This week in 1928

“I am innocent. I was arrested for grand larceny and for assault on a previous occasion, but I was found innocent of those charges. I went into the army during the World War when I was only 15. This is the reward.”

— Daniel J. Graham JR., convicted of murder, electric chair, New York.
Executed August 9, 1928

The third uniformed member of the New York Police Department to die in the electric chair since 1915, Graham was accompanying Midtown paymaster Judson Pratt to a construction site when, prosecutors said, he shot the man in the head and stole the forty-seven hundred-dollar payroll. Graham then moved Pratt’s body into the passenger seat and drove from Fifty-third Street all the way to the Bronx with the dead man. Because of a downpour, nobody noticed.