This week in 1920

“If I’ve got to leave this good old Earth, I want to make a statement before I go. I’m feeling all right, but it’s over others I’m worrying.”

— Howard Baker, convicted of murder and robbery, electric chair, New York.
Executed December 9, 1920

Baker left his wife and three children to join a gang headed by his own forty-five-year-old mother and her twenty-three-year-old lover. The gang robbed the Buckminster and Graves clothing store, and Baker shot a night watchman during the getaway attempt.“Good-bye, boys,” he said to his fellow death-row inmates as he left the cellblock. He told Dr. Squire, the head prison physician, “I appreciate everything you have done.”