This week in 1957
In the death chair, after Warden Tinsley patted him on the shoulder:
“Thanks, Warden.”
— John “Jack” Gilbert Graham, convicted of murder, gas chamber, Colorado.
Executed January 11, 1957
Once a petty criminal and drifter, Graham would eventually force drastic changes in airport security measures on one of the darkest days in Colorado’s history. A twenty-three-year-old husband and father whose family lived with his mother, Daisie King, Graham owed more than four thousand dollars in bad checks. In an attempt to cash in on his mother’s life insurance policy, Graham placed a bomb made of twenty-five sticks of dynamite in her suitcase. Eleven minutes after takeoff, the bomb went off in the cargo hold, killing thirty passengers and five crewmen.
Time magazine quoted Graham saying, “As far as feeling remorse for those people, I don’t. I can’t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”
This week in 1985
Addressing Gov. Richard W. Wiley directly:
“Killing is wrong when I did it. It is wrong when you do it. I hope you have the courage and the moral strength to stop the killing. I have no bitterness toward anyone. May God bless and forgive you all.”
— Joseph Carl Shaw, convicted of murder, electric chair, South Carolina.
Executed January 11, 1985
Shaw’s pending execution reignited capital punishment politics in the state, leading the South Carolina Coalition Against the Death Penalty to place a large ad in the state’s largest newspaper. The opposition distributed more than a thousand bumper stickers with a picture of the electric chair and the caption “Use it!”
Shaw pleaded guilty in the shooting deaths of a teenage couple, after which he had mutilated the young girl’s body. The New York Times reported, “Mr. Shaw was also sentenced to life in prison for murdering Betty Swank about a week before the other killings.” The newspaper noted that Shaw had accomplices in both crimes.
This week in 1900
“Good-bye, people. I gladly give my life for my sweetheart. I loved her.”
—William Wasco, convicted of murder, hanging, Pennsylvania.
Executed January 9, 1900
The Washington Post ran a brief that read, in part, “The crime for which Wasco was executed was the murder of Annie Sestak, a comely young Hungarian girl, who had refused to marry him. He shot himself at the same time, but soon recovered from his wounds.”
