Jay Kelly Pinkerton Warning: This story contains graphic content, near the end. Jay Kelly Pinkerton was executed by the state of Texas on May 15, 1986, for the rape and murder of two women. On October 26, 1979, Pinkerton entered the Amarillo home of David and Sarah Lawrence between the hours of 9:30  and 11:30 […]

Charles Rumbaugh’s minor notoriety as a killer and criminal only came after he committed the murder that put him on Texas death row. On April 4, 1975, Rumbaugh shot and killed an Amarillo jewelry store owner, fifty-eight-year-old Michael Fiorillo, during a robbery. When he was arrested the next day, he pulled a gun on the […]

Executed for the Robbery/Torture/Murder of a Jacksonville, Florida, furniture store owner in 1976. On July 30, 1976, Ronald Straight received a mandatory conditional parole from the Florida Parole and Probation Commission. By early September, he had drifted to Jacksonville, where he moved into an apartment occupied by Timothy Palmes, Palme’s girlfriend Jane Albert, and Albert’s […]

  During the month of October 1974, Patrick Randel, an undercover narcotics agent with the Texas Department of Public Safety, was working a drug buy/sting operation against two underworld figures from Austin. With $850 in “buy money,” Randel agreed to purchase Quaaludes from the two men. On October 23, the three met in a room […]

Story by Jason Lucky Morrow Posted: December 9, 2015 On November 9, 1927, twenty-year-old Howard Hitchens of Georgetown, Delaware, was growing concerned for his uncle, Robert, whom he had not seen in several days. When he went to the man’s home in nearby Frankford, he found him “beaten to death in a blood splattered room,” […]

On March 23, 1973, James Dupree Henry broke into the home of eighty-one-year-old Orlando civil rights leader, Zellie Riley, with the intention of robbing him. After finding just $64 and some credit cards, Henry bound Riley, who was his next door neighbor, to a chair beat him with a pistol, slit his throat with a […]

. On August 7, 1978, Harker Heights Police Officer Carl Levin located an arson suspect entering a vacant house in the small community located southeast of Killeen, Texas. When Officer Levin stopped the individual and asked for identification, the man pulled out a .25 caliber pistol and shot the thirty-one-year-old Levin in the head, killing […]

On Halloween night, 1974, Ronald O’Bryan took his eight-year-old-son, Timothy, and his daughter, trick-or-treating with some other neighborhood friends near their home in the Deer Park suburb of Houston. Since there was a light rain falling, they only collected candy in a two-block area for half-an-hour before returning home. As he went to bed, Ronald […]

Rich Owens was the executioner for the state of Oklahoma from 1915 to 1947. In addition to being a guard, his took the position as executioner because the state paid him $100-150 for every man he executed. During his life, he killed a total of 75 men: sixty-six of those were by execution, and the […]

During the early part of April, 1942, Donald Fearn, a twenty-three-year-old railway mechanic living in Pueblo, Colorado, sat in his tan colored Ford Sedan and watch night after night as a bevy of pretty young girls departed from a nursing class. Beautiful sixteen-year-old Alice Porter, a high school student taking night classes, caught his attention […]