— 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.”

— Johnson William Caldwell, convicted of murder, gas chamber, California.
Executed May 6, 1955

After serving time in the Texas State Prison for embezzlement, Caldwell found his way to California, where he met Lilly Pearl Storts. Three days and one drunken party later, they were married. When Caldwell asked for an informal loan one night, Storts refused. The next morning he returned home, hit her with an iron ipe, and strangled her to death with two belts. When stopped by an officer in Arkansas, he surprised the lawman by saying: “I’m the man you want for the murder of my wife.”

— Tommy Ray Jackson, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed May 4, 2000

In a halfway house where Jackson was paroled after a burglary charge, he met with an accomplice and they discussed how to steal a car to commit more robberies. Later they waited in a University of Texas–Austin parking lot to steal the car of Rosalind Robinson. Driving out of town, they took turns raping her and finally shot her in the back of the head. Jackson kept her car until police arrested him.

— Manuel Pina Babbitt, convicted of rape and murder, lethal injection, California.
Executed May 4, 1999

Leah Schendel, age seventy-eight, did not die of the beating Babbitt gave her. What killed her was the heart attack she suffered from the ordeal. Babbitt, a paranoid schizophrenic and Vietnam War veteran, denied any recollection of what he had done. During his appeal, his lawyers said the post-traumatic stress syndrome he suffered in the wake of his two tours of duty in Vietnam caused him to black out during the murder.

Babbitt was awarded the Purple Heart while on death row.