This week in 1996

“I would like to say for my family and my friends, as the poem was written, ‘Remember me, but let me go.’”

— John Albert Taylor, convicted of rape and murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed January 26, 1996

Taylor’s was the first Utah firing-squad execution since 1977. Convicted of raping and strangling an eleven-year-old girl, Taylor lifted his chin for the prison warden to secure a strap around his neck before his execution was carried out.

Sherron King, the mother of Taylor’s victim, sat alone in a hotel the night of the execution. “I felt something pass through my heart around midnight and felt he was dead,” she told the Associated Press. “Part of me wanted him to die and the other part of me felt bad for him,” she said. “My heart goes out to his mom.”