Timothy O'Bryan

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: Ernesto Miranda

date_of_death: January 31, 1976

age: 34

cause_of_death: Stabbing

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: If you have ever been on the wrong side of a conversation with local police and were read your rights (You have the right to remain silent ...) then you have Ernesto Miranda (actually his attorney) to thank. Ernesto Miranda was a violent, predatory American criminal and day laborer whose conviction on kidnapping, rape, and armed robbery charges based on his confession under police interrogation was set aside in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona, which ruled that criminal suspects must be informed of their right against self-incrimination and their right to consult with an attorney before being questioned by police. This warning is known as a Miranda warning.

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.