Word: smithland
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Kentuckians convicted of every capital crime except criminal assault die in the electric chair. For rapists the penalty is hanging in the county where the crime was committed. Last year 1,500 sightseers packed Smithland to see William Thomas De Boe become the State's first white man hanged for rape (TIME, April 29, 1935). Last week in Daviess County, which has not had a hanging since a private one in 1905, a Negro outdrew white William De Boe nearly 7-to-1 as a gallows performer...
Livingston County had never seen anything like it. Fifteen hundred people gathered at Smithland, the county seat, from all over southwestern Kentucky. A 16-year-old girl had her neck broken when a car turned over hurrying through the dawn to get there on time. A professional executioner had been brought in from Illinois. And William Thomas De Boe had dressed himself as if he were going down to Paducah for a dance when he marched up the 13 steps to the scaffold to become the first white man hanged for rape in Kentucky's history. What took place...
...almost seemed as though he was playing for time, for a few more minutes of life," recalled Oda Kayse, the Smithland telephone operator. "It didn't bother me, but I guess it did some of the other women. I wouldn't mind seeing another hanging...
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