Timothy O'Bryan

popular name: Ernest Haywood

date_of_death: December 14, 1946

age: 86

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: The Haywood family was a politically and socially influential white family in Raleigh, North Carolina during with 1800s through the early 1900s with plantations dependent on slave labor in North Carolina as well as Alabama. Ernest Haywood was an attorney practicing in Raleigh where he specialized in commercial, insurance, corporation, and real estate law. On February 21, 1903, Saturday afternoon, the young lawyer Haywood met Ludlow Skinner, his mistress's brother-in-law, on the steps of the Fayetteville Street Post Office. After a brief argument Haywood pulled out a pistol and shot at Skinner one time and missed. He then chased Skinner briefly and shot him dead in the street with 100 witness. The murder and subsequent trial achieved nationwide attention and rocked the foundations of turn-of-the-century Raleigh society. As a lawyer and founding member of the Raleigh Bar Association, he was found innocent by a jury of his peers after only 15 minutes of deliberation.

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 for 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.

popular name: Raymond Patriarca

date_of_death: July 11, 1984

age: 76

cause_of_death: Heart attack

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Raymond Patriarca was an American mobster from Providence, Rhode Island, who became the long-time boss of the Patriarca crime family, whose control extended throughout New England for more than three decades. Even at an early age, Patriarca was charged with hijacking, armed robbery, assault, safecracking, and auto theft. He was indicted as an accessory to murder before Prohibition's end in 1933. During the 1940s, Patriarca continued to rise in power. In 1950, mobster Philip Buccola fled the country to avoid prosecution for tax evasion, and Patriarca took control of his criminal operations. Throughout the notoriety of the last half of his life, Mr. Patriarca insisted he was a legitimate businessman who operated the National Cigarette Service, a vending machine business, in the Federal Hill section of Providence. But law-enforcement officials contended that Mr. Patriarca controlled a web of illicit activities that spread across New England, including loan sharking, numbers lotteries, trafficking in marijuana and cocaine and, for a time, jukebox vending rackets and the smuggling of immigrants. Make no mistake, Patriarca 30-year reign was brutal and violent with the mob boss arrested more than 30 times on charges ranging from bootlegging to conspiracy to murder, and served several prison sentences. The last was a six-year term at the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta stemming from his 1968 conviction for conspiracy in the slayings of Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei at Pannone’s Market in Providence, Rhode Island on April 20, 1968.