This week in 1936

The ending of Bud Kimball’s six-stanza poem “Bud Kimball’s Philosophy”:

“I’ve been enmeshed and now I must pay
An unjust penalty in my ensnared despair
My eyes are blind by not my mind
Still my heart is kind”

— Earl Bud Kimball, convicted of murder, hanging, California.
Executed May 22, 1936

Kimball, age twenty-one, shot business partner James Kennett twice in the head with a rifle and caved in his skull with a pick after Kennett flashed a knife at him. He was convicted of murder and later admitted to killing twenty-five other men. Kimball later retracted his statement, saying: “I told them all of that stuff out to devilment to get more bananas and cigarettes.”