This week in 1947

“I’m ready. I’ve been ready for a long time.”

— Louise Peete (aka Louise Peete Judson or Lofie Louise Preslar) , convicted of murder, gas chamber, California.
Executed April 11, 1947

Facing the gas chamber for the murder of an elderly woman, Peete had already spent twenty- five years in San Quentin for the shooting death of a man. Between those murders, two husbands from her three marriages had committed suicide. One reporter observed that she “kept a roomful of newsmen guffawing. . . . It was a most amazing interview with a woman about to die.”