Louise Peete
On April 11, 1947, Louise Peete is executed in the gas chamber of San Quentin Prison. She was one of only four women executed in the California gas chamber. She was born Lofie Louise Preslar on September 20, 1880 in Bienville, Louisiana. Her childhood was uneventful and she received an expensive education, but was expelled from school for inappropriate behavior.
Emiliano Zapata
On April 10, 1919, Emiliano Zapata, a leader of peasants and indigenous people during the Mexican Revolution, is assassinated in Morelos by government forces.
Billy the Kid
Eric Rudolph
On April 8, 2005, Eric Rudolph agrees to plead guilty to a series of bombings, including the fatal bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, in order to avoid the death penalty. He later cited his anti-abortion and anti-homosexual views as motivation for the bombings.
On April 7, 1994, Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in their genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In less than three months, Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda murdered an estimated 800,000 innocent civilian in the worst episode of genocide since World War II.
Dr. Sam Sheppard
On April 6, 1970, Sam Sheppard, a doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife in a trial that caused a media frenzy in the 1950s, dies of liver failure. After a decade in prison, Sheppard was released following a re-trial. His story is rumored to have loosely inspired the television series and movie "The Fugitive."
Julius & Ethel Rosenberg
On April 5, 1951, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sentenced to death after being found guilty of conspiring to transmit atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. The Rosenberg case began with the arrest of Klaus Fuchs, a German-born and U.S.-employed scientist who confessed to passing classified information about the U.S. atomic program to the Soviets. Following his 1950 conviction, U.S. authorities began an extensive investigation of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the top secret U.S. atomic development headquarters where Fuchs worked during the war.
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
