The cold steel of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison was waiting for Martha Place, and on March 20th, 1899, she became the first woman in American history to be executed by this method. The 49-year-old woman from New Jersey had been convicted of murdering her 18-year-old stepdaughter, Ida Place, in a vicious attack that involved acid and suffocation. Her husband, William, survived an axe blow from her that same day.
Witnesses described her as composed and resigned, offering no final words before the current ended her life. She was not just a killer; she was the first test subject for a new state weapon, and the machine worked exactly as designed.
The second woman to face this fate was Mary Farmer, executed at Auburn Prison on March 29th, 1909. Her crime was born from greed and a forged deed. She and her husband, James, rented land from their neighbor, Sarah Brennan, and Mary had been quietly stealing the property by forging Sarah’s signature.
When the fraud was about to be 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭, Mary killed Sarah with an axe and hid her body in a trunk. Both Mary and James were sentenced to death, but days before her execution, Mary wrote a confession clearing her husband completely. James was later acquitted.
Mary walked to the chair holding a crucifix, murmuring a prayer. It took three jolts of over 1,800 volts before doctors pronounced her dead.
Virginia Christian was only 17 years old, one day past her birthday, when the state of Virginia executed her on August 16th, 1912. She would have been the youngest woman ever put to death by electric chair. Virginia had left school at 13 to work as a laundress for Ida Bellwood, a wealthy white woman in Hampton who frequently beat and berated her.
The fatal confrontation began when Ida accused Virginia of stealing a locket and a skirt. In the chaos, Virginia grabbed a broom handle and hit back, then forced a towel into Ida’s mouth to stop her screaming. Ida suffocated.
An all-white, all-male jury deliberated for just 23 minutes before finding Virginia guilty. Her mother, paralyzed and unable to travel, wrote a desperate letter to the governor begging for her daughter’s life. It did not work.
Virginia remains the only female juvenile ever executed by electric chair in American history.
Ruth Snyder’s execution on January 12th, 1928, at Sing Sing became infamous for a grainy, illegal photograph taken by a hidden camera strapped to a reporter’s ankle. The flash captured her body at the exact instant 2,000 volts tore through it, and the image ran on the front page of the New York Daily News the next morning. Ruth was a homemaker in Queens, married to Albert Snyder, a man 13 years her senior.
The marriage was cold and unhappy, and she took a lover named Judd Gray, a corset salesman. Together, they took out a life insurance policy on Albert worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s money, then killed him in his own bed, staging the scene to look like a burglary. The staging fell apart immediately, and the two lovers turned on each other, each blaming the other for the fatal blow.
Both were convicted and sentenced to death. Ruth was executed 10 minutes before Judd followed her into the same chair.
Irene Schroeder was known by many names: Trigger Woman, Iron Irene, The Blonde Bandit. She was executed on February 23rd, 1931, in Pennsylvania’s electric chair, the first woman to die that way in the state. Her story is marked by a six-year-old boy testifying against his own mother in open court.
That boy was her son, Donnie. Irene grew up poor in New Castle, Pennsylvania, and married young, but domestic life never held her. She left her marriage for a life of robbery with her lover, Glenn Dague, and her brother, Tom Crawford, dragging young Donnie along in the getaway car.
On December 27th, 1929, during a robbery, a highway patrolman pulled their car over, and Irene shot him dead. After a long manhunt, she was captured following a shootout in Arizona. At trial, she claimed she was not even Irene Schroeder, but the jury did not believe her.
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. Glenn Dague was executed minutes after her.
Anna Antonio weighed only 85 pounds when she was strapped into the chair at Sing Sing on August 9th, 1934. Newspapers called her Little Anna, and she had stopped eating almost entirely in her final weeks, dropping 15 pounds. Anna was 28, a wife who had endured 12 years of beatings from her husband, Salvatore, who was also involved in the 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 trade.
In 1933, she hired two men to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him for the $5,000 life insurance payout. His body was found beside a country road, shot five times and stabbed. Anna maintained her innocence, reminding the warden that her husband was a violent man and that if she wanted him dead, the guns were already in the house.
She admitted the two men told her what they planned, and fear for herself and her three children kept her from stopping it. On the day of her execution, which was also her daughter’s birthday, she embraced the prison matron, kissed her cheek, and sat down in the chair wearing a dress she had sewn herself. She repeated a Catholic prayer as the straps closed around her.
Eva Coo saw a vulnerable man as an opportunity. Harry Wright could not fully care for himself, and when his mother died, the responsibility fell to Eva, who ran a successful speakeasy and brothel called Little Eva’s. She needed money when business suffered, and Harry, defenseless and trusting, became her solution.
She took out multiple life insurance policies on him and recruited an employee, Martha Clift, to help 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him. On June 14th, 1934, they drove Harry to an isolated road, where Eva struck him in the head with a wooden mallet, and Martha ran him over with a rented car, doing it more than once to make sure. They left his body staged to look like a hit-and-run.
Martha turned state’s witness and received a 20-year sentence. Eva was executed on June 27th, 1935, at Sing Sing, the fifth woman to die in that chamber.
Tony Jo Henry robbed a stranger to save an outlaw. Born Annie Beatrice McQuiston, she had lived a hard life, working the streets as a teenager and moving through brothels in Shreveport’s red-light district. She fell in love with Claude Cowboy Henry, who was sentenced to 50 years in a Texas prison for murder.
Tony Jo decided she would do whatever it took to free him, and her plan involved robbing a bank to fund a jailbreak. On February 14th, 1940, she and an accomplice accepted a ride from a salesman named Joseph Callaway. Somewhere along the highway, the robbery turned into murder, and Callaway was shot and killed.
At trial, Tony Jo and her accomplice each insisted the other had pulled the trigger. On November 28th, 1942, she walked into the basement of the Calcasieu Parish Courthouse 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 the state’s history.
Lena Baker told the coroner herself, I killed Ernest Knight. She never ran and never hid, believing the truth would protect her. It did not.
Lena 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 once again.
When she tried to leave, an argument broke out, and Knight grabbed an iron bar. Lena said she feared for her life and grabbed for his gun as she tried to push past him. In the struggle, Knight was shot in the head.
Her trial lasted less than a single day, and an all-white, all-male jury deliberated for just 30 minutes before finding her guilty. On March 5th, 1945, she was executed at Georgia’s Reidsville State Prison. Her final words were simple: What I done, I did in self-defense or I would have been killed myself.
I am ready to meet my God. She remains the only woman ever executed by Georgia’s electric chair. In 2005, the state granted her a full posthumous pardon, acknowledging that denying her clemency had been a grievous error.
Ethel Rosenberg was executed on June 19th, 1953, at Sing Sing, just hours before the start of the Jewish Sabbath. She remains the only woman ever executed by the United States government for a crime other than murder. She and her husband, Julius, were convicted of conspiring to pass American nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Ethel’s actual involvement remained far murkier than her husband’s, and 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 to charge them both, sentence them both to death, and hope Julius would break and name other spies to save his wife. He never did.
Julius went first, pronounced dead after three jolts of electricity. Ethel followed, and it took four separate shocks before doctors still detected signs of life. A fifth was ordered before she was finally pronounced dead.
Witnesses described smoke rising from her body during the process. They left behind two young sons, who spent the rest of their lives trying to clear their mother’s name.
Rhonda Bell Martin was a waitress in Montgomery, Alabama, soft-spoken and familiar with regulars. Nobody suspected the woman refilling their coffee had already buried six members of her own family and that she was the reason all of them were dead. She poisoned her own mother, three of her children, and two of her five husbands using rat poison slipped quietly into food over the course of nearly two decades.
Her fifth husband survived her poisoning attempts but was left permanently paralyzed, and his lingering illness finally led investigators to look closer at the pattern of deaths. In March 1956, Rhonda confessed to nearly all of it. On October 11th, 1957, she 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 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, 58 years, one method. 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 exact same chair, waiting for the exact same current, decades and states apart, yet somehow bound together by the same machine. But there is a 13th case, a woman whose execution became so controversial that even the officials who carried it out still argue about whether it should have happened at all. Her case would go on to change the national conversation around capital punishment forever.
