JUST IN: Woman Executed in the Electric Chair on Her Daughter’s Birthday — The Case That Shocked Many

JUST IN: Woman Executed in the Electric Chair on Her Daughter’s Birthday — The Case That Shocked Many

[music] A door opens at the far end of the corridor. A single pair of footsteps moves through it. Slow, steady, no hesitation. Singing Prison, Austining, New York. August [music] 9th, 1934. 11:00 at night. The woman walking toward the execution chamber weighs just 85 lb. Her head has been partially shaved.

 She is wearing a blue dress with white trim. A dress she made herself inside the death house, cutting the fabric and sewing every stitch by hand. [music] Earlier that day, prison staff asked her what she wanted for her final meal. She gave them three words, and those words melted the hearts of everyone around. Now she is approaching the electric chair.

 15 months earlier, she had entered this prison as a convicted killer. But while she takes those final steps, something else is happening beyond that corridor. And 90 years later, one question still hangs over that night. Was the woman in that chair actually the killer the state believed she was? Or had New York just executed the wrong person? Stay with us because this story is not what it looks like from the outside.

 Welcome back to Red Mark Files. This is an interesting video. Hit the like button and subscribe to this channel. We cover the case’s history almost forgot. Let’s get into it. To understand what led her to the execution chamber, you first need to understand the man whose death put her there. His name was Salvatore Antonio. [music] Most people called him Sal.

 He was approximately 30 years old at the time of his death. He worked as a railroad breakman in Albany, New York. A union job, steady pay, workingclass income. On paper, Sal Antonio looked like a man holding his family together. He carried two life insurance policies, one worth $2,800 with the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, his union.

 [music] A second worth $2,500 with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Together, that was close [music] to $5,000, a significant amount of money in 1932 during the depths of the Great Depression. S met Anna when she was just 16 years old. He was considerably older from the very first day of their marriage.

 The age gap meant the balance of power in that relationship was never equal. Together they had four children. One died in infancy. Three survived. Phyllis, [music] who was nine, Marie, who was seven, and Frank, who was just 3 years old. But behind the image of a working man with a union card and an insurance policy.

 Court records tell a different story about what life looked like inside the Antonio household. Anna told investigators and later confirmed in court that their home was, in her own words, always full of dope and guns. That single statement suggests Sal’s life extended well beyond his railroad shifts. It points to associations, activities, and company that had nothing to do with legitimate employment.

 Anna also described 12 years of physical abuse. S allegedly controlled every part of her life. Where she went, what she did, who she spoke to, and when she stepped out of line, she was beaten. So, here is the question the facts force onto the table. Was the $5,000 in insurance money really the motive, or was Anna Antonio simply a woman who had run out of road? The facts, from here, will speak for themselves.

 The court found Anna Antonio guilty. That is the legal record. But the full picture of who she was before that verdict deserves to be told clearly and honestly. Anna was born around 1906. She was Italian, part of the immigrant community settled in the Albany, New York area. People who knew her called her little Anna.

 She was slight, dark-haired, and quiet. [music] At the time of her execution, she stood small enough that the electric chair built for the frame of an adult man dwarfed her completely. She married S when she was 16 years old. From that point forward, her world was the home, the children, and whatever boundaries S set around her.

 She had no income of her own. No independence. Divorce for a poor Italian immigrant woman in the 1930s with three children and no resources was not a realistic option. It was for all practical purposes not available to her at all. She had no criminal record, not a single prior contact with law enforcement.

 Before Easter Sunday 1932, Anna Antonio had never been arrested, never been charged, and never appeared in any court document. Her daily life, by all accounts, consisted of raising her children, and sewing her own clothes. The blue dress she wore to her execution, she made it herself inside the death house. Now, here is the detail that changed everything.

 Sam Farraach, the man who would later be named as the person Anna allegedly hired to kill S, was not someone Anna found on her own. Fraach was S’s friend. He moved in S’s world, not Anna’s. That one fact complicates the state’s version of events in ways the prosecution never fully resolved at trial. And then the knock came at her door.

 The moment police told Anna that her husband had been found dying on the side of a road, her reaction would set everything that followed in motion. 12 years is a long time to live in fear inside your own home. From the day Anna married S, the walls of that marriage closed in around her.

 [music] Court records show that S controlled her movements. Where she went, when she left, who she saw, when she pushed [music] back, even slightly, the punishment was physical. This was not an isolated incident. It was a pattern that stretched across more than a decade, and the home itself was no refuge. Anna told investigators that the house was, in her own words, always full of dope and guns.

 These were not things she discovered hidden in a drawer. They were out in the open, part of daily life. S’s world included people and activities that had nothing to do with his railroad job. And Anna and her children lived inside that world with no way out. By the winter of 1931 into 1932, the pressure inside that household had reached a point that Anna could no longer absorb.

 She had three children depending on her. She had no income of her own. She had no legal path to end the marriage. A poor Italian immigrant woman in depression era Albany did not simply walk into a lawyer’s office and file for divorce. That door was not open to her. Then, according to trial testimony, something happened that would change everything.

 Sam Farace, not a stranger, but S’s own friend, reportedly came to Anna and told her directly that he intended to kill S. His stated reason was a personal grievance of his own, separate from anything Anna had raised. Anna’s response to him, per her own statement to authorities, was this. I don’t care what you do. I am only interested in the children.

 Four words that would follow her into the courtroom. What Anna said in that moment, just those four words, would be replayed in court and cost her everything. Now, we need to look at the two men at the center of this case because without them, there is no murder charge against Anna Antonio at all. The first is Samuel Farache, 42 years old, from Geneva, New York.

 Court records describe him as a drug dealer with ties to Sal Antonio’s circle. He was not a man Anna brought into her life. He was already there, moving through Sal’s world long before Easter Sunday 1932. The second is Vincent Seetta, 22 years old from Albany. Also connected to the same criminal circles that surrounded S.

Like Fraetta’s path to this crime ran through S, not through Anna. Before we get to the night of the murder, if you’ve been watching for a while, you know what to do. Hit that like button. It helps this channel more than you know. Now, Easter Sunday, 1932. The state’s case against Anna rested on one central claim that she arranged for Fraachi and Sciieteta to kill S in exchange for a cut of his life insurance.

 Frai and Sietta, the prosecution argued, were to be paid $800 once the policies were collected. The attack itself, Salot five times and stabbed repeatedly, was not random. The use of both a firearm and a knife, pointed to something planned in advance, not a confrontation that got out of hand. But here is where the state’s theory runs into serious trouble.

 The entire case against Anna came almost entirely from the statements of Farachi and SEA. Two men who were themselves charged with the same murder. Two men who had every reason to push as much of the blame as possible onto someone else. And there is one more fact the prosecution never adequately answered. According to Anna’s attorney, Daniel Prior, not a single dollar from either insurance policy was ever collected by anyone after Sal’s death. Not $1.

 Easter Sunday, March 27th, 1932. It was a holiday. A Sunday, the kind of day most families in Albany spent at home together. Church in the morning, a meal in the afternoon, children nearby. For the Antonio family, that day would end very differently. Sal Antonio left that evening, where exactly he was told he was going or who told him.

 The record does not fully document. What the record does document is what happened to him on the road south of Albany, and it is not easy to read. Faraceta were with him, according to their own statements given to police after the arrest. The three men traveled together until they reached Castleton Road outside Hudson, south of Albany. That is where the car stopped.

That is where Sal Antonio’s life ended. What Ferrari and Sieta did to him on that road was savage. S was shot five times. He was stabbed approximately 15 times. When it was over, his body was left near a roadside culvert, partially hidden, not fully concealed. The two men drove away and left him there.

 It was only by chance that someone passing along that road noticed him. A passer by spotted the body, realized the man was still alive, and called for help. S was rushed to the hospital. He was clinging to life barely. He died in the emergency room. And before he took his last breath, Salvatore Antonio never named a single person who had done this to him.

Not one name. His final silence left the entire case wide open, and investigators would spend the weeks ahead trying to fill that silence themselves. New York State Police Officer William H. Fluer arrived at the hospital within minutes of Sal’s death. He made a decision in that moment that shaped everything that followed.

 He did not go to the crime scene first. He went directly to question Anna. What he found when he spoke to her stopped him cold. Anna’s responses were vague. Her answers were unclear. And most damaging of all, she showed no visible shock, no grief, not a single tear by the officer’s account for a husband who had just been found beaten and dying on a highway.

 Fluacher noted every detail. A woman who had just been told her husband was dead and she didn’t cry. That one moment would follow her all the way to the electric chair. Word spread through Albany quickly. A railroad union worker murdered on Easter Sunday. Shot and stabbed and left on the side of a road.

 The brutality of it was impossible to ignore and people noticed. Investigators turned their attention in two directions at once. The crime scene on Castleton Road and the behavior of everyone connected to Sal Antonio. Anna, in the days that followed, did not behave the way a grieving widow was expected to behave. She did not push authorities to find her husband’s killers.

 She did not make public statements. She did not break down in ways that matched what the community around her expected to see. Investigators noted this. It added to the picture that Flubacher had already begun building in his mind the night S died. Then there was the matter of the insurance money. S had carried nearly $5,000 in life insurance.

 If the entire point of the murder, as the state would later argue, was to collect that money, then the weeks after his death should have seen some movement toward filing a claim, there was none. Anna’s attorney, Daniel Prior, would later confirm that no attempt was ever made to collect on either policy.

 Not by Anna, not by anyone connected to her. Faraceta, for their [music] part, did not run. Both men remained in the area in the days and weeks following the murder. They did not disappear. They did not leave the state. Whether that was confidence or carelessness, the record does not say. Anna’s own focus, based on her later statements, was her children, Phyllis, Marie, and Frank.

 Three young children, no income, and a future that had suddenly collapsed around her. Her brother, Pasquali Capello of Skenctity, remained close to the family throughout. He would later become the one person who stepped forward to hold what was left of it together. Suspicion is not a court case. Officer Flubacher knew that. His red of Anna on the night S died had already pointed him in a clear direction.

 But what he felt in that room and what he could prove in a courtroom were two very different things. The investigation needed evidence. And in the spring of 1932, evidence was hard to come by. The crime scene on Castleton Road gave investigators a body with five bullet wounds and approximately 15 stab wounds.

 It told them the attack was violent. It did not tell them who was responsible. Forensic tools available in 1932 were limited. There were no eyewitnesses who came forward in the immediate days after the murder and Sal himself had died without speaking a single name. The investigation stalled. So investigators shifted their approach. They began mapping every person connected to Sal Antonio, his union contacts, the people who passed through his household, and the criminal associations that Anna herself had described to police. The picture that

emerged from that process was not the portrait of a clean, simple working man. Two names kept appearing, Samuel Faracetta. Both men were known to S. Both were connected to the drug activity Anna had described inside the home, and both had been seen with S in the period leading up to Easter Sunday.

 Anna’s own whereabouts on the night of the murder presented a quiet but important detail. She was not on that highway. She did not fire a weapon or raise a knife. Her presence with her children was the foundation of her implicit defense. But the state was not building a case around who held the weapon. Under New York conspiracy law, a person who arranged a murder was equally guilty whether they were present or not.

 With that legal framework in place, investigators turned their full pressure onto Farra and Seta and eventually both men talked. When Fra and Seeta finally gave their statements to police, the direction of the entire case shifted. Both men told investigators the same thing. Anna Antonio had come to them and asked them to kill her husband.

 In exchange, she had promised them $800 to be paid from S’s life insurance once the policies were collected. Those statements given under sustained pressure and without the level of legal protection that would be required under modern standards became the foundation of the prosecution’s entire case against Anna.

 Without them, there was very little connecting her directly to the murder. On May 5th, 1932, 5 weeks after Sal Antonio was left dying on Castleton Road, all three were arrested. Anna Antonio, Samuel Farache, and Vincent Seeda were each charged with murder in the first degree. But here is the problem every viewer watching this needs to sit with for a moment.

 The two men accusing Anna of planning this murder were the same two men who drove S down that road, shot him five times, and stabbed him approximately 15 times. They were not neutral witnesses. They were not bystanders who happened to see something. They were the killers now pointing their finger at the woman they claimed put them up to it.

 In a situation where shifting blame onto Anna was also the most logical way to reduce their own. The defense would raise this point at trial loudly. It was a reasonable argument. The jury would not be moved by it. Anna, for her part, held her position from the moment she was arrested. She acknowledged knowing Ferrari.

 That much was true and provable. But she denied the conspiracy the state described. She denied directing anyone to kill S. She denied promising anyone a single dollar. In depression era Albany, a young Italian immigrant mother had just been charged with arranging her husband’s murder. The case was about to go to trial. The trial of Anna Antonio, Samuel Ferach, and Vincent Seeta opened in Albany County Court in the spring of 1933.

 It lasted 26 days. For that era, that was a long time. It reflected just how complicated and contested this case truly was. Because on the surface, the state had a story. But underneath that story were questions that refused to go away. Presiding over the courtroom was Judge Earl H. Gallup representing Anna was her attorney, Daniel H.

 Prior of Albany, a man who believed in his client enough to keep fighting for her long after the verdict was delivered. The state laid out its argument in plain terms. Anna Antonio wanted her husband dead. She recruited two men from his own social circle. She promised them $800 from S’s insurance policies. The murder on Castleton Road was the result.

 The prosecution presented it as a transaction, cold, deliberate, [music] and driven entirely by money. Prior pushed back directly. The state’s case, he argued, rested almost entirely on the testimony of two men who were themselves charged with carrying out the killing. Two men who had every personal reason to frame the story in a way that put Anna at the center and reduce their own culpability.

 Without their statements, Prior pointed out there was no case. Author James M. Grryer, who later researched this case in full detail, documented another layer that shaped everything inside that courtroom. Anna was poor. She was an Italian immigrant woman in 1933 Albany. Those two facts alone placed her at a serious disadvantage before a single piece of evidence was presented.

 The jury deliberated and returned its verdict. All three defendants, Anna Antonio, Samuel Farac, and Vincent Seeda were found guilty of murder in the first degree. On April 15th, 1933, Judge Gallup sentenced all three to death by electrocution. Prior immediately began filing appeals. Court after court refused to overturn the verdict.

 A motion for a new trial filed later during the reprieve period landed back on Judge Gallup’s desk. The same judge who had sentenced Anna to die denied it. Anna Antonio arrived at Sing Singh Prison in April 1933. She was the only woman on death row. There were no facilities set up for a female condemned prisoner, so three matrons were brought back specifically to supervise her around the clock, 7 days a week, every hour of the day.

 Over the next 15 1/2 months, the state of New York spent $4,650 on her personal supervision alone. Prison officials later told the press it was more than had ever been spent on any single prisoner in Singh’s history. But no amount of supervision could protect Anna from what that time on death row did to her.

 She lived through three formal reprieves, three separate occasions where a date was set for her execution, and then pulled back at the last moment. Each cycle pushed her closer to the edge. She stopped eating regularly. She stopped sleeping. The weight fell off her body week by week. By her final months, she was down to 85 lbs.

 The matrons brought her tea and toast and urged her to eat. She told them, “I am almost dead now. I feel at times I am not breathing.” Those matrons, technically her guards, became the closest thing to friends she had inside those walls. They cared about her. And on the night she finally walked to the chair, they positioned themselves directly in front of her to block any photographer from capturing the moment.

They remembered what had happened in 1928 when a hidden camera produced a death photo of Ruth Snyder. They were not going to let that happen to Anna. Outside the prison walls, the case was gaining attention. Italian civic organizations across New York sent petitions to the governor. Clarence Darrow, one of the most respected defense attorneys in the country and a lifelong opponent of capital punishment, publicly declared his support for Anna.

Newspaper editorials described the cycle of reprieves and reschedules as cruel and unusual punishment. None of it was enough. On June 27th, 1934, the matrons partially shaved Anna’s head in preparation for the first execution attempt. As the hour approached, she waited. [music] Then at 10:50 at night, just 10 minutes before she was scheduled to die, Vincent Seeta sent word that he needed to speak with warden Lewis E.

Laws immediately. What Saleta told the warden that night was this. He alone had killed Sal Antonio. The motive, he said, was a personal dispute over a $75 debt S owed him. S had threatened his life, and he acted first. Anna, Seta stated directly, was absolutely innocent of the crime. Warden Laws stopped everything.

He ordered a 2-hour stay and called Governor Leman. Anna, who was already standing in the corridor just outside the execution chamber, collapsed when she heard the news. Governor Leman listened. He read Seata’s full statement. He granted a 24-hour reprieve, then a 10-day reprieve, then a full month.

 While the courts considered whether a new trial was warranted, Albany District Attorney John Delaney had no patience for any of it. He called Sata’s statement an absolute fabrication of lies and pushed for the execution to proceed. Every court agreed with Delaney. The motion for a new trial was denied. The appeals ran out. The new execution date was set for August 9th, 1934.

 By the time that date arrived, Anna had not eaten in days. Her head was shaved for the second time. She had slipped in and out of a semi-conscious state in the days leading up to it. That afternoon, her brother Pasquali arrived with his wife and Anna’s three-year-old son, Frank. They were not allowed to touch. Anna kissed her little boy through the prison screen and made her brother promise once more to care for her children.

 That same day, August 9th, was her daughter Marie’s 7th birthday. From inside the death house, Anna had sent Marie a handmade dress and a box of candy. Marie had written back that if good news came from the prison, she was planning a birthday party. No good news came. Anna’s final recorded words spoken to Warden Laws before she left her cell were these.

 I don’t care what you do to me. I am not afraid to die. I have nothing on my conscience. I never killed anyone. At 11:00 that night, the guards came. Anna walked to the execution chamber without assistance. She sat in the chair. She prayed quietly with Father John P. Macaffrey, the prison chaplain. She did not cry. She did not fight. She did not break.

 Three jolts of electricity were administered. At 11:16 that night, Dr. Charles Seuite pronounced her dead. Samuel Farache was brought in immediately after. He walked in smiling, sat down, and told the witnesses, “I go to die, but I am innocent. I wish you good luck, all of you.” He was pronounced dead at approximately 11:23.

 Vincent Sata entered the chamber at 11:27. The same man who had declared Anna entirely innocent just 40 days earlier. He said nothing. He was pronounced dead at 11:31. All three bodies were claimed by family members the following morning. Anna Antonio was buried in Albany on August 13th, 1934, 4 days after the state put her in that chair.

 Her brother Pasqual kept his word. He took custody of her children. 3-year-old Frank came to live with him in Skenctity. The girls were placed temporarily in an orphanage with a firm plan to bring them home once his wife’s health allowed. The two insurance policies, the $2,800 union policy and the $2,500 Metropolitan Life Policy, were never collected.

 Not a single dollar. The financial motive the state built its entire case on produced nothing for anyone. Three people died in that execution chamber for the murder of Salvatore Antonio. The one man whose lastm minute confession might have changed everything waited until there was no time left for it to matter. In August 9th, the day Anna Antonio was executed was her daughter’s 7th birthday.

 That detail needs no commentary. What moment in Anna’s story hit you hardest? Drop it in the comments below. And if you’re not subscribed yet, now is the time. We cover the cases that demand to be remembered. See you in the next one.