Elena Semander

popular name: Silas Jayne

date_of_death: July 13, 1987

age: 80

cause_of_death: Leukemia

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Notorious Chicago-based stable owner implicated in multiple disappearances and murders including the famous 1955 Peterson-Schuessler murder, involvement in the 1956 murder of the two Grimes sisters, and in the 1977 disappearance of heiress Helen Brach.

popular name: Angelo Genna

date_of_death: May 26, 1925

age: 27

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wounds

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Angelo Genna ran the Genna Brothers crime family which was involved primarily in bootlegging during the Prohibition era of the 1920s. Angelo Genna, with the blessing of Johnny Torrio, masterminded the hit on Dean O'Brion (mob boss of the North Side Gang) in his flower shop. In retaliation Genna met the same fate on May 26, 1925, when Bugs Moran, Vincent "The Schemer" Drucci, and Hymie Weiss shot and wounded Genna numerous times during a high-speed car chase. Genna died later that night without revealing who shot him.

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.