Elena Semander

popular name: Dean O'Banion

date_of_death: November 10, 1924

age: 32

cause_of_death: Homicide - gunshot wounds

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: As the leader of the North Side Gang in the early 1920s, Dean O'Banion was a feared Chicago mobster who was the main rival of Johnny Torrio and Al Capone during the bloody and violent Chicago bootlegging wars of the 1920s. He was gunned down in his flower shop allegedly by John Torrio's gang members (with the help of Genna Brothers) including Frankie Yale, John Scalise and Albert Anselmi (which is still in dispute to this day). The O’Banion killing would spark a brutal five-year gang war between the North Side Gang and the Chicago Outfit that culminated in the killing of seven North Side gang members in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929.

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.

popular name: Sam Battaglia

date_of_death: September 7, 1973

age: 64

cause_of_death: Natural Causes

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Sam "Teets" Battaglia joined the Torrio-Capone gang at the age of 16, right at the beginning of the Beer Wars of the 1920s. As a high-level member of the Chicago Outfit criminal organization, Sam Battaglia quickly rose in the ranks of the gang, and was known as a brutal loan shark. He became head of the Chicago Outfit in 1966 but was convicted and sent to federal prison that same year and died at his home shortly after his release.