This week in 1934

“Don’t strap me to the chair too tightly. It might keep the gas from my lungs.”

— Joseph Behiter, convicted of murder, gas chamber, Nevada.
Executed July 13, 1934

Behiter whistled a tune as he walked to the gas chamber, but few other details of his execution survive. Behiter received the death penalty for murdering Maxine Armstrong, a Las Vegas dancehall girl; he was the seventh man executed by lethal gas in the state of Nevada. The entire account of his execution measured five paragraphs in the Los Angeles Times.