This week in 1997

“First and foremost I would like to tell the victims’ families that I am sorry because I don’t feel like I am guilty. I am sorry for the pain all of them have gone through during holidays and birthdays. They are without their loved ones. I have said from the beginning and I will say it again that I am innocent…”

— Kenneth Ransom, convicted of murder, lethal injection,Texas.
Executed October 28, 1997

Ransom was one of the three men who stabbed employees at a Houston amusement center, in what was considered one of the worst mass slayings in the city’s history. Ransom was the second of the group to receive the death penalty. Before him was Richard J. Wilkerson, a former pit attendant at the facility.