6 Most Evil Women Executed in Sing Sing’s Electric Chair
Ruth Snyder On January 12th, 1928, a photographer named Tom Howard walked into the witness gallery at Sing Sing prison with a single shot plate camera strapped to his ankle and a shutter cable running up his pant leg. When the current hit the woman in the chair, he crossed his legs and triggered the shutter. The next morning, the New York Daily News ran that blurred photograph under a one-word headline and the extra edition sold out in 15 minutes.
It remains the only photograph ever taken of an electric chair execution. The woman in that chair was 32 years old, a mother, a former switchboard operator from Queens. And the story of how she got there started with something as ordinary as a bad marriage. It was 1915 and Ruth Brown was a vivacious 20-year-old when she married Albert Snyder, a 33-year-old art editor for Motor Boating magazine, a William Randolph Hearst publication paying him $100 a week.
The couple were mismatched from the beginning. Albert openly mourned a former fiancee named Jessie Guishard, hung her photograph in their first home, named his boat after her, and once told Ruth that Guishard was the finest woman he had ever met. When Ruth gave birth to their daughter Lorraine in 1918, Albert reportedly blamed her for having a girl instead of a boy.
In June of 1925, Ruth met Henry Judd Gray at a restaurant in Manhattan. Gray was a married corset salesman from East Orange, New Jersey. The affair began almost immediately. The tabloids would later have a field day with their pet names. She called him lover boy. He called her momsy. But what nobody knew at the time was that Ruth had already started planning her husband’s death.
Working through a corruptible insurance agent who was later imprisoned for forgery, Ruth tricked Albert into signing what he believed was a single $1,000 life insurance policy. In reality, the package totaled $48,000 across three separate policies, all carrying double indemnity riders that would compound to roughly $96,000 if death occurred by an unexpected act of violence.
That is approximately $1.48 million today. Ruth did not just forge her husband’s signature and hope for the best. She bribed the postman to ring the doorbell twice when premium notices arrived, so she could intercept the mail before Albert ever saw them. That detail, the postman ringing twice, is the one James M.
Cain later credited as the inspiration for The Postman Always Rings Twice. According to Gray’s confession, Ruth made at least seven prior attempts on Albert’s life. She disconnected the gas range twice. She ran the car engine in a closed garage. She dosed his whiskey with bichloride of mercury, but he poured it out, blaming his bootlegger.
She added sleeping powders to his medicine. Seven separate times she tried to kill her husband, and seven times she failed. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected. On Saturday night, March 19th, 1927, the Snyders attended a bridge party. While they were out, Judd Gray slipped into the house and hid in a spare bedroom.
The family returned around 2:00 in the morning. After Albert and 9-year-old Lorraine went to sleep, Ruth led Gray into the master bedroom. Gray swung a 5-lb iron sash weight at Albert’s head. The first blow only stunned him. Albert grabbed Gray by the necktie. Gray panicked, crying out for Ruth to help. She seized the sash weight and finished what Gray could not.
They stuffed a chloroform-soaked rag into Albert’s nose and garroted him with picture wire. Then they staged a burglary, hiding Ruth’s jewelry under her own mattress. Ruth tied her own wrists, gagged herself, and waited for the neighbors to find her. The story collapsed within hours. Detectives found her wrists tied so loosely they had left no marks.
The house showed none of the chaos you would expect from an actual break-in. Deputy Inspector Arthur Carey told her plainly that they saw a lot of burglaries and that they were not done this way. Then came the detail that ended everything. A small tie pin engraved with the initials JG was found at the scene. It actually belonged to Albert, a keepsake from Jesse Guichard.
But when detectives asked Ruth what JG meant, she blurted out a question, asking whether Judd Gray had confessed. Nobody had mentioned his name. Nobody had even hinted at a lover. Police bluffed that he had. She broke. Gray, traced to Syracuse, folded under interrogation within hours. District Attorney Richard E.
Newcomb tried them jointly before Justice Townsend Scudder in Queens County Supreme Court. Ruth was defended by Edgar F. Hazelton and Dana Wallace. Gray was represented by Samuel L. Miller and William J. Millard. Every major paper in the country sent reporters. Damon Runyon, covering the trial for the Hearst chain, called it the dumbbell murder.
Each defendant blamed the other from the witness stand. Ruth said Gray had acted alone. Gray said Ruth had been the mastermind. The tabloids had already made up their minds about both of them. Ruth was the bloody blonde, the granite widow, the iron widow, the Viking ice matron of Queens Village. Gray was just the putty man.
After weeks of testimony, the jury convicted them both in 98 minutes. Under New York law, the sentence was mandatory. Death. Governor Al Smith refused clemency. A New York Times editorial argued that equal suffrage had put women in a new position, and that if women were equal before the law, they had to pay the same penalties for breaking it.
Ruth converted to Catholicism on death row. On the night of January 12th, 1928, she walked into the execution chamber at Sing Sing. State electrician Robert G. Elliott, a man who prided himself on conducting humane executions, waited by the chair. Ruth spoke her last words, borrowing from Christ on the cross.
She said that the father should forgive them, for they did not know what they were doing. She was the first woman put to death at Sing Sing since Martha Place in 1899, nearly three decades earlier. Gray died six minutes after her. Neither had shown remorse for Albert Snyder. Each had blamed the other until the very end.
Ruth had written a sealed letter for Lorraine to be opened when the girl was old enough to understand. She asked that the child not visit the prison. Lorraine was placed in a Catholic institution by her grandmother Josephine Brown shortly before the execution. The insurance company sued and won. The policies were ruled fraudulent in November 1928 and the appeal was lost in 1930.
Ruth lies in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx under a footstone that reads only May R and her death date. The photograph Tom Howard took that night shaped American attitudes toward capital punishment for the rest of the 20th century. Sophie Treadwell, who attended the trial, wrote the play Machinal in 1928 reframing Ruth as an everywoman crushed by the marriage market.
The case inspired Cain’s Double Indemnity, the 1944 Wilder and Chandler film, and decades of true crime fascination that has never fully faded. And somehow it gets worse. Because Ruth Snyder was not the last woman Sing Sing would put in that chair. She was not even close. Martha Beck. In late 1947, a lonely nurse from Pensacola, Florida, placed an ad with a lonely hearts mail-order club and got a letter back from a man who called himself a successful businessman from New York.
She had no money for him to steal. So he wrote her a rejection letter and moved on to his next victim. Most swindlers would have forgotten her name by the following week. But Martha Beck did not take rejection well. She threatened to kill herself. The man came back, and what started as a failed con turned into one of the most disturbing partnerships in American criminal history.
Martha Jule Seabrook was born on May 6th, 1920 in Milton, Florida. She had been obese since childhood, had endured abuse during her youth, and was emotionally tormented by a mother who seemed incapable of affection. Despite everything working against her, she trained as a nurse, married briefly to a bus driver named Alfred Beck, had two children, and rose to the position of superintendent at the Pensacola Hospital for Children.
By any reasonable measure, she had pulled herself out of the worst circumstances imaginable. She was intelligent and capable. But she was also desperately lonely, and that loneliness would become the hinge on which everything turned. The man who answered her ad was Raymond Fernandez. Born in Hawaii in 1914 to Spanish parents, Fernandez had suffered a serious head injury in 1945 when a steel hatch struck him on a freighter near Curacao.
He emerged from that injury a different person, bald, personality altered, and devoted to voodoo and what he called black magic, a set of beliefs he picked up from a cellmate during a year in a federal prison in Tallahassee for a stolen clothing case. By 1946, he was living in New York running a scheme that targeted widows through a lonely hearts correspondence club called Mother Denans’ Friendly Club.
He would court them by mail, visit them in person, charm them out of their savings, and disappear. When Beck moved to New York to be with him, she brought her two children. Fernandez told her to get rid of them. On a January afternoon in 1948, she walked into a Manhattan Salvation Army office and abandoned both of them.
From that point forward, Beck posed as Fernandez’s sister to disarm the women who answered his ads. The arrangement worked until Beck’s jealousy turned violent. Every time Fernandez slept with a target, she intervened. The pair later confessed to as many as 17 to 20 deaths between 1947 and 1949, though only three were ever confirmed.
Among the earlier victims was a woman named Jane Lucille Thompson, who died under suspicious circumstances during a trip to Spain with Fernandez in 1947. No autopsy was ever performed. Another was Myrtle Young of Arkansas, whom Fernandez had married under a fake name in 1948. She died of a barbiturate overdose.
But here is the detail that everyone missed at the time. The confirmed murders were not distant or abstract. They were close, personal, and staggering in their brutality. Janet Fay was a devout 66-year-old widow from Albany, whose husband Matthew had died in 1946. She began corresponding with Fernandez under a fake name in late 1948.
He visited her in Albany for New Year’s 1949. Beck was introduced as his sister. Fay accepted his marriage proposal, drained roughly four to six thousand dollars from her bank accounts and traveled with the couple to a rented apartment at 15 Adeline Street in Valley Stream, Long Island. That night Beck bludgeoned Janet Fay with a hammer.
Fernandez finished the killing. They stuffed the body into a trunk stored it briefly at his sister’s house then buried it in the cellar of a rented home in Ozone Park, Queens under fresh concrete. What gave them away was a detail that should have been obvious. Forged typewritten letters from Janet alarmed her stepdaughter Mary Spencer of Amsterdam, New York because Janet Fay did not type.
You would think someone would have said something. Nobody did. And the killings continued. They moved on to 28-year-old widow Delphine Downing in Wyoming Township, Michigan who had a two-year-old daughter named Reynold. On February 28th, 1949 Downing accidentally saw Fernandez without his toupee and became hysterical.
Fernandez sedated her and then shot her in the head with her own .32 caliber pistol. What followed regarding the child was described in court filings as deliberate and premeditated. The scope of what happened to two-year-old Reynold was detailed during the trial in terms that the court record makes clear but that do not bear repeating here.
Both mother and daughter were buried under fresh cement in the basement. Suspicious neighbors called police who arrived on March 1st, 1949. Fernandez, believing that Michigan’s lack of a death penalty would protect him, confessed eagerly and even bragged about the New York murder. Governor Thomas E.
Dewey of New York, personally negotiated the extradition. The trial for the Janet Fay murder opened on June 9th, 1949 before Judge Ferdinand Pecora in Bronx Supreme Court. The defense pleaded insanity. Prosecutors brought in testimony so graphic that even the era’s most sensational tabloids could not print it. Beck strode into court in green shoes and bright silks and once walked from the witness chair to plant a kiss on Fernandez’s mouth in front of the jury.
The press was relentless. They called her a lonely heart blob, a fat, unfeeling woman, a 300-lb morbid giantess. Every headline reduced her to her weight. Judge Pecora instructed the jury that abnormality alone did not constitute the kind of insanity that would excuse a criminal act. After 12 and 1/2 hours of deliberation on August 18th, 1949, the jury convicted both.
Death was mandatory. Appeals went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which declined review. Governor Dewey denied clemency. The date was set for March 8th, 1951. On the night of March 8th, 1951, tradition at Sing Sing dictated that the weakest condemned went first. Fernandez had to be carried into the chamber, paralyzed with fear.
But he rallied long enough to declare that he wanted to shout it out that he loved Martha, and he asked what the public could possibly know about love. He died at approximately 11:15 that night. Beck had been told 2 hours earlier about his final note professing his love. She walked into the death chamber under her own power, flanked by two weeping matrons.
She gave the press her final statement. She said her story was a love story, but that only those tortured with love could understand what she meant. She said she had been pictured as a fat, unfeeling woman, but that she was not unfeeling, not stupid, not moronic. She asked how many crimes in the history of the world had been attributed to love.
Witnesses said her mouth formed the words so long as the straps were fastened. She was pronounced dead at 11:24. She was 30 years old. She was buried in an unmarked grave. The case inspired The Honeymoon Killers in 1969, Deep Crimson in 1996, and Lonely Hearts in 2006. Martha Beck killed for a man who had tried to throw her away.
Fernandez killed for money. Together they created something neither could have managed alone, a traveling operation of fraud and murder that left a trail of bodies across three states. She was the sixth woman executed by New York in the 20th century. And the woman who came after Beck into Sing Sing’s chair would be executed not for murder at all, but for something the judge called worse than murder, Ethel Rosenberg.
On the morning of August 11th, 1950, federal agents arrested a 34-year-old mother of two on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and charged her with conspiracy to commit espionage. Her husband Julius had been arrested three weeks earlier. The government believed he had run a Soviet spy ring that passed atomic secrets to Moscow.
They believed Ethel knew about it. That was 1950. By June of 1953, both were dead. But here is what makes Ethel Rosenberg’s case different from every other name on this list. The FBI’s own director privately admitted the case against her was not strong. She was arrested as leverage, a pressure point designed to make Julius talk.
He never did. And the government’s bluff ended in the electric chair. Ethel Greenglass was born on September 28th, 1915 at 64 Sheriff Street on the Lower East Side, the only daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her father Barnett was a struggling sewing machine repairer. Her mother Tessie openly favored her sons and made Ethel feel like an outsider her entire life.
Ethel graduated Seward Park High School at 15, worked as a clerk, organized a strike of 150 women workers, won a federal reinstatement order, and pursued music and theater, singing with the Schola Cantorum at Carnegie Hall. She joined the Young Communist League around 1935. The following year, she met Julius Rosenberg at a New Year’s Eve benefit.
They married on June 18th, 1939. Julius, a City College electrical engineer, joined the Communist Party that December and went to work for the US Army Signal Corps. He was recruited as a Soviet asset on Labor Day, 1942. The conspiracy centered on Ethel’s youngest brother, David Greenglass. As a US Army machinist assigned to Los Alamos.
Greenglass provided Julius with sketches of the implosion lens of the plutonium bomb. The handoff involved a courier named Harry Gold, a torn Jell-O box top as a recognition signal, and a meeting in Albuquerque in June 1945. According to David’s trial testimony, Ethel typed up his handwritten notes at the Rosenberg apartment that night. That single claim about the typing would become the most consequential piece of testimony in the entire case.
The investigation unraveled like falling dominoes. British physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed in February 1950. Fuchs led to Gold. Gold led to Greenglass. Greenglass cut a deal that protected his wife Ruth. And to do so, he gave the FBI his sister’s husband. The Justice Department’s interrogation plan for Julius explicitly included the question of whether his wife had been aware of his activities.
She was not a target. She was a tool. Julius was arrested on July 17th, 1950. Ethel followed on August 11th after testifying before a grand jury. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover privately wrote in a memo that the case was not too strong against Ethel Rosenberg, but that for the purpose of acting as a deterrent, it was very important that she be convicted, too.
She was not a suspect. She was a bargaining chip. And the timing of what happened next was almost too perfect. Just 10 days before the trial opened, both David and Ruth Greenglass changed their original story. David had previously told investigators the atomic data was passed on a New York street corner. Now suddenly both said Ethel had typed the notes in her living room.
That change put Ethel at the center of the conspiracy. Judge Irving R. Kaufman presided. Assistant U.S. Attorney Irving Saypol led the prosecution with a young Roy Cohn as second chair. The defense was handled by Alexander and Emanuel Bloch, a father and son team. David and Ruth Greenglass were the only direct witnesses tying Ethel to espionage.
And their testimony was the backbone of the government’s case. The jury convicted on March 29th, 1951. Sentencing came on April 5th. Judge Kaufman declared from the bench that he considered their crime worse than murder. He said their conduct in putting the atomic bomb into the hands of the Russians years before American scientists predicted they would have it had already caused the communist aggression in Korea with casualties exceeding 50,000.
He said millions more innocent people might pay the price of their treason. He called Ethel a full-fledged partner. That is not a typo by the way. A federal judge said espionage was worse than murder then sentenced a woman to death based largely on her brother’s testimony. Testimony that her brother later admitted he had fabricated.
Ethel was the lone female prisoner on Sing Sing’s death row for two full years. She wrote to her attorney Manny Bloch that they expected her to break under the strain because she was a woman. That they thought the death house would haunt her and that without Julius she would collapse. She said she would not. And she did not.
For 26 months she sat in that cell, the only woman surrounded by men awaiting execution, and she held firm. Albert Einstein and Pope Pius XII publicly urged clemency. Rallies were held across Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre called the case a legal lynching. Both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations received personal letters from the Rosenberg’s young sons, Michael and Robert.
President Eisenhower refused clemency in a statement on February 11th, 1953. He said the nature of the crime far exceeded the taking of a life, that it involved the deliberate betrayal of the entire nation, and that it could result in the death of many thousands of innocent citizens. On June 17th, 1953, Justice William O.
Douglas issued a stay of execution. Two days later, Chief Justice Fred Vinson convened the full Supreme Court in a special session and vacated it 6 to 3. The defense had argued for delay because executions on the Jewish Sabbath would offend the Rosenberg’s faith. Judge Kaufman responded not by postponing, but by moving the execution earlier to before sundown at 8:00 in the evening, rather than the usual 11:00 at night.
The couple last saw each other and their sons on June 16th. In their final letter to Michael and Robert, written that morning, they told their boys that at first they would grieve bitterly, but that they would not grieve alone, and that they must eventually come to believe that life was worth the living. Ethel added a note to Manny Block asking that her wedding ring and 10 Commandments medal go to her sons.
Julius walked first at 8:04 that evening. He died after three 2,000-V jolts at 8:06. Ethel followed in a dark green print dress, accompanied by Rabbi Irving Koslowe, reciting Psalms 15 and 31. The first three shock cycle did not kill her. Doctors detected a heartbeat after attendants had already begun unstrapping her from the chair.
They stopped, reattached the electrodes, and applied two more jolts. Witnesses reported smoke rising from her head. Dr. H. W. Kipp pronounced her dead at 8:16. The entire process had taken 12 minutes. Deputy Attorney General William P. Rogers later said of the failed pressure strategy that she had called their bluff.
In 1995, the declassified Venona project decrypts confirmed that Julius had run a sizeable Soviet spy ring, though most of the intelligence he passed involved proximity fuses, radar, and jet engines, rather than atomic weapons. The documents indicated Ethel was peripheral and was never assigned a code name. In 2001, on the television program 60 Minutes II, David Greenglass admitted publicly that he had committed perjury about the typing to protect his own wife.
Ethel Rosenberg was the only American woman ever executed by the federal government for a crime other than murder. Her sons Michael and Robert were adopted by Anne and Abel Meeropol after the execution. Abel Meeropol was the songwriter who wrote Strange Fruit. The boys grew up, took the Meeropol name, and continued to seek a posthumous exoneration for their mother through the Rosenberg Fund for children.
The debate over whether Ethel Rosenberg deserved to die has never been settled. What has been settled through declassified documents and her own brother’s admission of perjury is that the key evidence against her was a lie. Ethel Rosenberg died because the government needed someone to break. The next woman to reach Sing Sing’s chair was there for a very different reason.
She had already beaten the system twice, walked free both times, and still could not stop killing. Frances Creighton. In 1923, a woman in Newark, New Jersey, was tried for poisoning her own teenage brother with arsenic. She was acquitted. Within days, she was arrested again, this time for poisoning her father-in-law.
She was acquitted a second time. The press called her the Borgia of Newark, and then she disappeared from public life for over a decade. She resurfaced on Long Island in 1935 when another person in her household died of arsenic poisoning. And by sheer coincidence, the same toxicologist who had testified against her in 1923 was the one who examined the body.
How does someone walk away from two poison trials and end up back in the same chair in front of the same expert 12 years later? Mary Frances Avery was born around 1898 in New Jersey. She married John Creighton, and by 1920, the couple were living with his parents in Roseville, Newark. That year, John’s mother, Anna, died of fever and cramps.
His father, Walter, died shortly after with the same symptoms. Then, in 1923, Frances’ own teenage brother, Charles Raymond Avery, who who moved into the household, and whose $1,000 life insurance policy named Francis as beneficiary, became violently ill and died. An autopsy ordered over the Crightons’ objection found arsenic.
The investigation determined the pattern was consistent with deliberate poisoning. Francis and John were tried for Raymond’s murder. She was acquitted. Days later, she was re-arrested for Walter Crighton’s death. The legendary New York toxicologist Alexander O. Gettler, chief poisons expert for the medical examiner’s office, found only trace arsenic that time, and she was acquitted again.
Public sympathy helped. She was visibly pregnant at trial, nursing her infant son in her cell between proceedings. The jury let her go. The newspapers did not. They branded her the Borgia of Newark, and the Crightons fled. They landed in Baldwin, Long Island, where John joined the local American Legion post. There he befriended Everett C.
Applegate, a 36-year-old investigator with the Nassau County Veterans Welfare Bureau. Around 1934, Everett moved in with his wife, Ada, who was 34 and mostly bedridden at over 250 lb, along with their 12-year-old daughter. The two families crammed into a four-room bungalow to save money during the depression. What happened inside that house was a pattern of abuse and misconduct that went undetected until it was far too late.
Everett Applegate exploited his position of authority and trust to harm the Crightons’ 14-year-old daughter. The scope of the abuse, as documented in trial testimony, was extensive and ongoing. Francis was aware. Ada was reportedly aware. And nobody intervened. If Francis Creighton had stopped here, this would be a very different story.
In mid-September 1935, Ada Applegate became violently ill with diarrhea and bilious vomiting. She was hospitalized briefly, returned home with no diagnosis, and died on September 27th, 1935. The death was ruled coronary occlusion. The funeral procession was already at the graveside on October 1st when Nassau County District Attorney Martin W.
Littleton received an anonymous package in the mail. Inside were yellowing newspaper clippings from Francis Creighton’s 1923 poison trials. And no, that is not made up. Somebody mailed the prosecutor a dead woman’s press clippings at the exact moment the coffin was about to go into the ground. Littleton confronted Everett Applegate and forced him to authorize an autopsy.
The same Dr. Alexander Gettler, who had testified in the Newark trials 12 years earlier, now examined Ada’s organs. He found roughly 11 grains of arsenic, well over three times a lethal dose, likely administered in eggnog laced with rat poison. 12 years apart, the same expert, the same poison, the same woman at the center of it.
Francis cracked under a 12-hour interrogation and gave several conflicting confessions. She said she had killed Ada so Everett could make things right regarding the situation with her daughter and stop the neighborhood gossip. She alternately described Everett as the prime mover and admitted sole responsibility depending on the hour.
The trial opened on January 12th, 1936 before Justice Courtland A. Johnson at the Nassau County Court in Mineola. Gettler testified to the 11 grains. John Creighton took the stand and claimed he had known nothing about any of it. The defense painted Francis as a weak woman led wrong by an evil man. After 10 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted both Francis and Everett.
Death was mandatory. On death row, Francis collapsed repeatedly claiming hysterical paralysis. A five-doctor commission concluded she was suffering hysteria as a result of her impending death but was legally sane. Her appeals failed. Governor Herbert Lehman refused to commute. On the night of July 16th, 1936 the Sing Sing physician administered a hypodermic of morphine.
Francis was wholly unconscious, possibly comatose. State electrician Robert G. Elliott, the same man who had executed Ruth Snyder 8 years earlier was visibly shaken by what greeted him. Francis arrived in a pink nightgown and black satin kimono slippers on her feet a rosary woven through her fingers the back of her head shaved for the electrode.
She was wheeled into the death chamber in a wheelchair the first time any condemned prisoner had been transported that way in Sing Sing’s history. She was lifted limp into the chair. The current was applied at 11:04 that night. She made no sound spoke no last words and was dead within moments. Half an hour later, Everett Applegate followed her.
He used his final breath to declare his innocence and to call down God’s mercy on the prosecutor who had put him there. The press christened Francis the Long Island Borgia, a woman who had beaten poison charges twice and walked free both times, only to circle back to the same method, the same poison, and the same toxicologist who finally put an end to it.
Francis Creighton was the fourth woman to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair. The first had been strapped into that same seat 37 years earlier before any woman on Earth had ever been executed by electricity. Martha Place. On Monday morning, March 20th, 1899, a 49-year-old woman walked into the execution chamber at Sing Sing Prison, leaned on the warden’s arm, and sat down in the electric chair.
She was wearing a black gown she had sewn herself. No woman had ever sat in that chair before. No woman anywhere in the world had ever been executed by electricity. Martha Place was the first. Brooklyn, 1893. Martha Garretson was a 44-year-old dressmaker and single mother when she took a position as housekeeper to William W.
Place, a recent widower living at 598 Hancock Street. Place needed someone to care for his daughter Ida. Martha married him within 2 months. From the beginning, neighbors and the family would later tell police, Martha resented the girl. Then, on a date roughly 2 years before the murder, Martha attacked Ida in an incident that police documented as a deliberate assault.
She later told investigators she acted out of envy of the girl’s youth. The attack was never separately prosecuted. Police had been called to the home at least once in 1897 after Martha threatened Ida’s life. The warning signs were all there. Nobody acted on them. On the morning of February 7th, 1898, William and Martha quarreled bitterly over money, including William’s refusal to allow Martha’s biological son Ross to live in the home.
17-year-old Ida took her father’s side. William left for work. Martha waited until she was alone with the girl. What the investigation later uncovered was staggering in scope. The autopsy determined that the cause of death was asphyxiation. Investigators documented evidence of chemical burns and blunt force trauma consistent with a sustained and deliberate attack.
The medical examiner’s findings indicated that Ida had been subjected to multiple forms of harm before she died. She was found in her upstairs bedroom. Martha then waited downstairs. When William came home that evening, she attacked him with an axe she had retrieved from the cellar. She struck him on the head, fracturing his skull.
He wrenched himself free, staggered out onto the sidewalk, and roused the neighbors. Martha retreated to the kitchen, opened all the gas burners, draped clothing over her head, and tried to take her own life by asphyxiation. She was unconscious but alive when patrolmen broke in. Ida lay dead upstairs. Now Martha could have confessed.
She could have pleaded guilty. She did neither. She maintained her innocence her hospital bed and told police she had carried the axe upstairs because she was afraid her husband was going to attack her. The trial opened in King’s County Supreme Court before Judge William F. Heard. The press coverage was savage in a way that only the 1890s could produce.
The New York Times described her as rather tall and spare with a pale, sharp face, a long, pointed nose, thin lips, and a retreating forehead and then compared her appearance to that of a rat. Prosecutor George Ashton detailed the prior acid attack and the earlier police calls. William Place, slowly recovering from his fractured skull testified against his own wife.
The defense pleaded insanity citing a childhood sleigh injury that her brother claimed had left her mentally unstable. The jury rejected it in under 4 hours. Conviction meant death. Martha fainted at the verdict. Her appeal to the New York Court of Appeals failed. Her lawyers petitioned the new governor, Theodore Roosevelt who had taken office on January 1st 1899.
The question of whether women should be electrocuted at all was being debated publicly. The Medico-Legal Society of New York held a contentious forum that February. The only female speaker, Ida Trafford Bell drew applause when she insisted that women had just as much right to be electrocuted as a man. Roosevelt agreed.
In his denial he wrote that the murder was one of peculiar deliberation and atrocity and that to interfere with the law in this case would be justified only if no murderess were ever to face capital punishment again, regardless of circumstances. He added that his sympathies in criminal cases were for the wronged and not the wrongdoer.
The execution posed challenges nobody had anticipated. No woman had ever been prepared for the electric chair. Her thick gray hair had to be clipped on the crown for the head electrode. Her long skirt was slit at the ankle so the leg electrode could be attached without exposing her. She entered the death chamber at 11:00 in the morning on March 20th, 1899, the 26th person electrocuted at Sing Sing.
A Catholic priest walked beside her. State electrician Edwin F. Davis applied 1,760 volts. Her last words were a low murmured prayer. Some witnesses recalled her saying, “God help me.” Others remembered it as “God save me.” The first jolt killed her. The prison doctor called it the best execution that had ever occurred there.
The San Francisco Call noted by contrast that the last woman condemned to die in New York had gone to the gallows shrieking and fighting, but that Martha Place had hardly uttered a sound. She was buried in the family plot in East Millstone, New Jersey without religious observances. William Place, now a widower for the second time, did not attend.
But Martha Place’s grim distinction as the first woman to die in the electric chair would not be its last. 36 years later, a Canadian-born roadhouse owner from upstate New York would sit in that same chair for killing a disabled man over an insurance payout worth less than the cost of the trial. If you’re liking this video and you’re not subscribed yet, now’s the time.
We drop new cases every day. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Eva Coo. On the night of June 14th, 1934, a woman and her accomplice drove a disabled man to an abandoned farmhouse on top of Crum Horn Mountain in Otsego County, New York. They told him they were going to dig up wild cherry trees for transplanting.
While his back was turned, she struck him in the head with a wooden mallet. As he lay on the ground, the car was driven over his body, reversed, and driven over him again. And then, at that exact moment, the property owner arrived with a family of potential buyers to show them the house. Five adults and five children walked up to the car under which the body still lay, and had a 15-minute argument about trespassing before leaving.
Nobody looked down. Eva Coo was born around 1889 in Haliburton, Ontario, Canada. She divorced a railroad worker named Bill Coo around 1920 and settled in Oneonta, New York by 1924. She bought an apartment building, opened a speakeasy during prohibition, and earned the nickname Little Eva. In 1928, she purchased a roadhouse on the Cooperstown-Oneonta Highway that did brisk business throughout the dry years.
When prohibition ended in 1933 and the Delaware and Hudson Railroad cut passenger service the following year, the money dried up almost overnight. Eva became desperate. Harry Wright was the answer to her problem, or or she thought. Everyone called him Gimpy because of his pronounced limp. He was a 50-something disabled handyman, an alcoholic, and by every account, a man of limited intellectual capacity.
His dying mother had more or less dropped him into Eva’s care, and Eva had allowed him to live in a back room at the inn from 1931 onward in exchange for chores. After Harry’s mother died, Eva acquired the deed to the family home. The house then burned down under mysterious circumstances, and Eva collected the insurance and sold the lot.
Harry signed his will leaving everything to Eva. Then she began layering life insurance policies on him. Prosecutors would later detail roughly $7,000 in coverage, several policies carrying double indemnity riders for accidental death, all naming Eva as sole beneficiary. Pay attention to this next detail because it explains everything that followed.
Eva was not just insuring a man she planned to kill. She was insuring a man nobody would miss. A man with no family left, no connections, no voice. The perfect victim. She enlisted Martha Clift, a young employee at the roadhouse, in the plot. On the afternoon of June 14th, 1934, Eva persuaded Wright that they were going to dig up trees.
The three drove a rented car to the abandoned farmhouse on Crumhorn Mountain. Eva stepped inside the building, came out with a mallet, and struck Wright once on the head from behind. As he lay on the ground, he reportedly said that now he knew why she had brought him there. Clift then started the car and ran over the body, reversed, and drove over him a second time, crushing his chest.
That is when Mrs. Eva Fink, the property owner, arrived to show the farmhouse to a man named Benjamin Hunt, his wife Sarah, and their five children. Mrs. Hunt and Mrs. Fink walked over to the parked car and exchanged sharp words with Coo and Clift about the trespassing for roughly 15 minutes. Eva told them she had stopped only to relieve herself.
The Hunts left. They had stood feet from a dead man and never realized it. Coo and Clift loaded Wright’s body into the car, drove back toward the roadhouse, and dumped him in a ditch off State Route 7, about 100 yd from the inn, to stage a hit-and-run. Eva reported Harry missing to a state trooper at the Chenevus outpost.
The coroner initially ruled it a hit-and-run accident. The case cracked open from three directions at once. First, the local funeral director, Revo Tillapaugh, was suspicious of the wound pattern and said so to police. Second, investigators discovered the unusual stack of insurance policies in Eva’s name. Third, and most damning, the Hunt family walked into the Cooperstown State Police Barracks days later and reported the bizarre encounter at the farmhouse.
A search of Eva’s home turned up dozens of additional insurance policies on friends, employees, and acquaintances, all naming Eva as beneficiary. Both women were arrested on June 25th, 1934. Each blamed the other. The trial before Justice Riley H. Heath opened in Cooperstown on August 16th, 1934, the first murder trial in the village in 13 years, and it turned into a spectacle.
Reporters from the New York Daily News, the New York Mirror, the Albany Times Union, and dozens of other papers crowded the courthouse. Entrepreneurs sold 25 cent miniature wooden mallets as souvenirs outside. The press called Eva the mallet murderer. Martha Clift turned state’s witness in exchange for a reduced charge.
She connected every dot. The prosecution exhumed Wright’s body twice, dressing the corpse in second-hand clothing each time and restaging it on Crum Horn Mountain to corroborate [clears throat] witness statements. On September 6th, 1934, after deliberating only 1 to 2 hours, the jury of nine farmers and three laborers convicted Coo of first-degree murder, mandatory death.
Clift received second-degree murder and 20 years to life, eventually serving roughly 13 at Bedford Hills before vanishing into anonymity. Eva’s execution was originally scheduled for October 1934, but was stayed pending appeal. The New York Court of Appeals affirmed her conviction on April 30th, 1935. Governor Herbert Lehman refused to commute.
A scandal erupted when a New York Mirror article, allegedly written by Eva, turned out to have been smuggled by her own attorney, who had taken $3,000 to sneak a journalist posing as a stenographer into her interviews. Eva refused her last meal, believing to the very end that the governor would call. He did not.
She entered the death chamber at 11:00 that night on June 27th, 1935, escorted by two matrons, wearing a blue dress with a red and white floral pattern. 34 witnesses watched. She walked erect, shoulders pushed back, eyes puffy from weeping, but with what Warden Lewis E. Lawes later described as a trace of her old bravado.
She sat unassisted, gripped the armrests, and gasped once when the death cap was placed on her head. Her last words, spoken to the matrons, were a simple goodbye, darlings. Robert G. Elliott applied the current. She was pronounced dead within minutes. Warden Lawes, Sing Sing’s most famous warden and a vocal opponent of the death penalty, gave Eva what may be the most striking epitaph any executed prisoner ever received from the person responsible for their confinement.
He said he did not know if she was innocent or guilty, but that he knew she got a rotten deal all around. He said one of her trial attorneys had written to him asking for four invitations to her execution. That, Lawes said, was the kind of defense she had. Eva’s family in Ontario, who had believed her dead for 14 years before reading the news of her arrest, never claimed her body.
She is buried in an unmarked plot in Adams Corners, Putnam County, near Peekskill. Between 1899 and 1953, Sing Sing’s electric chair took the lives of six women. Some were guilty beyond question. Others went to their deaths under circumstances that are still debated today. All All them walked the same corridor, sat in the same chair, and heard the same hum of the generator before the end.
