“I don’t want to die with a lie on my lips. I lied when I said this killing was a result of gin and anger. I deliberately planned a robbery…although, so help me God, I didn’t mean to shoot.”

— August Vogel, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed May 9, 1930

Vogel was known as “the Whim Slayer” for shooting a man who bumped into his car, according to newspapers. Vogel led a gang of Chicago thieves that included his brother George, who confessed to the murder in a last-ditch effort to save Vogel. Vogel, age twenty-seven, had previously attempted to pin the murder on George. But neither was able to shift the blame, and Vogel was electrocuted as planned.

“. . . This is the first time since my condemnation that I thought what it was to die. The shock was terrible . . .what a night of horror was the next night! . . . [The doctor]perceived that agony of my soul and asked me some questions of the state of my mind . . . and [I poured] my heart out to him . . .I had fortunately concealed my real name, that I might return, like the prodigal, to my parents, and live a life devoted to God and their comfort.”

— Joseph Taylor, convicted of violent assault and robbery, hanging (possibly unsuccessful), Massachusetts.
Executed May 8, 1788

Taylor was part of a gang of thieves who mugged a man in broad daylight. As Taylor and his accomplices fled, the man started screaming for help. Since the man was mugged on a public highway, Taylor was convicted of capital highway robbery and was hung in a gallows constructed at the scene of the crime.

Some accounts record that Taylor actually died on the gallows, while others insist he fled to Sweden.

“Gentlemen, I have very few words to say. In fact, I would make no remarks at this time except that by not speaking I would appear to acquiesce in my execution. I only wish to say that the extent of my wrong-doing in taking human life consisted in the death of two women, they having died at my hands as the result of criminal operations. I wish to also state here, so that there can be no chance of misunderstanding hereafter, that I am not guilty of taking the lives of any of the Pitezel family—the three children and Benjamin, the father—of whose death I was convicted, and for which I am today to be hanged. That is all I have to say.”

Herman Webster Mudgett, best known by his alias H. H. Holmes or Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, convicted of murder, hanging, Pennsylvania.
Executed May 7, 1896

Holmes killed more than twenty people in his hotel on Chicago’s South Side and sold some of their remains to medical schools, according authorities. Perhaps it’s understandable that Holmes instructed that his body be cemented into his coffin to fend off grave robbers after his execution. He had built his hotel to prepare for Chicago’s World Fair, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and many of his guests were his victims.

Holmes was the “devil” in Erik Larson’s book “The Devil in the White City.”