This week in 1905

After taking off her eyeglasses:
“These are for my sister. Please see that she gets them.”

— Mary Mabel Rogers, convicted of murder, hanging, Vermont.
Executed December 8, 1905

Rogers, age twenty-two, faced her execution “with the stoical calmness she has maintained since her arrest.” She had chloroformed her husband Marcus and rolled him into a river to drown with the help of “a half witted boy,” Leon Perham. Granted two reprieves by the state of Vermont, Rogers waited three years before her death sentence was carried out after a decree from the U.S. Supreme Court.