This week in 1936

“My God! Have mercy on me.”

— Delbert Green, convicted of murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed July 10, 1936

Green had been convicted of murdering his wife because, he said, she was unfaithful. The same evening, he also killed his stepfather and mother-in-law. After he was convicted and sentenced to death, he tried to plead insanity on the grounds that his whole family had a history of mental illness—his father and aunt had been sent to asylums, and his grandfather committed suicide. In the days before his execution, Green’s mother and fellow inmates wrote letters attempting to sway the governor to commute his sentence.

Green’s daughter, who was seven at the time of his execution, defended her father almost forty years later in an interview with the Ogden Standard Examiner, saying that he would have done anything for her mother, who was unfaithful.