On this day, April 11, in 1947, a matronly gray-haired Southern belle Louise Peete was executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin for her second murder conviction. She was 66.
Peete came from a wealthy Louisiana family, but everywhere she went boyfriends, husbands and employers kept dying.
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In Waco, Texas, Peete was acquitted of murder after she explained she had killed an oil baron in self-defense.
In 1920, in Los Angeles, she wasn’t so lucky. She was sentenced to life in prison for murdering another oil magnate and burying his body under his house. But she was a model prisoner, and released after 19 years.
Peete moved in with an elderly couple and thanked them by killing the wife and burying her under an avocado tree and putting the husband in a mental institution.
