SING SING PRISON, NY — The year was 1899, and the machine was new. Electricity, once harnessed to light the nation’s cities, had been repurposed as an instrument of state-sanctioned death. And on March 20th of that year, a 49-year-old woman named Martha Place sat in total silence inside this maximum-security prison, waiting to become something the world had never seen before: the first woman ever executed by electric chair.
Place was not the first woman put to death in America. She was, however, the first to face the terrifying new technology that proponents promised would be more humane than hanging. It would not be humane.
It would be a spectacle. And over the next 58 years, eleven more women would follow her down that same corridor, strapped into the same type of chair, their lives extinguished by surges of voltage that witnesses would describe in chilling, visceral detail. Their crimes ranged from cold-blooded murder-for-insurance to desperate acts of self-defense.
Some were guilty beyond any doubt. One, history would later conclude, was executed for a crime she never should have been convicted of at all.
Martha Place’s story began in a Brooklyn home fractured by resentment. She had married William Place, a widower, and entered a household that did not want her there. His 18-year-old daughter, Ida, became the object of a hatred that festered for years.
On February 7th, 1898, that hatred exploded. Martha attacked Ida with acid, then suffocated the young woman with a pillow. When William arrived home, she turned an axe on him as well.
He survived. Ida did not. The trial was swift, the conviction certain, and the appeals failed one after another.
The state of New York had built its new killing machine, and it wanted to test it.
When guards led Martha Place into the execution chamber, witnesses described her as composed, almost resigned. She offered no memorable final statement. She simply sat down in the chair and waited.
The current surged. It was over. Newspapers called her a warning shot, proof that the electric chair worked exactly as designed.
Seventy years earlier, a woman convicted of murder might have faced the noose. Now, there was something new. And within a decade, another woman would test it.
Mary Farmer’s case reads like a slow-burning nightmare of greed and forgery. In October 1907, she walked into a lawyer’s office in Watertown, New York, and filed paperwork to transfer a piece of land into her own name. The signature belonged to a woman named Sarah Brennan.
The problem was that Sarah Brennan never signed it. Mary Farmer had forged it. For months, Mary had been quietly stealing her neighbor and landlord’s property, one fraudulent document at a time.
By April 1908, the scheme was unraveling. So Mary picked up an axe and ended the problem. She killed Sarah Brennan and hid the body inside a trunk, where it sat for months as neighbors grew suspicious and questions multiplied.
Both Mary and her husband James were arrested and sentenced to death. But on death row, Mary made a decision that would define her legacy. She wrote a confession clearing James completely, insisting the killing was hers alone.
James was acquitted in a second trial. On March 29th, 1909, Mary Farmer walked to the electric chair at Auburn Prison holding a crucifix, murmuring a prayer. It took three jolts of more than 1,800 volts before doctors pronounced her dead.
A forged deed, a hidden trunk, and a final act of mercy toward the husband she had nearly destroyed.
Then came a case that still haunts American legal history. Virginia Christian was 17 years old, one day past her birthday, when the state of Virginia strapped her into the electric chair in 1912. She remains the only female juvenile ever executed by this method in American history.
Virginia had left school at 13 to work as a laundress for Ida Bellwood, a wealthy white woman in Hampton, Virginia, who beat and berated the teenager regularly. On March 18th, 1912, Ida accused Virginia of stealing a locket and a skirt. An argument escalated into violence.
Virginia grabbed a broom handle, struck back, and then, in a desperate attempt to silence Ida’s screaming, forced a towel into her mouth. Ida suffocated.
Virginia’s trial lasted almost no time at all. An all-white, all-male jury deliberated for 23 minutes before convicting her of first-degree murder. Her account of the fight and the years of 𝓪𝓫𝓾𝓼𝓮 meant nothing to them.
Her mother, paralyzed and unable to travel, wrote a desperate letter to the governor. It did not work. On August 16th, 1912, one day after turning 17, Virginia Christian was executed.
She remains the only woman Virginia has ever executed by electrocution. A servant girl, a stolen skirt, 23 minutes that decided everything.
The most infamous case on this list produced one of the most 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 images in the history of American journalism. Ruth Snyder was a Queens homemaker trapped in a cold, unhappy marriage to Albert Snyder, an art editor 13 years her senior. She took a lover, a corset salesman named Judd Gray, and together they devised a plan built on greed and betrayal.
They took out a life insurance policy on Albert worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money. On March 20th, 1927, they murdered him in his own bed, staging the scene to look like a burglary. The staging fell apart almost immediately.
Under questioning, Ruth and Judd turned on each other instantly, each blaming the other for the fatal blow.
Both were convicted and sentenced to death. On January 12th, 1928, Ruth Snyder was executed at Sing Sing, ten minutes before Judd Gray followed her into the same chair. But that was not the end of her story.
A reporter named Tom Howard had strapped a hidden camera to his ankle, and at the exact instant 2,000 volts tore through Ruth’s body, the flash fired. That photograph, grainy, illegal, unforgettable, ran on the front page of the New York Daily News the next morning. A woman’s death, captured and sold to the public.
It remains one of the most infamous images in criminal history.
The next woman to face the chair brought a child into the story, and that child’s testimony would help seal her fate. Irene Schroeder was a poor young mother from New Castle, Pennsylvania who left her domestic life behind for a life of robbery with her lover, Glenn Dague, and her brother, Tom Crawford. She dragged her six-year-old son Donnie along in the getaway car.
On December 27th, 1929, during a robbery, Pennsylvania Highway Patrolman Corporal Brady Paul pulled them over. Irene shot him dead. Her brother wounded a second officer.
Donnie watched the entire thing from the backseat.
After a manhunt that crossed state lines, Irene and Glenn were captured in Arizona following a shootout. At trial, Irene tried claiming she was someone else entirely. The jury did not buy it.
Her own son took the stand against her. Those were the words of a six-year-old boy testifying in open court: “I saw my mama shoot a cop.” On February 23rd, 1931, Irene Schroeder became the fourth woman executed in the American electric chair.
Her final words were to her son. “I am going to die, my boy, but I am not afraid. Be a good boy, and don’t be afraid.”
Minutes later, Glenn Dague walked to the same chair. A six-year-old boy grew up knowing he had helped send his mother to die.
Anna Antonio weighed just 85 pounds when they strapped her into the chair. Newspapers called her Little Anna. By the time her execution date arrived, she had nearly stopped eating entirely, dropping 15 pounds in her final six weeks.
Anna was a 28-year-old wife who had endured 12 years of beatings at the hands of her husband Salvatore, a man also involved in the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 trade. In 1933, she hired two men to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him for his $5,000 life insurance policy. That Easter, Salvatore’s body was found beside a country road, shot five times and stabbed.
All three were convicted.
Anna maintained her innocence almost to the very end, but she admitted the two men had told her what they planned to do. On August 9th, 1934, she was executed at Sing Sing, the same day as her own daughter’s birthday. Guards came for her shortly before 11 p.
m. She stood trembling in the corridor for ten full minutes before entering the chamber. She wore a dress she had sewn herself, one dark stocking pulled over her left leg, her right leg left bare for the electrode.
She repeated a Catholic prayer as the straps closed around her. The two men she hired were executed immediately after her in the same chair.
Eva Coo saw a vulnerable man not as someone to protect, but as a payout. Harry Wright, known locally as Gimpy, could not fully care for himself. When his mother died, the responsibility fell to Eva, who ran a speakeasy and brothel called Little Eva’s during Prohibition.
When business suffered, she saw Harry as a solution. She took out multiple life insurance policies on him, and on June 14th, 1934, she and an employee drove Harry to an isolated road on Crum Horn Mountain. Eva struck him in the head with a wooden mallet.
Her accomplice ran him over with a rented car, more than once. They left his body staged to look like a hit-and-run.
The investigation exhumed his body twice. The accomplice turned state’s witness and received 20 years instead of death. Eva’s trial became a public spectacle, drawing national coverage to Cooperstown.
On June 27th, 1935, Eva Coo was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing, just days after turning 46. She was the fifth woman to die in that particular chamber.
Tony Jo Henry robbed a stranger to save an outlaw. Born Annie Beatrice McQuiston, she had worked the streets as a teenager and fallen in love with a man named Claude Cowboy Henry, who was serving 50 years in a Texas prison for murder. She planned to rob a bank to fund his jailbreak.
On February 14th, 1940, she and an accomplice accepted a ride from a salesman named Joseph Callaway. The robbery turned into murder. Callaway was shot and killed.
After three separate trials, Tony Jo was sentenced to death. Four days before her execution, Cowboy Henry escaped from prison just to see her one final time before being recaptured.
On November 28th, 1942, Tony Jo Henry walked into the basement of the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse in Louisiana wearing a plain black dress, her shaved head hidden beneath a colorful scarf. She smiled at reporters, declined to make a final statement, and was executed by Louisiana’s portable electric chair. She remains the only woman ever executed by electrocution in that state’s history.
Outside, roughly 300 people gathered hoping for a glimpse of history.
Then came the case that would force a state to admit a grievous error six decades later. Lena Baker was a Black domestic worker in Cuthbert, Georgia, employed by a white man named Ernest Knight who ran a local gristmill. According to her testimony, Knight had repeatedly held her against her will and assaulted her.
On April 30th, 1944, he locked her inside the mill again. When she tried to leave, an argument broke out. Knight grabbed an iron bar.
She feared for her life and grabbed for his gun. In the struggle, Knight was shot in the head.
Lena did not run. She told the coroner herself, “I killed Ernest Knight.” She believed the truth would protect her.
It did not. Her trial lasted less than a single day. An all-white, all-male jury deliberated for 30 minutes before convicting her.
On March 5th, 1945, she was executed at Georgia’s Reidsville State Prison. Her final words were simple and devastating. “What I done, I did in self-defense or I would have been killed myself.
Where I was, I could not overcome it. I am ready to meet my God.” In 2005, the state of Georgia formally granted Lena Baker a full posthumous pardon, acknowledging that denying her clemency had been, in the board’s own words, a grievous error.
The most politically charged case on this list came at the height of Cold War fear. Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius were convicted of conspiring to pass American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union. Ethel remains to this day the only woman ever executed by the United States government for a crime other than murder.
Evidence later showed Julius had passed information to Soviet contacts during World War II. Ethel’s actual involvement was far murkier. Much of the case against her rested on testimony from her own brother, David Greenglass, who decades later admitted he had lied under pressure from prosecutors.
The government’s strategy was clear. Charge them both. Sentence them both to death.
Hope Julius would break and name other spies to save his wife. He never did. On June 19th, 1953, they were executed at Sing Sing, hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath.
Julius went first. Ethel followed. It took four separate shocks before doctors detected signs of life.
A fifth was ordered before she was finally pronounced dead. Witnesses described smoke rising from her body. They left behind two young sons who spent the rest of their lives trying to clear their mother’s name.
The final woman on this list was a waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, soft-spoken, familiar with the regulars who never suspected the woman refilling their coffee had buried six members of her own family. Rhonda Bell Martin poisoned her own mother, three of her children, and two of her five husbands using rat poison slipped into food over nearly two decades. Her fifth husband survived but was left permanently paralyzed.
His lingering illness led investigators to look closer at the pattern of deaths. In March 1956, Rhonda confessed to nearly all of it.
On October 11th, 1957, Rhonda Bell Martin was executed in Alabama’s electric chair, clutching a Bible and quietly reciting the 23rd Psalm alongside the prison chaplain as the current took her. She declined to make any final statement. She remains the last woman ever executed in Alabama’s electric chair, closing out an era that began with Martha Place 58 years earlier.
Twelve women. Fifty-eight years. Poison, gunfire, forged deeds, hired killers, and one woman who never should have been convicted at all.
Some were monsters who destroyed their own families for money. Some were victims the system refused to see, punished twice, once by the men who hurt them, and once by the courts that were supposed to protect them. All of them sat in the same chair, waiting for the same current, decades and states apart, bound together by the same machine.
But there is a 13th case, a woman whose execution became so controversial, so contested, that even the officials who carried it out still argue about whether it should have happened at all. Her case changed the national conversation around capital punishment forever, and her story is the one that historians continue to debate more than any other. That story is still unfolding.
