Elena Semander

popular name: Hymie Weiss

date_of_death: October 11, 1926

age: 28

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wounds

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Chicago mobster and a tough rival of legendary mobster Al Capone. Hymie Weiss was thought to be the first to use the infamous words 'Lets take him for a ride' when planning a hit on someone. Folklore has it that Weiss was the only mob rival that Capone was truly afraid of. Hymie died in a hail of machine gun bullets known as the "Holy Name Cathedral Massacre" seeking further revenge by Capone after the killing of his boss, Dean O'Banion.

popular name: Vincent Alo

date_of_death: March 9, 2001

age: 96

cause_of_death: Complications from cerebral hemorrhage

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Vincent “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo was a mobster and made man who operated for decades alongside Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano while staying well outside of the spotlight. Called "one of the most significant organized crime figures in the United States" by the U.S. District Attorney, Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo was just 15 years old when Prohibition became law. Over the next decade, Alo would work side by side with Lansky and Luciano as they navigated the brutal underworld of bootlegging, thievery and murder. Alo’s later career included prison time and the ultimate Mob tribute: being immortalized as "Johnny Ola" in The Godfather, Part II. Born in East Harlem in 1904, Alo built a quiet reputation in gambling rackets stretching from the Bronx to South Florida. FBI files placed him at the center of underground casinos, loan operations and even the Las Vegas skim. He avoided major indictments and convictions, making him an outlier in a world defined by arrests, violence and betrayal. Alo died in 2001 at age 96. And while he passed away in Florida from a complications of a stroke, Vicenet Alo was returned to NYC to be buried with is family at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx.

popular name: Velma Barfield

date_of_death: November 2, 1984

age: 52

cause_of_death: Execution by lethal injection

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Velma Barfield was an American female serial killer and is remembered for being one of the first women to be executed in the United States after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Barfield was 1 of 9 children born in South Carolina into abject poverty. As the eldest girl, she was expected at a young age to cook, clean and mend clothes for the entire family (no easy task in a house with no electricity, no running water and no toilet facilities). A childhood marked by abuse and a difficult relationship with her family, she met and married Thomas Burke in 1949 and had two children. It was during her marriage to Burke that she developed a debilitating addiction to narcotics to treat depression and pain from several surgeries. Over a period of 16 years, Velma Barfield poisoned several victims when they discovered she was forging checks to fund her drug habit. Those victims include her own mother, her fiancé, and her mother-in-law, among others. She used arsenic to kill them, often claiming they had died from natural causes. After the death of Stuart Taylor (Barfield's boyfriend and a relative of victim #6 Dollie Edwards) the local police were tipped-off by Barfield's sister in 1976, thus investigators were able to link the deaths to her through forensic evidence. Upon her arrest and without a lawyer present, she confessed initially to 3 of the murders. In 1978 she was convicted of the death of her fiancé, Stuart Taylor, and sentenced to death. After 2 appeals and 6 years on death row, the "Death Row Granny" Velma Barfield was executed on November 2, 1984, by lethal injection in North Carolina. Her execution was notable because she was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1962 and one of the few women executed in the 20th century. She was buried next to her first husband in a grave that remains unmarked in Parkton Cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina.