Michael Wayne Richard (1959 - 2007)

Michael Wayne Richard (August 24, 1959 – September 25, 2007) was convicted of rape and murder whose execution gained notoriety due to controversies regarding procedural problems related to the timing of the execution. Richard admitted he was involved in the murder and offered to help find the murder weapon. Police found the weapon and testing […]

Johnny Leartice Robinson (1952 - 2004)

Johnny Leartice Robinson (25 July 1952 – 4 February 2004) was executed by the State of Florida for the 1985 murder of Beverly St. George.  Robinson had faced several criminal charges before being arrested for murder; he was convicted of several previous rapes and was on parole for a rape conviction in Maryland at the […]

Danny Rolling (1954 - 2006)

Rolling was born in Shreveport, Louisiana. He had a difficult upbringing and the idea that he was an unwanted child was reinforced by his father, James Rolling, from birth. James was a Shreveport police officer who abused him; his mother, Claudia; and later, his brother, Kevin. In one incident, Danny’s mother went to the hospital […]

Michael Bruce Ross (1959 - 2005)

Ross was born in Putnam, Connecticut on July 26, 1959 to Patricia Hilda Laine and Dan Graeme Ross. The oldest of four children, having two younger sisters and a younger brother, he grew up on a chicken farm in Brooklyn, Connecticut. Ross’s home life was extremely dysfunctional; his mother, who had abandoned the family at […]

Mark Dean Schwab (1968 - 2008)

Schwab was released from prison on March 4, 1991, after serving three years of an eight-year sentence for the aggravated rape of a 13-year-old boy committed in 1987. The rest of his sentence was commuted and he was placed on 15 years of probation.  A month later, Cocoa resident Junny Rios-Martinez, Jr., went missing. Schwab […]

Jay D. Scott (1952 - 2001)

Jay D. Scott (August 21, 1952 – June 14, 2001) was executed by the U.S. state of Ohio for the 1983 murder of a delicatessen owner in Cleveland. He was the second man put to death by Ohio since it reinstated the death penalty in 1981.  On May 6, 1983, Vinnie M. Price, owner and […]

Tommy Lynn Sells (1964 - 2014)

Sells and his twin sister, Tammy Jean, contracted meningitis when they were 18 months old; Tammy died from the illness. Shortly thereafter, Sells was sent to live with his aunt, Bonnie Woodall, in Holcomb, Missouri, where he lived until he was five years old. When Sells was eight, he began spending time with a man […]

Brian Steckel (1968 - 2005)

On September 2, 1994, Steckel knocked on Long’s door and asked if he could use her telephone. He then unplugged the telephone and demanded sex from her. After she refused, he threw her onto a couch and attempted to strangle her with some pantyhose. The pantyhose broke, so he continued his attack with a sock. […]

Shannon Thomas (1971 - 2005)

Thomas and Keith Bernard Clay’s intention on Christmas Eve was to rob the two children’s father, Roberto Rios, a small-time marijuana and cocaine dealer, of his drugs and money. In the early afternoon Rios was duct taped to a chair, severely beaten, tortured with a pair of shears and shot twice in the head and […]

Stephen Vrabel (1956 - 2004)

Vrabel and Susan Clemente were an unmarried couple living together with their daughter, Lisa Clemente, in a Struthers, Ohio apartment that the family rented from Susan’s sister and brother-in-law. On March 3, 1989, Vrabel went into the Miller Rod and Gun Store in Youngstown to purchase a gun. He selected a gun but when asked […]

Donald Ray Wallace (1957 - 2005)

On January 14, 1980, Indiana State Trooper Thomas Snyder was called to the Evansville home of Ralph Hendricks as it had been reportedly burglarized. Snyder went to the home of Patrick and Theresa Gilligan, which was next door to Hendricks’s house, to inquire whether the Gilligans might have seen or heard anything unusual. Snyder, discovering […]

Stanley Williams (1953 - 2005)

Stanley Williams was born December 29, 1953 in Shreveport, Louisiana to a 17-year old mother. His father abandoned the family when Williams was just a year old. In 1959, at the age of six, Williams moved with his mother from Rayville, Louisiana to Los Angeles, California by a Greyhound Lines bus. His mother moved into […]

Willie Williams (1956 - 2005)

William James “Flip” Williams, Jr. (November 9, 1956 – October 25, 2005) was a mass murderer executed by lethal injection. He was convicted of the September 2, 1991 murders of three rival drug dealers and a visitor to their Youngstown, Ohio home.  Williams had returned to the neighborhood after a long absence to find that […]

Marvin Wilson (1958 - 2012)

Marvin Wilson American murderer who was executed by the State of Texas on August 7, 2012. He entered death row on May 9, 1992, for the murder of a police drug informant. Wilson abducted and shot 21-year-old Jerry Robert Williams following a physical confrontation between the two in the 1500 block of Verone in Beaumont. […]

Hastings Arthur Wise (1954 - 2005)

Hastings Wise was an ex-convict who had served prison time for bank robbery and receipt of stolen goods before obtaining a technical degree and, eventually, finding employment at R.E. Phelon. He had no criminal convictions for the approximately fifteen years between his release from prison and the murders of 1997. According to his pastor, in […]

Bobby Woods (1965 - 2009)

A seventh-grade dropout, Woods was so illiterate that he had to refer to a spelling list just to write simple notes to his family. He had IQ scores of 80 and 78 during elementary school. His IQ score right before his murder trial was 70, and another in 2002 returned 68. Woods also worked as […]

Matthew Wrinkles (1960 - 2009)

Matthew Wrinkles A convicted multiple murderer, sentenced to death. He served 14 years at Indiana State Prison located in Michigan City, Indiana, where he was also executed on December 11, 2009.  On July 21, 1994, Wrinkles murdered his wife, Debra Jean Wrinkles, his brother-in-law Tony Fulkerson, and Fulkerson’s wife, Natalie Fulkerson, at their residence in […]

Lillian Gish (1893 - 1993)

Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio, to Mary Robinson McConnell (1875-1948) (an Episcopalian) and James Leigh Gish (1872-1912) (who was of German Lutheran descent). She had a younger sister, Dorothy.  The first several generations of Gishes were Dunkard ministers. Her great-great-great-grandfather came to America on the ship Pennsylvania Merchant in 1733 and received a land […]

Marion Davies (1897 - 1961)

Davies was born Marion Cecilia Douras on January 3, 1897, in Brooklyn, the youngest of five children born to Bernard J. Douras (1857–1935), a lawyer and judge in New York City; and Rose Reilly (1867–1928). Her father performed the civil marriage of Gloria Gould Bishop. Her elder siblings included Rose, Reine, and Ethel. A brother, […]

Carmen Miranda (1909 - 1955)

Carmen Miranda was born Maria do Carmo Miranda da Cunha in Várzea da Ovelha e Aliviada, a village in the northern Portuguese municipality of Marco de Canaveses. She was the second daughter of José Maria Pinto da Cunha (17 February 1887 – 21 June 1938) and Maria Emília Miranda (10 March 1886 – Rio de […]

Romy Schneider (1938 - 1982)

Romy Schneider’s first film, made when she was 15, was Wenn der weiße Flieder wieder blüht (When the White Lilacs Bloom Again) in 1953, credited as Romy Schneider-Albach. In 1954, Schneider for the first time portrayed a royal, playing a young Queen Victoria in the Austrian film Mädchenjahre einer Königin (known in the U.S. as […]

DJ AM (1973 - 2009)

Goldstein was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family. As a child, he was verbally abused by his father, whom Goldstein called “unbelievably cruel.” His father abused drugs and alcohol and was sent to jail for committing bank fraud and later died due to complications from AIDS. Goldstein attended the elite Quaker school Friends’ […]

Sahara Davenport (1984 - 2012)

Sahara Davenport A native of Dallas, Sahara Davenport began his drag career while attending Southern Methodist University. After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in dance, he relocated to New York City, where he began performing regularly at many gay bars and nightclubs throughout the city. Sahara Davenport has been seen on television on A&E […]

Michael Johns (1978 - 2014)

John Lee was born in Perth, Western Australia on 20 October 1978. As a teenager, he appeared as The Coachman in Pinocchio at the Regal Theatre and was a choir singer in Anything Goes at His Majesty’s Theatre. He attended Newman College in Perth. In 1997, John Lee moved to the United States on a […]

Mirjana Puhar (1995 - 2015)

Mirjana Puhar Puhar was born in Sremska Mitrovica – a city of less than 40,000 people in the Vojvodina province of Serbia – and she spent the first few years of her life with parents who lived in constant fear, as the Kosovo War raged around them. After the conflict ended, her family fled Serbia […]

Betsy Palmer (1926 - 2015)

Palmer was born Patricia Betsy Hrunek in East Chicago, Indiana, the daughter of Marie (née Love), who launched the Chicago Business College, and Rudolph Vincent Hrunek, an industrial chemist who was an immigrant from Czechoslovakia. She graduated from DePaul University, where she studied theater. Palmer married Dr. Vincent J. Merendino on May 8, 1954; the […]

Shelby Foote (1916 - 2005)

Foote was born in Greenville, Mississippi, the son of Shelby Dade Foote and his wife Lillian (née Rosenstock). Foote’s paternal grandfather, Huger Lee Foote (1854-1915), a planter, had gambled away most of his fortune and assets. His paternal great-grandfather, Hezekiah William Foote (1813-1899), was an American Confederate veteran, attorney, planter and state politician from Mississippi. […]

Macon McCalman (1932 - 2005)

Nicknamed “Sonny, McCalman helped form the Front Street Theatre in his hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. During the Korean War, he served in the U.S. Army.[citation needed] Over the course of his acting career McCalman appeared in various film and TV guest roles, usually in supporting parts, both dramatic and comedic often as heavies and authoritarian […]

Duncan Hines (1880 - 1959)

Hines was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the son of a Confederate soldier. His mother died when he was four and he was raised by his grandmother. Hines attended Bowling Green Business University, which later merged with what is now Western Kentucky University and worked in the American West for Wells Fargo and other companies […]

Ray Kroc (1902 - 1984)

Kroc was born on October 5, 1902 in Oak Park, near Chicago, to parents of Czech origin, Rose Mary (Hrach) and Louis Kroc. His father was from the village Břasy near Plzeň, Bohemia (now the Czech Republic). He grew up and spent most of his life in Oak Park, Illinois. During the First World War […]