This week in 1999

“. . . Oh, I would like to say in closing, ‘What about those
Cowboys?’”

— William Prince Davis, convicted of robbery and murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed September 14, 1999

When Davis was twenty-one years old, he shot and killed Richard Lang, an employee of the Red Wing Ice Cream Company. Davis fled with a shotgun and $712. A week later, he returned to burglarize the business. He was convicted in a one-day capital murder trial. From childhood Davis had been in and out of reformatory institutions, and by the time he was executed at age forty-two, he had spent half of his life on death row.