Rainey Bethea was the last person to be publicly executed in the United States. A black male, who was 26 years old, he confessed to the rape and murder of a 70-year-old white woman named Lischia Edwards, and was publicly hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky after being convicted of her rape. Mistakes in executing the hanging and the surrounding media circus contributed to the end of public executions in the United States. Wikipedia
The definitive Wikipedia entry for Rainey Bethea. Wikipedia is the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainey_Bethea
