“Gentlemen, I not only lose my own life, but it kills my children and my mother.  I am an innocent man.  I wish you good bye.  Don’t look on me with a bad face when I am gone.  That’s all I have to say.”

— Michael Emil Rollinger, convicted of murder, hanging, Illinois

Executed November 17, 1899

Hall, who was credited with killing 19 men over a 20 year time span, had prison guards and town police so worried that measures were taken the night before and the morning of his execution to regulate traffic into the town. Hall’s friends were so vigilant in trying to get his sentence overturned that local police searched cars coming into the town, confiscating weapons and preventing moonshine from being imported into the town.

“Mom, I just want y’all to know that I love you. No matter what in life, I want you to stay strong. Doreen, you have been a very special part of my life, too. I want you to keep doing what you are doing. Stay strong. Dad, I want you to stay strong.”

— Tony Chambers, convicted of abduction and murder, lethal injection, Texas
Executed November 15, 2000

The day the body was found in a wood behinda middle school, Chambers provided the police with oral, written, and videotaped confessions about the rape and strangulation of an 11-year-old girl. In the confession, he included details about carvings on her stomach done with a protractor and scalpel which they believed only the killer would know.

“I’m sorry for shooting your son down at that particular robbery. Politicians say that this brings closure. But my death doesn’t bring your son back—it doesn’t bring closure. I wish that I could do more, but I can’t. I hope this brings you peace.”

— Emerson Rudd, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed November 15, 2001

When Rudd was eighteen years old, he and three others entered a seafood restaurant, intending to rob it. After the manager, Steve Morgan, handed over eight hundred dollars, Rudd shot him in the abdomen. He died the next day.