The Last Public Hanging
Mel Tharp
There is something about the sight of a stack of pancakes on a platter along with strips of crisp bacon that is generally tantalizing to the taste buds. To me, however, this evokes memories of a special date in the history of American justice. That date is August 14, 1936.
On that date in history Rainey Bethea was publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. It would officially be recorded as the last public hanging in the United States.
In our contemporary it seems incongruous that a ten-year-old boy would be preparing to leave at dawn to watch a man die on the scaffold. Yet, it seems to my parents as well as thousands of others that this was the proper thing to do. School teachers and ministers advised parents that it would serve as an example for their offspring to see a bad man pay for his crime.
As I finished my breakfast, I remember dad urging me to “hurry up, son, and get dressed. We’ll need to get there early.”
Meanwhile, at 3:00 a.m., on a lonely stretch of highway between Louisville and Owensboro, L.I. Dishman and A.O. Reisz, Daviess County Sheriff’s deputies, were racing the dawn to Owensboro. Their passenger, a 22-year-old black man named Rainey Bethea, had only 152 minutes to live.
A few miles away, a Louisville&Nashville train sped westward through the night toward Owensboro. In a crowded passenger can sat author Hash, the man who would spring the trap to send Bethea to his doom. Hash was conspicuous in his white suit and white Panama hat - peculiar attire for a hangman.
At the Daviess County Courthouse, Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the 43-year-old sheriff sat waiting and worrying. If Hash failed to arrive, this mother for four would become the first woman in America to hang a man.
On the streets of Owensboro, a city of less than 20,000, crowds estimates at between 10,000 and 25,000 also waited. They slept in the courthouse yard, on the running boards of cars and in ditches along the banks of the Ohio River.
In the parking lot of the county garage at First and Locust Streets, a bright streetlight cast eerie shadows across the waiting crowd. The raw lumber of a new gallows built the afternoon before, towered 25 feet.
The area beneath it, the pit into which the condemned man would drop, was open to public view. The heavy weather-proofed rope, with 13 turns in the noose, hung waiting through the night.
For 329 years, since a blacksmith named John Read was hanged at Jamestown, Virginia, public hangings had been a part of American justice. But this would be the last American crowd to watch a man die in the gallows.
The road that would end on the 13 gallows steps began Sunday, June 7, 1936.
Elischa Edwards, a wealthy widow, lived in a three-room apartment on the second floor of a house at 322 E. Fifth Street in Owensboro. When she failed to answer repeated knocks on her door that morning about 11 o’clock, Robert Richardson, a neighbor, climbed a stepladder to look over the transom.
When neighbors entered the apartment they found the 79-year-old woman lying dead across her bed. There were bruises on her throat,a pool of blood beneath her.
Coroner Delbert J. Glenn would rule at 6 p.m. That she had been strangled and raped during the night.
Two hours after Mrs. Edwards’ body was found, police searching her apartment discovered a black celluloid rung with a black “R” against a white background. It was a cheap ring of a type commonly found at the state prison in Eddyville.
The investigation showed the robber had climbed onto a coal shed roof and then onto a servants house and onto the roof of a covered walkway and finally onto the kitchen roof and into Mrs. Edward’s apartment.
Within hours, police were looking for Bethea, a Roanoke, Virginia native who had moved to Owensboro five years earlier.
Bethea had worked as a house servant for several Owensboro families and had been employed at the apartment house where Mrs. Edwards lived. A year before he had been sent to Eddyville for burglary. In January, after serving six months he was released on parole.
The celloloid ring was identified as belonging to Bethea.
On June 16, a warrant was taken charging Bethea with murder and rape. Shortly before 2 p.m., a worker at Owensboro River Sand&Gravel spotted Bethea beneath some bushes along the Ohio River bank.
At 2:00, Patrolmen Dayton Hicks and Frate Auston arrested Bethea at the foot of Daviess Street.
Twenty-five minutes later, Bethea was arraigned before Police Judge F.A. Roby who ordered his case sent to the grand jury. At 2:50 p.m., he was in the police car speeding toward Louisville.
It was one of the hottest summers on record in Owensboro. Little rain had failed for the past months. Temperatures were short and local officials wanted to prevent a lynching.
In route to Louisville Bethea confessed to Patrolman Raleigh Bristow and Deputies Dishman and Reisz. In the Louisville jail he signed a confession saying the diamond rings, necklace and earrings stolen from Mrs. Edwards’ apartment were hidden behind curtains in his room near 11th and Fredrica Streets.
A search of Bethea’s room, however, revealed nothing.
The next day, Nethea denied his guilt, saying he “must have been drunk” when he confessed.
The next day he confessed again - this time with W.E. Crady, a jail custodian. In this confession, he said the jewelry was in a barn across from Mrs. Edwards’ apartment. The jewelry and the dress belonging to Mrs. Edwards were later found there.
On June 22, 1936, Circuit Court Judge George S. Wilton ordered a special session of the grand jury to convene.
Although Bethea was charged with rape, robbery and murder, Commonwealth Attorney Herman Birdhead sought indictment on the charge of only - rape. In 1911, Kentucky had established death by electrocution for all capital offenses except rape. The penalty for rape remained death by hanging.
“I expect to prosecute the defendant for rape and if he is convicted, he will be hanged in Daviess County,” Birkhead promised the grand jury.
At 10:00 a.m., the grand jury began its deliberation. At 11:15 a.m., they returned their single rape indictment.
Three days later, the minimum time allowed by Kentucky law, the trial began.
Crowds began to gather downtown at 7:00 a.m. Everyone entering the courthouse was searched for weapons.
At 9:05, Bethea was led into the courtroom.
A pool of 111 men was called for jury duty. The first 12 were called.
Before the trial began, Bethea entered a plea of guilty. The prosecution presented its case anyway. But there was no defense.
After three hours of testimony, the jury retired to consider the sentence,
Four and one-half minutes later, at 12:23 p.m., they returned to the courtroom. The unanimous verdict reached on the first ballot was death by hanging.
Bethea rose to stand before the bench. Wilson ordered him “hanged by the neck with his body suspended so as to cause death” between sunrise and sunset July 31.
On July 10, four black lawyers in Louisville began working on Bethea’s case, hoping to show that he had not received a fair trial because he was a black man charged with raping a white woman.
When they presented a motion for a new trial the following, the deadline for such motions had already expired.
On July 28, Bethea’s new lawyers filed an appeal. It was denied. Then U.S. District Judge Elwood Hamilton in Louisville delayed the execution until he could decide. Then on August 3rd he ruled that it could proceed.
On August 6, Govermor A.B. Chandler signed a new death warrant ordering Bethea to hang at sunrise on August 14.
Bethea’s lawyers said there would be no further appeals. Now, the end was only hours away.
At 6:00 p.m., August 13, Bethea had his last meal of fried chicken, pork chops, cornbread, pickles, mashed potatoes, lemon pie and ice cream.
After finishing his meal, Bethea asked for a pencil and paper. On five sheets, each of a different color, he wrote to his sister, Ora Fledge of Nichols, South Carolina:
“Dear Sister: This is my last letter and I have told them to send you my body and I want you to put it beside my father and I am saved an don’t you worry about me because I am going to meet my maker and don’t you worry at all because I am saved looking to meet you someday in the other world so goodby and pray that we will meet again some day.”
Now, at 4:00 a.m., Bethea’s long ride in the patrol car was almost over.
Hash train was pulling into Union Station. Sheriff Thompson was there to meet him. At 4:25, she went to the gallows to wait for her deputies and Bethea.
The crowd grew steadily and dawn was approaching as I walked with dad to the gallows site. There were children, many of them babies.
There were “hanging parties” and “necktie parties.” Hot dogs, popcorn, soft drinks, tamales, fish and fruit were hawked on the streets. Confession stands were set up on the courthouse lawn and near the gallows.
People stood on the roofs of downtown buildings, clung to the tops to telephone poles and stood on automobiles. The limbs of nearby trees were thick with people. A few even stood on the top of the hearse that waited for Bethea’s body. Some who had staked out front row seats began selling them to late comers.
At 4:20, activity began to pick up. The new gallows were tested for the first time. George Phil Hanna, a White County, Indiana farmer, had knotted the ropes on 80 necks on 40 years as a hangman. But he had never pulled the lever to drop the men to their deaths.
Now, at 5:12, the crowd began shifting, looking for Bethea. At 5:29, a patrol car stopped near the jail and Bethea was led through the crowd, handcuffed between two deputies.
“I will die happy,” he said. “I have made my peace with God.”
Bethea stopped at the foot of the gallows. “Let me take off my shoes. I want to put on a clean pair of socks,” Bethea said. He left his shoes and dirty socks at the foot of the scaffold.
Bethea prayed with Rev. Herman J. Lammers the Catholic priest who had baptized him in jail. As he climbed the steps, Bethea said, “I want to see the priest again.” Lammers patted his shoulder.
At the top, tested the trap with his left foot to see if it would support his body standing on it. He made his religious confession to Lammers and received last rites.
The black hood was then slipped over Bethea’s head. Sheriff Lester Pyle, of Carmi, Illinois, who had come to assist Hanna, bound his hands with a strap.
Hannas’ professionalism demanded decorum at hangings. There was always a prearranged signal for the trap to be sprung. He didn’t want the condemned man to know it was coming.
But when Hanna was ready, Arthur Hash was looking the other way. He failed to see the signal. “Do it now!” Hanna commanded sharply.
“I forgot to pull a bolt out of the trigger,” Hash recalled later. “But somebody pulled it for me. Then Bethea’s body fell. It was the most horrific sound I ever heard.”
Bethea’s body fell straight 8 1/2 feet to the end of the rope. His head jerked sharply to the right. There was no movement in his body as he hung there. Death appeared to be instant - aneous though it would be eight minutes before the doctors pronounced him dead of a broken neck.
Despite his request to be buried next to his father, Bathea’s body was taken to Potter’s Field behind Clmwood cemetery to rest in an unmarked grave at a horse barn.
Meanwhile, back at town, Hash told reporters: “I’m drunk as hell. I am getting away from this town as fast as I can. Well, anyhow it’s over.”
For months after witnessing Bethea’s death on the gallows, I was a child with a tortured soul. At school I frequently skipped play times on the premise that I was behind in my studies. At night I would lie in bed and try to imagine what was going through Bethea’s mind during his last moments of life.
Gradually, as I grew older, I managed to put that hot August morning in 1936 into the deepest, darkest vaults of my mind.
I can relate to the words of William Shakespeare:
“ ‘Tis in my memory lock’d,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.”
Or more succinctly, in the words of Arthur Hash, the man that dropped Bethea to his death.
“Well, anyhow, it’s over.”
