“My God! Have mercy on me.”

— Delbert Green, convicted of murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed July 10, 1936

Green had been convicted of murdering his wife because, he said, she was unfaithful. The same evening, he also killed his stepfather and mother-in-law. After he was convicted and sentenced to death, he tried to plead insanity on the grounds that his whole family had a history of mental illness—his father and aunt had been sent to asylums, and his grandfather committed suicide. In the days before his execution, Green’s mother and fellow inmates wrote letters attempting to sway the governor to commute his sentence.

Green’s daughter, who was seven at the time of his execution, defended her father almost forty years later in an interview with the Ogden Standard Examiner, saying that he would have done anything for her mother, who was unfaithful.

“I can’t see why this is being done to me.”

— Walter Beyer, convicted of murder, hanging, Kansas.
Executed July 10,1945

A member of German General Rommel’s Afrika Korps during World War II, Beyer was hanged along with four others for murdering a fellow POW at Fort Leavenworth Military Prison. A headline in the New York Times called them “the first war captives executed in the U.S.” The execution was witnessed by only seven reporters. Beyer, who was considered the ringleader of the group, had beaten the POW to death because, in his eyes, he was a traitor.

“I swear to you, sheriff, I’m an innocent man. I have never been to the Thompson house, and I never saw Mrs. Thompson on the day that she was murdered. I believe that there were two of them—two men—who did the murder that I’ve been wrongly accused of. Even if I did know their names, I’d swing before I would have their blood upon me.”

— John Stone, convicted of murder, hanging, Illinois.
Executed July 10, 1840

Stone, age thirty-four, was the first man publicly executed in Chicago. He was accused of raping and murdering Lucretia Thompson, which he denied. Stone was escorted by two hundred horsemen to a lakeshore gallows at the back of Myrick’s Tavern.

It did not go as planned. Stone’s drop from the scaffold was only four feet, and he died of strangulation.