The Morning America Killed the Public Hanging

Dawn breaks over Owensboro, Kentucky, and the fields on the edge of town already look like a fairground. Vendors are hawking hot dogs. Trucks have hauled in bleachers. By sunrise, an estimated 20,000 people — more than double the town's population — are jostling for a view of a wooden gallows built specially for the occasion. Somewhere in that crowd, photographers from wire services around the world are setting up their cameras, because in a few hours, the United States is about to carry out its last public execution.

The story that raced across front pages — and has been repeated ever since — was pure spectacle: a female sheriff cackling as she sprang the trap door herself, a drunken mob screaming for blood, souvenir hunters swarming the body to rip pieces from the death hood and hangman's rope as ghoulish keepsakes. It's the image that stuck — small-town America, hungry and savage, turning a man's death into a circus.

That version sold papers. Editors in 1936 were scandalized that a public hanging was even happening in the age of radio and skyscrapers, and a woman sheriff supposedly pulling the lever was too good a headline to fact-check. The legend only grew more useful with time — a clean, damning symbol for anyone arguing against capital punishment, and a much easier story to tell than the messier truth.

Strip away the embellishment and the real story is still damning enough. Rainey Bethea, 22, had been convicted of raping and murdering Lischia Edwards. Sheriff Florence Shoemaker Thompson, who'd taken the job after her husband's death, did preside over the execution — but she didn't spring the trap herself. She hired an experienced hangman, G. Phil Hanna, specifically because she feared a botched execution in front of tens of thousands of witnesses. There's no solid evidence of the mass drunken revelry or souvenir-cutting later attached to the day. What's beyond dispute: the sheer size of the crowd, and the wave of international revulsion it triggered, embarrassed officials enough to help end the era of public executions in America. Kentucky banned them outright the following year — the last state to do so.

The gallows in that Owensboro field were the last of their kind the country would ever build in daylight, in public, for a crowd.

Rainey Bethea was a young Black man from Roanoke, Virginia, orphaned by age 17, who had settled in Owensboro, Kentucky, working odd jobs. Little is known about his life before he arrived in Owensboro in 1933. In June 1936, 70-year-old Lischia Edwards was found robbed, raped, and murdered in her home; a ring known to belong to Bethea and his fingerprints were found in the room. He confessed. Prosecutors then made a calculated legal choice: murder was punishable by death in the electric chair at Eddyville, while rape was punishable by public hanging in the county where the crime occurred — so prosecutors charged him with rape only, never murder.

Four court-appointed lawyers, three under 30, represented him in rushed legal proceedings, and Bethea reportedly told one attorney his confession was coerced and that he should plead not guilty — but on the morning of trial he unexpectedly pleaded guilty anyway. On August 14, 1936, he was hanged in a public lot in Owensboro rather than the courthouse lawn, specifically to avoid damage to the grounds from the size of the crowd expected. An estimated 20,000 spectators gathered; the execution, botched slightly in its timing, was carried out by a deputized former police officer because the county's sheriff — Florence Shoemaker Thompson, the first female sheriff in the U.S. to preside over an execution — declined to spring the trap herself. The scale of the crowd was heightened by national fascination that the sheriff was a woman and a mother of four; reporters nationwide described a "carnival in Owensboro" run by a "pistol-packing lady sheriff." He is remembered today as the last person publicly executed in the United States. A recent book, Sonya Lea's American Bloodlines, reframes the case as a "legal lynching" — the machinery of law used to accomplish what a mob would otherwise have done — and calls the event a "brutal carnival."

That framing is the right bridge into your broader question, because Bethea's hanging sat at the exact seam between "legal" execution and lynching — and looking at both together is the honest way to answer what you're asking.

Lynching was extrajudicial killing — usually by hanging, sometimes by burning, shooting, or mutilation — carried out by a crowd acting outside any court process, on the premise that the victim was guilty of something (often invented or wildly exaggerated) and that the community had the right to punish them directly. Between the end of Reconstruction and the mid-20th century, thousands of Black Americans were killed this way, concentrated heavily in the South but not confined to it. The trigger was rarely proportionate to the punishment: accusations ranged from actual violent crimes to "insolence," business competition with white neighbors, testifying against a white person, or simply being in the wrong place. The charge of sexual assault against a white woman — the same charge leveled at Bethea — was the single most common pretext, used specifically because it was the one accusation that could mobilize a mob fastest and make dissent look like complicity.

This is the part later generations find hardest to absorb: lynchings were frequently public spectacles, announced in advance, attended by crowds numbering in the hundreds or thousands — men, women, and children, dressed for the occasion. Newspapers sometimes printed the time and place beforehand. Trains ran special routes to carry spectators in. Vendors sold food and souvenirs. Body parts — fingers, teeth, pieces of clothing, links of rope — were taken as keepsakes; photographs were made into postcards and mailed. Children were sometimes let out of school to attend. This wasn't an aberration from mob psychology; it was the mechanism working as intended. The public, ritualized nature of the violence was the point — it turned a killing into a communal statement of racial hierarchy, and the festivity signaled that the community as a whole endorsed it, not just the individuals who tied the rope.

Bethea's hanging shows how thin the line was between this and the "legal" system: it had a judge, a jury, a death warrant — and it also had a 20,000-person crowd, vendors, and out-of-town spectators treating it as an event. Contemporary reporters explicitly used the word "carnival" to describe it. The law didn't replace the spectacle; in this case, it hosted it.

Local government: Sheriffs and local police were frequently complicit by inaction, and sometimes by active participation — handing prisoners over to mobs, "discovering" they couldn't stop a crowd, or simply not showing up to the jail that night. Local elected officials depended on the same electorate that supported the lynchings, so there was no political incentive to prosecute participants, and in the rare cases where indictments happened, all-white local juries almost never convicted.

State government: State officials mostly treated lynching as a local law-and-order matter outside their jurisdiction, and many state courts and governors were unwilling to challenge local white political power over the issue. Some governors spoke against lynching rhetorically while doing little concretely; a few, especially from the 1930s on, began supporting anti-lynching legislation as national embarrassment grew — Kentucky's 1938 ban on public executions, passed in the wake of the Bethea spectacle, is itself an example of state action arriving only after the practice had become a reputational liability, not because it was recognized as murder all along.

Federal government: This is where the failure was most durable and most deliberate. Anti-lynching legislation was introduced in Congress dozens of times starting in 1900s (the Dyer Bill in the 1920s, the Costigan-Wagner Bill in the 1930s), and every version was blocked — almost always by filibuster from Southern Democratic senators who described federal intervention as an attack on states' rights. Presidents from both parties, needing Southern votes in Congress for other priorities (including, in the 1930s, New Deal legislation), generally declined to spend political capital fighting for it. Franklin Roosevelt privately supported anti-lynching measures but declined to publicly push hard, reportedly telling advocates he couldn't risk alienating Southern committee chairs he needed for his broader agenda. A federal anti-lynching law did not pass until 2022 — the Emmett Till Antilynching Act — by which point the practice itself had been extinct in its classic form for decades; it stands as one of the longest-delayed pieces of civil rights legislation in American history relative to how long the campaign for it lasted.

The throughline: at every level, the people with power to intervene had more to lose politically from stopping it than from allowing it. Lynching was sustained not by an absence of law but by an active alignment of local, state, and federal incentives against enforcement — which is also why the "legal" alternative, exemplified by Bethea's case, could produce nearly identical outcomes and nearly identical crowds while staying just inside the boundary of due process.

Early life & family: Born October 30, 1892, in Louisville, Kentucky, to Andrew Jefferson and Henrietta Fronie Shoemaker.

Husband: She married Joseph Everett Thompson on January 12, 1915, and they had four children together. Everett was sworn in as sheriff of Daviess County on January 1, 1934, but died of suspected pneumonia on April 10, 1936, at age 42.

How she became sheriff: Widowed with four kids and no income, Florence had no way to provide for her family, and by law the county judge needed to appoint someone to finish out Everett's term. The judge asked her to fill the vacancy — a customary practice known as "widow's succession" — and she accepted to support her family, being sworn in the day after her husband's funeral. She rarely wore a uniform, sometimes just pinning a badge to her dress, and generally didn't make arrests herself unless no one else was available. Early in her tenure she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.

The Bethea execution: Just over two months into her term, Bethea was sentenced to hang, and because the law required the execution to happen in the county where the crime occurred, it fell to her as sheriff. She was deeply conflicted, worried as a devout Christian about her standing with the church — her priest, Father Albert J. Thompson, assured her she could carry out her duties and remain in good standing. Reporters nicknamed her "The Hangwoman," and she received letters both urging her to perform the hanging herself and pleading with her not to. The Louisville NAACP secretary wrote to Governor Happy Chandler expressing concern, and the governor in turn wrote Thompson asking her not to let it become a spectacle.

She ultimately decided not to perform the execution herself, asking each of her deputies first before hiring Arthur L. Hash, a former Louisville police officer and WWI veteran, for the job. She kept her children away entirely: she forbade them from attending and arranged for them to stay with a friend, after death threats had been made against them. On the morning of the execution, an FBI agent drove her to the scene, and she waited in a car about 50 yards off before leaving shortly after Bethea died. The execution itself went badly — Hash was reportedly too drunk to pull the lever when signaled, and one of Thompson's deputies had to lean on it to spring the trap. Accounts of the crowd's behavior conflicted; some reporters described the crowd as rowdy and unruly, jumping on the body and tearing the hood off, while others disputed that. A New York Times reporter wrote that a crowd, some jeering and some in a festive mood, watched a praying man be put to death.

Afterward she was flooded with both marriage proposals and death threats — one warning that they'd already gotten Hash and were coming for her and her children next.

Length of service: Her initial appointment only covered the remainder of her husband's unfinished term, so a special election was held to decide who'd serve out the rest of it. She ran and won in a landslide — 9,811 votes to her nearest opponent's two — and was elected on November 3, 1936. She chose not to run again when that term ended, and her successor, Simon B. Smith, was sworn in January 3, 1938. So in total: appointed sheriff from roughly April 1936, then elected to finish the term through early January 1938 — under two years. She stayed on afterward as a deputy sheriff under Smith for nine years.

Later life: In December 1944 she remarried, to J. Carl Riney, whose late wife had been a friend of hers. Her Parkinson's continued to progress, and in July 1959 she was hospitalized. She died April 13, 1961, at 68, and was buried beside her first husband, Everett, in Owensboro's Mater Dolorosa Catholic Cemetery.

How she's remembered today: Mostly through the frame of the Bethea case itself — as the reluctant, grief-stricken widow thrust by circumstance into overseeing one of the most notorious public spectacles in American legal history, rather than as a violent or willing participant. The definitive modern account is historian Carrie Pitzulo's 2017 journal article "The Skirted Sheriff: Florence Thompson and the Nation's Last Public Execution," which reframed her less as "The Hangwoman" of contemporary tabloid coverage and more as a woman navigating an impossible position — widowhood, financial necessity, gender expectations, and religious conscience all colliding in a single event that made her briefly, unwillingly, a national fixture.