After 75 years, last public hanging haunts Kentucky city (photos)
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After 75 years, last public hanging haunts Kentucky city (photos)
26-year-old Rainey Bethea has his last meal, before being publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky, August 13, 1936. Bethea, convicted of rape and murder of a 70-year-old woman, was the last person killed in a public execution in the United States.
Rainey Bethea (c. 1909[b] – August 14, 1936), was the last person publicly executed in the United States. Bethea, who confessed to the rape and killing of a 70-year-old woman named Lischia Edwards, was convicted of her rape and publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky. Mistakes in performing the hanging, and the surrounding media circus, contributed to the end of public executions in the United States.
Little is known about Bethea's life before he arrived in Owensboro in 1933. Born around 1909 in Roanoke, Virginia, Bethea was an African-American man orphaned after the death of his mother in 1919 and his father in 1926. He worked for the Rutherford family and lived in their basement for about a year, and then he moved to a cabin behind the house of a man named Emmett Wells. He worked as a laborer and later rented a room from a woman, Mrs. Charles Brown. He also attended a Baptist church.
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