Rainey Bethea

Rainey Bethea ( – August 14, 1936), was the last person publicly executed in Kentucky. Bethea, who confessed to the rape and killing of a 70-year-old woman named Lishia Edwards, was convicted of her rape and publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky.

Biography

Early life Little is known about Bethea's life before he arrived in Owensboro in 1933. Born around 1909 in Roanoke, Virginia, Bethea was an African-American man orphaned after the death of his mother in 1919 and his father in 1926. He worked for the Rutherford family and lived in their basement for about a year, and then he moved to a cabin behind the house of a man named Emmett Wells. He worked as a laborer and later rented a room from a woman, Mrs. Charles Brown. He also attended a Baptist church.

Bethea's first run-in with the law happened in 1935, when he was charged with breach of the peace and then fined $20. In April of the same year, he was caught stealing two purses from the Vogue Beauty Shop. Since the value of the purses exceeded $25, Bethea was convicted of a felony, grand larceny, and consequently sentenced to one year in the Kentucky State Penitentiary at Eddyville. by climbing onto the roof of an outbuilding next door. From there, he jumped onto the roof of the servant's quarters of Emmett Wells' house, and then walked down a wooden walkway. He climbed over the kitchen roof to Edwards' bedroom window.

After removing a screen from her window, he entered the room, waking her. Bethea then choked Edwards and violently raped her. After she was unconscious, he searched for valuables and stole several of her rings. In the process, he removed his own black celluloid prison ring, and failed to later retrieve it.

On June 12, 1936, Bethea confessed a second time, telling the guards where he had hidden the stolen jewelry. Owensboro police searched a barn in Owensboro and found the jewelry where Bethea said he had left it. Under Kentucky law, the grand jury could not convene until June 22, and the prosecutor charged Bethea solely with rape. Under extant state statutes, executions for murder and robbery were carried out by electrocution at the state penitentiary in Eddyville. Rape, however, could be punished by public hanging in the county seat where the crime occurred.

On June 25, 1936, officers returned Bethea to Owensboro for the trial, which took place that same day. Bethea asserted a Clyde Maddox would provide an alibi, but Maddox claimed he did not know Bethea. The defense subpoenaed four witnesses: Maddox, Ladd Moorman, Willie Johnson (a supposed accomplice given Bethea's statements), and Allen McDaniel. The first three were served; however, the sheriff's office could not find a person named Allen McDaniel.

On the night before the trial, Bethea announced to his lawyers that he wanted to plead guilty, doing so the next day at the start of the trial. The prosecutor still presented the state's case to the jury in spite of the guilty plea, requesting a death penalty for Bethea. In his opening statement, Commonwealth's Attorney Herman Birkhead said, "This is one of the most dastardly, beastly, cowardly crimes ever committed in Daviess County. Justice demands and the Commonwealth will ask and expect a verdict of the death penalty by hanging."

Appeal and petition for habeas corpus

Back in Louisville, Bethea acquired five new African-American lawyers to try to save his life: Charles Ewbank Tucker, Stephen A. Burnley, Charles W. Anderson Jr., Harry E. Bonaparte, and R. Everett Ray. Hash arrived at the site intoxicated wearing a white suit and a white Panama hat. At this time, no one but he and Thompson knew that he would pull the trigger.

On August 6, the Governor of Kentucky, Albert Chandler, signed Bethea's execution warrant and set the execution for sunrise on August 14. Thompson requested the governor to issue a revised death warrant because the original warrant specified that the hanging would take place in the courthouse yard where the county had recently planted, at significant cost, new shrubs and flowers. Chandler was out-of-state, so Lieutenant Governor of Kentucky Keen Johnson, as acting governor, signed a second death warrant moving the location of the hanging from the courthouse yard to an empty lot near the county garage.

Rainey Bethea's last meal consisted of fried chicken, pork chops, mashed potatoes, pickled cucumbers, cornbread, lemon pie, and ice cream, which he ate at 4:00 p.m. on August 13 in Louisville. At about 1:00 a.m., Daviess County deputy sheriffs transported Bethea from Louisville to Owensboro. At the Daviess County Jail, professional hangman Phil Hanna of Epworth, Illinois, visited Bethea and instructed him to stand on the X that would be marked on the trapdoor.

Bethea left the Daviess County Jail at 5:21 a.m. and walked with two deputies to the scaffold. Within two minutes, he was at the base of the scaffold. Removing his shoes, he put on a new pair of socks. He ascended the steps and stood on the large X as instructed. After Bethea made his final confession to Fr Herman J. Lammers of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Louisville, who had also supervised Bethea's conversion to Catholicism during Bethea's incarceration at the Jefferson County Jail two weeks prior to the execution, officers placed a black hood over his head and fastened three large straps around his ankles, thighs, arms, and chest.

Hanna placed the noose around Bethea's neck, adjusted it, and then signaled to Hash to pull the trigger. Instead, Hash, who was drunk, did nothing. Hanna shouted at Hash, "Do it!" A deputy then leaned onto the trigger, which sprang the trap door. Bethea fell 8 feet (2.4 m), and his neck was instantly broken. Afterward, two doctors confirmed he was dead. His body was taken to Andrew & Wheatley Funeral Home. He wanted his body to be sent to his sister in South Carolina so that she could arrange for him to be interred next to his father, but against these wishes, he was buried in a pauper's grave at Owensboro Cemetery (also known as City Cemetery and "Potter's Field") in Owensboro.

It was estimated that a crowd of about 20,000 people gathered to watch the execution. Afterwards, Hanna complained that Hash should not have been allowed to perform the execution in his drunken condition. Hanna further said it was the worst display he experienced in the 70 hangings he had supervised.

The spot where the scaffold stood (approximately 37.775248° -87.116462°) is now part of a drop-off/pick-up lane in front of the Owensboro Convention Center.

End of public executions in Kentucky As the Kentucky General Assembly had been meeting in its biennial sessions at the time, the media circus surrounding the Bethea execution embarrassed members of the Kentucky legislature. In spite of the humiliation, they could not amend laws regarding executions until the next session in 1938. However, the trial judges in two separate Kentucky rape cases ordered that the hangings of John "Pete" Montjoy and Harold Van Venison be conducted privately. Montjoy, age 23, was privately hanged in Covington on December 17, 1937.

On January 17, 1938, William R. Attkisson of the Kentucky State Senate's 38th District (representing Louisville), introduced Senate Bill 69, repealing the requirement in Section 1137 that executions for convicted rapists be conducted by hanging in the county seat where they raped their victims. The bill was promoted in the Kentucky House of Representatives by Representative Charles W. Anderson Jr., one of the attorneys who assisted Bethea in his post-conviction relief motions.

After both houses approved the bill, Governor Chandler signed it into law on March 12, 1938; it became effective on May 30 of that year. Chandler later expressed regret at having approved the repeal, claiming, "Our streets are no longer safe." The last person ever legally hanged in Kentucky was Harold Van Venison, a 33-year-old African-American singer, who was privately executed in Covington on June 3, 1938.