Some of the sources may be paywalled, but here they are.

The Innocence Defense (part 1)

The Innocence Defense (part 2)

2 accused of lying in death row case

Former death row inmate goes back to prison

On June 23, 1986, the naked and partially charred body of 17-year-old Katrina Graddy was found in a burning crack house. Pieces of a nylon cloth were tied around her neck and around one wrist. Katrina had been raped with a glass bottle. It was determined that the fire was started intentionally, but the cause of death was strangulation. Following the discovery of the body, police questioned Carl Schenck, who had been asleep in his truck parked directly across from the burning house.

Schenck told investigators that he had parked there the night before. He had been waiting for the return of a hitchhiker he had picked up earlier in the day while the hitchhiker went to purchase some marijuana. Schenck fell asleep and eventually was awakened by the fire engines. A black shaving bag left by the hitchhiker in Schenck's vehicle was taken as evidence. Schenck said Rudolph Holton had a close resemblance to the hitchhiker.

On the night of the murder, a man named Johnny Newsome reportedly saw Holton and Katrina talking outside the vacant house where Graddy's body was later found. Newsome said Holton was holding a black shaving bag. A woman named Carrie Nelson claimed that on the night of Katrina's murder, she saw Holton enter the vacant house.

Holton said he was home at the time of the murder. His alibi was supported by Solodon "Red" Clemmons, who owned the house where Holton was living in at the time of the murder. Holton claimed that the last time he had been to the vacant house was 10 days before the murder. When investigators told Holton that they found his fingerprints on a cigarette pack found in the house, he admitted to using drugs in the house several days before the murder, but denied that he was near the vacant house that evening.

Eventually, Holton was arrested and charged with first degree murder. Photographs were taken of Holton, showing scratches on his chest and finger.

During the pretrial investigation, the defense learned that Katrina had reported being raped a week prior to the murder by a person who used a street name of "Pine." The defense could not ascertain the true identity of "Pine" prior to the trial and proceeded without that information.

A fellow inmate named Flemmie Birkins, who had known him for several years, testified that Holton had confessed to the murder. According to Birkins, Holton said "he had killed a girl, that he had strangled her" and then set fire to the house. He said Holton claimed that had not meant to kill the girl. A detective testified that Birkins had revealed details about the murder not known to the public. Second-hand confessions should be treated with caution. Birkins, who was facing charges for burglary and grand theft, had a potential motive to lie.

However, the story told by Birkins checked out.

There were unexplained scratches on Holton's chest and hand, three eyewitnesses had implicated him in the murder, and his fingerprints had been found on a pack of cigarettes, giving him a way to set a fire. Furthermore, Holton had lied to the police about his whereabouts.

On December 5, 1986, Holton was convicted of first degree murder, rape, and arson. On the jury recommended the death penalty in a 7-5 vote. The judge sentenced Holton to death by electrocution. In 1990, the Florida Supreme Court upheld his conviction and death sentence.

Holton v. State

During an evidentiary hearing in 1999, the defense was shown two police reports that were taken on the night Katrina was allegedly raped by "Pine". One of the police reports confirmed that Katrina had reported being raped, but withdrew the complaint. The second report showed that a man named David Pearson was questioned by police and arrested for obstruction by giving a false name (he gave the name of Donald Lamar Smith), even though the rape charges were dropped by Katrina. Holton's trial attorney stated that had she had this information prior to proceeding with the trial, she could have pursued the connection between the incident with David Pearson and the subsequent murder the Katrina.

Additionally, the defense presented the argument that Pearson's criminal records indicated that Pearson carried a leather black pouch, which had a similar description to the shaving bag seized from Schneck's car.

In 2001, another evidentiary hearing was held in the Holton case.

The prosecution submitted a sworn statement from David Pearson. Pearson claimed that he knew Katrina because they grew up together. He admitted that she had accused him of rape days before her murder. Pearson denied the rape and claimed that he had consensual sex with her in exchange for drugs. Following an argument after sex, he claimed that Katrina had stolen the drugs. Pearson said he slapped her during the argument and took the drugs back, after which the girl fled.

After hiding the crack, Pearson said he had talked to the police. The police said had Katrina accused him of rape. Pearson denied it and said she made a false accusation due to an argument over drugs. Pearson also admitted that he used Donald Smith’s name in the past when he was arrested.

Another undisclosed police report was introduced in 2001. Another man named Donald Lamar Smith indicated that he knew information about the manner of death that was not releasesd to the public. One morning in June 1986, Katrina came to Mr. Smith's house on Harrison Street.

"She came up and asked me to come, can I ask you something and I said what and she said that Pine had just raped me. Um, she say that she said what is your full name and I said Donald Lamar Smith and she said is your birth date 9-25-57, and I said, yeah. She said well, Pine used your name last night, yesterday, I think. She said to me Pine raped me and used your name and told the police."

Smith said Graddy had bruising on her neck and told him that "Pine" had choked and raped her. Katrina explained that Pine gave her some [crack] rocks, but she would not have sex with him, so Pine raped her.

A week or so later in June 1986, Smith noticed that a house on Scott Street was on fire. Mr. Smith went over to see what was happening. On his way to the house, he saw Pearson walking fast from the scene. Pearson told him that Katrina was found strangled in the home. A few weeks later, Smith testified, Pearson had privately confessed to the murder.

The prosecution presented evidence that Katrina had dropped the charges against Pearson, potentially because her accusations of rape against him were, in fact, fabricated. They also said Smith's testimony was not credible.

Smith had testified at the evidentiary hearing that he ran to the scene of the house when he saw the fire and, after briefly speaking with David Pearson, he went to the scene and spoke with Officer Lawless. A report by Officer Lawless indicated that he had arrived on the scene at 6:45 a.m. and the fire had just been extinguished. This was consistent with the trial testimony from firefighters indicating that they arrived at the scene at 6:33 a.m. and quickly extinguished the fire.

According to the report, Donald Smith did not speak to Officer Lawless until approximately 11:30 a.m., almost five hours after the fire had been extinguished. Prosecutors also noted that Smith had every opportunity to come forward at the time of Katrina's murder.

"So you knew that based on what you just tes­ti­fied to here that they had the wrong man in jail for this mur­der, right?"

"Well, I told the police who did it. If they would just find me. I was in the projects. So that was their job to do that."

"So if you're aware if some­body is inno­cent of a mur­der, and you know who the guilty par­ty is, you're not going to vol­un­teer it, right, sir?"

"Not in the projects. I'm just not like that."

Lawyers for Holton also contended that the various documents about Birkins were significant because they would have allowed the jury to realize that Birkins was a "horrible criminal" who was facing a lengthier prison sentence than the 3.5 to 4.5 year guideline range disclosed at the trial. Due to an apparent miscalculation, the jury was not aware that Birkins had actually faced a range of 9 to 12 years in prison.

Birkins had a long criminal record. He had prior convictions for attempted murder, sexual assault, and armed robbery. He had previously been acquitted of first degree murder in another case.

However, the state noted that at Holton's sentencing hearing, the prosecutor said Birkins had testified in the case without any guarantee of leniency. Birkins's attorney had successfully argued against incarceration in the state prison based on the fact that Birkins had just been "jumped" by one of Holton's friends. Birkins had reportedly been warned that he would be murdered in prison. The judge then asked Birkins if he thought he would be any safer in county jail rather than prison. When Birkins indicated that he would be safer in county jail, the judge placed him on five years probation, the first two of which were community control with the first year being specified residence in the county jail.

The defense called a woman named Elease Moore, who had lived next door to Graddy and her moth­er. She was 64, had lived in Central Park all her life and knew just about everyone. She used to spend afternoons on the porch with ​"Big Carrie" Nelson, who died six years after the mur­der. It was Nelson who first put detec­tives onto Holton, say­ing she rec­og­nized him because he had bro­ken into her home four times. Years lat­er, Moore claimed that Nelson had told her she real­ly had not seen Holton that night.

"She was going to get even with him," Moore tes­ti­fied. ​"Her groceries were gone, and she believed Rudolph had stolen them."

Why had­n't Moore come for­ward soon­er? ​"It was­n't impor­tant to me, sir," she said.

On the night of Katrina's murder, Moore said she was drink­ing gin and Bull and hav­ing sex with Johnny Newsome. She said they fell asleep about two hours before Newsome testified that he had seen Holton and Newsome together. He and Birkins both took the stand and recanted their trial testimony. Birkins claimed he was offered leniency in exchange for his testimony against Holton.

The prosecution showed Birkins copies of his state­ment to police, his deposition, and his tri­al tes­ti­mo­ny. They walked him through each doc­u­ment to show that Birkins had con­sis­tent­ly told the same sto­ry and to sug­gest his new ver­sion was a lie. They also noted that witness recantations are exceedingly unreliable. Birkins said he nev­er told any­body he lied at tri­al until 14 years lat­er, when two investigators for Holton's new attorney, Linda McDermott, found him. The prosecution found it hard to believe that Birkins had shared such an intimate secret with such ease.

"So you were talk­ing to him after five or ten min­utes, (and) the conversation (was) that you had com­mit­ted per­jury under oath in a murder tri­al; is that what you're telling us?"

"Yeah."

All along there had been a rea­son to ques­tion Birkins's sto­ry. McDermott didn't spot it until about the eighth time she went through Noblitt's and Durkin’s report, a month or so before the hearing. The police report doc­u­ment­ed the sec­ond time detec­tives took Holton from jail to police headquarters. It said they talked to him start­ing at 5:10 p.m. In the tri­al tran­script, Birkins said Holton con­fessed to him in the jail clin­ic on June 26, between 5 and 5:30 p.m.

How could Holton have con­fessed in the jail clin­ic when he was at the police station?

The incon­sis­ten­cy could be as insignif­i­cant as some­one get­ting a time wrong, or it could be a lit­tle piece of a big lie.

On November 2, 2001, Judge Daniel Perry overturned Holton's conviction. He found no evidence that the state had acted maliciously, but that the failure to overturn information favorable to the defense meant Holton's convictions could not stand. The recantations were not a factor in ruling. On December 18, 2002, the decision was upheld on appeal by the Florida Supreme Court.

The morn­ing the news broke, a net­work of death penal­ty oppo­nents con­nect­ed across con­ti­nents sprang to life. European abo­li­tion­ists sent an e‑mail blitz demand­ing Holton's release. Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty had Holton's pic­ture on its Web site with a link: Rudolph Holton, Innocent! The group’s 1,200 mem­bers start­ed call­ing the State Attorney's Office at 8:36 a.m. By 10 a.m., sec­re­taries were hang­ing up on them. The group also was organizing a vig­il out­side the Hillsborough County Courthouse.

McDermott called them off, wor­ried that protests would only make pros­e­cu­tors dig in. ​"In some ways, I don't want to be too pushy."

While deciding whether or not to retry Holton, officials visited Flemmie Birkins, who was work­ing at the Salvation Army. He was miss­ing his front teeth. He said some­body beat him up after he tes­ti­fied about being an informant. Birkins initially didn't want to talk, but was convinced to visit the courthouse. During talks, Birkins made a surprise admission.

On videotape, Birkins recanted his recantation.

The com­mit­tee met again and watched the video. Some in the room found Birkins' account cred­i­ble; how could inves­ti­ga­tors have got­ten him to admit to per­jury so eas­i­ly? They did not trust Holton's lawyers and inves­ti­ga­tors, who worked at the agency some called the "anti-Christ." They were zealots, will­ing to do any­thing for the anti-death penalty cause. The room was divid­ed over which Flemmie Birkins to believe, but there was lit­tle divi­sion about his val­ue as a wit­ness. They had no case.

In New Year's week in 2003, prosecutors decided not to retry Holton. Prosecutor Mark Ober sat down with Graddy's old­er broth­er, Winford Moore, to inform him he could not pros­e­cute Holton. The state's case had decayed too much. Moore understand, saying he didn't trust Johnny Newsome. Ober called Holton’s defense team with the news.

Forty-five min­utes lat­er, the inter­com rang in McDermott's office. It was Holton, breathing hard. McDermott act­ed like it was any old day. “Hey, Rudy. What's going on?"

Holton choked up. The guards said he was going home. Still play­ing: ​"You're going home?" Then, turning seri­ous: ​"Yeah, you are going home."

At this, Holton made a seemingly odd comment to McDermott.

"Oh man. This caught me by surprise."

"This caught you by surprise?"

We've been work­ing on this for six years, she said. You knew it was coming.

"Thank you, Linda." he said, heav­ing. "I owe you."

"Don't wor­ry about it."

The phone would not stop. The Los Angeles Times was on the line; CNN want­ed her Monday night.

McDermott and her team arrived at Union Correctional Institution after 5 PM.

Across the road, reporters were wait­ing. Holton had scrawled out a state­ment. "I just want to say I'm sit­ting on top of the world, enjoy­ing the moment of the vic­to­ry of the free­dom that I've been fight­ing for for many years. … I forgive everybody." A pick­up truck drove by and cir­cled back twice. The passenger screamed: "They deserve to die! They deserve to die! Burn in hell!"

Two months after Holton's trial, the prosecutor, Joe Episcopo, was fired two months after Holton's tri­al for fal­si­fy­ing records to make his conviction rate look bet­ter than it was. He said the charges were untrue and the fir­ing polit­i­cal. He ran for state attor­ney, lost and joined the defense bar. He said Holton should be free. ​"I am sor­ry it hap­pened. At the time I believed what I was doing."

His first night of free­dom, Holton vis­it­ed the Westminster Oaks Retirement Village in Tallahassee.

He want­ed to meet 72-year-old Mary Hardison, a death penal­ty oppo­nent who had writ­ten Holton every month for 14 years. He called her ​"mom" and her late hus­band "dad". She tele­phoned her chil­dren as soon as she heard the news: ​"Your broth­er is out of prison!"

He sat in her house, with its reclin­er, soft car­pet and tea cups, over­look­ing woods. She was over­joyed to have him there.

At the hotel lat­er, he was reunit­ed with his 31-year-old daugh­ter, Sontrivette, and his 28-year-old son, Rudolph Jr. They nev­er real­ly knew him as their father, and had not seen him in years. Now they would have to work through how much to let him into their lives.

Holton had a Big Mac and got a fit­ful night’s sleep at the Homewood Suites. He woke Saturday and neat­ly made his bed.

"Daddy, you don’t have to do that," Sontrivette said.

That after­noon Holton stopped by McDermott’s office. After years work­ing to get him out, it was weird to have him there. He passed the file cab­i­nets with his name on them and lin­gered in the law library, where they worked his case.

"I was his attor­ney and now, I still feel like he needs me," McDermott said. But she could­n’t be there for him much longer, not like before. He would need fam­i­ly and friends.

After Holton's release, several disturbing things happened in short succession.

Flemmie Birkins claimed that private investigators for McDermott had bribed him $120 into recanting his testimony.

Johnny Newsome also came forward and recanted his recantation. Newsome claimed that these investigators had coerced him into making a false confession to perjury. Newsome, who was black, said they had appealed to his conscience by insisting to him that Rudolph Holton was an innocent black man who was being railroaded.

"It's made up. It ain't true. It didn't happen," said Martin McClain, a lawyer who worked on Holton's case. "These guys are lying. They have lied in the past. They lie when it is convenient."

He had a point, but the claim was definitely plausible. Holton wasn't going to be retried, so why come forward now? Perhaps they felt guilty. It wouldn't be the first or last time that private investigators had engaged in coercive tactics. It was possible that they had done so without Holton's knowledge. Birkins and Newsome were both charged with perjury. Mark Ober said the basis for the charge was simple.

"They swore to tell the truth, and they violated that oath, and a horrible tragedy occurred as a result of that oath. Either an innocent man has spent the past 16 years on death row for a crime he did not commit, or a guilty man was set free, and that is inexcusable."

Holton supported the charges against Birkins and Newsome. Some defense attorneys did not, claiming it would potentially deter other recantations. Nevertheless, both men would plead guilty to perjury. Birkins was sentenced to 13 years in prison and Newsome was sentenced to 14 years in prison. Birkins was released from prison in 2014. Newsome was released from prison in 2017, but returned for unspecified reasons in 2018. He died in prison on November 24, 2018.

In August 2003, Rudolph Holton got married.

He made plans: Get married, have a family, go fishing, get a dog, get a truck, start a business. He met Sandra Holton. She was divorcing his uncle, a man she had accused of threatening to kill her. Rudolph Holton said she asked him to marry her the first time they got intimate. "I didn't have nobody," he said in court. "I wanted somebody to love me." Sandra Holton, a dialysis technician, paid the bills and drove him to job interviews.

Within months, however, Holton got into trouble. He was charged with beating the son of Sandra's ex-husband and for striking Sandra several times with a golf club. Holton pleaded guilty to aggravated battery and misdemeanor assault and was sentenced to 14 months in prison.

Holton married a woman he met after his release. In June 2004, Holton pleaded guilty to aggravated battery for striking the woman with a golf club and to misdemeanor assault for a confrontation with a cousin. He was sentenced to two years in prison. After his release, he and Sandra reconciled. On June 18, 2006, however, Holton strangled Sandra during an argument.

Coincidentally, Katrina Graddy had also been strangled.

There was one key difference: Sandra survived. Holton only succeeded in strangling her unconscious. During his trial for attacking her, Holton testified that while high on alcohol and drugs, he threw beer on his wife and grabbed her neck, but denied choking her. The jury didn't buy it and found him guilty of attempted second degree murder and domestic battery. While Holton was in jail, Sandra visited him with her new boyfriend, who asked Holton for permission to marry her.

Holton gave the man his blessing.

Ex-death row inmate jailed for choking wife

During his sentencing hearing, Holton blamed Sandra for botching his attempt at a new life, telling a judge, "I married the wrong lady." Citing his 11 prior felony convictions, the judge sentenced Holton 20 years in prison. Now 73, Holton was released from prison on June 11, 2023.

In December 1941, 21 year old Viljo Suokas was recovering in a military hospital. He had just been appointed a Knight of the Mannerheim Cross.

Having already served in the Winter War, Suokas had earned a reputation as an exceptionally brave long range patrolman and had spent dozens of days deep behind enemy lines.

Two years later, on October 4, 1943, Suokas was mortally wounded behind enemy lines. His men carried their commander on a stretcher through enemy territory, trying to get him to safety.

On the way, Suokas lost consciousness several times.

The last time he regained consciousness, Suokas raised his eyes to his men and whispered:
"Boys, I cannot go on any longer. Take off your caps and say the Lord's Prayer for me."

The men did as he asked.

At eight in the morning, they buried their commander in a hollow beneath the roots of a fallen pine and mined the area around the grave. Then they set out back toward their own lines.
Suokas's grave was left far from his homeland. His remains were never found.

He was Knight No. 44.

All credit to JHL-Colorizing (Instagram)

Source: Wereldmuseum Amsterdam, TMnr 10001518

The Forgotten Story of the Last Teenager Hanged in England

Francis “Flossie” Forsyth and Norman James “Flash” Harris

A blog post about the case (it features many comments from many who knew the murderers and the victim)

On June 25, 1960, 23-year-old Allan Edward John Jee walked home his fiancée, Jacqueline Herbert. The two had gotten engaged the day before.

Allan caught the bus to Hounslow in Middlesex, where he lived. Getting off the bus, he went down James Street. There, four youths were standing in the shadows waiting for someone to rob. They were 18-year-old Francis Forsyth, 23-year-old Norman James Harris, 23, 17-year-old Terence Lutt, and 20-year-old Christopher Louis Darby.

As Allan got close to them, Lutt blocked him and punched him in the face. Allan fell to the ground. He struggled and shouted out "what do you want me for." To keep him quiet, Forsyth repeatedly kicked Allan in the head. The gang went through his pockets, but missed the 10 shilling note. That was all the money Allan had. They ran off empty handed, passing Anthony Cowell, who was able to give reasonable description of them. The attack occurred at 11:17 pm. Allan was rushed to the West Middlesex Hospital in Isleworth, where he died from his head injuries two days later.

The police investigation, led by D.S. Fred Hixon, interviewed a large number of youths in connection with the attack, including Norman Harris on June 29th. They then circulated descriptions of them and this led to a breakthrough. On July 17, Kevin Cullinan told police that a friend of his, Francis Forsyth, had been boasting about the crime. He named the other three youths, whom he had seen in a coffee bar on the night of the attack. All four were arrested on July 19, 1960.

In a statement to the police, Harris admitted to holding down Allan. "I put my hand in his inside pocket to get his wallet," he said, "but there was nothing there at all. Forsyth was standing above us and I realised he had put the boot in."

The four youths went on trial at the Old Bailey before Mr. Justice Winn on September 20, 1960. All pleaded not guilty. Mr. Mervyn Griffiths-Jones led the prosecution and told the jury, "Allan Jee was knocked to the ground, and was held there while his pockets were gone through. He was kicked into unconsciousness and left dying, bleeding and moaning on the ground, while these four young men made good their escape." Lewis Nicholls of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory testified that there were blood stains on Forsyth's shoes and trouser bottoms. Pathologist Dr. Donald Teare testified that Allan had been kicked five times in the head. The four tried to argue they were drunk and had not intended to kill Allan.

Under the 1957 Homicide Act, Britain abolished the felony murder and established two degrees of murder, capital murder and non-capital murder. The murder of Allan Jee was a capital offense since it had been carried out in furtherance of a robbery. Since he had only been a lookout, the prosecution agreed to reduce the charge against Christopher Darby to non-capital murder. After his arrest, Forsyth claimed that he didn't intend to kill Allan.

"I only kicked him twice to keep him quiet. I didn't think I had hurt him that much. We did not want to roll anybody, but we had a few shants and I always get a bit garrotty then."

Pathologist Dr. Donald Teare testified that Allan had been kicked five times in the head. The trial lasted six days. On September 26, 1960, Francis Forsyth, Norman Harris, and Terence Lutt were all convicted of capital murder and Christopher Darby was convicted of non-capital murder. It took the jury only 40 minutes to reach its verdict. Forsyth and Harris were sentenced to death, Lutt was detained at her Majesty's pleasure since he was a juvenile, and Darby received a life sentence.

Photos of the four defendants

Forsyth appealed, claiming he and his accomplices could not be found guilty of capital murder since he had murdered Allan only after Harris had checked his pockets. The appeal was dismissed, with the judges suggesting that Darby's non-capital murder conviction may have been too lenient. Petitions for a reprieve for Forsyth and Harris were made, but on November 8, 1960, the Home Secretary said he had decided to let the law take its course.

Francis Forsyth, 18, and Norman Harris 23, were both executed by hanging on November 10, 1960. Forsyth was hanged at Wandsworth Prison and Harris was hanged at Pentonville Prison.

Forsyth was allowed to meet his pregnant girlfriend, 17-year-old Margaret Catlin, before his scheduled execution. In a telegram, which she received three hours after his execution, Forsyth told Catlin, "Always remember my star will watch over you both and give you the love and strength you so richly deserve my angel yours till eternity."

Shortly before his execution, Harris wrote a letter to Allan's parents. In it, he said he was sorry for what he'd done to their son. It was said that he walked to death "like a man".

In stark contrast, a fellow inmate heard Forsyth weep, "I don't want to die."

Lutt and Darby were both released from prison in 1970. Lutt died of leukemia in 1975. Darby reportedly died in the late 2000s. His daughter said he expressed remorse before his death.

Only an hour after Forsyth was hanged, his friend, 20-year-old career criminal Victor Terry, who heard about his execution on the radio, shot and killed 61-year-old John Pull, a security guard and former amateur archaeologist, during a botched bank robbery. He was aided by his girlfriend, 18-year-old Valerie Slater, as well as 16-year-old Philip Tucker and 20-year-old Alan Hosier. Terry argued that the murder was an accident. He was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

After the Home Secretary declined to intervene, Victor Terry, 20, was executed by hanging at Wandsworth Prison on May 25, 1961. Tucker and Hosier were convicted of non-capital murder. Tucker was detained at her Majesty's pleasure and Hosier received a life sentence. Slater was convicted of being an accessory to murder and sentenced to a year of probation.

These are some of the mugshots and one standup shot of Murder Incorporated hit man ,Harry Strauss. He was said to have killed up to 200 men for various crime families throughout the country. Based in Brooklyn, he’d take a train or a flight to the city his target was located. He died in the electric chair in 1941

When Furman v. Georgia was announced in 1972, several death row inmates around the country were interviewed for their reactions. Two of them were Elmer Branch and Calvin Sellars in Texas. Branch was a petitioner whose case had been consolidated with the Furman case. They are all relevant to the McDuff case because it underlines what kind of person McDuff was.

Bear with me for a long read.

Elmer Branch, a black man, had been sentenced to death for raping and robbing an elderly white woman during a burglary. He threatened to rape her again before fleeing. Elmer had been caught red-handed with his trousers still unzipped when he was arrested just 15 minutes later. Elmer never denied his guilt, but his lawyers said his death sentence was racially biased. As a black man who had raped a white woman in the Deep South, Elmer was far more likely to be sentenced to death.

Most states where rape was once a capital offense only reinstated the death penalty for murder as a way to curb racial disparities in capital sentencing. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court found that execution was an excessive punishment for the rape of an adult woman. The death penalty would return nationwide for murder, but its return was not retroactive. For most of the hundreds of death row inmates in the country in 1972, the Furman ruling was a one-time second chance since life without parole didn't become a sentencing option in most states until the 1980s or 1990s.

Elmer reading a newspaper about Furman v. Georgia

Elmer said he was relieved, but understood why some people would want him dead. Race aside, he had broken into an elderly woman's home, raped her, robbed her, and then threatened to rape her a second time. He promised to do his best to atone for his past.

"I feel real good. I was surprised in a way. After they put it off and put it off, I figured they would do the same thing."

"I don't believe in the death penalty, but I can't judge other people. If I ever get out, I'll try to find a job. I would go someplace new. I would go somewhere where I could make something of myself."

Elmer Branch was a terrible person, but to his credit, he kept his word. Under more lenient laws at the time, he presumably would've been paroled some time in the late 1970s. There is no evidence he was ever rearrested.

Calvin Sellars, a white man, had been sentenced to death for his role in the armed robbery of a wealthy white tobacco and candy merchant. In 1978, Calvin had his conviction overturned and was released from prison since his written confession was obtained under coercion. The charges were dismissed in 1979 since prosecutors could no longer locate key witnesses.

Having read about his case in detail, I can safely say Calvin was guilty.

Calvin's written confession was made under coercion, but it was verifiably truthful. The police had enough evidence to convict Calvin without his confession. They threatened him because he had accomplices whom they wanted his assistance to identify since all of the robbers were wearing masks. Had the investigators simply been patient, Calvin would've confessed anyway.

Three days after his arrest, Calvin confessed voluntarily to a police officer named C. V. Stone, who had been his friend for the past 12 years. Calvin led him directly to stolen jewelry at his mother's home and named his accomplices: Sam Hoover, John Young, and Samuel Spivey. Tellingly, Calvin only named Hoover, who had planned the robbery, in his confession to Stone. The whole case is crazy. An appellate court remarked that "seldom has this Court considered a more spectacular or bizarre case than this habeas corpus petition." Sam Hoover was a defense attorney and a former mayor. Calvin studied law in prison and became a paralegal after his release from prison.

An interview of Calvin in 1970

Calvin acted as his own attorney during the habeas corpus hearing in 1977 which led to his conviction being overturned. He got one of the investigators in his case to admit to threatening him on the witness stand.

This appeal contains some of the transcripts

"While I was in the floorboard of the police car, was I not sometime or another threatened with my life if I did not fully cooperate with the police? More specifically, did you not tell me that I would never see the lights of Houston again, that my body would be found in a ditch if I didn't get my business straight or confess to my involvement in the Schepps robbery as you so thought I was involved?"

"Yes, you were told that in so many words."

What makes the case so bizarre is that Sam Hoover was an outstanding lawyer. Of the 1250 felony cases he had dealt with, 1236 ended in acquittals. As for why such a competent lawyer would turn to crime, another lawyer, Percy Foreman, said Hoover did it for the love of the game.

"Sam Hoover has an outstanding mind. His problem is he'd rather be Al Capone than a U.S. Supreme Court justice."

Hoover was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He was released in 1981 after being disbarred and serving another two years in federal prison for income tax fraud evasion. In 1983, he was rearrested for stealing an extremely expensive fur coat. He was convicted of grand theft and sentenced to 15 years in prison. It's unclear how much time he served. Hoover was still in prison in 1988, but he died a free man in 1992.

Spivey testified against Hoover and received immunity.

Calvin and Young were convicted of armed robbery and both sentenced to death. Young died in prison in 1974. Since he had confessed, Sellars had been offered a chance to testify against Hoover in exchange for immunity. He turned down the offer.

Robbery used to be a capital offense in some states. However, only two people had been executed for robbery in Texas since the 1930s.

In 1958, Alvin Blankenship was executed for robbing his former workplace. During the robbery, he beat an elderly nightwatchman, shot him four times, and slashed his throat twice. In opposing clemency for Blankenship, the prosecutor described the victim's survival as "one of God's miracles."

In 1962, Herbert Bradley was executed for robbing a grocery store. During the robbery, he had beaten a grocer with a hammer and shot him six times, leaving him permanently crippled from the waist down. Bradley was the last person to be executed in the United States for a non-fatal robbery.

I think you get the idea.

Sellars and Young were sentenced to death since they had physically and psychologically tortured the couple, especially the merchant's wife, during the robbery. At one point, they threatened to murder the couple's infant daughter and fired a shot was fired into the bed where the child lay.

This appeal goes into graphic detail

I don't think a crime like this is forgivable, but sometimes the worst person can change. Unlike Elmer, Calvin did return to prison. In 1986, he was charged with threatening three customers in a bar with a firearm. Five months before his court date, Calvin said he began reading the one book he never looked at while on Death Row: the Bible. He said the book saved his life. In many cases, finding God is just a way for convicts to escape responsibility.

But this time, Calvin did take responsibility.

Against the advice of his lawyer, Calvin rejected a two-year plea offer and asked the judge, a born-again Christian, to pass sentence. He received the maximum sentence: 10 years. In 1989, Calvin was released after serving only 2.5 years due to prison overcrowding and returned to his paralegal career.

An interview of Calvin in the 1990s

Now, you may be wondering how any of this is relevant to McDuff.

It's all relevant in showing what kind of monster McDuff was.

Convicted murderers generally have the lowest recidivism rate of all convicts. Neither Elmer nor Calvin had murdered anyone, but they had committed horrific crimes. They and other former death row inmates understood that the Furman ruling was their ONE-TIME lucky break. Nearly all of them were eternally grateful for that chance. In the 1990s, a woman named Joan Cheever tracked some of the former death row inmates.

Staying Clean: Life After Death Row

Arthur Broussard, who killed a Houston grocery-store owner in 1970, says that's the story of his life. "I was a kid," says Broussard, now 46. "I have no excuses ... If they had executed me, I would have gotten what I deserved." Paroled in 1986, he's struggled to make ends meet by renovating houses and hauling trash.

Carl Harris, 44, who shot his foster mother and a friend during an argument in 1967, says 24 years in prison have changed him forever. "You change anyway between 20 and 40, but prison really changes you."

No, it would change MOST people, but not all of them.

After learning that his life had been spared, Calvin Sellars gave his own feelings on the death penalty: "I can't say I'm against it 100 percent. In some extreme cases, it is justified." He was most likely basing his opinion on personal experiences with fellow death row inmates in Texas. There were some actual monsters whom you fear would likely rape and/or murder again, given the opportunity.

One such monster was Joe Edward Smith.

In 1959, Joe Edward Smith and his best friend, Adrian Johnson, were the ringleaders in a gruesome murder. At least 7 and as many as 11 black boys, ages 13 to 17, had participated in the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of William Bodenheimer III, a 12-year-old white boy. The case is discussed in a 2004 article by the Dallas Observer: The Icebox Revisited. The article insinuates that the boys were most likely innocent. The article is good, but gets several details wrong, glosses over damning physical evidence, and ignores certain key facts. I could go into detail about why they were guilty.

That said, I'll keep it simple.

During his trial, Johnson, who took the stand in his own defense, testified that he and the other boys were out boxing at the time of the murder. Shortly after his arrest, however, Smith had told reporters he was cleaning his flower bed at the time. Johnson had said he was playing dominoes.

Here's the proof that they changed their stories

According to their confessions, the boys did go boxing, but only after the murder.

Smith v. State

Initially, the Dallas Police Department thought a local white sex offender was responsible for the murder. The boys weren't suspects until one of them abruptly confessed after being arrested for unrelated robberies. The police also presented hard proof that Smith and Johnson were both lying when they claimed that their confessions had been beaten out of them.

Smith claimed that the police had given him a busted lip.

However, two television cameramen had recorded a video of Smith and taken photos of him, Johnson, and several of the other boys only an hour after their confessions. They were all visibly uninjured. A news cameraman asked Smith if he had been in any way mistreated. He said he wasn't. Despite his total lack of any physical injuries, Johnson testified that the police had pummeled his face and chest with the stock of a shotgun.

These were the photos taken of Johnson, Smith, and three of their accomplices shortly after their confessions

Prosecutor Frank Briscoe mockingly asked Johnson, "Did they beat you first and then bring you coffee, or did they bring you coffee and then beat you?"

This appeal contains graphic details of Adrian Johnson's confession

Upon hearing Johnson's confession, the court went into shocked silence. The mother of Bobby Bodenheimer, Doris Field, said that upon seeing her son's body, "I lost any remnants of a belief in an anthropomorphic God." However, in many ways, Doris was a saint. She resisted the racist backlash that followed her son's murder and said racism had contributed to the crime.

The mail to Doris Field came slowly at first. Condolences and well-wishers, mostly. A few days later, volume increased and sentiment changed: The [n-words] will get what's coming to them. We'll make sure of it. One friend promised to get a bat and kill "every one" he saw.

By mid-August it got to the point that Field wrote a letter to the Houston Post: "Since my son's death I have been largely sustained by the sincere sympathy of the whole community," she wrote, "but the attitude on the part of some has alarmed me. As long as we foster the sickness of the slums and segregation we shall all be infected by it. This is not to say that I am convinced of the guilt of current suspects, but merely that the anger directed against them would be put to better use if turned toward those conditions which breed crime."

After the letter was printed, it got really bad. Bundles and bundles of the stuff. Now she would get what was coming to her, too.

Doris was correct.

The boys confessed voluntarily because the Dallas Police Department had been integrated since 1948. They made their confessions to black detectives on the force. Johnson himself had been molested by Johnnie Routte, his 39-year-old "play uncle", who preyed on him and other black boys.

That said, it is hard for me to have much sympathy for these boys. Their crime was horrifying and they had no remorse. People who commit crimes like this will almost always either deny or downplay their guilt. That's why their confessions kept changing. The boys kept blaming the others before eventually admitting to their active participation in the murder. Robert Miller portrayed himself as the real victim in an interview decades later.

"The Houston Police Department cleaned its books on some little black kids. That's all it was. Tuesday I'll be 57. That was 44 years ago. I could admit it now, if I did it. But I'll go to my grave telling the truth: I didn't."

There was blood on Robert Miller's pants. There was human waste on the pants of his brother, Roy Miller, who pleaded guilty. In 1965, Charles Archer, who was free on bail, was charged with participating in the gang rape of a 16-year-old black girl. Contrary to what many would expect, most of the boys were punished far less severely than they would have been today.

Robert Miller and Ira Sadler, who were both 13, served 8 years.

David Clemons, who was 15, served four years. Charles Archer, also 15, was declared insane and committed to a mental hospital.

Roy Miller, who was 16, served 12 years.

Ringleaders Adrian Johnson and Joe Edward Smith, who were both 17, would fare differently. At the time, the minimum age to face the death penalty under Texas law was 17, not 18. As such, Johnson and Smith were sentenced to death by electrocution. Under the shorter capital appellate process at the time, both boys should've been executed.

Against all odds, Joe Edward Smith would somehow slip through the cracks and live long enough to be spared by the Furman ruling. By 1972, he had become the longest-serving death row inmate in Texas. He had spent 11 years on death row, which was extremely long by pre-Furman standards.

He recalls going to bed countless times thinking he'd be dead the next day, but he was never executed. (A torture, he would later say, almost worse than death.)

Smith won 22 stays of execution. In 1964, Doris Field sent a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons, asking that Smith's life be spared. Capital punishment, she wrote, was an immoral form of collective revenge. She never got a reply. Later that year, on December 8, 1964, Smith came within 9.5 hours of execution. By the time the stay arrived, he had eaten his last meal. During his 11 years on death row, Smith watched nearly 20 other death row inmates walk to the electric chair, the last in 1964.

One of them was Adrian Johnson. A key factor in their differing fates is that Johnson stood trial in 1959. Smith was not tried until December 1961.

An interview of Joe Edward Smith in 1966

Joe Edward Smith will never forget the night they electrocuted his best friend. Speaking from his prison cell on the Texas State Penitentiary's death row, Smith said his buddy "walked past my cell and smiled at me. I smiled back to give him courage."

The electric chair at the Texas State Penitentiary

On April 19, 1962, Adrian Johnson, now 19, was executed by electrocution at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. In his final moments, he knelt beside the electric chair. "I want to pray," he said, giving blessings to his mother. Johnson then offered his last words: "I pray that this will be the last time something like this will happen." In the lead-up to his execution, he continued to deny his guilt, but accepted that perhaps it was for the best.

"I had no participation in this crime whatsoever, and those Houston police perjured themselves to send me here. But I've made my peace with God. If I don't get another stay, I will accept this as God's will."

During an interview in 1970, Smith said at times, he felt that he would rather be executed than spend the rest of his life wondering if he would be executed.

"I ain't mad at nobody. I know we got to have a system, and I'm glad I've had a chance to stay alive this long. But rather than spend the rest of my life like this I'd rather just go on and die and get it over with."

"I was in death row at the walls Huntsville's main prison unit downtown). There were eight cells and the chair was just a few feet away. Sometimes they would leave the door open and we could see it sitting there. Just looks like an old chair to me. I've watched a lot of guys go through that door. I never saw one break down. They always try to hold it in and when you're sitting there watching him walk past for the last time, you try to hold it in."

A televised interview of Joe Edward Smith in 1972

"I've increased my education through reading, writing, studying. At the time I was arrested, I couldn't read and I since learned to read while I was on death row in the Harris County Jail. Since I've been in the department of corrections, I've had access to the prison library and I have been able to increase my knowledge through the use of the books that they let us have. We are allowed to check out three books a week from the prison library here at Ellis."

"So you're not just sitting there waiting to die there."

"No I'm not. I'm hoping and praying that someday, that I will get out."

Against all odds, Smith once more slipped through the cracks. The Icebox Murder, once considered Houston's most infamous race crime, was gradually forgotten, erased from public consciousness. In 1980, Smith won parole and was released from prison. Whether he would've reoffended is unclear. All things considered, Smith's sudden death in 1981 was likely for the best.

Smith died 11 months after his welcome-home party in 1980. Twenty years on death row, then he gets out, falls out of a tree doing some yard work and breaks his neck.

Another former death row inmate, Jerry Ward, was luckier. Ward was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 18-year-old Joyce Osten. Known as the "Parkway Phantom", he was responsible for the kidnapping and rapes or attempted rapes of five other women.

A long 1966 article about Ward's crimes

An interview of Ward in 1972

Ward was paroled in June 1984. A year later, he raped and murdered 32-year-old Connie Cooke. Days later, Ward, now 41, killed himself in Nevada as police searched for him in connection with her disappearance. In 2012, DNA tests posthumously linked Ward to the rape and murder of 24-year-old Brenda Hackett in September 1984. Perhaps Ward also slipped through the cracks.

Kenneth McDuff was different from the others. He wasn't out for redemption. Unlike almost all the Furman parolees, he took his second chance at life and cashed it in.

However, McDuff sure as hell didn't slip through the cracks.

Free To Kill (a great long article about McDuff)

It was October 11, 1989. Falls County sheriff Larry Pamplin telephoned his longtime friend deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara in Waco and told him, "You're not going to believe what happened, Parnell. They've paroled Kenneth McDuff." There was a brittle silence as McNamara processed this totally illogical piece of information, then McNamara laconically inquired, "Have they gone crazy?" There didn't seem to be any other explanation.

McDuff hadn't fallen through the cracks in the system; he had slithered through, cleverly, insidiously, like a rodent in the shadows.

Edward Earl Johnson is best known for Fourteen Days of May, a documentary which follows the final two weeks of his life and the desperate efforts of his new lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, to stop his execution. Clive still believes Johnson, a young black man with no criminal record, was innocent and that his confession to the attempted rape of an elderly white woman and the murder of a white police officer in Leake County, Mississippi was obtained under coercion.

Fourteen Days in May: The Most Compelling Death Penalty Documentary Ever Made

Johnson said his only crime was being black in Mississippi.

"When my lawyers tried to attack the confession, you know, as to how it was obtained, they didn't want to hear that. All they wanted to know was look, we got it and that's all that counts. He's guilty. I was guilty before I was convicted and guilty before I even went to trial. You know, the main part was that white man was killed and they have a black man accused of doing it and they said he done it and that was it."

Like most fraudulent claims of innocence, however, Johnson's claims immediately collapse under minor scrutiny. His clemency petition effectively conceded that he was guilty. In his own affidavit for the clemency petition, at no point does Johnson say he was innocent or that his confession was obtained under coercion. Instead, he said he had wanted to plead guilty to the murder. He never said that in the film.

The clemency petition describes Johnson's crimes as a "tragic mistake he made in his youth." However, his appeals tell a very different story.

Johnson v. State

In the early morning hours of June 2, 1979, Johnson, then 18, broke into the apartment of 69-year-old Sally Franklin. He beat her unconscious while trying to rape her. Before Johnson could rape Franklin, a neighbor came to investigate the noise, forcing him to flee. Before Johnson could leave, 52-year-old town marshal J.T. Trest arrived at the scene and asked him what he was doing. Johnson said he wasn't doing anything, but when Trest shined a flashlight into his car, he jumped out and shot him three times in the chest with a .25 caliber pistol. Johnson then used Trest's .357 magnum to execute him with two gunshots to the head.

Johnson said his lawyers had argued that his confession was obtained under coercion, but nobody listened. He also said Franklin had told the police he wasn't her attacker, whom she said had a beard. In reality, Franklin initially declined to identify Johnson, saying she was in a state of shock from being beaten and needed time to recover. After recovering, she identified him as her attacker. Johnson waited years to claim that his confession was taken illegally. No such claim was mentioned in his 1982 appeal.

During the trial, Johnson's lawyers had focused largely on trying to save their client's life at the sentencing phase. The appeal contains excerpts from their closing statements (I'd recommend them for the curious).

The documentary was directed by Paul Hamann, an anti-death penalty advocate who cofounded Reprieve along with Clive Stafford Smith. Paul is massively biased in favor of Johnson and suddenly claims at the end that Clive had "located" a woman who said Johnson was with her at a pool hall at the time of the murder. This is hearsay without any independent corroboration which contradicts the "alibi" that Johnson presented at the trial.

Despite being misleading, Fourteen Days in May is still a good watch. Honestly, I'd say the truth makes it a far better watch.

"They're determined to execute me and I'm determined for them not to execute me, 'cause I don't believe that considering the way the case has been. I don't see... and I don't believe it for one minute. I refuse to break. I can't do that. I refuse to now."

Johnson wanted to say he was guilty, but didn't. He should've told the truth. By lying, he made things worse for his family and other supporters. Clive believed him, but later admitted that he was naive and arrogant. His naivety and arrogance becomes apparent in the documentary.

"The fact of the case though is that you're a black kid in Leake County, which has got a bunch of Klan people, and they go around shooting Freedom Riders and then they get acquitted, you know. And the fact is that you're accused of basically attempting to rape a white woman and killing a white police officer. Those are the two most heinous things that for a white person in Mississippi can happen."

Leake County had its share of white supremacists, such as Ross Barnett, but there is no evidence that it was a hub for Klan activity. The Freedom Riders never travelled through county, either. A motion to quash Johnson's indictment on the grounds of racial discrimination in the grand jury selection was denied specifically because most of the grand jurors were black.

In his arrogance, Clive told Johnson's family that he would win.

I was also twenty-seven when I took on Edward's case in an effort to fend off an execution then just days away. I was in the full arrogance of youth, and in my very brief legal career had yet to see a client executed. I did not expect to lose. I had been to a prestigious law school and was sure that some clever legal wheeze would see him safe. I was not wholly without imagination – in the limited time we had, I got a personal intervention from Pope John Paul II calling on the Catholic governor, Bill Allain – a Democrat – to spare Edward's life ("Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy"). Yet that was wasted energy. I should have known that a pending re-election would be far more persuasive to Allain than the threat of eternal damnation.

Clive's frantic appeals for Johnson were ripped apart. When Clive argued that Johnson's confession was taken in violation of his rights, the prosecution argued that Johnson had not been under arrest and accompanied the police voluntarily. Johnson himself confirmed this in the documentary. Because Johnson had not under been arrest, the police were not required to read him his rights.

Johnson's trial attorneys, R. Jess Brown and Firnist Alexander Jr., claimed he was offered a chance to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence, but that he had turned down the offer after they erroneously informed him that he would be ineligible for parole. The courts found even if this was true, this did not constitute a prejudicial error which deprived the trial of its fundamental fairness. This is because even if a plea deal was offered, it was Johnson's decision to reject it. There was no evidence that the alleged error was the sole factor in Johnson's decision to reject the alleged plea deal. However, the courts also found no evidence that a plea deal was ever offered in the first place.

It is now clear that Brown and Alexander, out of desperation, both lied to protect Johnson because they thought he was innocent. Life without parole didn't even exist as a sentencing option for anyone except habitual offenders in Mississippi until 1993. Even more damning is that in 1997, Alexander received a two-year suspended from legal practice for legal misconduct.

We find that the conduct in which Mr. Alexander engaged despite his repeated disciplinary sanctions for similar conduct evinces a want of personal honesty and integrity and renders him unworthy of public confidence. Furthermore, his conduct evinces a flagrant lack of regard and respect for the directives both by the Bar and by this Court to cease engaging in such conduct.

Firnist J. Alexander, Jr. v. The Mississippi Bar

In 1998, Alexander's suspension was deemed too lenient and he was disbarred. Truth be told, it was a long time coming.

The Tribunal suspended Mr. Alexander from the practice of law for two years. The Bar has cross-appealed arguing that a more severe discipline should be imposed, given Mr. Alexander's prior disciplinary record. This Court agrees with the Bar and believes that Mr. Alexander's repeated offenses merit the ultimate sanction of disbarment. This is the only remedy that will vindicate the Bar in the eyes of the public and prevent Mr. Alexander from further sullying the reputation of the legal profession in Mississippi.

But if the trial attorneys were lying, who else was lying?

Johnson's supporters were mistaken at best and lying to protect him at worst. The woman who said he was at a pool with her at the time of the murder turned out to be his friend, Big Mary.

At Edward's funeral, his friend Big Mary revealed that he couldn't have committed the crime because he had been with her at the time. When Clive Stafford Smith asked why she didn't tell anyone that, Mary said: "I did. I went to the police and they told me to go home and mind my own business."

Assuming that Big Mary was telling the truth, the police shouldn't have turned away her since it was an ongoing investigation. However, we have no reason to believe that she ever went to the police in the first place. Unlike Johnson's other alibi witnesses, Big Mary chose not to testify.

Because Big Mary lied to Clive that Johnson was with her at the time of the murder, she was most likely also lying when she said she went to the police.

In the highly unlikely scenario that Big Mary went to the police, there were actual reasons for that. Johnson had already confessed and offered hard proof to corroborate his confession: he told them where to find J.T. Trest's revolver, which had gone missing after his murder.

Johnson gave a very different "alibi" at his trial. Witnesses confirmed that he had been playing cards with them until about 20 minutes prior to the murder. The jury rejected the "alibi" since the card game took place only five to six miles away and Johnson owned a car. Johnson became a suspect since he owned the same type of car seen driving away from the crime scene and had been seen with a .25-caliber pistol, the same type of pistol later found near J.T. Trest's body. Another witness who saw the murderer had identified the suspect as a black male.

Johnson had offered witnesses who attested to his good reputation for peace and nonviolence in the community. The prosecution offered Johnson's confession as hard proof that they clearly didn't know him as well as they thought he did. Not only did Johnson confess, he had CONFESSED again to a fellow inmate in the county jail. That inmate, Sammy Jamison, testified against Johnson and corroborated his confession to the police.

Johnson's maternal grandmother swore that when he was a child, he would hear female voices and would sit and stare off into space, requiring him to be called several times to get his attention. Officials presented hard proof that even she was lying. She and her husband had been interviewed as part of Johnson's evaluation by the Mississippi State Hospital. Neither said he "heard voices" as a child, despite specific questions on any hallucinations.

Psychologist Charlton Stanley concluded that the defense's expert, Dr. Charles Summers, was in error in believing that Johnson had suffered impairing brain damage from birth. Johnson displayed no learning disability or organic brain syndrome in connection with his performance as a student. However, he concurred with Summers's findings that Johnson had an alcohol dependency and at times suffered from alcoholic blackouts and episodes of amnesia.

That leads us the greatest irony of Fourteen Days in May. Unbeknownst to Paul Hamann, his own film was used against Johnson. Although Johnson supposedly suffered from alcoholic blackouts and amnesia, his own statements prove that he remembered everything.

The courts also had before them the affidavits of prison officials and the psychiatric progress notes, which revealed that Johnson's responses to a broad range of inquiries were normal and rational, for example, that he fully understood his execution was imminent, that he continued to express hope for some reprieve, that he had selected the menu for his last meal, and that he had spoken with a television crew which had visited the penitentiary and interviewed him about his status.

Johnson's retelling of what happened

Johnson was too ashamed to tell the truth.

This is why

Johnson had convinced so many people of his innocence, including his trial attorneys, family, and friends, as well as the prison chaplain and several black prison guards. Even J.T. Trest's brother had said, "Edward Earl couldn't have killed my brother." Because Johnson lied to the end, Clive had to tell his devastated family that he failed to save him, despite him supposedly being innocent and despite his promises that he would save him.

"Everyone's been very calm and collected about this. Well, let me tell you, I'm not calm and I'm not collected. I just came from talking with the family and I ask you rhetorically what I was meant to say. What I was meant to say, why it happened. I stayed with Edward Johnson. I had a privilege to stay with Edward Johnson for the last hours of his life. And I can say he was a lot more calm than I was. And I can only say this. When the family asked me why, all I could say was it's a sick world. It's a sick world. Thank you."

Clive was right about one thing. It is a sick world.

In all likelihood, Edward Earl Johnson was a would-be serial killer and rapist who was caught after fumbling his first crimes.

According to Sally Franklin, Johnson initially tried to trick her into opening the door by giving a fabricated name and tore open the screen door when she refused to open the door, then attacked her even after she offered him money. Johnson remembered everything since he was sober when he did it. His grandmother said she never saw him drink.

According to his clemency petition, Johnson was ambitious to become a police officer. Shortly before the murder, he had taken an aptitude test for law enforcement. The results did not reach his grandmother until just after his arrest. The petition insinuates that Johnson had passed the test. That raises the question of what he would've done had he become a police officer.

Johnson most likely would've killed again.

Serial killers generally target victims of their own race. Johnson may have been testing how much he would be able to get with. According to his confession, he attacked J.T. Trest, even though Trest hadn't done anything to him yet. He then executed him as he lied on the ground. When Johnson claimed his confession was obtained under coercion, he may have been projecting a fantasy of becoming a police officer in the Deep South as a way to murder black people.

"He said, '[N-word], all we have to say is that you jumped out the car and ran.'"

Charlton Stanley concluded that Johnson was a sociopath.

That said, even sociopaths can have feelings. ASPD exists on a spectrum. Minutes before his execution, Johnson hugged Paul (this is shown in the film). Prison warden Don Cabana later recounted his last moments with Johnson in Death by Midnight.

"He insisted to the very end, somewhat oddly, that he did not commit the crime … my experience with condemned prisoners was always that once strapped to the chair, they came around somehow with something, if only something simple as 'Tell the victim's family I'm sorry,' 'Tell my mother I'm sorry,' something that indicated something bad had happened, I was there and I was part of it. But not so with this young man."

In his last moments, Johnson finally broke:

"When I performed my ritualistic function of asking if he had a final public statement, this young man looked me in the eye with tears streaming down his cheeks, and he said: 'Warden, you're about to become a murderer. I did not kill that policeman, and dear God, I can't make anyone believe me.'"

Cabana evidently forgot exactly what Johnson said:

"He indicated his innocence… and that he regretted the whole situation, but that he bore no ill will to anyone… and he was thankful that the process was coming to a close for himself and his family, and stated that he was not guilty."

Johnson likely knew his appeals were most likely going to fail. The prison psychologist said he appeared "to be too calm and too much in control ... [to] appreciate the gravity of his situation." Stanley said he was deliberately patterning his behavior on that of Jimmy Lee Gray. However, Johnson's breakdown in his final moments confirms that it was a facade. He was scared of dying. That's what makes the documentary a compelling watch.

"Yeah... it's a tiring wait, you know. I think sometime, I might just have to wait up to that last moment, you know. Maybe the last hour. Maybe the last minute. Maybe the last second. Who knows? I just got to prepare myself for that. And I am preparing."

We already know how this one ends.

Johnson's final statement in the gas chamber echoed his wait for a stay of execution: "Well, I guess no one is going to call. OK, let's get this over with."

Ohio historian here. Not a geologist by any means, but in doing some history of Precambrian time in Ohio I've been on a deep dive on how the hell do we know about the age of the Earth to begin with?

It turns out, it's sands of time.

I mean, I wish it was those ones, too, but the gaming industry apparently can’t stop firing people before getting a damn remake out the door.

No, no, these are more literal than that.

-------------------------

In 1948, a graduate student named Clair Patterson walked into Harrison Brown's laboratory at the University of Chicago and received what sounded like a simple dissertation assignment. Brown had worked out a method for measuring the ratio of uranium to lead in meteorites, which would yield the age of the Earth. He needed someone to do the lab work. It was "duck soup," Brown told him (or, for you young-timers, “this is a side quest”).

It was not duck soup. Or a side quest.

Every sample Patterson touched came back flooded with lead. Overwhelming, measurement-destroying quantities of lead, orders of magnitude higher than what should have been in an ancient meteorite, let alone on Earth. 

The lead was in his glassware. It was in his reagents. It was in the distilled water. It was in the air. 

He changed his equipment. The lead came back. 

He changed his solvents. The lead came back. 

He scrubbed everything with acid. The lead came back. 

The project that was supposed to take a year took seven.

Patterson eventually built one of the first ultra-clean laboratories in the history of science: a sealed room with filtered air, acid-washed surfaces, and purified reagents, working under conditions stricter than a modern semiconductor fabrication plant. He is literally photographed shirtless scrubbing his lab to keep it clean. He followed Brown to Caltech. By 1953, working with a mass spectrograph at Argonne National Laboratory, he had his number: the earth was 4.55 billion years old, give or take about seventy million. 

He drove to his mother's house in Iowa to tell her. He was so overwhelmed that he insisted she take him to the hospital because he thought he was having a heart attack. But he was not having a heart attack. He was having a career.

Because it turns out a rock Patterson used, and the tiny crystal inside that rock that made the measurement possible at all, is the reason he discovered we had poisoned our planet.  

The Part Where We Stab the Earth With a Diamond Straw and Suck What Comes Out

Drill a water well in Ohio and you will hit bedrock somewhere between fifty and two hundred feet down. The diamond bit punches through glacial till, clay, sand, and gravel, all of it deposited in the last two million years by ice sheets that advanced and retreated across the Midwest. Then it strikes limestone, or shale, or dolomite, some sort of sedimentary rock laid down between 500 and 300 million years ago, when Ohio was the floor of a shallow tropical sea. All of it comes out as a core.

Think of when you suck on an Icee as a kid, holding the straw’s suction and letting the ice come out. If it was solid enough, it’d stay as one hard core (and your mom would not be amused). That’s basically a drill core, only it’s a slurpee of all the rock underneath, and it goes for hundreds or thousands of feet.

If the well goes deeper (and most do not) the drill eventually reaches basement rock. For you Minecraft nerds, this is bedrock: igneous and metamorphic crystalline formations, granite and gneiss. It is literally the foundation of the continent. In Ohio, that basement is around a billion years old. Nobody sees it. It sits under everything, holding up the state, and the only people who encounter it are drillers who have gone too far and geologists who go looking for it on purpose.

The question every geologist wants to answer about basement rock is: how old is it? But you cannot tell by looking. A billion-year-old granite looks like a hundred-million-year-old granite looks like a ten-million-year-old granite. It is gray. It is hard. It has crystals in it. If you lick it (yes, geologists do this), it tastes like dust. The rock does not volunteer its age. To get that information, you have to break the rock open, sort through its mineral grains under a microscope, find one specific crystal that is usually smaller than a grain of sand, and ask the atoms inside it what year they moved in.

That crystal is zircon. And the entire field of deep-time geology runs on it.

Zircon (ZrSiO4, zirconium silicate) is what geologists call an accessory mineral: it forms in tiny quantities inside igneous and metamorphic rocks when magma cools, and it is not the main event. Quartz is the main event. Feldspar is the main event. Zircon is the thing you find when you crush a kilogram of granite into powder, run it through heavy-liquid separation to isolate the densest grains, spread those grains on a tray under a binocular microscope, and pick through them with a needle. The grains you are looking for are typically between 100 and 300 micrometers long. 

For perspective, two hundred micrometers is the width of two human hairs laid side by side. You could fit several on the period at the end of this sentence. You could inhale one. You certainly have, if you have ever stood near a road cut on a windy day, because zircon survives weathering and ends up in ordinary dust. Taste that, son? That’s Silurian dolomite, that is.

Now, that crystal you breathed in at a highway rest stop may have been Silurian, or it may have been older than any living thing that has ever existed on this planet. Zircon does not care. It is chemically inert. It does not dissolve in most acids. It has a Mohs hardness of 7.5, just below topaz. It does not melt until 2,550 degrees Celsius, which exceeds the temperature of most geological events short of a meteor impact. Metamorphism does not destroy it. Erosion does not destroy it. You can bury a zircon crystal under a mountain range, subject it to temperatures and pressures that turn the surrounding rock into something unrecognizable, and the zircon will come out the other side with its internal chemistry intact.

It is, grain for grain, the most durable thing on the planet. Diamonds are harder. Zircons are forever. Suck it, De Beers.

This durability is useful, but it is not the reason geochronologists care about zircon. They care about zircon because of what it does with uranium.

The Part Where They’re Literally Sands of Time

When a zircon crystal forms in a cooling magma, its crystal lattice incorporates trace amounts of uranium. Not a lot: we’re talking tens to hundreds of parts per million, depending on the magma's chemistry. But it accepts uranium readily, because uranium atoms fit into the lattice positions where zirconium normally sits. Lead, by contrast, does not fit. The crystal rejects lead at the moment of formation. 

This is the critical fact. A newly formed zircon crystal contains uranium and zero lead. From that moment, every atom of lead found inside the crystal is lead that uranium has decayed into, and nothing else.

Uranium-238 decays to lead-206. Uranium-235 decays to lead-207. Both decay chains are long, passing through dozens of intermediate radioactive daughters (radium, radon, polonium, and others), but the end product is always a stable isotope of lead. The half-lives are known numbers that don’t fluctuate: 4.468 billion years for uranium-238 for example, 703.8 million years for uranium-235, etc. These rates were set by nuclear physics at the formation of the solar system and have not changed since, because radioactive decay is governed by the weak nuclear force, which does not respond to temperature, pressure, or any geological process. It does not speed up. It does not slow down. It ticks.

So, you have a geological clock. Literal sands of time. The crystal starts with uranium and no lead. Lead accumulates at a known rate. Measure the ratio of lead to uranium in the crystal today, and you can calculate how long the clock has been running.

Arthur Holmes, a twenty-five-year-old geology student at Imperial College London who looks like he’s about to ruin Lord Kelvin’s day, was the first person to do this systematically. In 1911, he collected uranium-bearing minerals from a site in Norway, measured their lead-to-uranium ratios, and calculated their ages. He arrived at 370 million years for the Devonian-age rocks, and up to 1,640 million years for Pre-Cambrian samples. In the same paper, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Holmes noted that zircon was "dense and stable, and capable of withstanding great changes in their environment without undergoing alteration." He had identified the best clock in geology, but the instruments needed to actually use it would take another seventy years to build.

In practice, you collect a rock sample. You crush it in a jaw crusher, then a disk mill, reducing it to sand-sized particles. You run those particles through the series of sieves and heavy-liquid separations like we talked about earlier, isolating the densest mineral grains. You pick through those grains under a microscope, selecting zircon crystals by their shape and luster: stubby prisms, mostly transparent, sometimes pale yellow or purple. You mount the selected grains in epoxy, cut the mount in half to expose the crystals' cross-sections, and polish the surface. You image the polished crystals under a scanning electron microscope using cathodoluminescence, which reveals the internal growth zoning: concentric bands of slightly different chemistry that record the crystal's history. Some crystals have simple zoning. Some have cores surrounded by rims of different ages: old magmatic cores overgrown by younger metamorphic rims. You choose your analytical targets based on those images.

Then you put the mount in a SHRIMP. 

I’ve…got nothing here. I didn’t name the damn thing after an aquatic animal. Sometimes, scientists are just as shit at naming conventions as historians.

SHRIMP stands for Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe. It is a mass spectrometer the size of a room. The instrument fires a focused beam of oxygen ions at a spot on the zircon's polished surface, about 20 to 30 micrometers across: smaller than the crystal itself, small enough to target a single growth zone. The beam blasts atoms out of the crystal surface, a process called sputtering. Those atoms are ionized, accelerated, and separated by mass in a magnetic field. The instrument counts individual isotopes: uranium-238, uranium-235, lead-206, lead-207, lead-204. From those counts, you calculate the ratios. From the ratios, you calculate the age.

The whole process, from crushing rock to getting an age, takes weeks. The actual measurement on the SHRIMP takes minutes per spot. The number you get at the end might describe an event that happened four billion years ago, resolved to within a few million years, read from a speck of mineral you could lose between your fingernails.

Science. Is just so, so fucking cool.

The Part Where Someone Named Hell Wrong (and Also, Creationists)

Now, I’ll back up here, cause I’m certainly no scientist. I’m a damn historian. I stumbled into this the same way driller stumbled into the Middle Run Formation in Ohio: completely by accident, and motivated mostly by curiosity to figure out how the fuck a grain of sand can tell time. And there’s always been skeptics.

For example, in 2001, Simon Wilde, John Valley, William Peck, and Colin Graham published a paper in Nature describing a single grain designated W74/2-36 from Australia. They put it on the SHRIMP II ion microprobe at Curtin University, fired ions at it, and the oldest spot yielded a uranium-lead age of 4,404 million years, plus or minus 8. That is 4.4 billion years. The crystal had formed roughly 150 million years after the Earth itself, during the Hadean eon, a period named after the Greek word for hell.

But the crystal did more than give a date. Wilde and Valley measured its oxygen isotope ratios. The d18O value of 7.4 per mil in one zone was too high to have come from mantle-derived magma; it required a source that had interacted with liquid water at the surface. The chemical evidence locked inside a crystal the size of a sand grain, found in a conglomerate in a sheep paddock, required the existence of oceans on Earth at 4.4 billion years ago. 

The Hadean, it turned out, was not hell. It had water. The name was wrong, and a zircon proved it.

The 2001 result attracted the scrutiny that any claim about the oldest thing on Earth should attract. The concern was that over 4.4 billion years, uranium decay inside the crystal produces alpha particles that damage the crystal lattice. If that damage created pathways for lead to migrate, the clock could be biased. A crystal that had leaked lead would look younger than it actually was. A crystal that had gained lead from outside would look older. Either way, the number would be wrong.

So, in 2014, John Valley and a team of collaborators answered this by doing something that would have been science fiction twenty years earlier. They milled a needle-shaped specimen from the core of the Jack Hills zircon, about 100 by 100 by 1,000 nanometers, and loaded it into a local electrode atom probe. The instrument field-evaporated atoms from the needle's tip one at a time, measuring each atom's mass and three-dimensional position. It was six hundred million ions total. They mapped the distribution of lead, uranium, yttrium, and rare earth elements at the scale of individual atoms.

Read that again. They fucking lasered a grain of sand the size of a bacterium, atom by atom.

Again. For the people in the back. Science is so fucking cool.

What they found were clusters: pockets of radiogenic lead and other incompatible elements, each about 10 nanometers across, spaced 10 to 50 nanometers apart. The clusters had formed during a reheating event around 3.4 billion years ago, when lead that had built up from a billion years of uranium decay migrated short distances into tiny zones of radiation damage. But the clusters were far too small and far too isolated to affect the uranium-lead age measured by the SHRIMP, which averaged isotopes over a volume about 100,000 times larger. The lead had shuffled a few nanometers. The clock had not budged. Valley's paper confirmed the age at 4,374 million years for the zircon's core, plus or minus 6 million. Any magma ocean that had homogenized the Earth's crust must have occurred before that. 

Radiometric dating has been challenged since Bertram Boltwood published the first uranium-lead ages in 1907. Some challenges were productive: Boltwood's half-life values were wrong (he used 2,600 years for radium; the actual value is 1,600), his samples contained thorium he had not accounted for, and his ages were off by a factor of two. 

The technique improved because people identified specific errors and fixed them. Concordia diagrams, developed in the 1950s, exist precisely because discordant uranium-lead ages are common and need correction. The science is better now because serious scientists asked hard questions sixty and seventy years ago.

And this is the thing about the sciences, mine included: we’re constantly making observations, failing, and building upon them. Sometimes (let’s be honest, most of the time) those failures stick around entire lifetimes. But we continue to work off what we know, asking what we don’t know.

I say that because the other kind of challenge comes from young-Earth creationists who start with the conclusion that the Earth is roughly six thousand years old and work backward. The most organized effort was the RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth), an eight-year program funded by the Institute for Creation Research. The RATE team's central finding, published in 2005, was that radiometric decay had occurred in the quantities mainstream science described, but that it must have been accelerated at some point. Their most publicized study involved helium diffusion in zircon crystals from a geothermal borehole in New Mexico. 

Mainstream geophysicists noted that accelerating nuclear decay by the required factor would have released enough heat to melt the Earth's crust several times over. 

The RATE team acknowledged the heat problem and proposed that God had miraculously removed it.

The RATE project did not overturn radiometric dating. It confirmed, inadvertently, how much evidence supports it: the team could not find a single radiometric system that produced a young age without invoking physics that would have sterilized the planet. 

The zircon clock ticks. It has ticked for 4.4 billion years, and it does not require anyone's permission to keep going.

The Part Where the Grad Student Takes On Exxon 

And yeah, and that lede I buried way back when: Patterson’s “heart attack” at his mother’s house in Iowa wasn’t because he realized the planet was 4.55 billion years old.

He had realized we had poisoned our planet.

Because Patterson had spent seven years fighting lead contamination in his lab, he knew exactly how much lead was in the modern environment, and he knew it was not supposed to be there. 

The levels he had measured were hundreds of times higher than natural baselines. He traced the source to tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive that had been pumping fine lead particles into the atmosphere through every car exhaust pipe in America since 1923. 

He published his findings. The American Petroleum Institute, which had funded some of his oceanographic work, cut him off. He kept going. He drilled ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica and showed that atmospheric lead had spiked precisely when leaded gasoline went on sale. He testified before Congress. The lead industry's hired expert, Robert Kehoe, testified that lead levels in the human body were natural and always had been. Patterson's ice cores said otherwise. Patterson won. The 1970 Clean Air Act and the eventual ban on leaded gasoline grew directly out of his research. Children's blood lead levels fell 76 percent within thirteen years of the ban.

A grad student who was supposed to measure the age of the Earth accidentally discovered that an entire industry was poisoning the planet, and spent the rest of his career making them stop.

 Thank God grad students cannot follow directions.

Works Cited

Holmes, Arthur. "The Association of Lead with Uranium in Rock-Minerals, and its Application to the Measurement of Geological Time." Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A 85, no. 578 (1911): 248-256.

Wilde, Simon A., John W. Valley, William H. Peck, and Colin M. Graham. "Evidence from Detrital Zircons for the Existence of Continental Crust and Oceans on the Earth 4.4 Gyr Ago." Nature 409 (2001): 175-178. 

Valley, John W., Aaron J. Cavosie, Takayuki Ushikubo, David A. Reinhard, Daniel F. Lawrence, David J. Larson, Peter H. Clifton, Thomas F. Kelly, Simon A. Wilde, Desmond E. Moser, and Michael J. Spicuzza. "Hadean Age for a Post-Magma-Ocean Zircon Confirmed by Atom-Probe Tomography." Nature Geoscience 7 (2014): 219-223.

Patterson, Clair C. "Age of Meteorites and the Earth." Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 10 (1956): 230-237; Searcy, "Immeasurable," University of Chicago Magazine; Andrew Moseman, "This Caltech Scientist's Legacy Is a Less Toxic World," Caltech Magazine, February 25, 2026 .

Boltwood, Bertram B. "On the Ultimate Disintegration Products of the Radio-active Elements. Part II. The Disintegration Products of Uranium." American Journal of Science 23 (1907): 77-88.

Carlson, Ernest H. Minerals of Ohio, 2nd ed. Columbus: Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey Bulletin 69, 2015.

Compston, William, and Robert T. Pidgeon. "Jack Hills, Evidence of More Very Old Detrital Zircons in Western Australia." Nature 321 (1986): 766-769.

Burchfield, Joe D. Lord Kelvin and the Age of the Earth. New York: Science History Publications, 1975.

Dalrymple, G. Brent. The Age of the Earth. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Harley, Simon L., and Nigel M. Kelly. "Zircon: Tiny but Timely." Elements 3, no. 1 (2007): 13-18. 

Hanchar, John M., and Paul W.O. Hoskin, eds. Zircon. Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry 53. Washington, DC: Mineralogical Society of America, 2003.

Humphreys, D. Russell, et al. "Helium Diffusion Age of 6,000 Years Supports Accelerated Nuclear Decay." Creation Research Society Quarterly 41, no. 1 (2004): 1-16.

Photo Credit: PBS

I have been off of you tube for years now and this is my first return video. I would love some recommendations on how to make my videos more appealing for historical audiences like you all and advice on good "off the beaten path" historical topics. I usually focus on little discussed topics or abandoned towns, anything in those realms would be incredibly helpful.

On the night of October 26, 1979 in Amarillo, Texas, seventeen year old Jay Kelly Pinkerton broke into the house of thirty year old Sarah Lawrence. He took a bowie knife from the master bedroom and stabbed Lawrence in the abdomen with it. After stabbing her in the abdomen, he penetrated into her wound with his penis. When he was finished with the sexual assault, he slashed her throat and cut off her breasts. He continued to mutilate her body afterwards by stabbing her over thirty times. Evidence also shows he vaginally penetrated her after her death. Detectives followed a trail of footsteps that led to his residence. Pinkerton, who was a high school dropout that was working as an apprentice butcher, was known to the police as a peeping tom. The police briefly held him, but let him go due to a lack of evidence at the time.

On April 9th 1980, tragedy stroke again. Jay Kelly Pinkerton (who had recently turned eighteen) broke into a family furniture store and raped and stabbed 25 year old Sherry Welch to death. There were also bite marks on her breasts. Sherry Welch managed the furniture store. It was revealed in an autopsy that Welch was also stabbed over thirty times. Welch and Lawrence's murders were very similar in their grisly nature.

The police finally managed to connect both of the murders to Pinkerton. They connected Pinkerton to Lawrence's murder through a bloody handprint he left in the house and they connected him to Welch's murder through the bite marks he left on her breasts. Pinkerton was arrested on September 26th, 1980. The police also managed to get the testimony of an inmate at the jail Pinkerton was staying at while awaiting trial. Pinkerton bragged to the inmate about the murders.

Pinkerton went to trial for Lawrence's murder, was found guilty and received a death sentence on May 30th, 1981. Eleven months later, Pinkerton went to trial for Welch's murder. He was sentenced to death on May 1982 for her murder. Pinkerton received four different execution dates for Lawrence's murder. He had an execution date in 1984 and two in 1985, but all three were stayed. He received his fourth and final execution date in 1986. On May 15th 1986, Jay Kelly Pinkerton was put to death by lethal injection within the Huntsville Unit execution chamber for Sarah Lawrence's murder. Welch's murder case was still on appeal at the time. This makes Jay Kelly Pinkerton one of twenty two offenders executed in the Post-Fuhrman United States prior to the ban on the execution of juvenile offenders in 2005 by the Supreme Court case Roper v. Simmons.

https://law.justia.com/cases/texas/court-of-criminal-appeals/1983/68903-3.html

https://www.historicalcrimedetective.com/msm-jay-kelly-pinkerton-1979/

https://murderpedia.org/male.P/p1/pinkerton-jay-kelly.htm

https://www.myhighplains.com/high-plains-history/amarillos-season-of-terror-the-murders-of-jay-kelly-pinkerton-44-years-later/

Tuan Anh Nguyen was a Vietnamese refugee who came to America in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. His family was sponsored by a church in Columbus, Indiana. While Nguyen was attending high school in Columbus, he began dating Donna Barthlow. They eloped in 1978. After several moves, they settled in Tulsa, Oklahoma. They had a son, which they named Nathaniel. However, Nguyen began exhibiting jealous and possessive behavior. At the time, they were staying at Donna's cousin's house along with the cousin's husband and their two children. Donna decided that she wanted a divorce and she asked him to leave the house. So, Nguyen decided to stay with a friend.

Nguyen had another friend (who was unaware of his intentions) take him to the house where Donna and his infant son were staying. Nguyen entered the house. In the house, he stabbed Donna 26 times, her six year old nephew Joseph 17 times and her three year old niece Amanda 22 times. Nguyen left his infant son unharmed. Joseph and Amanda's parents would eventually discover the bodies.

Nguyen fled the state of Oklahoma. He first went to Wisconsin where he met a young girl named Mychau Truong. He moved to Louisiana with her where he physically and sexually abused her. Nguyen essentially kept her as a prisoner. They later moved to Arizona. In 1986, during one of Nguyen's beating sessions, Truong shot him. Truong was pregnant with Nguyen's child and only fourteen at the time. After police arrived and discovered Nguyen's fugitive status, Nguyen was transferred to Oklahoma. He was put on trial and found guilty of all three of the murders. He received a life sentence for Donna's murder and two death sentences for Joseph and Amanda's murders. His lawyers tried to argue that during his time on death row, his mental health deteriorated so much that he didn't understand his punishment. Despite this, Tuan Anh Nguyen was executed by lethal injection on his 39th birthday on December 10th, 1998.

https://murderpedia.org/male.N/n1/nguyen-tuan-anh.htm

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-10th-circuit/1075401.html

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1998/12/09/Stays-denied-for-inmate-in-Oklahoma/8367913179600/

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/1998/12/11/triple-murderer-executed-in-oklahoma-on-birthday/

On July 13, 1942, the Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101 carried out its first mass killing operation at Jozefow, a Polish village in the Lublin district. Major Wilhelm Trapp, the battalion commander, wept as he gave the order. He then made an offer that has no parallel in the Holocaust's operational record: any older man who did not feel up to the task could step out. Of roughly five hundred men, about a dozen did. By the end of the day, the battalion had shot approximately 1,500 Jewish men, women, and children. It would be the first of hundreds of thousands they would murder over the course of the war.

Ordinary Men, first published in 1992 and revised in 2017, reconstructs the actions of the battalion through postwar judicial interrogations conducted by the Hamburg prosecutor's office in the 1960s. The battalion was composed of middle-aged reservists from Hamburg, working-class and lower-middle-class men, many with families, most with no ideological commitment to National Socialism. They were not SS. They were not volunteers. They were ordinary men, which is the book's argument and its singular horror.

At Józefów a mere dozen men out of nearly 500 had responded instinctively to Major Trapp's offer to step forward and excuse themselves from the impending mass murder. Why was the number of men who from the beginning declared themselves unwilling to shoot so small? In part, it was a matter of the suddenness. There was no forewarning or time to think, as the men were totally "surprised" by the Józefów action. Unless they were able to react to Trapp's offer on the spur of the moment, this first opportunity was lost.

As important as the lack of time for reflection was the pressure for conformity—the basic identification of men in uniform with their comrades and the strong urge not to separate themselves from the group by stepping out. The battalion had only recently been brought up to full strength, and many of the men did not yet know each other well; the bonds of military comradeship were not yet fully developed. Nonetheless, the act of stepping out that morning in Józefów meant leaving one's comrades and admitting that one was "too weak" or "cowardly." Who would have "dared," one policeman declared emphatically, to "lose face" before the assembled troops. "If the question is posed to me why I shot with the others in the first place," said another who subsequently asked to be excused after several rounds of killing, "I must answer that no one wants to be thought a coward." It was one thing to refuse at the beginning, he added, and quite another to try to shoot but not be able to continue. Another policeman—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply, "I was cowardly."

Most of the interrogated policemen denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, many did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but claimed that they had not heard that part of the speech or could not remember it. A few policemen made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political values and vocabulary of the 1960s were useless in explaining the situation in which they had found themselves in 1942. Quite atypical in describing his state of mind that morning of July 13 was a policeman who admitted to killing as many as twenty Jews before quitting. "I thought that I could master the situation and that without me the Jews were not going to escape their fate anyway. . . . Truthfully I must say that at the time we didn't reflect about it at all. Only years later did any of us become truly conscious of what had happened then. . . . Only later did it first occur to me that had not been right."

In addition to the easy rationalization that not taking part in the shooting was not going to alter the fate of the Jews in any case, the policemen developed other justifications for their behavior. Perhaps the most astonishing rationalization of all was that of a thirty-five-year-old metalworker from Bremerhaven:

I made the effort, and it was possible for me, to shoot only children. It so happened that the mothers led the children by the hand. My neighbor then shot the mother and I shot the child that belonged to her, because I reasoned with myself that after all without its mother the child could not live any longer. It was supposed to be, so to speak, soothing to my conscience to release children unable to live without their mothers.

The full weight of this statement, and the significance of the word choice of the former policeman, cannot be fully appreciated unless one knows that the German word for "release" (erlösen) also means to "redeem" or "save" when used in a religious sense. The one who "releases" is the Erlöser—the Savior or Redeemer!

In terms of motivation and consciousness, the most glaring omission in the interrogations is any discussion of anti-Semitism. For the most part the interrogators did not pursue this issue. Nor were the men, for understandable reasons as potential defendants, eager to volunteer any illuminating comments. With few exceptions the whole question of anti-Semitism is marked by silence. What is clear is that the men's concern for their standing in the eyes of their comrades was not matched by any sense of human ties with their victims. The Jews stood outside their circle of human obligation and responsibility. Such a polarization between "us" and "them," between one's comrades and the enemy, is of course standard in war. It would seem that even if the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 had not consciously adopted the anti-Semitic doctrines of the regime, they had at least accepted the assimilation of the Jews into the image of the enemy. Major Trapp appealed to this generalized notion of the Jews as part of the enemy in his early-morning speech. The men should remember, when shooting Jewish women and children, that the enemy was killing German women and children by bombing Germany.

If only a dozen policemen stepped out at the beginning to extricate themselves from the impending mass murder, a much larger number either sought to evade the shooting by less conspicuous methods or asked to be released from the firing squads once the shooting had begun. How many policemen belonged to these categories cannot be ascertained with any certainty, but an estimate in the range of 10 to 20 percent of those actually assigned to the firing squads does not seem unreasonable. Sergeant Hergert, for instance, admitted excusing as many as five from his squad of forty or fifty men. In the Drucker-Steinmetz group, from which the greatest number of shooters was interrogated, we can identify six policemen who quit within four rounds and an entire squad of five to eight who were released considerably later. While the number of those who evaded or dropped out was thus not insignificant, it must not obscure the corollary that at least 80 percent of those called upon to shoot continued to do so until 1,500 Jews from Józefów had been killed.

Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. Revised ed. New York: Harper Perennial, 2017. p.82-85

Christopher Browning is a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and one of the foremost scholars of the Holocaust's operational mechanics. Milgram's obedience experiments at Yale in the early 1960s demonstrated that roughly two-thirds of participants would administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks when instructed by an authority figure. Browning draws on Milgram throughout Ordinary Men, but the Jozefow data breaks the framework. Milgram's subjects obeyed because authority was immediate, constant, and insistent. Trapp's men were given explicit permission to refuse. The authority figure was weeping. What Milgram got wrong is that the pressure came from beside, not above, from the men standing in the same row, from the shared understanding that stepping out meant declaring yourself weaker than the man next to you.

The one policeman who called himself a coward had the clearest view of the situation. He understood that the real courage was in the refusal, and he named his failure to refuse for what it was. Eighty percent of those assigned to the firing squads continued to the end.

History teaches us it does not require enthusiasm to become a mass murder. It requires the absence of refusal.

Photo Credit: Deportation from the Zychlin ghetto, March 1942. German policemen oversee the removal of Jews to the Chelmno killing center. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

On the night of February 13-14, 1945, approximately 800 British and American aircraft dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs on Dresden in two waves separated by three hours. The first wave created fires. The second wave fed them. The resulting firestorm generated winds exceeding 150 miles per hour and temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt glass and asphalt. The death toll, once wildly inflated by Nazi propaganda and later by David Irving, was established by a 2010 commission of historians appointed by the city of Dresden at approximately 22,700 to 25,000. Margaret Freyer was a civilian caught in the streets.

I stood by the entrance and waited until no flames came licking in, then I quickly slipped through and out into the street. I had my suitcase in one hand and was wearing a white fur coat which by now was anything but white. I also wore boots and long trousers. Those boots had been a lucky choice, it turned out.

Because of the flying sparks and the fire-storm I couldn't see anything at first. A witches' cauldron was waiting for me out there: no street, only rubble nearly a metre high, glass, girders, stones, craters. I tried to get rid of the sparks by constantly patting them off my coat. It was useless. I stopped doing it, stumbled, and someone behind me called out, 'Take your coat off, it's started to burn.' In the pervading extreme heat I hadn't even noticed. I took off the coat and dropped it.

Next to me a woman was screaming continually, 'My den's burning down, my den's burning down,' and dancing in the street. As I go on, I can still hear her screaming but I don't see her again. I run, I stumble, anywhere. I don't even know where I am any more. I've lost all sense of direction because all I can see is three steps ahead.

Suddenly I fall into a big hole—a bomb crater, about six metres wide and two metres deep, and I end up down there lying on top of three women. I shake them by their clothes and start to scream at them, telling them they must get out of here—but they don't move any more. I believe I was severely shocked by this incident; I seemed to have lost all emotional feeling. Quickly, I climbed across the women, pulled my suitcase after me, and crawled on all fours out of the crater.

To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. It's only my eyes which take this in; I myself feel nothing. The woman remains lying on the ground, completely still. Why? What for? I don't know, I just stumble on. The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. I hold another wet handkerchief in front of my mouth, my hands and my face are burning; it feels as if the skin is hanging down in strips.

On my right I see a big, burnt-out shop where lots of people are standing. I join them, but think, 'No, I can't stay here either, this place is completely surrounded by fire.' I leave all these people behind, and stumble on. Where to? But every time towards those places where it is dark, in case there is no fire there. I have no conception of what the street actually looked like. But it is especially from those dark patches that the people come who wring their hands and cry the same thing over and over again: 'You can't carry on there, we've just come from there, everything is burning there!' Wherever and to whomsoever I turn, always that same answer.

In front of me is something that might be a street, filled with a hellish rain of sparks which look like enormous rings of fire when they hit the ground. I have no choice. I must go through. I press another wet handkerchief to my mouth and almost get through, but I fall and am convinced that I cannot go on. It's hot. Hot! My hands are burning like fire. I just drop my suitcase, I am past caring, and too weak. At least, there's nothing to lug around with me any more.

I stumbled on towards where it was dark. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. I had a feeling that they were being shot, but my mind could not understand what was really happening. Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders. I fall then, stumbling over a fallen woman and as I lie right next to her I see how her clothes are burning away. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: 'I don't want to burn to death—no, no burning—I don't want to burn!' Once more I fall down and feel that I am not going to be able to get up again, but the fear of being burnt pulls me to my feet. Crawling, stumbling, my last handkerchief pressed to my mouth … I do not know how many people I fell over. I knew only one feeling: that I must not burn.

Then my handkerchiefs are all finished—it's dreadfully hot—I can't go on and I remain lying on the ground. Suddenly a soldier appears in front of me. I wave, and wave again. He comes over to me and I whisper into his ear (my voice has almost gone), 'Please take me with you, I don't want to burn.' But that soldier was much too weak himself to lift me to my feet. He laid my two arms crosswise over my breast and stumbled on across me. I followed him with my eyes until he disappears somewhere in the darkness.

I try once more to get up on my feet, but I can only manage to crawl forward on all fours. I can still feel my body, I know I'm still alive. Suddenly, I'm standing up, but there's something wrong, everything seems so far away and I can't hear or see properly any more. As I found out later, like all the others, I was suffering from lack of oxygen. I must have stumbled forwards roughly ten paces when I all at once inhaled fresh air. There's a breeze! I take another breath, inhale deeply, and my senses clear. In front of me is a broken tree. As I rush towards it, I know that I have been saved, but am unaware that the park is the Bürgerwiese.

I walk on a little and discover a car. I'm pleased and decide to spend the night in it. The car is full of suitcases and boxes but I find enough room on the rear seats to squeeze in. Another stroke of good luck for me is that the car's windows are all broken and I have to keep awake putting out the sparks which drifted in. I don't know how long I sat there, when a hand suddenly descended on my shoulder and a man's voice said, 'Hello! you must get out of there.' I got such a fright, because obviously someone was determined to force me away from my safe hiding place. I said, with great fear in my voice, 'Please, allow me to stay here, I'll give you all the money I've got on me.' (If I think about this now it almost sounds like a joke.) But the answer I got was 'No, I don't want your money. The car is on fire.'

Good God! I leapt out immediately and could see that indeed all four tyres were burning. I hadn't noticed because of the tremendous heat.

Now I looked at the man and recognized him as the soldier who had put my arms across my chest. When I asked him, he confirmed it. Then he started to weep. He continued to stroke my back, mumbling words about bravery, Russian campaign … but this here, this is hell. I don't grasp his meaning and offer him a cigarette.

We walk on a little way and discover two crouching figures. They were two men, one a railwayman who was crying because (in the smoke and debris) he could not find the way to his home. The other was a civilian who had escaped from a cellar together with sixty people, but had had to leave his wife and children behind, due to some dreadful circumstances. All three men were crying now but I just stood there, incapable of a single tear. It was as if I was watching a film. We spent half the night together, sitting on the ground too exhausted even to carry on a conversation. The continuous explosions didn't bother us, but the hollow cries for help which came continuously from all directions were gruesome. Towards six o'clock in the morning, we parted.

I spent all the daylight hours which followed in the town searching for my fiancé. I looked for him amongst the dead, because hardly any living beings were to be seen anywhere. What I saw is so horrific that I shall hardly be able to describe it. Dead, dead, dead everywhere. Some completely black like charcoal. Others completely untouched, lying as if they were asleep. Women in aprons, women with children sitting in the trams as if they had just nodded off. Many women, many young girls, many small children, soldiers who were only identifiable as such by the metal buckles on their belts, almost all of them naked. Some clinging to each other in groups as if they were clawing at each other.

From some of the debris poked arms, heads, legs, shattered skulls. The static water tanks were filled up to the top with dead human beings, with large pieces of masonry lying on top of that again. Most people looked as if they had been inflated, with large yellow and brown stains on their bodies. People whose clothes were still glowing … I think I was incapable of absorbing the meaning of this cruelty any more, for there were also so many little babies, terribly mutilated; and all the people lying so close together that it looked as if someone had put them down there, street by street, deliberately.

I then went through the Grosser Garten and there is one thing I did realize. I was aware that I had constantly to brush hands away from me, hands which belonged to people who wanted me to take them with me, hands which clung to me. But I was much too weak to lift anyone up. My mind took all this in vaguely, as if seen through a veil. In fact, I was in such a state that I did not realize that there was a third attack on Dresden. Late that afternoon I collapsed in the Ostra-Allee, where two men took me to a friend who lived on the outskirts of the city.

I asked for a mirror and did not recognize myself any more. My face was a mass of blisters and so were my hands. My eyes were narrow slits and puffed up, my whole body was covered in little black, pitted marks. I cannot understand to this day how I contracted these marks, because I was wearing a pair of long trousers and a jacket. Possibly the fire-sparks ate their way through my clothing.

Carey, John (ed.), The Faber Book of Reportage (Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 752-755.

Dresden became one of the most debated Allied operations of the war, with over 25,000 killed. W.G. Sebald argued in On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) that postwar German literature systematically failed to reckon with the experience of Allied bombing: 600,000 civilians killed, 3.5 million homes destroyed, and the experience almost entirely absent from the Federal Republic's literary output. The silence was not accidental; Sebald attributed it to a collective failure of narrative capacity, arguing that the destruction exceeded what prose could metabolize. The Faber Book of Reportage (1987) preserved Freyer's account, one of the few firsthand narratives of what it was like to be inside a firestorm at ground level.

Photo Credit: Peter, Richard (sen.). View from Deutschefotothek the City Hall Tower toward the South after firebombing of Dresden. Photograph, September 17 – December 31, 1945.

Margot de Valois was nineteen years old on the night of August 23, 1572. She had been married to Henri de Navarre for six days. The wedding was Catherine de Medici's centerpiece of Franco-Huguenot reconciliation: a Catholic princess wed to the Protestant heir to the Bourbon line, with every senior Huguenot leader in France invited to Paris for the celebration. The reconciliation was a trap, or became one. Historians still argue over whether Catherine planned the massacre in advance or improvised it after the botched assassination of Admiral Coligny two days before the wedding.

Leonie Frieda's Catherine de Medici (2003) draws on Margot's own memoir for the scene inside the Louvre that night.

At the Louvre, where so many Huguenot nobles had lodged for the marriage, the killings also began. Earlier, on the evening of the 23rd, Margot had been in her mother's private apartments with her sister Claude, Duchess of Lorraine. She had seen for herself that there were strange preparations being made that indicated trouble, although in her memoirs she wrote, 'As for me no one told me anything about this.' She had already fallen victim to what she feared most: excluded by the Protestants who surrounded her husband, now her family treated her as suspect. It was impossible to ignore the whispering and febrile activity around her, yet she was cold-shouldered by both sides. In her memoirs she recalled that dreadful night:

"The Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I had married the King of Navarre, so that no one told me anything until that evening. I was at the coucher of the Queen my mother, sitting on a chest with my sister [the Duchess] of Lorraine, who was very depressed, when my mother noticed me and sent me to bed. As I was making my curtsy, my sister caught me by the sleeve and detained me. She began to weep and said, 'Mon Dieu, sister, you must not go.' This frightened me greatly. My mother, noticing it, called my sister and spoke to her sharply, forbidding her to tell me anything. My sister said that it was not right to send me away like that to be sacrificed and that, if they discovered anything, no doubt they would avenge themselves on me. My mother replied that, God willing, I would come to no harm, but in any case I must go, for fear of awaking their suspicions. I could see that they were arguing, though I did not catch the words. She commanded me sharply again to retire. My sister, melting into tears, bade me goodnight, not daring to say anything further; and I left the room bewildered and dazed without knowing what it was that I feared. No sooner had I reached my closet than I said my prayers, imploring God to take me under His wing and to guard me against what or whom I knew not."

For Catherine to have withheld her daughter from the Protestants' apartments that night might have alerted them to the plot. She was therefore allowed to go to what her mother well knew would very soon become a charnel house. It was a mark of the Queen Mother's utter commitment to the success of the operation that she put the prosperity of her plans before the well-being of her daughter.

Henri of Navarre had been in his apartments at the palace holding an urgent meeting with his suite of nobles about the worrying signs that an attack of some sort might be imminent. He was restless and decided that he would speak to the King early the next morning. When Margot arrived,

"The King, my husband, who was in his bed, sent word to me that I should retire which I did. I found his bed surrounded by some thirty or forty Huguenots, who were strangers to me as yet, as I had been married only a few days. All night long they talked of the accident to the Admiral, deciding to go to the King as soon as it were day and to demand justice."

Margot was to get little rest that night, for as her husband rose at the first light of dawn, having been unable to sleep, he decided to play tennis while waiting for the King to rise. He had not walked more than a few paces from his apartment when he and his companions were stopped by guards on the King's orders. Separated from his gentlemen, the elite of the Protestant party, most of whom he would never see again, Henri was taken with his cousin the Prince de Condé to a chamber and ordered to remain there by the King's command for his own safety. As he was locked in with his cousin, his comrades were being slaughtered, easy victims trapped in the heart of their enemy's citadel.

Nançay, captain of the royal guard, led his men as they began their gruesome work. Most of the Huguenots were asleep when the killing started. Dragged from their beds, their throats were cut before they had a chance to fight back. As the noise of screams and terror resounded throughout the passages, staircases, and confusing catacomb of corridors that made up part of the much-altered palace, the survivors ran desperately, attempting to hide from the teams of killers. Finding nowhere to conceal themselves, many were chased into the great courtyard of the Louvre. There, awaiting them, were the King's archers who pushed the terrified men and women on to the halberds of the Swiss guards, who impaled their unarmed quarry with grim efficiency.

Margot had just fallen asleep in her husband's bed when someone was heard desperately banging and kicking against the door, crying out, 'Navarre! Navarre!' Margot's old nourrice (wet-nurse), thinking it was Navarre himself, hurriedly unlocked the door only to find that it was Monsieur de Leran, one of his gentlemen. Margot was aghast when she saw him:

"Wounded in the elbow by a sword and by a halberd on the arm, and [he] was pursued by four archers who followed him into the room. To save himself, he flung himself on my bed, and I, with that man holding me, rolled into the passage and he after me, still hugging my body. I did not know who he was nor whether he meant to outrage me nor whether it was him or myself whom the archers were pursuing. We both screamed and were equally terrified. But at last, as God would have it, Monsieur de Nançay, the captain of the guards, came in. Seeing me in that position, though he pitied me, he could not help laughing, and … gave me the life of that poor man who was clinging to me. I had him laid in my closet and his wounds tended and kept him there until he recovered. While I was changing my shift, which was bloody, Monsieur de Nançay told me what was happening and assured me that the King my husband was in the King's room and that no harm would come to him. Wrapping me in a bed-robe, he led me to the apartment of my sister Madame de Lorraine where I arrived more dead than alive. As I entered the antechamber, the door of which was standing wide open, a gentleman named Bourse, running from the archers who were at his heels, was struck by a halberd not three feet away from me. I fell almost fainting into the arms of Monsieur de Nançay and … as soon as I could recover, I ran into the little room where my sister slept."

According to Margot's account she then intervened for two of her husband's men, his valet de chambre, Jean d'Armagnac, and Jean de Miossens, first gentleman to Henri of Navarre. They begged her to save them and she in turn went on her knees before the King and Queen Mother, who reluctantly agreed to spare their lives.

Frieda, Leonie. Catherine de Medici (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 334-337.

Robert Kingdon's Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres (1988) traces how the event's historiography has been shaped by confessional allegiance for four centuries, with Catholic and Protestant historians constructing incompatible narratives from the same documentary evidence. Margot wrote her memoir decades later, in exile, with every reason to cast herself as both victim and heroine. The memoir is self-serving, vivid, and almost certainly embellished. It is also the closest thing that survives to a first-person account from inside the royal palace during the massacre. Catherine sent her daughter to bed among the Huguenots she was about to have killed because withdrawing Margot might have alerted the Protestant guests. Claude, Margot's older sister, understood what was coming and wept at the door.

Photo Credit: Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Scene de la saint-Barthelemy (1833). Oil on canvas, Musee du Louvre.

The massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, killed between 250 and 300 Lakota Sioux, the majority of them women and children. The Seventh Cavalry had been sent to disarm Spotted Elk's band, which had been practicing the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement that alarmed the Bureau of Indian Affairs into issuing panic telegrams requesting military intervention. The Seventh Cavalry carried institutional memory of the Little Bighorn and brought it to Pine Ridge: twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the engagement, decorations that Lakota activists have been petitioning Congress to rescind since 1990.

Dee Brown published Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970, and it sold over four million copies in its first decade. The book traces the systematic dispossession of Native peoples across the American West from 1860 to 1890, told entirely from Indigenous perspectives through treaties, speeches, and testimony. Brown was a librarian at the University of Illinois, not a professional historian, and the academic establishment received the book with the wariness institutions reserve for work that reaches a public they have failed to reach themselves. Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) had appeared the year before; together the two books reframed popular understanding of westward expansion in ways the profession is still absorbing.

Dee Brown chose to end his book in the aftermath, in the Episcopal mission where the wounded were carried. The passage closes with Black Elk's testimony, recorded forty-two years later by John Neihardt on the reservation.

In the first seconds of violence, the firing of carbines was deafening, filling the air with powder smoke. Among the dying who lay sprawled on the frozen ground was Big Foot. Then there was a brief lull in the rattle of arms, with small groups of Indians and soldiers grappling at close quarters, using knives, clubs, and pistols. As few of the Indians had arms, they soon had to flee, and then the big Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened up on them, firing almost a shell a second, raking the Indian camp, shredding the tepees with flying shrapnel, killing men, women, and children.

"We tried to run," Louise Weasel Bear said, "but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children."

"I was running away from the place and followed those who were running away," said Hakiktawin, another of the young women. "My grandfather and grandmother and brother were killed as we crossed the ravine, and then I was shot on the right hip clear through and on my right wrist where I did not go any further as I was not able to walk, and after the soldier picked me up where a little girl came to me and crawled into the blanket."

When the madness ended, Big Foot and more than half of his people were dead or seriously wounded; 153 were known dead, but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward. One estimate placed the final total of dead at very nearly three hundred of the original 350 men, women, and children. The soldiers lost twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel.

After the wounded cavalrymen were started for the agency at Pine Ridge, a detail of soldiers went over the Wounded Knee battlefield, gathering up Indians who were still alive and loading them into wagons. As it was apparent by the end of the day that a blizzard was approaching, the dead Indians were left lying where they had fallen. (After the blizzard, when a burial party returned to Wounded Knee, they found the bodies, including Big Foot's, frozen into grotesque shapes.)

The wagonloads of wounded Sioux (four men and forty-seven women and children) reached Pine Ridge after dark. Because all available barracks were filled with soldiers, they were left lying in the open wagons in the bitter cold while an inept Army officer searched for shelter. Finally the Episcopal mission was opened, the benches taken out, and hay scattered over the rough flooring.

It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

—BLACK ELK

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, 1970), p. 482-483.

Black Elk was twenty-seven when the massacre happened and sixty-nine when John Neihardt recorded his testimony on the Pine Ridge reservation in 1932. The phrase "a people's dream died there" has since become one of the most quoted sentences in Native American literature. It has also become the most decontextualized, so often excerpted that the political conditions Brown spent 483 pages documenting dissolve into elegy.

Heather Cox Richardson's Wounded Knee (2010) reconstructs the bureaucratic chain that produced the massacre, including budget disputes in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, panic telegrams from agents who misunderstood the Ghost Dance, a Seventh Cavalry with institutional memory of the Little Bighorn and no interest in restraint. The Army officer searching for shelter while the wounded lay in open wagons is the institution performing its concern at the speed of paperwork. If that wasn’t already evident of the photo of the dead still laying in the open, 3 weeks after the massacre.

Photo Credit: Spotted Elk's camp three weeks after the Wounded Knee massacre, still-frozen bodies wrapped in blankets. Photograph by Trager and Kuhn, January 1891. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

An appellate court's summary of what happened

On May 20, 1994, Adria Sauceda attended an outdoor Friday night party held at the home of Juan Francisco "Paco" Delgado in San Antonio. A witness observed Adria, who was partially undressed, in the middle of a circle of men who were taking turns raping her. Two women, Mirasol Torres and Vicki, approached and tried to help her. Adria refused their offers and told them to leave her alone. Adria appeared to be drunk and was unable to assist the women as they attempted to pull her pants back on her.

One of the women, Mirasol Torres, later testified that she recognized Adria Sauceda, whose nickname Mirasol said was "Freckles," because they had met before, shared a mutual friend, and had gone to high school together. She testified that she observed Adria with her shirt on but her pants down to her knees in the middle of a circle of men. It was apparent to her that something was going on because she also observed used condoms. Mirasol Torres testified further that she and her friend Vicki approached the scene and attempted to help Adria, who appeared "flimsy, like she was real loose, her arms and everything." Mirasol Torres insisted that Adria did not appear to understand what was happening to her and did not appear to be in any condition to consent to what was being done to her. She also testified that the men who were raping Adria told her to shut up, go get a drink, and argued that Adria knew what she was doing.

Around the same time, another partygoer, Simon Ortega, became aware that Adria was in a crowd of people in the dark behind the bushes. Ortega was approached by a male, whom he did not recognize, who advised Ortega that Adria had passed out, was back behind the bushes, and had her clothes off. This man invited Ortega to rape her. Ortega refused. A few hours later, he saw another man carry Adria out from behind the bushes and place her on the hood of Ortega's car. At that time, Adria appeared to Ortega to be "real shaken up," "disoriented," "not all there," and "like if she was in shock." Ortega tried to talk with Adria as she laid on the hood of his car.

Another man whom Ortega did not recognize then picked up Adria, carried her to a truck that was parked in the driveway of the home nearest to the party, and proceeded to also rape her. Ortega then directed the man who raped Adria in the truck to place her inside Ortega's vehicle so that he could take her home. Ortega testified that he had feared for Adria's safety because some of the young men present appeared and spoke as if they had gang affiliations. This may explains why he did not stop the other men from raping her.

Another man, who was later identified as 21-year-old Humberto Leal Jr., approached Ortega and asked that Adria be placed in his car instead. When Ortega protested, Leal told Ortega that he knew the girl and her family, knew where she lived, and would take her home and explain everything to her family. He drove away with her. Adria was never seen alive again. About 30 minutes later, Leal's brother and sister, Gualberto and Nancy Leal, arrived at the party.

Gualberto yelled that Leal had returned home "full of blood, saying he had killed a girl." Several of the party attendees went looking for Adria. They found her naked body on a dirt road and called the police. Her head had been bashed in and she had been raped with a broken stick of lumber about 14 to 16 inches long. It was still protruding from her. There was a gaping hole in her head from the corner of her right eye to the center of her head, and blood was oozing from the hole. There was a bloody rock by her right thigh. Her left arm was under a chunk of asphalt weighing 30 to 40 pounds.

When Leal was questioned by police, he had scratches and cuts on his body. He said he was with Adria in his car when she started hitting him and the steering wheel, causing him to hit a curb. He tried to calm her down, but she leaped from the car and ran away. After waiting about 10 minutes to see if she would return, he went home. After the police informed Leal of what his brother had said, he changed his story. He said he followed Adria after she jumped out of the car. She attacked him and he pushed her away. Adria then fell on the ground and did not get up. Leal said he tried to wake her, but got scared and fled when he saw bubbles coming out of her nose. He said he went home, prayed, and told family members what had happened.

Police searched the Leal family home and found Adria's blouse under a pile of laundry in the laundry room. It had bloodstains that matched Adria's blood type. Police also found traces of blood on the passenger door and seat of the car. The bloodstains had been wiped off. A medical examiner testified that Adria had died from blows to the head and that based on the injuries to her head, she would have had to been struck with the rock two or three times. The medical examiner said her neck had injuries consistent with manual strangulation and that she had three bite marks on her body that matched dental impressions of Leal's teeth.

Bite mark evidence has since been discredited as junk science, but the other evidence was sufficient to establish Leal's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Gualberto made a written statement to the police in which he reaffrar

The booking photo of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr.

Leal was charged with capital murder in the commission of kidnapping and aggravated rape. Prosecutors announced their intent to seek the death penalty. The prosecution's evidence against Leal was overwhelming and much of it does not need to be summarized. Still, there is one noteworthy detail. When he was summoned as a witness by the prosecution, Gualberto Leal recanted his prior statements and gave perjured testimony in an attempt to protect his brother.

Leal came home covered in blood and confessed voluntarily to Gualberto. Gualberto was giving perjured testimony to protect Leal, with full knowledge of the fact that he was guilty.

Gualberto lied that he had been unable to understand a single word that his brother had said when he came home. He denied that Leal said anything about leaving a body by a school or about murdering a girl. This was physically impossible. The search for Adria only started when Gualberto arrived at the party and loudly announced in front of everyone that his brother had come home covered in blood and confessed to murdering a girl.

For Gualberto's testimony to be truthful, all of those partygoers who said otherwise would have to be lying. That would include Simon Ortega, whose testimony was trustworthy since he had tried to help Adria. Furthermore, Gualberto had contradicted himself by specifically denying that Leal said anything about leaving a body by a school or murdering a girl. He couldn't have known that because he had already testified that he supposedly couldn't understand anything that his brother said when he returned home.

The defense's only witness was Leal's girlfriend, Elvira Briones. She testified that she and Leal had sex at the party and she hadn't noticed Adria with any men.

On July 10, 1995, Leal was convicted of capital murder after 90 minutes of deliberation. The sentencing phase was held the next day. The options were death or life imprisonment with parole eligibility after 40 years.

Leal had no criminal record, but the prosecution presented testimony by 16-year-old Melissa Ruiz. Melissa testified that in May 1994, about two weeks before Adria's murder, Leal had raped her and bitten her on the neck. Her testimony was corroborated by a police officer who had photographed the bite marks and bruises on her body and a physician who examined her about 66 hours after the assault. Furthermore, Melissa's older sister, Iza Marie, testified stated that Leal had called her repeatedly at her place of employment in the weeks following the rape, threatening to have someone murder her if she testified against him.

The prosecution also introduced testimony from police officers and school officials to establish that Leal also had a history of intimidating and bullying fellow students and teachers.

The defense, which had evidently been waiting for the sentencing phase to go all out, offered the testimony of psychiatrist Raymond Potterf:

Dr. Potterf testified on direct examination that (1) petitioner suffered from alcohol dependence and pathological intoxication, (2) the latter condition occurs when a person who ingests alcohol experiences a sudden change in mental status and becomes very aggressive, and (3) there is no cure for petitioner's condition. On cross-examination, Dr. Potterf admitted that it was possible petitioner's tendency toward violence predated petitioner's problems with alcohol. On re-direct, petitioner's trial counsel elicited testimony from Dr. Potterf suggesting that petitioner had been beaten as a child and that such children tend to develop anti-social personalities. On re-cross-examination, Dr. Potterf admitted that persons with anti-social personalities tend to ignore societal norms and can be dangerous.

The defense also called several other witnesses.

A former high school teacher for Leal, Mary Matamaros, testified that she had counseled him when he was her student, she never felt afraid of him, and his father, Humberto Leal Sr., had mistreated him and one of his brothers.

A 14-year-old friend of Leal, Edward Carter, testified about an incident in which Leal had saved his life by shoving him out of the way of gunfire.

Leal's 14-year-old brother, Carlos, testified that Melissa Ruiz had sent love letters to Leal a few years before the alleged rape.

Leal's mother, Maria Francesca Leal, testified her son had began drinking until he passed out about a year and a half ago and requested the jury to be merciful and take pity on him.

Leal also took the stand. He testified that although he did not get along with his father, his father had never beaten or hurt him. He said he was sorry that Adria had died, but felt her family, rather than the jury, should decide his fate. He said he had been a good inmate while awaiting trial, had no criminal record, and was not a violent person. He said he was very drunk on the night of the murder and that while had made mistakes, he was not a murderer. Lastly, Leal said he would most likely be peaceful if sent to prison, but would act to defend himself if he felt threatened. He denied any gang affiliations. On cross-examination, Leal insisted that he was innocent.

Leal testified that Adria had scratched him and he pushed her. When he felt something wet on the back of her head, he shook Adria in an unsuccessful attempt to wake her, and he fled in fear when he saw bubbles coming out of her nose. He denied wiping any blood from his car, did anything more to Adria than push her down. He suggested that his father had found Adria's blouse in the street and brought it inside the house. He said that as he was taking Adria from the party, he turned at the end of the street in the opposite direction from the way Adria directed him to go. When Adria tried to get out of his car, he initially refused to stop. He said Adria got out his vehicle and when he tried to take her back to his car, she began hitting, pushing, and scratching his face. Leal said he left Adria's body fully clothed three or four streets from where her body was found.

Leal conceded that any person who could bash in Adria's head, leave a stick inside her, and take a piece of her clothing as a trophy was a violent and dangerous person. He denied raping Melissa.

After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that Leal posed a continuing threat to society and that there was no mitigation sufficient to warrant leniency. As such, he was condemned to death.

The TDCJ death row notecard for Humberto Leal Jr. (the victim's name was misspelled)

During a post-conviction hearing in 2004, Leal's sister, brother, mother, and father all gave perjured testimony in an attempt to protect him.

Nancy Leal lied that she had seen fresh blood on the pants of both Ralph Guerrero and Juan "Paco" Delgado suspected from the reactions of Ralph and Paco that they knew what had happened, Ralph and Paco were burning papers and a lady's purse. She said she did not speak with Leal's lawyers prior to trial, but had told one of them, Jose Guerrero, and the police that she had seen blood on the clothing of the two men.

Nancy had accompanied Gualberto when he arrived at the party and yelled that Leal had come home covered in blood and confessed to murdering a girl. She was giving perjured testimony to protect Leal, with full knowledge of the fact that he was guilty.

Gualberto Leal lied that after he and Nancy arrived at the party, he saw Ralph and Paco with Adria's purse and all her things. He said the two men were burning pictures and other items they had taken from the purse. Gualberto lied that Paco had blood smeared on his right pants leg at the thigh while Ralph had blood splattered on his left leg at the ankle but neither man had a lot of blood on him. Ralph tried to explain the blood on his clothes by claiming he had a bloody nose. Paco attempted to explain away the blood on his clothing by claiming the girl had sat on his leg.

Gualberto also lied that he could not read and did not read either of the two statements he signed for police. In fact, after Leal's conviction, Gualberto had written an affidavit in English, in which he explicitly stated that Leal had come home stumbling, evidently drunk, mumbling "the girl, the girl," and speaking incoherently about a girl in a ditch.

Gualberto also attempted to fabricate an alibi for Leal, claiming that he and his brother had both been home since five that morning.

Humberto Leal Sr. testified that he had routinely washed the outside of the windshield and windows of the car every morning by spraying a water hose on same. He said he used the car for deer hunting about four times and put the deer on or inside his car after he killed and gutted same. Leal Sr. said he had found a woman's blouse in the street outside his house on the morning in question and put it in the backyard. His wife had then picked up the blouse and put it with other clothes that needed washing. Leal Sr. said he had told Jose Guerrero about finding the blouse, but could not recall whether he told his son's lawyers about his habit of washing off his vehicles.

Leal Sr. claimed that he never saw any blood on the blouse.

Maria Francesca Leal testified that her husband found Adria's blouse outside on the street and threw it into their yard. She said she did not see any blood on it, but had put in with other clothes to be washed and told the police and her son's attorney about the blouse.

Overall, the testimony of Leal's family only proved that the apple didn't fall from the tree. Gualberto, Nancy, Francesca, and Humberto Leal Sr. were undoubtedly all guilty of perjury. Francesca and Humberto Leal Sr. were most likely also accessories after fact to Adria's murder. Leal Sr. most likely washed out any blood in the car and Francesca, for reasons known only to her, placed the bloody blouse at the bottom of the pile. The court concluded that the testimony wouldn't have changed the outcome of the trial. Other challenges against the sufficiency of the evidence were rejected.

Humberto Leal Garcia Jr., 38, was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville on July 7, 2011. His last meal consisted of fried chicken, tacos, fried okra, a bowl of pico de gallo, and two Cokes. After his execution, relatives of Leal Jr. burned a T-shirt with an image of the American flag in protest in Guadalupe, Mexico. To the end, his family maintained that he was innocent. His uncle, Alberto Rodriguez, criticized the United States for executing his nephew and Mexico for not doing enough to save his life. He declared, "There is a God who makes us all pay."

But in his final statement, Leal Jr. made a surprise confession:

"I am sorry for everything that I have done. I've hurt a lot of people. For years I have never thought that I deserved any type of forgiveness. Lord Jesus Christ in my life, I know He has forgiven me, I have accepted His forgiveness. I have accepted everything. Let this be final and be done. I take the full blame for this. I am sorry and forgive me. I am truly sorry. I ask for forgiveness. Life goes on and it surely does. I am sorry for the victim's family for what I had did. May they forgive me. I don't know if you believe me, life goes on. I am sure it does. To the man to the right of me, I ask for forgiveness for you. Life goes on, it surely does. I ask for forgiveness. I am truly sorry. That is all. Let's get this show on the road. One more thing, Viva Mexico, Viva Mexico."

With the exception of Humberto Leal Jr., none of the men who gang raped Adria Sauceda for hours were ever identified. Semen was found inside her and potentially could've identified at least one of the other rapists from the party, but it was never tested. Adria's family was silent about her for years. In 2011, her parents talked about her shortly before the execution of their daughter's murderer.

Long-silent family of victim speaks