All Women Executed by the Electric Chair: Their Crimes, Last Meals & Final Words

March 20th, 1899. Sing Sing Prison, New York. A woman sits in total silence waiting to become  the first of her kind in American history. Not the first woman ever executed, the first woman ever executed by electricity. Her name was Martha Place  and in the 60 years that followed, only 11 more women would walk the same path she did.

12 women, one method. Some killed for money, some killed for love. One killed to save her own life and was executed anyway. Today, you’ll hear all 12 stories in order exactly as they happened. From the first spark in 1899 to the last in 1957.  Their crimes, their trials, their final meals, their final words.

Case one, Martha Place. Ida Place was 18 years old and she was afraid of her own house. Inside that house in Brooklyn lived her father, William, and her stepmother, Martha. Martha Place had married into a home that didn’t want her and by 1898, something inside her had curdled into rage.

 Martha was born Martha Garrettson in New Jersey in 1849. Her early life gave no warning of what was coming. She simply became a woman worn down by a difficult marriage and a stepdaughter she resented more with every passing year. On February 7th, 1898, that resentment turned deadly. Martha attacked Ida with acid then suffocated her with a pillow.

 When William Place came home, Martha turned the axe on him, too. Though he survived the attack, police arrived to find a household torn apart by violence that had been building for months. The trial moved quickly. Martha was convicted of first-degree murder. Her appeals failed one after another and New York’s newly built killing machine was waiting for her.

 On March 20th, 1899, Martha Place became the first woman in world history executed by electric chair. Witnesses described her as composed, almost resigned as she was led into the chamber. She left no memorable final statement, just silence. And then, the chair took her. She wasn’t just a murderer, she was a warning shot.

 The state had built a new weapon, and it worked exactly as designed. Case two, Mary Farmer, Halloween 1907. A woman walks into a lawyer’s office in Watertown, New York and files paperwork to transfer a piece of land into her own name. The signature on the deed belongs to Sarah Brennan. The problem? Sarah Brennan didn’t sign it.

 Mary Farmer did, pretending to be her. Mary Farmer and her husband, James, lived on land they rented from Sarah Brennan, their neighbor and landlord. For months, Mary had been quietly forging documents, slowly stealing Sarah’s property out from under her, one signature at a time. By April 1908, the fraud was close to unraveling.

 So, Mary ended the problem the only way she knew how. She killed Sarah Brennan with an axe and hid her body inside a trunk. For months, the trunk sat there. Neighbors asked questions. Sarah’s absence became impossible to explain. When police finally forced the trunk open, they found her. Both Mary and James were arrested and sentenced to death.

 But on death row, something shifted in Mary. Days before her execution, she wrote a confession, clearing her husband completely, admitting the killing was hers alone. James was later acquitted in a second trial and lived out his life in the same county where his wife had committed murder. On March 29th, 1909, Mary Farmer walked to the electric chair at Auburn Prison, holding a crucifix, murmuring a prayer.

 she became the second woman in American history to die this way. Three jolts of over 1,800 volts were needed before doctors pronounced her dead. A forged deed, a hidden trunk, a wife’s final act of mercy toward the husband she’d nearly destroyed. Case three, Virginia Christian. She was 17 years old, one day past her birthday, when the state of Virginia strapped her into the electric chair.

 She would have become the youngest woman ever executed by this method in American history. Instead, she died the day before that anniversary even arrived. Virginia Christian left school at 13 to work as a laundress for Ida Bellwood, a wealthy white woman in Hampton, Virginia. The relationship between them was never equal.

 Ida frequently beat and berated the teenager who worked in her home. On March 18th, 1912, everything came to a head. Ida accused Virginia of stealing a locket and a skirt. Virginia denied it. Ida attacked her, striking her with a heavy object. In the chaos that followed, Virginia grabbed a broom handle and hit back. Then, in a desperate attempt to silence Ida’s screaming, she forced a towel into her mouth. Ida suffocated.

 Virginia was arrested the same day. Her trial lasted almost no time at all, an all-white, all-male jury deliberated for 23 minutes before finding her guilty of first-degree murder. Her own account of the fight, the years of abuse she’d endured, none of it was allowed to matter. Her mother, paralyzed and unable to travel, wrote a desperate letter to the governor begging for her daughter’s life. It didn’t work.

 On August 16th, 1912, one day after turning 17, Virginia Christian was executed. She remains the only female juvenile ever put to death by electric chair in American history, and to this day she is still the only woman Virginia has ever executed by that method. A servant girl, a stolen skirt, and 23 minutes that decided everything.

Case four, Ruth Snyder. The photograph is grainy, illegal, and unforgettable. A hidden camera strapped to a reporter’s ankle. The flash catches a woman’s body at the exact instant 2,000 volts tear through it. That photograph ran on the front page of the New York Daily News the next morning. Her name was Ruth Snyder.

 Ruth was a homemaker in Queens, married to Albert Snyder, an art editor 13 years her senior. The marriage was cold and unhappy long before she met Judd Gray, a corset salesman who became her lover. Together, Ruth and Judd built a plan. They took out a life insurance policy on Albert worth today’s equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 Then, on March 20th, 1927, they killed him in his own bed, staging the scene to look like a burglary gone wrong. The staging fell apart almost immediately. Investigators found the stolen jewelry hidden in the house. Under police questioning, Ruth and Judd turned on each other instantly, each blaming the other for striking the fatal blow.

 Their finger-pointing became the trial’s biggest spectacle. Both were convicted. Both were sentenced to death. On January 12th, 1928, Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing 10 minutes before Judd Gray followed her into the same chair. She became the first woman executed there since Martha Place almost 30 years earlier.

 That hidden photograph would go on to become one of the most infamous images in American criminal history. A woman’s death captured and sold to the public the very next morning. Case six, Irene Schroeder. “I saw my mama shoot a cop.” Those were the words of a six-year-old boy testifying against his own mother in open court. That boy’s name was Donnie.

His mother was Irene Schroeder, and by the time she died, newspapers had given her more nicknames than almost any other woman in American criminal history. Trigger Woman, Iron Irene, The Blonde Bandit. Irene grew up poor in New Castle, Pennsylvania, married young, and had her son Donnie by the time she was still practically a teenager herself.

But domestic life never held her. She left her marriage behind for a life of robbery and adventure with her lover, Glenn Dague, and her own brother, Tom Crawford, dragging young Donnie along in the getaway car through it all. On December 27th, 1929, that lifestyle turned fatal. During a robbery, Pennsylvania Highway Patrolman Corporal Brady Paul pulled their car over. Irene shot him dead.

 Her brother wounded a second officer in the same encounter. Donnie, sitting in the backseat, watched the entire thing happen. After a long manhunt across state lines, Irene and Glenn were finally captured following a shootout in Arizona. At trial, Irene tried claiming she wasn’t even Irene Schroeder at all, insisting her real name was someone else entirely. The jury didn’t buy it.

 Her own son’s testimony helped seal her fate. On February 23rd, 1931, Irene Schroeder became the first woman executed in Pennsylvania’s electric chair, and the fourth woman executed this way in the entire country. Her final words were to her six-year-old son, “I am going to die, my boy, but I am not afraid.

 Be a good boy, and don’t be afraid.” Minutes after she died, Glenn Dague walked the same hallway to the same chair. A getaway car with a child in the backseat, a highway patrolman who never made it home, and a 6-year-old boy who grew up knowing he helped send his mother to the chair. Six women down, six left to go. Before we continue, be honest.

 Out of all six of these women so far, which one do you think deserved mercy the most? Just drop a name in the comments. Case seven, Anna Antonio. She weighed 85 lb when they strapped her into the chair. Newspapers called her Little Anna, and by the time her execution date arrived, she’d stopped eating almost entirely, dropping 15 lb in her final 6 weeks alive.

 Anna Antonio was 28, a wife who’d endured 12 years with a husband who beat her regularly. Her husband, Salvatore, was also involved in the drug trade, which made him plenty of enemies beyond his own home. In 1933, Anna hired two men, Sam Forrazi and Vincent Saetta, to kill him. She wanted the $5,000 his life insurance would pay out.

 That Easter, Salvatore’s body turned up beside a country road, shot five times and stabbed. Investigators quickly connected Anna to the two hired men, and all three were arrested and convicted of first-degree murder. Anna maintained she was innocent almost to the very end, reminding the warden that her husband had been a violent man.

 That if she truly wanted him dead, the guns were already sitting around the house. But, she also admitted the two men had told her beforehand what they planned to do, and that fear for herself and her three children kept her from stopping it. In her final weeks, Anna essentially stopped eating. She’d weighed 100 lb just weeks before her execution date, but by the time she was led to the chair, her weight had collapsed to just 85 lb, making her one of the smallest people ever put to death this way.

 At one point during her final days, she cried out, “I have already died enough for a million men.” On August 9th, 1934, Anna Antonio was executed in Sing Sing’s electric chair, the same day as her own daughter’s birthday. Guards came for her shortly before 11:00 at night. She stood trembling in the corridor outside the death chamber for 10 full minutes before she was finally allowed to proceed.

 When she reached the chair, she paused, turned, and embraced Helen Evans, the prison matron who had stayed by her side for nearly 2 years on death row, kissing her on the cheek before finally sitting down. She wore a dress she’d sewn herself, one dark stocking pulled over her left leg, while her right leg was left bare for the electrode, and repeated a Catholic prayer as the straps closed around her.

 The two men she’d hired were executed immediately after her in the very same chair. Case 8, Eva Coo. Harry Wright couldn’t fully care for himself. Everyone in Oneonta, New York, knew that much. When his mother died, the responsibility for Gimpy, as locals called him, fell to the woman who ran the roadhouse where he worked.

 Her name was Eva Coo, and she saw Harry Wright not as a man to protect, but as an opportunity. Eva ran a successful speakeasy and brothel called Little Eva’s, built during Prohibition. When business started to suffer, she needed money, and Harry Wright, defenseless and trusting, became her solution. Some accounts suggest she had already embezzled his inheritance and burned down his late mother’s house to collect on that insurance, too, well before she ever turned her attention to killing him. She quietly took out multiple life

insurance policies on him. Then, she recruited an employee, Martha Clift, to help her finish the job. On June 14th, 1934, Eva and Martha drove Harry to an isolated stretch of road on Crum Horn Mountain outside Oneonta. There, Eva struck him in the head with a wooden mallet, and Martha ran him over with a rented car, doing it more than once to make sure.

 They left his body by the roadside, staged to look like a hit-and-run accident. The investigation dragged his body out of the ground not once, but twice, as authorities pieced the case together, exhuming his remains to confirm what had really killed him. Martha eventually turned state’s witness, testifying against the woman she’d once called a friend, and received a 20-year sentence instead of death.

 Eva wasn’t so fortunate. Her 3-week trial in Cooperstown became something of a public spectacle, drawing national newspaper coverage as the details of the roadhouse and the murder scheme unfolded in court. At the prison gates, the two women shared one final tearful embrace before being driven off in separate directions.

One toward Bedford Reformatory to begin her 20 years, the other toward Sing Sing to await her death. On June 27th, 1935, Eva Coo was executed in the electric chair, the fifth woman to die in that particular chamber, just days after turning 46 years old. A caretaker who saw a vulnerable man, not as someone to protect, but as a payout waiting to happen. Case nine.

Tony Jo Henry. She robbed a stranger to save an outlaw. That was the whole plan, simple, desperate, and it ended with a man dead on the side of a Louisiana highway. Tony Jo Henry, born Annie Beatrice McQuiston, had lived a hard life long before 1940. She’d worked the streets as a teenager, moved through brothels in Shreveport’s red-light district, and eventually fell in love with a man named Claude “Cowboy” Henry.

When Cowboy was sentenced to 50 years in a Texas prison for murder, Tony Jo decided she would do whatever it took to free him. Her plan involved robbing a bank to fund a jailbreak. On February 14th, 1940, she and an accomplice, Harold “Arkie” Burks, accepted a ride from salesman named Joseph Callaway. Somewhere along that highway, the robbery turned into murder.

 Callaway was shot and killed, his body left behind as Tony Jo and Burks fled with his car. She was arrested after confessing to her aunt what had happened. At trial, Tony Jo and Burks each insisted the other had pulled the trigger, but neither story was enough to save them. After three separate trials, Tony Jo was sentenced to death.

 Four days before her execution, Cowboy Henry escaped from his Texas prison just to see her one final time before being recaptured. On November 28th, 1942, Tony Jo Henry walked into the basement of the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse wearing a plain black dress, her shaved head hidden beneath a colorful scarf. She smiled at reporters, declined to make a final statement, and was executed by Louisiana’s portable electric chair.

 She remains the only woman ever executed by electrocution in the state’s history. Outside, roughly 300 people gathered hoping for a glimpse of the historic event. Case 10, Lena Baker. She told the coroner herself, “Walked straight to his house and said, ‘I killed Ernest Knight.'” She never ran. She never hid. She believed the truth would protect her. It didn’t.

 Lena Baker was a black domestic worker in Cuthbert, Georgia, employed by a white man named Ernest Knight, who ran a local gristmill. According to Lena’s own testimony, Knight had repeatedly held her against her will and assaulted her. On April 30th, 1944, he locked her inside the mill once again. When she tried to leave, an argument broke out.

 Knight grabbed an iron bar used to secure the door. Lena said she feared for her life and grabbed for his gun as she tried to push past him. In the struggle, Knight was shot in the head. Lena’s trial lasted less than a single day, an all-white, all-male jury deliberated for just 30 minutes before finding her guilty of murder.

 The judge sentenced her to death. The governor granted a brief 60-day reprieve so the state’s pardon board could review the case, but in January 1945, clemency was denied. On March 5th, 1945, Lena Baker was executed at Georgia’s Reidsville State Prison. Her final words were simple. “What I done, I did in self-defense or I would have been killed myself.

 Where I was, I could not overcome it. I am ready to meet my God.” She remains the only woman ever executed by Georgia’s electric chair. 60 years later, in 2005, the state of Georgia formally admitted its mistake, granting Lena Baker a full posthumous pardon, and acknowledging that denying her clemency had been, in the board’s own words, “a grievous error.” Case 11, Ethel Rosenberg.

 Cold War America needed someone to blame, and it found two names, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Convicted of conspiring to pass American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union, Ethel remains to this day the only woman ever executed by the United States government for a crime other than murder. Ethel Greenglass met Julius Rosenberg through the Young Communist League in New York.

 They married in 1939 and had two young sons. Julius worked as an engineer. Evidence later showed he had in fact passed industrial and military information to Soviet contacts during the war years when the USSR was still an American ally. Ethel’s actual involvement remained far murkier. Much of the case against her rested on testimony from her own brother, David Greenglass, who decades later admitted he’d lied under pressure from prosecutors to protect his wife.

 The government’s strategy was clear from the start. Charge them both, sentence them both to death, hope Julius would break and name other spies to save his wife. He never did. Neither of them did. On June 19th, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed at Sing Sing prison just hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath. Julius went first, pronounced dead after three jolts of electricity. Ethel followed.

 It took four separate shocks before doctors still detected signs of life. A fifth was ordered before she was finally pronounced dead. Witnesses described smoke rising from her body during the process. They left behind two young sons, Michael and Robert, who spent the rest of their lives trying to clear their mother’s name.

 Decades later, even a Soviet era engineer involved in Russia’s own atomic program admitted the intelligence Ethel died for had barely mattered at all. Case 12, Rhonda Bell Martin, a waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, soft-spoken, familiar with regulars. Nobody suspected the woman refilling their coffee had already buried six members of her own family and that she was the reason all of them were dead.

 Rhonda Bell Martin poisoned her own mother, three of her children, and two of her five husbands using rat poison slipped quietly into food over the course of nearly two decades. Her fifth husband, Ronald, who had once been her stepson before their marriage, survived her poisoning attempts, but was left permanently paralyzed. It was his lingering illness that finally led investigators to look closer at the pattern of deaths surrounding her.

 In March 1956, Rhonda confessed to nearly all of it. She was formally tried and convicted only for the 1951 murder of her fourth husband, Claude Martin, but admitted to the rest herself. Prosecutors suggested insurance money as her motive, though the payouts she collected barely covered burial costs, leaving her true reasons still debated to this day.

 On October 11th, 1957, Rhonda Belle Martin was executed in Alabama’s electric chair, clutching a Bible and quietly reciting the 23rd Psalm alongside the prison chaplain as the current took her. She declined to make any final statement. She remains the last woman ever executed in Alabama’s electric chair, and the final woman on this list, closing out an era that began with Martha Place 58 years earlier.

12 women, 58 years, poison, gunfire, forged deeds, hired killers, and one woman who never should have been convicted at all. Some of them were monsters who destroyed their own families for money. Some of them were victims the system refused to see, punished twice, once by the men who hurt them, and once by the courts that were supposed to protect them.

 All of them sat in the exact same chair, waiting for the exact same current, decades and states apart, yet somehow bound together by the same machine. But there’s a 13th case we haven’t told you yet. A woman whose execution became so controversial, so contested, that even the officials who carried it out still argue about whether it should have happened at all.

Her case would go on to change the national conversation around capital punishment forever. Her story is coming next. Subscribe and turn on notifications because you will not want to miss it.