— Richard “Rickey” Harrison, convicted of murder, electric chair, New York.
Executed May 13, 1920

As Harrison and four other gunmen robbed a private Manhattan social club, police arrived, and the ensuing gun battle left one patron dead. Prosecutors contended, in a reconstruction of the incident, that Harrison fired the fatal shot. His fellow accomplices received jail sentences, but Harrison, age twenty-six, faced capital punishment.

As he left death row, fellow condemned inmates shouted, “Good-bye Rickey, we know you are innocent!” He replied: “It is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

— John Goodwin, convicted of murder, hanging, Arizona.
Executed May 13, 1913

After he deserted the army at Fort Apache with his friend William Stewart, Goodwin killed two men who had gone to the San Carlos Reservation to hunt deer. One of the deer hunters had kicked Stewart’s dog after it bit him. Goodwin and Stewart were sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders, but their lawyer thought he could reduce the sentence with a retrial.

The new verdict led Goodwin to the gallows.

— Leonel Torres Herrera, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed May 12, 1993

Herrera was convicted in 1981 for the shooting death of a Los Fresnos police officer. Before he died, the officer, Enrique Carrisalez, identified Herrera from a police mug shot. At the time, authorities argued, Herrera was fleeing the scene of the murder of another public safety officer—a crime Herrera later pleaded guilty to.

Years later, attorneys argued that it was actually Leonel’s brother Raul (murdered in 1984) who had committed—and confessed to—both killings and supplied sworn affidavits from witnesses who claimed to hear the confessions. The case, Herrera v. Collins, made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice William Rehnquist ruled that Herrera’s “actual innocence” claim did not warrant federal habeas corpus relief.

— Michael Lee Mcbride, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed May 11, 2000

After a tumultuous eleven-month relationship, during which McBride, a bartender, moved closer to Texas Tech University to be with Christian Fisher, his ex-girlfriend, he shot Fisher and a friend to death outside his apartment. He proceeded to shoot himself in the head but survived to tell a male nurse, “If you ever need any pointers of information on how to handle your women, just let me know.”

— Melvin Sullivan and Verne Braasch, convicted of robbery and murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed May 11, 1956

Sullivan was shot side by side with his partner in crime, Braasch. The men were convicted together of the murder of a service station attendant during a twenty-dollar robbery in Beaver, Utah. Their executions had been moved back four times.

— John Wayne Gacy, convicted of rape and murder, lethal injection, Illinois.
Executed May 10, 1994

Gacy became one of the most notorious serial killers in U.S. history after his conviction for the murder of thirty-three boys, many of whom he sexually molested and strangled. He hid most of his victims under his house, and others were found nearby. To friends Gacy was “Pogo the Clown,” because he liked to entertain neighborhood children. The press labeled him “the Killer Clown.”

— Isaiah Evans, convicted of murder, hanging, Louisiana.
Executed May 10, 1878

“Isaiah Evans (colored).” That’s all the New York Times revealed about the twenty-three-year-old man hanged for murdering an eighteen-year-old man. More than two thousand attended the execution. After a clergyman prayed, Evans’s rope was adjusted, he fell, and his neck broke. He had admitted to intoxication the night he shot a man named Edward Bowen.

— August Vogel, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed May 9, 1930

Vogel was known as “the Whim Slayer” for shooting a man who bumped into his car, according to newspapers. Vogel led a gang of Chicago thieves that included his brother George, who confessed to the murder in a last-ditch effort to save Vogel. Vogel, age twenty-seven, had previously attempted to pin the murder on George. But neither was able to shift the blame, and Vogel was electrocuted as planned.

— Joseph Taylor, convicted of violent assault and robbery, hanging (possibly unsuccessful), Massachusetts.
Executed May 8, 1788

Taylor was part of a gang of thieves who mugged a man in broad daylight. As Taylor and his accomplices fled, the man started screaming for help. Since the man was mugged on a public highway, Taylor was convicted of capital highway robbery and was hung in a gallows constructed at the scene of the crime.

Some accounts record that Taylor actually died on the gallows, while others insist he fled to Sweden.

Herman Webster Mudgett, best known by his alias H. H. Holmes or Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, convicted of murder, hanging, Pennsylvania.
Executed May 7, 1896

Holmes killed more than twenty people in his hotel on Chicago’s South Side and sold some of their remains to medical schools, according authorities. Perhaps it’s understandable that Holmes instructed that his body be cemented into his coffin to fend off grave robbers after his execution. He had built his hotel to prepare for Chicago’s World Fair, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and many of his guests were his victims.

Holmes was the “devil” in Erik Larson’s book “The Devil in the White City.”