there he said he had never spoken to Ethel about these matters. Historians who pressed for the release argued that Ruth Greenglass, a legal stenographer, was the likelier typist, and the historian Steve Usdin said Greenglass "sent his sister to the electric chair to save himself." Greenglass himself later admitted that he had lied about his sister to protect his wife.
The Rosenbergs' sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, were adopted after the executions and took a new surname. In December 2016 they went to the White House and asked President Barack Obama to exonerate their mother. They did not seek a pardon, which they said would imply guilt. They accepted that their father was guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, while arguing that he did not engage in atomic spying and should not have been executed. "This is our mother we’re talking about," Robert Meeropol said. The White House declined to comment.
On February 9, 1978, Kimberly Leach, twelve, was reported missing from her junior high school in Lake City, Florida. She was found on April 7, 1978, in Suwannee County. Ted Bundy was convicted of her murder and kidnapping at a trial held in Orlando in 1980, after the venue was moved, and was sentenced to death for the murder and to life for the kidnapping.
He had already been convicted in a separate Florida case: the murders of Margaret Bowman and Lisa Levy, both university students, at the Chi Omega sorority house in Tallahassee, together with three counts of attempted first-degree murder and two of burglary. He received two death sentences. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed that case in June 1984. In the Leach appeal, decided in May 1985, the court ruled that testimony refreshed by hypnosis was inadmissible in Florida criminal trials from then on, but found that it had not affected the verdict and upheld the conviction and sentence.
In his final days Bundy confessed to 28 murders in Washington, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, California, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Vermont, according to United Press International; most of those confessions never came before a court. In an interview with the broadcaster James Dobson, he described how his remorse faded with each killing. The United States Supreme Court and the Florida Supreme Court rejected his last appeals, and a claim of mental incompetence failed. At the order of Governor Bob Martinez, he was executed in the electric chair at the state prison at Starke on January 24, 1989, and was pronounced dead at 7:16 a.m. His last words were a request that his love be passed to his family and friends. Several hundred people gathered outside the prison cheered at the news, while a small group of death penalty opponents held candles across the road.
John Wayne Gacy confessed to killing 33 young men and boys between 1972 and 1978 near Chicago. The case broke in 1978, when officers watching him over the disappearance of a fifteen-year-old boy gathered enough to obtain a search warrant for his home, the Associated Press later reported. At his trial in 1980 he pleaded insanity. The jury rejected the defense and in March 1980 convicted him of 33 counts of murder, sentencing him to death on twelve of them.
The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed the convictions in 1984. In April 1993 the federal appeals court in Chicago turned down his habeas petition, rejecting his complaints about the jury instructions, the questioning of jurors and his trial lawyers' performance. Over fourteen years on death row, Gacy recanted his confession and denied all but one of the killings.
He was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois and was pronounced dead at 12:58 a.m. on May 10, 1994, at the age of 52, after a blockage in the tubing delayed the procedure. His last words, as relayed by the state’s corrections director, were that taking his life would not make up for the loss of the others. William Kunkle, who had prosecuted him and watched him die, said he "got a much easier death than any of his victims." Nearly two dozen relatives of the dead waited in an administration building for the news. The brother of John Mowery, who was nineteen when he was killed in 1977, said he felt that justice had finally been served.
The work of naming the dead continued long after the execution. In 2011 the Cook County Sheriff’s Office reopened the effort to identify eight victims who had never been named. That November, DNA from his sister and brother identified the young man known as Victim No. 19 as William George Bundy of Chicago, born in 1957, who had left for a party in October 1976 and never came home. "Today’s terribly sad, but it is also a day that provides closure," his sister said. In October 2021 the sheriff’s office named Victim No. 5 as Francis Wayne Alexander, a North Carolina native who had moved to Chicago by way of New York and was killed in 1976 or early 1977, at twenty-one or twenty-two.
On May 11, 1982, Nancy Weiler and her daughters, Kristina, ten, and Katherine, five, were murdered in their home in Jacksonville, Florida. Police arrested Allen Lee Davis two days later. A witness who had dropped him off near the scene testified that Davis afterward had a camera matching one the family reported missing. In 1983 a Duval County jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder and recommended death, and the judge imposed three death sentences.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and sentences on October 4, 1984. The federal Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit denied his habeas petition in August 1997. Under a death warrant for July 8, 1999, Davis returned to the state supreme court, arguing among other things that the condition of the state’s electric chair made his execution cruel or unusual. The court rejected his claims on July 1. Justice Anstead, joined by Justice Shaw, wrote that death by electrocution was itself cruel and unusual punishment.
Davis was executed in the electric chair on July 8, 1999. Florida paused executions afterward, and the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to the chair.
On September 24, 1999, ruling on the claim of another condemned man, Thomas Provenzano, the Florida Supreme Court upheld electrocution, while urging the legislature to adopt lethal injection. Three of the seven justices dissented. Justice Shaw wrote that electrocution "is a spectacle whose time has passed," and attached to his opinion photographs of Davis taken after the execution; the opinion was made public, the photographs included, on the internet. On January 14, 2000, in a special session, the legislature made lethal injection the state’s method of execution, leaving the electric chair only for a prisoner who chose it in writing. The bill passed the Senate 37 to 0 and the House 102 to 5. With the law changed, the United States Supreme Court dropped the case. On February 23, 2000, Terry Melvin Sims became the first person executed by lethal injection in Florida.
At about 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a massive explosion tore apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. It killed 168 people, among them eight federal law enforcement officers. The building housed a day-care center that could be seen from the front. Seventy-seven minutes after the blast, Oklahoma State Trooper Charles Hanger stopped a yellow Mercury with no license tag on Interstate 35, near the Billings exit, about seventy-eight miles north of the city. He arrested the driver, Timothy McVeigh, for carrying a concealed, loaded gun.
The trial was moved to Denver after the district court found that a fair trial was not possible in Oklahoma. Prosecutors presented evidence that McVeigh had been driven by anger over the federal siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco, Texas, in 1993, and chose the date to mark its anniversary. His friends Michael and Lori Fortier testified that he had told them of his plans in 1994. On June 2, 1997, the jury convicted him on all eleven counts: conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of a weapon of mass destruction, destruction by explosives and eight counts of first-degree murder. On August 14, 1997, he was sentenced to death. The Tenth Circuit affirmed in September 1998.
The execution was first set for May 16, 2001, and was postponed after the FBI disclosed that it had withheld more than 4,500 documents from the defense; the Justice Department said nothing in them cast doubt on his guilt. On June 11, 2001, McVeigh was executed by lethal injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was pronounced dead at 8:14 a.m. Eastern time. It was the first federal execution in thirty-eight years. He made no final statement and left a handwritten copy of the poem "Invictus." In Oklahoma City, survivors and relatives watched a closed-circuit broadcast. "This is a completion of justice," said a mother whose four-year-old daughter died in the bombing. President George W. Bush said the victims had received justice, not vengeance. Amnesty International called the execution a failure of human rights leadership.
In July 1982 there was an attempt on Saddam Hussein’s life in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad. What followed, according to the charges brought more than two decades later, was a campaign of revenge against the town: mass detentions, the forced removal of families and, after a summary trial before the Revolutionary Court, death sentences for 148 Shia men and boys.
The Iraqi High Tribunal tried Saddam Hussein and other former officials for the Dujail killings. On November 5, 2006, it convicted him of crimes against humanity and sentenced him, his half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the former intelligence chief, and Awad Hamed al-Bandar, the former head of the Revolutionary Court, to death by hanging. Four defendants received prison terms and one was acquitted. Human Rights Watch, which monitored the trial, called it "fundamentally unfair." Its report cited evidence withheld from the defense, limits on cross-examining witnesses, a presiding judge whose conduct undermined the appearance of impartiality, and government pressure that contributed to the first presiding judge’s resignation.
The defense received the full 300-page judgment on November 22. The appeals chamber confirmed the verdict and sentence on December 26. The tribunal’s statute barred commutation and required execution within thirty days. Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn on December 30, 2006, reportedly in a former military intelligence building in north Baghdad. A video recorded on a mobile phone showed him being taunted on the gallows, and its spread angered Sunni Arabs and embarrassed the Iraqi government and the United States. Barzan al-Tikriti and al-Bandar were hanged on January 15, 2007. Human Rights Watch warned that the execution jeopardized his second trial, for genocide in the 1988 Anfal campaign. "History will judge these actions harshly," said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch.
• June 3, 1928: Grace Budd disappears in New York City.
• June 20, 1929: Carl Panzram kills Robert G. Warnke at the U.S. Penitentiary, Leavenworth.
• September 5, 1930: Panzram is hanged at Leavenworth.
• March 22, 1935: Albert Fish is convicted of Grace Budd’s murder at White Plains.
• January 16, 1936: Fish is executed at Sing Sing.
• November 20, 1945: The International Military Tribunal opens at Nuremberg.
• October 1, 1946: The tribunal convicts nineteen defendants, including Ernst Kaltenbrunner and Alfred Rosenberg.
• October 16, 1946: Ten of the condemned, Kaltenbrunner and Rosenberg among them, are hanged.
• March 29, 1951: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage.
• April 5, 1951: Judge Irving Kaufman sentences them to death.
• June 19, 1953: The Rosenbergs are executed at Sing Sing.
• February 9, 1978: Kimberly Leach disappears from her school in Lake City, Florida.
• March 1980: John Wayne Gacy is convicted of 33 murders.
• May 11, 1982: Nancy, Kristina and Katherine Weiler are murdered in Jacksonville.
• July 1982: An attempt on Saddam Hussein’s life in Dujail is followed by mass arrests and executions.
• January 24, 1989: Ted Bundy is executed at Starke, Florida.
• May 10, 1994: Gacy is executed at Stateville Correctional Center.
• April 19, 1995: The Oklahoma City bombing kills 168 people.
• June 2, 1997: Timothy McVeigh is convicted on all eleven counts.
• July 8, 1999: Allen Lee Davis is executed in Florida’s electric chair.
• September 24, 1999: The Florida Supreme Court upholds electrocution; Justice Shaw’s dissent includes photographs of Davis.
• January 14, 2000: Florida adopts lethal injection.
• June 11, 2001: McVeigh is executed at Terre Haute, Indiana.
• November 5, 2006: Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death for the Dujail killings.
• December 30, 2006: Saddam Hussein is hanged in Baghdad.
• January 15, 2007: Barzan al-Tikriti and Awad al-Bandar are hanged.
• July 15, 2015: David Greenglass’s grand jury testimony is released.
• December 1, 2016: The Rosenbergs' sons ask President Obama to exonerate their mother.
• October 25, 2021: Cook County names Francis Wayne Alexander as a Gacy victim.