Posted on 05/01/2024 2:37:37 PM PDT by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1942, red-haired Robert S. James became the last man judicially hanged in the state of California. He’d earned the noose three times over. The press called him “the Diamondback Killer” or “Rattlesnake James”.
“Robert James,” records Robert Keller in his book 50 American Serial Killers You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, Volume Five, “must rank as one of the most creative killers in the annals of American crime. Not content with such mundane methods as shooting, stabbing or strangling, James resorted to such inventive devices as auto wrecks, drowning and rattlesnake bites.”
James’s cunning homicides and his proclivity for cross-country travel meant his crimes went unnoticed for years.
Born Major Raymond Lisenba in 1895, he seemed destined to a hardscrabble life of Alabama sharecropping like his parents until his brother-in-law paid for him to go to Birmingham and attend barbering school.
In 1921, at age 26, Lisenba married. His wife quickly left him, however, and filed for divorce, citing extreme cruelty. James moved to Kansas and married again, and began an affair with a young local girl. He made her pregnant, and after her father showed up at his barbershop with a shotgun, Lisenba skipped town and moved to Fargo, North Dakota, abandoning wife no. 2. He also changed his name.....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
He killed people by snakebite? Seems like it might be a little difficult to prove.
When I was 12 or so, I read Warden Duffy’s book “88 Men and 2 Women”, about the executions that he witnessed while warden of San Quentin, one of which was this one. I wouldn’t mind rereading it, but I don’t really want to buy a copy.
I read the article. He seems nice.
80 years ago an anti death penalty warden at San Quentin?
All the way back then CA had lost it’s ever frkn mind
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