Elena Semander

popular name: Lizzie Borden

date_of_death: June 1, 1927

age: 66

cause_of_death: Pneumonia

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Lizzie Borden is infamous for being the prime suspect in the double murder of their father and step-mother. She was tried and acquitted and no one else was charged in the murders. The murders and trial received widespread publicity throughout the United States and, along with Borden herself, they remain a topic in American popular culture to the present day. They have been depicted in numerous films, theatrical productions, literary works, and folk rhymes, and are still very well-known in the Fall River area.

popular name: Judd Gray

date_of_death: January 12, 1928

age: 35

cause_of_death: Executed by electrocution

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Judd Gray was a corset salesman and Ruth Brown Snyder's lover and accomplice in the badly planned murder of her husband, Albert Snyder. The bored housewife from Queens, New York who, after 7 or so unsuccessful attempts, finally succeeded in killing her husband Albert Snyder with the assistance of her lover Henry Judd Gray using a combination dumb bell beat-down and strangulation. Although found guilt and executed in Sing Sing Prison, that is not what made this pathetic couple famous. During the execution photographer Tom Howard of the Chicago Tribune, with a small plate camera strapped to his ankle, took the infamous picture just as the electricity was running through Ruth Snyder's body that was published the next day in the New York Daily News. As one crime reporter said during the trial, the Snyder-Gray murder was a "cheap crime involving cheap people".

popular name: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg

date_of_death: June 19, 1953

age:

cause_of_death: Execution by electric chair

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: It was a case that mesmerized the country and the world. On June 19, 1953, at the height of the Cold War, New York City–born Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put to death in the electric chair. Convicted of conspiring to pass atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union, they were the first civilians to be executed by the United States on espionage charges. Their conviction of spying for the Soviet Union included providing top-secret information about American radar, sonar, jet propulsion engines, and nuclear weapon designs. Convicted of espionage in 1951, they were executed in 1953 at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York. For decades, many people, including the Rosenberg's sons (Michael and Robert Meeropol), maintained that Julius and Ethel were innocent of spying on their country and were victims of Cold War paranoia. Several years after their execution, top nuclear scientist Boris V. Brokhovich stated the Soviets had developed their own bomb by trial and error. "You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing", he said. "We got nothing from the Rosenbergs." The notes allegedly typed by Ethel Rosenberg as dictated by her husband apparently contained little that was directly used in the Soviet atomic bomb project. According to Julius's contact Feklisov, the Rosenbergs did not provide the Soviet Union with any useful material about the atomic bomb: "He [Julius] didn't understand anything about the atomic bomb and he couldn't help us."