On Sunday, June 7, 1936, the body of seventy-year-old Lischia Edwards, a widow and mother to a University of Kentucky professor, was found dead in her upstairs apartment in Owensboro. Edwards had been raped and strangled. Edwards rented a room from Emmett Wells on East Fifth Street. When a neighbor hadn’t heard her typical morning movements, he found assistance from other neighbors and broke into the room, where Edwards was discovered dead in her bed. People rushed to find her relatives at the Central Presbyterian Church.
Article continues after advertisement
Others ran to Settle Memorial United Methodist Church to find the local doctor; Coroner Delbert Glenn was also pulled from the Methodist Church. All of this activity caused curiosity among the church’s white parishioners. Before the police had been called, the doctor and the coroner were in the room and examining Edward’s body. In testimony, Dr. George Barr said, “I went in the room, and she was dead, killed, and she was bruised about the face.” Later the coroner called Barr back to examine Edwards at the funeral home, where the doctor reported vaginal swelling and blood loss that indicated a rape.
Glenn observed bruises on Edwards’s neck, where she appeared to have been choked. He lifted the sheets to see a pool of blood around Edwards’s hips. He also “investigated to see how they got in,” including raising the windows, examining the screens, and parts of the roof, and walking through the backyard. It was only after this trampling through the scene that he asked the neighbors to contact the police, and soon after, Assistant Chief of Police Will Vollman and Patrolman Raleigh Bristow, followed by Commonwealth’s Attorney Herman A. Birkhead and Owensboro chief of police R. P. Thornberry, arrived. The police inspected the crime scene and searched the room. Some of Edwards’s jewelry was missing, and the killer was said to have left behind his muddy footprints. After the police left, Glenn reported that he found an Eddyville prison ring—a celluloid material prisoners used to mold rings from toothbrushes—this one initialed with an R, in the kitchen cabinet, near “where the person came in the window, I presume.”
The police searched their records for any criminals in the area, focusing on those whose name might match the R on the ring. They identified Rainey Bethea as a Black man who had a prison record and set out in search of him. A guard was placed at Bethea’s residence, and the police looked for him all night.
The local press and citizens had one thing in common with the judge, police, and lawyers—everyone was certain of Bethea’s guilt. No one cared that the confessions came without counsel.
Perry Ryan, a former assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, who has published several books on hangings in Kentucky, including The Last Public Execution in America, wrote, “Pandemonium erupted in Owensboro when news of the murder broke. Doors and windows were locked, producing a suffocating effect in the hot weather. Many of the Owensboro women refused to go out after dark. In fact, some would venture out in the daytime only when it was absolutely necessary. Some of the men actually began wearing guns on their waists.”
The Owensboro Inquirer, under the headline “Action Demanded,” published a critical editorial the next day:
Owensboro’s most heinous crime was committed early Sunday morning when an aged and prominent woman was brutally assaulted and murdered. In the quiet of the Sabbath morning when all the neighborhood was wrapped in slumber, some dastardly degenerate crept into the room, choked her to death, assaulted her criminally and left her bruised and bleeding body lying on the bed.
Owensboro citizens are demanding that those sworn to preserve the peace of the community and protect its people act and act quickly. Women and children of the city are living in a state of terror, fearing that the fiend, if uncaught, will commit other outrages in this city.
How long are the citizens of Owensboro going to stand for such crimes? Are these crimes committed because officials and jurors are lax in their sworn duty?
Not a stone should be left unturned that will help to point out the criminal. When and if he is caught, there should be no undue delay in his trial. Whether he is hanged or sent to the electric chair, there should be a minimum amount of delay.
He was without mercy for his defenseless victim. Why should he be shown the slightest degree of mercy? The quicker such a beast is destroyed the better it will be for Daviess County.
By Monday, two new suspects were arrested, but they admitted no crime. The police locked them up in holding cells. Photos of a celluloid prison ring with the initial R began to circulate in local newspapers. A twelve-year-old boy came forward to say that the ring belonged to Rainey Bethea, a Black man who had worked for his parents. Police were still unsure and decided that Bethea could have chosen to make a ring with a first initial rather than for a surname.
Patrolman Vogel found fingerprints near the head of Edwards’s bed, of which he noted that one finger seemed to resemble Bethea’s fingerprints, which were on file at the police headquarters. The Owensboro police, in the throes of early belief in the infallibility of fingerprinting, thought they’d caught their man. Vogel sent the files off to the FBI, but no one at that agency confirmed their accuracy. No one considered whether Bethea’s cleaning of the room as a laborer for Edwards could have created those same fingerprints.
On Tuesday, the Owensboro Inquirer published a front-page report with a large photograph of Rainey Bethea, noting he was the prime suspect and that the police had not been able to locate him. “After evasively eluding the police for 30 hours after the murder, assault and robbery…Rainey Bethea, 32, the negro ex-convict hunted as her slayer apparently effected his escape from Owensboro,” they wrote, aging Bethea almost ten years.
On Wednesday, the police determined that they had enough evidence to convict Bethea. They dispatched descriptions of Bethea to police throughout the region. The two suspects who had been jailed were released. The complaint was filed:
AFFIDAVIT
This affiant R. P. Thornberry states that he has reasonable grounds for believing that Rainey Bethea has committed the crime of willful [sic] murder. That said crime was committed in manner and form as follows: That, in Daviess County, Kentucky, on or about the 7 day of June, 1936, that said Rainey Bethea did unlawfully, maliciously & feloniously kill, slay, and murder Mrs. Lishia R. Edwards by striking, beating, and choking her with his hands, fists and feet, upon her body, arms, limbs and person from which striking beating and choking the said Lischia R. Edwards did then and there die against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
/S/ R. P. Thornberry, Subscribed and sworn to before me by
1936 P. Thornberry the 10th day of June 1936.
A warrant was issued, and the angry white people in the region began a search for Rainey Bethea.
By Wednesday afternoon, a house painter saw Bethea by the banks of the Ohio and reported that Bethea proclaimed, “The law is after me.” This would be the first of a half dozen reports by white observers and officials declaring that Bethea had made confessions to them. Two officers arrested Bethea, pointing their pistols at him, and shouting from the top of the riverbank, “Come up here, boy.” Oddly, Bethea was sent in the car of an Owensboro Inquirer journalist to travel to the police station. Local reporters said that this happened because law officers and the city police judge Forest Roby were concerned about mob violence.
At the arraignment, Judge Roby sent Bethea to the jail in Louisville. White journalists reported that Bethea appeared drunk at the time of arrest, that he was interrogated by police, and initially admitted nothing. Suddenly, en route to Louisville, the officers said Bethea had confessed. The police reported to the newspapers that “he said he choked her [Edwards] and did not know at the time of the assault if she was alive or dead.” This was pertinent information because, for the sexual assault to be punishable by a public execution, Edwards would have had to have been alive at the time of the assault, and in addition, hangings were not possible sentences for murder; they were only eligible for crimes of rape. An archaic Kentucky law had been brought out of hiding in 1920 when Will Lockett, a Black man, was convicted and sentenced to die for raping a nine-year-old white girl from Lexington. Even though Lockett was electrocuted, Kentuckians believed the sentence was too lenient. In the wake of the white community demanding more punishment, the Kentucky General Assembly amended the death penalty statute to allow juries to sentence a rapist to hang in the county seat where the crime was committed.
The law did not specify whether the hanging should be public or private. Soon after the law’s change, eight Black men were hanged publicly for allegedly raping white women. One white man was hanged, a sentence imposed after he raped a pregnant white woman.
The Louisville Courier-Journal covered the transport of Bethea on June 11, emphasizing that the white public was tricked by the law, under the headline “Negro Admits Daviess [County] Crime”:
Rainey Bethea, 22, Negro, spirited away from the Owensboro City Hall Wednesday afternoon as a threatening crowd of 200 milled outside, confessed in Louisville Wednesday night that he assaulted and killed Mrs. Elza Edwards, 70, in Owensboro last Saturday. His safe departure from Owensboro was effected [sic] through subterfuge. The officers said they focused the attention of the mob there on one automobile, and then slipped the Negro into another and got out of town before the crowd grew aware of the switch.
A deputy jailer “positively identified the negro as Bethea,” said the Owensboro Inquirer. “A scar on the left side of his head, said to have been caused by a beating given him by police when he protested arrest previously, was the chief identifying mark.” Proclamations of Bethea’s guilt came then from the marks of white men on his body. The evidence for Bethea at this time was still the prison ring left at Edwards’s home—which was one of his places of work—and that he was a Black man with a criminal record.
When Bethea made his first confession, he signed a statement indicating that the stolen rings were hidden behind the curtains in his room. A search found nothing. The next day, Bethea denied his guilt, admitting that he was drunk when he confessed.
Bethea was escorted to the county jail. The jailer was said to have found blood on Bethea’s underwear when he was asked to disrobe. Not even a day after Bethea’s denial of his confession due to drunkenness, a white jail guard said that Bethea had confessed privately to him. This time, Bethea was to have said that the jewelry and a dress were found in a barn across from Edwards’s home. The jailer reported that Bethea said that he had been drunk the night he tried to steal Edwards’s jewelry, that she’d been asleep, and that when she woke up, he decided to rape her. The jailer continued, “When he was finished, Mrs. Edwards said, ‘I know you.’ He [Bethea] claimed that she was still alive when he left.” With these words, the jailer confirmed the notion that the right circumstances had occurred for a death sentence to be given.
In all, there would be five such confessions. The local press and citizens had one thing in common with the judge, police, and lawyers—everyone was certain of Bethea’s guilt. No one cared that the confessions came without counsel. Miranda rights were forty years away.
A circuit judge called a special session of the grand jury in ten days, on June 22, 1936, the earliest date possible by law. The temperatures would rise to 107 degrees by then.
*
The hanging was to be at sunrise on Friday. Phil Hanna was to supervise the hanging, and Arthur Hash was to pull the trigger that would cause the fall. The white-supervised gallows were completed, the white state police had been ordered, the white hangman was hired, the white man to pull the lever had been found, the white-managed hotel rooms were filled. The death warrant was issued. Thousands of white people began to pour into Owensboro by passenger train, freight train, bus, car, airplane, and on foot. Hundreds of white journalists arrived from all over America, lured by the hope of seeing a Black man hanged by a white woman. The Chicago Times sent a special truck rigged with a developing room and telephoto lenses for long focal views. White men and white women arrived in the town. White children and white babes in arms were there. It was said that the people of Owensboro could hardly sleep for the town’s murmur. Owensboro resident Medora Withers said, “People came to Owensboro, truckloads of people, sitting on the bed of the truck with their feet hanging over, hayride or picnic style. It was warm weather, and we were sleeping with the window up, and you could hear this muffled shuffle and voices all during the night. It was an eerie feeling.” Twenty thousand people in all, filling the streets from the site near the Ohio River all the way to the edge of Baptist Town, threatening the lives of the Black community by their very presence.
That Thursday night, some white people brought cots and slept outside near the gallows. Vendors arrived selling popcorn and cold bottles of Coca-Cola in buckets of ice to the waiting crowd. Other white people held “necktie” parties, one of them attended by the sheriff’s daughter. The Louisville Courier-Journal said, “Kentucky is already famous for her hospitality. Her Derby parties are known all over the country. Her hanging parties should have an even wider fame. Most people are interested in horse-racing, but all people are interested in death.” Hanging parties were not known to be held for the death of a white person.
On this Thursday, Bethea wrote a letter to be delivered along with his body, to his only remaining family member. He’d been promised by the authorities that he might be buried at the only home he knew, with his sister in South Carolina, six hundred miles southeast.
Dear Sister
This is my last letter and I have told them to send you my body and I want you to put it beside my father and I am saved and dont you worry about me because I goin to meet my maker and you must pray to meet me some day in the outher world so you must pray heard sister that we will meet someday and don’t you worry at all becuse I saved looking to meet you someday in the outher world So good by and pray that we will meet agin some day.
Mrs. Ora Fladger, R.F.D. #3, Box 135, Nichols, S.C.
Two white police officers left the jail in Louisville with Bethea at about 1:00 AM and made their way to Owensboro. They reported that Bethea did not admit his guilt, and that he had commented, “I’ll die happy. I have made my peace with God.”
The Louisville Times described the scene: “Hotels were overflowed. Restaurants and drug stores catered to crowds jamming doorways. Boisterous parties…were in progress in most of the rooms. Through the night a crowd had swarmed the streets.” The Louisville Courier-Journal said, “Persons from out of town poured in, automobiles rolled through the streets of this town…and concession stands sprang up to serve those who would wait all night for a vantage point around the lot that holds the gallows.” Except for those Black citizens required to work in hotels and restaurants, newspapers reported that Owensboro’s Black residents had temporarily vacated the town or were “at home in hid- ing.” The Owensboro Inquirer said, “Upon the pedestal, the gallows, fifteen feet tall, loomed against the sky last night, its waterproof-covered rope looped under the crossbeam. Early comers by scores staked out places in the vacant lot and prepared to wait all night for the hanging.”
Just after 4:00 AM, the enclosure to the lot had to be opened to allow people to stream in closer. White people climbed into trees, up light poles, and onto the roofs of buildings. They were hoping to see a white woman executioner hang a Black man.
A white FBI agent drove Thompson in a black car to within view of the scaffold, where they waited. Ryan says Thompson was worried that Hash might not be able to do the job of pulling the trigger, and she’d have to step in. Perhaps it was an intuition, because when Hash showed up on the gallows wearing a white Panama hat and a white suit, he was drunk. The news reported that the “throng [was] surprised….The action of Mrs. Thompson amazed the crowd which had expected her to hang Bethea personally.” Of her decision, Thompson later told reporters, “I did not want people pointing out my children and saying, ‘Their mother was the one who hanged a negro in Owensboro.’”
At 5:21 AM, two white deputies walked Bethea toward the gallows, with Father Lammers in his stiff white Roman collar following. At the steps, Bethea took off his shoes, replaced his socks with the new ones he’d brought, and left the old things behind. No one asked Bethea about this act, his views were ancillary and unnecessary to the moment that had been created. Some people from the crowd yelled, “Hang him!” while Bethea remained at the steps. Others said there were shouts of “Take him up where we can see him!”
Bethea was taken by the officers up the steps, where he stood on the X marked on the trapdoor, as he had been instructed. Eleven white men stood on the gallows with him—the hangman, the trigger-puller, officers of the law, the priest.
The priest held up his hand to silence the crowd. Bethea had chosen not to speak, but Hash, drunk and out of his mind, kept asking Bethea to say something. Instead, Bethea ignored him and gave his last confession to the priest. A black hood was thrust over Bethea’s head. At that moment, Bethea spoke, saying that he wanted to talk to the priest again, but that request was ignored. Hanna placed the noose over Bethea’s neck. Hash was visibly unsteady as he held the lever that would trigger the trapdoor. Hanna stepped away and gave the prearranged signal. Hash did nothing. One can’t help but imagine the terrifying silence of that pause in the dark. Hanna finally shouted, “Do it now!” One of the deputy sheriffs leaned onto the lever.
The trapdoor dropped. Bethea fell.
A descent of eight feet.
His head fell against his shoulder.
The white people watched as his heart continued to beat.
The Chicago Tribune reported that Dr. Tyler of Owensboro said that the “neck was broken cleanly by the drop. He expressed surprise that the heartbeat continued for more than sixteen minutes.”
Hanna climbed down the scaffold and cut the hood so Lammers could anoint the body.
The white men placed Bethea’s body in a reed basket. Then it was placed in the undertaker’s vehicle, which moved inch by inch through the dense crowd.
Hash stumbled down the steps and said, “I’m drunk as hell. I’m getting away from this town as soon as I can,” before he disappeared into the crowd. The Louisville media later reported that the hangman Hash had been arrested fourteen times in the past four years.
The Catholic church offered Bethea a funeral service, and Bethea’s body was taken to St. Stephens Catholic Church, where a requiem mass was said by Father Leo J. Denise at 8 AM. Three hours after Bethea died, the town ignored its promise to send his body to his sister. Instead, town officials buried him in a pauper’s grave.
The press left to file their stories, and what’s told about that day varies widely, depending on who was reporting, whether they were white or Black, and what region their paper represented. The Chicago Tribune reported, “As the doctors stepped away, souvenir hunters ripped the hangman’s hood from Bethea.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, under the headline, “10,000 Watch Hanging, Tear Hood from Body,” said that “Bethea still breathed when a few persons from the crowd…scrambled for fragments as mementoes of the spectacle.” The Associated Press filed a story saying that the crowd of white people “some jeering, others festive, but generally orderly—watched a prayerful black man put to death today on Daviess County’s ‘pit and gallows,’ authorized by Kentucky law for the hanging of a rapist….From the crowd came scattered shouts of ‘Take him up!…Up on the scaffold where we can see him! Let’s go!’” Under the banner “20,000 See Hanging, Crowd Cheers at Kentucky Public Execution,” the San Francisco Examiner wrote, “As the red sun rose from the Kentucky hills, a hulking Negro youth of 22 spun to his death at the end of a rope today. Twenty-thousand men, women and children cheered. Feeling good on hot dogs, lemonade, and good Kentucky whiskey, they cheered and whooped as a woman sheriff—from a distance—took an ‘eye for an eye’ in the name of the law.”
Owensboro had determined that the issue wasn’t what happened in what other cities called the “carnival of sadism,” but the immoral ethics of the press that had caused its national humiliation.
From Chicago—“Death Makes a Holiday: 20,000 Revel Over Hanging.” From Evansville, Indiana—“Ghostly Carnival Precedes Hanging.” From Louisville—“‘Did You Ever See a Hanging?’ ‘I Did,’ Everyone in this Kentucky Throng Can Now Boast.” Time magazine described the “admiring spectators” who “charged from every side, eager hands clawed at the black death hood. In a moment it was torn to shreds. The lucky ones stuffed the bits of black cloth proudly into their pockets.” The piece condescendingly described “soft-hearted Sheriff Thompson,” noting she was an “added attraction” to the hanging, and quoted her saying, “I suppose I will spend the rest of my life forgetting—or trying to forget.”
Florence Thompson’s daughter, Lillian (Thompson) Lee, reported that she saw a journalist with the Chicago Sun boarding a train before the hanging. Ryan said, “The next day, the Sun falsely reported that Sheriff Thompson had fainted on the scaffold, which of course was completely untrue. Lillian believed that ‘He had already written his story.’” The Owensboro news media and some white onlookers insist that when the lady sheriff didn’t show up to act as executioner, there was anger in the press’s unmet expectations, which then was taken out on the crowd, with the reporters lying about the audience’s unruly behavior. In an editorial on the Sunday after the hanging, in an effort to place the blame on the press who had been deprived of their headlines, the Owensboro Messenger and Inquirer called out the “girls and boys” of the press under the headline “ Panderers Galore.” “Ambitious and irresponsible reporters and photographers who swarmed into Owensboro for the Bethea hanging dipped their ready hands into the cloaca of evil designs and plastered over the name of this city the dirty results of their pandering,” the editors began. Accepting little responsibility for the scene that had been created by their orchestration of the hanging, they blamed the visitors from “Illinois, Tennessee, Missouri and some other states” and defended their Southern pride in faulting the “scurrilous attack upon [the city] by lurid writers and glib-tongued talkers in northern and eastern states for they delight to distort any news from Kentucky into weird barbaric tales. We have learned how best to protect our women from rapist-murderers, white or colored.”
Owensboro had determined that the issue wasn’t what happened in what other cities called the “carnival of sadism,” but the immoral ethics of the press that had caused its national humiliation. In an excoriating editorial, Owensboro blamed the horrific press on the throng that “was composed largely of people who journeyed to Owensboro from distant places” and said that to the “sensation seeking star scribes of quacks of American journalism it was entirely too tame an affair. This is the reason that some of them reported it as they wanted it to be—not as it was.”
The New York Times reported on the polemic discourse:
A furor of indignation has followed Kentucky’s recent…public hanging. The press has been deluged with letters from horrified subscribers. The leading Kentucky dailies have reproduced editorials from all over the United States, ridiculing Kentucky mannerisms and morals and denouncing the “carnival of sadism.” In their own columns they have demanded that the law be amended, all but the press of Owensboro, that is, which protests that the good people there have been slandered.
Black newspapers tended to focus on the systemic racism and the injustices to Black people rather than on the smaller controversies of the lady sheriff or the humiliated locals. The Chicago Defender sent a white correspondent to cover the hanging, since a Black person could hardly have approached the scene. The journalist described the scene at dawn, the “vendors of brightly striped candy, sugar cane slices, watermelon, peanuts, popsicles, ice cream, beer, and hot dogs…this throng of gay, ‘fun-seeking’ citizens…I asked a comely studious looking young lady who wore glasses did she think Bethea was guilty of ravishing and murdering a 70 year-old white woman. She shot a piercing glance of surprised anger at me. ‘Ni****s doan hev to be guilty down heah, stranger!’ she said in a voice whose music cut like daggers. ‘Ni****s er bahn to be lynched when we feels like heven’ some spoht!’”
The Pittsburgh Courier took a righteous stance, writing, “Ours is the task of ennobling and lifting up the lives of the savages who surround us. Do not be saddened by the execution of Rainey Bethea. Let [the hanging] impress upon you your own moral superiority, your opportunity to give leadership to your country.”
The Louisville Council of Churches wrote a letter to the hometown Courier-Journal, asking for a repeal of the rape law: “Women with young babes in their arms held the innocents high so that they could get the moral lesson of the thrilling moment. The crowd cheered as the trap was sprung. The newspapers described the scene as a ‘picnic hanging’ and a ‘hangman’s holiday.’”
Following the hanging, Thompson received a death threat in a letter signed “Sympathizers of the negro boy.” The sheriff asked L. E. Cranor, the US marshal for the Western District of Kentucky to intervene, who wrote back to her, “Don’t be alarmed just be careful. I think it’s the work of some fool negro woman that is only trying to scare you.” These words were from a federal law enforcement agency, the same agency that had been responsible for upholding slavery through the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Owensboro citizens continued to take umbrage to the ways in which they were being portrayed in the national press. Shortly after the hanging of Bethea, a local campaign began with an intention to alter the perception of the western Kentucky community. Its focus didn’t have to do with repealing a racist law but, instead, with condemning those journalists who they believed had lied about what happened. The Owensboro Lions Club set up a “vindication” committee to counteract the terrible publicity the town received by “unscrupulous news reporters.” By the time the cameras stopped clicking and the newsmen flew home, Kentucky had been humiliated in the national press, the onlooker’s violence both disputed and affirmed in accounts of this day. The state soon ended hangings in town squares, a practice that affected mostly Black people. Kentucky’s Governor A. B. “Happy” Chandler signed a bill repealing the requirement that death sentences for rape be conducted by hanging. Chandler later expressed regret at having approved the repeal claiming, “Our streets are no longer safe.” Chandler was not speaking of Bethea’s streets.
__________________________________
From American Bloodlines: Reckoning with Lynch Culture by Sonya Lea. Copyright © 2025. Available from University Press of Kentucky.