In the summer of 1936, Rainey Bethea was put to death in Owensboro. His hanging on the banks of the Ohio River drew tens of thousands to the western Kentucky city and created a media circus that made waves across the country, ultimately becoming the last public execution in the U.S.
Now, nearly 90 years later, a new book from Owensboro native Sonya Lea grapples with the hanging's history, looking at it through the lens of lynch culture and racial violence in America and contextualizing Bethea's case as a "legal lynching," meaning that the letter of the law was used to carry out racial violence instead of vigilante mobs.
In "American Bloodlines," Lea takes a hard look at why this "brutal carnival" happened, examining Bethea's case through court records, contemporary reporting and her own family history. She was inspired to look into the case after learning her grandparents attended the hanging as newlyweds, and in her research she learned she was related to the prosecuting attorney.
"One of the things that we can do through this case is to look and see how it might have been possible that justice would have been done, and that just takes a little bit of curiosity," Lea said.
'Owensboro's most heinous crime'
The story of Bethea's death starts with Lischia Edwards, a 70-year-old white woman who was found dead in her Owensboro home on a summer Sunday morning in 1936. A local doctor determined she had been strangled and raped.
Under the headline "ACTION DEMANDED," an editorial in the Owensboro Inquirer described it as "Owensboro's most heinous crime" and called the unknown assailant a "dastardly degenerate."
"Whether he is hanged or sent to the electric chair, there should be a minimum amount of delay," the editorial read. "He was without mercy for his defenseless victim. Why should be shown the slightest degree of mercy? The quicker such a beast is destroyed the better it will be for Daviess County."
Two days after Edwards' body was found, authorities turned the investigation to Bethea, a Black man in his 20s who Edwards had hired to work in her home.
Lea said the case against Bethea was flimsy, that the scene wasn't properly preserved and that "there wasn't a lot of evidence beyond what the people who took the confession said."
Authorities tied Bethea to the scene using fingerprints — in a room he'd been paid to clean — and a ring made at an Eddyville prison, where Bethea had served time, found at the scene with a letter "R" on it.
"He cleaned those rooms, so there would be a reason for those fingerprints to exist there," Lea said. "Also, the 12-year-old boy who was the one who testified … [he] had seen the prison ring on Rainey Bethea testified that he had seen it two years ago, and Bethea hadn't been to Eddyville at that time. He'd only been there the year prior. Also [it's] very unusual to have a ring have a first initial on it rather than a last initial."
Bethea, who Lea said had a history of alcohol abuse that police may have taken advantage of during their interrogations, did confess to the crime five times — but all of them were without the presence of legal counsel and Miranda rights were still decades away.
Four attorneys — three of them under the age of 30 — were appointed to represent Bethea during the rushed legal proceedings, including the 23-year-old son of the presiding circuit court judge. Lea reported that Bethea told one of the appointed attorneys that his confessions were coerced and that he should plead not guilty. The morning of the trial, though, he unexpectedly decided to plead guilty.
Despite Bethea's guilty plea, the commonwealth's attorney chose not to prosecute him for murder, which would have carried a sentence of execution by electric chair. Instead, Lea said they took advantage of a Kentucky law that many considered archaic even at the time.
"An old law had been brought out of hiding, after Will Lockett was charged for rape in 1920 and sentenced to die by electrocution," Lea recently wrote in in an op-ed for Louisville's Courier Journal. "Many Kentuckians felt the punishment was too lenient, and the law was revised to rape punishable by hanging in the county in which the crime was committed. Bethea's murder charge was dropped, so a public rather than a private execution might be mandated."
The trial itself took just over three hours — including four-and-a-half minutes of deliberation by an all-white jury — and Bethea was found guilty. During the proceedings, his defense counsel called no witnesses and delivered no closing argument.
A team of Black attorneys who called for an appeal condemned the defense, saying they were "present in body," but "absent in spirit."
No appeal was granted and a petition for habeas corpus was denied. Bethea was scheduled to be hanged on Friday, Aug. 14, 1936.
'You'd have thought it was a big picnic'
A frenzy built up around the town in the little more than two months between Edwards' death and Bethea's hanging. Media outlets from coast to coast covered the case, but most of it wasn't about Bethea or the crime that had been committed. Instead, the media circus was focused on Florence Thompson — who had succeeded her husband as the Daviess County Sheriff after his death just two months earlier.
Thompson, often referred to as "the Skirted Sheriff," was expected by many to be the executioner, though she didn't end up going through with it herself.
"Not only had all other states banned public hangings by the 1930s, making this punishment an aberrant sentence, but Owensboro had the double image of a white victim in Edwards and a white defender of the law in Thompson," Lea wrote. "White newspapers and communities assumed Bethea's guilt, so their attention now moved toward a misogynistic interpretation of Thompson's role."
As the execution drew near, people flooded into the western Kentucky rivertown, and workers scrambled to build a gallows near the riverfront. Lea said reports from the time indicated Thompson chose the location for the hanging because she didn't want the flowers that had just been planted at the courthouse to be trampled by the crowds.
The evening before the execution, some white people "brought cots and slept outside near the gallows" and a Courier Journal piece from the time referenced macabre "necktie" parties attended by some in the town — including reportedly one of Thompson's daughters.
"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," it read. "Most people are interested in horse racing, but all people are interested in death."
The morning of the hanging, vendors sold popcorn and cold soft drinks to the waiting crowd. In an archival interview with the Daviess County Public Library from 2013, the late Bill Shelton recalled the festive atmosphere as a sea of people gathered on the riverfront to witness Bethea's execution.
"Everybody went … everybody had a wonderful time, and it was over just like that," Shelton said of the scene from his youth. "They came from everywhere, and there was hawkers. They sold sandwiches and they sold Coca-Colas, and you'd have thought it was a big picnic or something."
The spectacle drew around 20,000 people, enough to nearly fill modern-day Rupp Arena in Lexington. In an interview with WKU Public Radio in 2016 before her death, Rachel Abbott said she never forgot seeing Bethea walk through the crowd.
"I was innocent of it all. I didn't know what was going to happen. I just seen what what they were doing, and I didn't realize what they were doing. He was just as calm. He wasn't crying and he wasn't fussing. Nothing," she said. "I guess he'd done accepted it, but he looked over at the girl that come out of the crowd with him, and he told her that 'I didn't do this.'"
In the crowd at the hanging of Bethea, also, were Lea's paternal grandparents — the personal connection that spurred her to start researching the case.
An oral history she was given by a neighbor held her grandmother's recollection of the execution: "We were so close to him we heard his neck pop."
A doctor on the scene said Bethea's neck had been "broken cleanly" by the eight-foot drop through the trap door. But, as a crowd was filled with people from around the region and journalists from around the country looked on, his heart kept beating for 16 minutes.
Though Bethea requested that his body be sent to South Carolina to be buried by his sister, the town did not honor his wishes. Instead, town officials buried him in a pauper's grave at Potter's Field in Owensboro. His final resting place was not marked.
Connecting the execution to modern racial violence
Reporting around Bethea's hanging was widespread, as journalists from publications around the country gave it sensational monikers like a "picnic hanging" and a "hangman's holiday." The coverage angered many in Owensboro, who Lea said would claim the event had a "still sensibility" to it.
The news stories written by Black newspapers, Lea said, were particularly damning as they focused on the systemic racism at play in the justice system.
"They were appalled by what was happening everywhere that they looked, while at the same time, the voices in the crowd were saying things like, 'This happens whenever we want it to happen,'" the author said.
Out of embarrassment, a local campaign was mounted in Owensboro to change the perception of the community after the hanging. The effort was not a push to end public hangings or change the law, but instead to condemn the journalists who had reported on the execution.
Before long, Kentucky's Legislature passed a bill ending the requirement that death sentences for rape be conducted by hanging. Gov. Happy Chandler signed it into law in 1938, two years after signing the death warrant for Bethea's hanging.
Later in his life, Chandler expressed regret at having ended the practice, claiming, "Our streets are no longer safe."
Lea said her research into the event has made her think harder about racial violence, and that it's not hard to draw a line from Bethea's execution to more modern instances of racial violence like the police killings of Breonna Taylor — who officers shot in her apartment during a botched raid in 2020 — and George Floyd, who a white officer killed on a Minnesota street the same year.
"How is it that we find ourselves and our families and in our communities coming to something like this and then, for generations afterward, wanting to suppress and deny, wanting to silence the fact that we were a part of an event like that, and that that attendance, in and of itself, is complicit?" Lea said. "There's just so many things layered up where things could have been different for Rainey Bethea, but at the same time, we can start to see the connections [and] how racial violence is still evident in our communities."
Lea argues the "institutional structures were supportive of racism" in Bethea's time, and that "many of those same systems are going in that direction again today."
She said "lynch culture," as she calls it, still exists today in various forms throughout society – through police violence, the justice system, racial profiling, the Prison Industrial Complex and the treatment of Indigenous peoples in both America and Canada. She said the realization has made her an activist.
"I call that belief in the inability to really form a just culture to be a part of what 'lynch culture' is and how it operates, and it operates in almost everywhere that you look in America," she said. "We have to be willing to come out of this deliberate silence and this way that we think that this is a free country and we're entitled to everything that we have and everything that we are, without seeing that this was a country that was also created by genocide, and we haven't made things right for people."
Addressing history
Scattered around the riverfront grounds where 20,000 people stood to watch Bethea hang from a hastily built scaffold are small public art pieces, benches and picnic tables, flowerbeds and trees — but no marker or signage to tell people what happened there in 1936.
That's something that Rhondalynn Randolph wants to fix. She's the president of the local NAACP chapter and the leader of the Owensboro Community Remembrance Project, a group dedicated to "reckoning with the history of racial injustice" in the city.
"In order to have peace and reconciliation, we have to know what truth is and be able to stand in those hard truths and face ourselves — face our past — so that we can move forward into the future," Randolph said. "If we're not even willing to talk about it, to tell the truth, it's hard to bring about change."
The group has operated for more than a decade, holding educational programs, film screenings and other events aimed at teaching people about the city's checkered history. Randolph said over the years, they've made multiple attempts to get a historical marker placed at the hanging site with the goal of providing "closure and healing" for Owensboro.
"It shows a respect to Rainey's humanity. It shows that our community is not that community anymore, and we're able to move forward by doing the right thing, even though the right thing wasn't done then," she said. "Just because it's lawful doesn't necessarily mean it's morally right."
Mary Danhauer, who works with Randolph on the OCRP and serves as secretary of the local NAACP, called Bethea's execution "a stain on our community that we need to acknowledge and not hide."
"I think if we don't address the history, then we're going to repeat it in some other form or fashion," she said. "I think we're seeing that now in some of the scapegoating that's going on with marginal communities. So if we don't address it, it's going to rear its ugly head again."
The OCRP has been in contact with the Equal Justice Initiative, an Alabama-based group that's partnered with many communities in recent decades to mark the sites of lynchings and other instances of racial violence. But, so far, their efforts have been met with consternation and, at times, mixed emotions from the community.
"It's been like a slow move, like a tortoise. But I think what we have is something that's solid and has a focus, and I think it will do the community some justice if we could get the buy-in," Danhauer said.
Lea said she's hopeful that her book, and continued local efforts, can ensure that this piece of local history doesn't fade from memory.
"I think a historical marker is a good first beginning," Lea said.
For the people who witnessed Bethea's execution, the memory was powerful and terrible.
Before her death in 2020, Abbott said in her interview with WKU Public Radio that she remembered the hanging well, even though she didn't want to.
"I tried to get away from it, because it was hurting me so bad. I started having my nightmares after I was older. It's like his spirit was just hanging all around me," she said. "My daughter said, 'Mama, let it go.' I said, 'I can't let it go. That's part of my childhood.' I can't."
Lea's book "American Bloodlines" was published last week by the University Press of Kentucky.
This story was produced by the Appalachia + Mid-South Newsroom, a collaboration between West Virginia Public Broadcasting, WPLN and WUOT in Tennessee, LPM, WEKU, WKMS and WKU Public Radio in Kentucky and NPR.
