Prize Winning Author of No Other World
The man, naked, kneeled before her in the misty yellow light. When she reached him, she pressed the snub-nosed .38 against his forehead and pulled the trigger, spattering his last thoughts, grey and warm, onto her face and dress.
The man fell back in the mud with a wet slap.
Burk screamed, “Jesus God, Toni Jo!”
VALENTINE’S DAY MURDERESS FINALLY HAS DATE WITH ELECTRIC CHAIR
Mrs. Annie Beatrice McQuiston, smiling but silent to the end, paid with her life early this afternoon in the electric chair for the brutal slaying three years ago of Joseph P. Calloway, 43-year-old Houston salesman.
At exactly 12:12, the big switch was thrown home to send 20,000 volts of current flowing through her body, making her the only woman executed in Louisiana’s electric chair.
She died in the dim corridor of the parish jail house where “Little Sizzler,” the state’s portable electric chair, had been set up.
The executioner quickly set about the job of fastening the electrodes about her body. The brine-soaked cap was placed on her head.
“Goodbye, father,” she said, looking up at Father Richard. “You’ll be here, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’ll be right here,” the priest answered.
McQuiston joked with the executioner as he fastened buckles that clamped her arms and legs to the big oaken chair. Finally, he completed his job.
“Do you have anything to say,” Deputy Sheriff Reid asked her.
“No, I haven’t,” she answered in a low steady voice, still smiling.
Her face was thinner than three years ago when she was arrested. Her eyes were somewhat sunken from a sleepless night. Her lips were painted and her eyebrows distinct.
At 12:11, a big leather mask covering all her face save her nose was fastened to her head. The executioner stepped quickly aside and pushed in the switch that sent the current surging through her body.
Her body trembled slightly, and her fists clenched tightly, a small handkerchief crammed into one of them.
McQuiston had little sleep Friday night, officers reported. Saturday morning she ate a light breakfast as her last meal and donned her freshly cleaned dress, a simple black garment with gold buttons down the front.
At 11:25, Athas Coe, a Lake Charles barber, was taken to her cell. She protested when told that all the hair on her head would be clipped off, but submitted peaceably as Coe quickly performed his job.
When she left her cell at 12:05, she had covered her head with a gay red, white, and green bandanna. Not until the leg and arm bands were fastened and it was time to put on the brine-soaked cap was it removed. She appeared interested in every move the executioner made as he prepared to take her life in the name of the state.
Exactly at twelve, the big generators on the truck outside were turned on and at the same instant the bells of the nearby church began ringing.
Early in the evening of February 14, 1940, Joseph P. Calloway was driving from Houston to Lake Charles. At home in Houston were his wife and nine-year-old daughter. At Orange, Texas, he stopped to pick up two hitchhikers, a man and a woman. The woman was Annie McQuiston.
Holding a gun to Calloway’s head, McQuiston told him to stop beside a barren rice field with a haystack. Calloway was taken into the field and he either took off his clothes at their orders or he was stripped. He begged for his life. He got down on his bare knees in the frozen earth and asked to pray.
Four days later, his body was found, his legs still drawn under him, just as they had been when he pitched forward on his face, with a hole, made by a .32 bullet, between his eyes.
No motive was ever established for the murder.
La Rochefoucauld