January 1928, and a newsman named Tom Howard walked into Sing Sing’s death chamber with a camera strapped to his ankle. He was posing as a reporter, and the moment the current hit the woman in the chair, he hiked up his pant leg and clicked the shutter. The picture he took that day became the first photograph ever made of an execution. The woman was Ruth Snyder, sentenced to die for the murder of her husband, and the image would run on the front page of the New York Daily News under a single word: DEAD.

It had all begun on a cold March night in 1927, in a quiet house in Queens Village. Albert Snyder, the art editor of Motor Boating Magazine, lay dead in his own bed, killed with a lead window sash weight, chloroform, and a piece of wire. His wife, Ruth, a 32-year-old housewife, had taken out a $48,000 life insurance policy on him two years earlier—with a double indemnity clause that paid out twice the amount if he died a violent death. Her lover, Judd Gray, a corset salesman from East Orange, New Jersey, confessed within three days.

Convicted in May 1927, both were sent to the electric chair at Sing Sing on January 12th, 1928. The camera that captured Ruth Snyder’s death was donated to the Smithsonian in 1963. Irene Schroeder was the second woman on the list, and she told the court she would rather sit in Pennsylvania’s electric chair than rot in a cell. The state took her up on it.

On December 27th, 1929, Corporal Brady Paul of the Pennsylvania State Police flagged down a car on a snow-packed road near New Castle, in Lawrence County. Inside were Schroeder, 22, her boyfriend Glenn Dague, a former Sunday school teacher, and her four-year-old son Donnie. When Paul asked for a license, he got bullets instead, and bled out in the roadway while the car made for the Ohio line. The papers christened her “Iron Irene.

” She was finally run down in Arizona, brought back east, and convicted of first-degree murder. On February 23rd, 1931, at 7:05 in the morning, she walked into the death house at Rockview, outside Bellefonte. The SCI Rockview execution record lists her as the first woman electrocuted in Pennsylvania. Dague sat in the same chair minutes later.

Number three was a Chicago story, and it began with a jazz record playing on repeat for almost four hours while a man bled out on a bedroom floor. On April 3rd, 1924, in an apartment at 817 East 46th Street, Beulah Annan, a 23-year-old switchboard operator at a laundry, shot Harry Kalstedt, her co-worker and lover, in the back. She put “Hula Lou” on the Victrola, poured herself a whiskey, and did not call her husband, Albert, a mechanic, until hours later. The papers dubbed her “the prettiest woman on death row.

” Maureen Watkins, a Chicago Tribune reporter, covered every hearing and turned the case into the 1926 play Chicago. Beulah became Roxie Hart. On May 25th, 1924, twelve men acquitted her in under two hours. Four years later, she had vanished from the headlines.

On March 10th, 1928, she died of tuberculosis at the Chicago Fresh Air Sanitarium, admitted under the name Beulah Stephens. The death certificate lists her age as 28. The fame outlived her. Number four had the same ending, a different route.

A bottle of gin and a . 38 on the floorboard of a Nash sedan was what Chicago police found on Forestville Avenue on March 11th, 1924, along with Walter Law, a married auto salesman, slumped dead over the wheel. The car belonged to Belva Gaertner, 38, a cabaret dancer who worked the clubs as Belle Brown and had twice divorced William Gaertner, a wealthy instrument manufacturer. She told detectives she had been drinking and remembered nothing, and she never budged from that story.

In the Cook County Jail, she gave interviews in a fur coat while Maurine Watkins took notes—notes that became the play Chicago and the character Velma Kelly. On June 6th, 1924, twelve men acquitted her in under two hours. Then she left the headlines for good. She remarried Gaertner, moved west, and died of natural causes in California on May 14th, 1965, at 80.

Number five never saw a courtroom. On the morning of November 3rd, 1935, a parked sedan sat outside St. Luke’s Hospital in Kansas City, a woman slumped against the door with a . 145 slug through her neck.

She was Vivian Chase, 32, whom federal agents had been calling the number one woman criminal in America. She ran with bank men across Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas, and in June 1935, she helped pull Volney Davis, a Barker-Karpis gunman, out of the hands of the law near Kansas City while he was being moved for trial. She had already walked out of the jail in Liberty, Missouri—the same town Jesse James’ crew had hit a bank in 1866—and the law never got her back. Detectives worked two theories: a cut of robbery money that came up short, or a drunken argument in a roadhouse that ended with a pistol.

The Kansas City Star ran the story. Nobody was ever charged. In New York, another woman was working a very different room. “Hello, suckers.

” Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan barked it from a chair perched atop the piano, and the room paid $10 a bottle for the privilege. Born in Waco, Texas in 1884, she ran the El Fey Club on 45th Street and later the 300 Club, where a police padlock on the door was practically part of the decor. By the fall of 1933, she was 49 and touring the Northwest with a review billed as “Too Hot for Paris. ” In Vancouver, British Columbia, she collapsed.

Surgeons operated on November 4th and found ulcerative colitis following amoebic dysentery. She died the next morning, November 5th, 1933. Her body came home by train, and some 12,000 people filed past the bronze casket at Campbell’s Funeral Church before burial at Calvary Cemetery in Queens. Thirty days later, on December 5th, 1933, repeal passed.

She missed it by a month. Number seven’s nickname came from a dress. An orange skirt that looked red under a theater marquee is the reason John Dillinger never made it to the corner of Lincoln and Halsted on July 22nd, 1934. Anna Sage, born Anna Companaș in Romania, a Gary, Indiana madam facing deportation over her houses, had tipped off Melvin Purvis of the Bureau of Investigation that Dillinger would be at the Biograph Theater watching Manhattan Melodrama.

Purvis stood by the door, struck a match to light a cigar, and agents put three bullets into Dillinger in the alley beside the theater. Sage had asked for two things: the reward money and the right to stay in the country. She got $5,000 of the $10,000 posted and nothing else. Immigration officials pressed ahead anyway, and in January 1936 the courts upheld her deportation order.

She sailed for Romania that spring, settled in Timișoara, and died of liver disease on April 25th, 1947. Number eight lost more than a country. A wool coat folded neatly in the snow beside a creek outside Koppl, a village near Salzburg, Austria, on March 24th, 1966. The woman lying next to it was Virginia Hill, 49, born in Lipscomb, Alabama, who 15 years earlier had faced the Kefauver Committee in Washington and told United States senators on the record that men gave her money because they liked her.

She had been Benjamin Siegel’s girlfriend, and she was in Paris on June 20th, 1947, when a rifle fired through the window of her Beverly Hills house and killed him. Austrian authorities examined the body and recorded the cause as an overdose of sedatives. That finding sits in the official death record. A 1993 biography by Andy Edmonds argues she was murdered over a diary listing names and payoffs, but produces no coroner’s file to match it.

One version has paper behind it. The other has a theory. In New York, another woman was losing her own fight from a hospital bed. A police officer stood outside her room at Metropolitan Hospital while the patient was fingerprinted under an oxygen tank.

It was June 1959, and the patient was Billie Holiday, 44, dying of cirrhosis. Detectives said they found a small amount of heroin in a tin foil packet. They photographed her, carried off her radio and her flowers, and posted a guard at the door. She had started at 15 singing for tips in Harlem speakeasies—Pods and Jerry’s on 133rd Street, when the whiskey was illegal and the rent parties ran till dawn.

In 1947, a federal narcotics conviction sent her to the women’s reformatory at Alderson, West Virginia, and cost her the New York cabaret card she needed to work any room that served a drink. Her lawyer finally obtained a court order lifting the police guard. Hours later, on July 17th, 1959, she was dead. Another Harlem name left even less paper behind.

Not one newspaper in Harlem ran a line when Stephanie St. Clair died in December 1969, and for years she had paid for their ad space. In 1923, she put $10,000 into a numbers bank on Edgecombe Avenue, hired runners, and took nickel bets off tenement stoops. She bought columns in the New York Amsterdam News telling black Harlem their rights when an officer knocked, and she named the cops collecting payoffs.

In 1930, she said it under oath before the Seabury Commission, and badges came off over it. When Dutch Schultz—Arthur Flegenheimer—pushed into Harlem policy, Queenie refused to sell, and her enforcer Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson fought him block by block. In 1938, she shot her husband, Sufi Abdul Hamid, and served time at Bedford Hills. Then, silence.

Her death was recorded at Central Islip, Long Island. Some accounts place her in the state psychiatric hospital there, others at home. Number 11 ran hers on open water. A woman in a white dress behind a counter in Nassau selling scotch by the case to rum runners who lined up on Bay Street with cash—that was Gertrude Lythgoe, the only woman the New York Times said made a fortune in the liquor trade.

Born in Bowling Green, Ohio in 1888, she was a stenographer for a British liquor firm when it sent her to the Bahamas in 1922, where whiskey was legal and 50 miles of water stood between her warehouse and a dry United States. Buyers called her Cleo, short for Cleopatra. The papers made it the Bahama Queen. She kept a pistol in her desk and sailed out to Rum Row aboard Bill McCoy’s schooner Tomoka to watch a transfer herself.

Arrested in New Orleans in 1925, she beat the charge, then quit, and wrote it all down in a 1964 memoir. Her death record, June 24th, 1974, Los Angeles County, California, 86 years old. No shootout. She outlived the business that made her.

Number 12’s children learned the truth at her funeral. Two grown children sat at a funeral in 1992 and learned from strangers that their mother had been the most hunted woman in Brooklyn. Celia Cooney kept it from them for 50 years. In the winter of 1924, she was 20, pressing shirts in a laundry and pregnant, and she and her husband Ed, a Navy Yard welder, walked into chain groceries with a .

32 and emptied the registers. The papers called her the bobbed-haired bandit, and a string of hold-ups put hundreds of policemen on the case. They ran to Jacksonville, Florida, where their baby girl was born and died within days. Detectives took them there on April 21st, 1924.

She pleaded guilty in King’s County, drew 10 to 20 years at Auburn, served seven, and came home in 1931 to a rented flat and silence. She died July 13th, 1992. The death record carries a married name and nothing else. Fifteen cents at a downtown hardware store bought the hammer that made Clara Phillips the tiger woman of Los Angeles.

On July 6th, 1922, she and a friend, Peggy Caffee, flagged down Alberta Meadows, a 21-year-old widow and bank clerk, and rode out to a lonely stretch of road near Montrose. Clara believed her husband, Armor Phillips, an oil stock salesman, was seeing the younger woman. Caffee came back down that hill alone with Clara and later told detectives everything. Clara ran, was picked up in Tucson, and a jury convicted her of second-degree murder that November—10 years to life at San Quentin.

She never made the train. On December 5th, 1922, she walked out of the Los Angeles County Jail through a sawed bar. Agents found her four months later in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, and brought her back on an extradition warrant. She was paroled in 1935 and died on June 21st, 1969.

A blond in a hotel room was the whole alibi that kept Machine Gun Jack McGurn out of the electric chair for the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre. On the morning of February 14th, 1929, seven men were lined up against a garage wall on North Clark Street in Chicago and cut down. Police grabbed Vincent “Machine Gun” McGurn, and Louise Rolfe, 22, a dancer, swore he had been with her at a Loop hotel since the night before. Reporters named her the blond alibi.

Prosecutors charged them under the Mann Act of 1910. Then the two married in 1930, and a wife could not be forced to testify against her husband. The murder case died. On February 15th, 1936, McGurn was shot dead in a bowling alley on North Milwaukee Avenue, a comic valentine left in his hand.

Four years later, on February 14th, 1940, an AP photographer caught Rolfe in a Chicago courtroom on a disorderly conduct charge. After that, the paper trail stops. Outside of the two men who climbed the stairs, the last person to see Jack “Legs” Diamond alive was a Ziegfeld showgirl—and she is the one name in this story with no death certificate. Marion Roberts, born in Boston around 1906, danced in Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies on Broadway before the papers started calling her Kiki, “Legs” Diamond’s love girl.

On December 17th, 1931, a jury in Troy, New York, acquitted Diamond of kidnapping Grover Parks, a trucker. He drank all night, stopped at Kiki’s rented rooms in Albany, then went to a boarding house at 67 Dove Street. Around 5:00 in the morning, two men walked up to the second floor and put three bullets in his head. Albany detectives questioned Kiki for hours and let her go.

She resurfaced on burlesque stages—Allentown, Pennsylvania, among them—billed as the dead gangster’s girl, and the trail stops in Boston in the 1940s. No grave, no certificate, no obituary. A nursing home in Santa Monica, California, January 17th, 1967. The woman in that bed, 82 years old, had once been the most photographed face in America.

Evelyn Nesbit started as a chorus girl in New York at 16, and on the night of June 25th, 1906, her husband, Pittsburgh coal heir Harry K. Thaw, walked up to architect Stanford White at the rooftop theater of Madison Square Garden—a building White himself had designed—and shot him three times in the face during a song called “I Could Love a Million Girls. ” Evelyn testified at two trials. Thaw walked on an insanity verdict in 1908.

By the ’20s, she was working speakeasies, running a tea room on West 52nd Street, singing for drinkers who came to stare at the face from the papers, and fighting a morphine habit that landed her in hospitals more than once. Her 1967 death record lists natural causes, no headlines attached. Ten days in a city workhouse for writing a play—that was Mae West’s sentence in a New York courtroom in April 1927. On the night of February 9th, police raided Daly’s 63rd Street Theater and hauled the whole cast into wagons over a drama called Sex, which West wrote, produced, and starred in.

The charge was corrupting the morals of youth. Judge George Donnellan gave her 10 days on Welfare Island in the East River and a $500 fine. The record shows she served eight, two off for good behavior. She came out talking, telling reporters the warden let her keep her silk underwear and took her to dinner, and she turned every line of it into advertising—Diamond Lil on Broadway the next year, a Paramount contract by 1932.

She died at her Hollywood apartment in the Ravenswood on November 22nd, 1980, at 87, after a series of strokes. A little black book full of bankers, judges, and Broadway names made Polly Adler the best-known madam in New York. Born in Yanov, in the Russian Empire, in 1900, she came through Ellis Island at 13, sewed shirts in a Brooklyn factory, and by the early ’20s was renting apartments on the Upper West Side, where the liquor was real and the precinct knew the address. Cops raided her.

She moved and reopened. In 1935, a vice sweep under special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey finally stuck, and she served 30 days on Welfare Island. Then she did what nobody expected: moved to Los Angeles, finished high school in her 40s, took classes at UCLA, and wrote it down.

A House Is Not a Home, published in 1953, sold roughly 2 million copies and named the men who used the backstairs. She died of lung cancer in Los Angeles on June 9th, 1962, at 62. A roadhouse on Crum Horn Mountain Road outside Oneonta, New York—that was where Eva Coo sold illegal beer and kept a handyman named Harry Wright, and where the night of June 14th, 1934, ended with Wright lying dead on the shoulder of the road, struck by a car. Wright, a limping veteran the locals called “Gimpy,” had been living in a shack behind the place.

Investigators in Otsego County found life insurance policies taken out on him worth roughly $12,000, with Coo as the beneficiary. Her friend Martha Clift turned state’s evidence and laid out the whole night, and deputies hauled both women back to the spot and staged a reenactment with a dummy while newspaper photographers worked the scene. A jury convicted Coo of first-degree murder. Clift drew 20 years to life.

On June 27th, 1935, Warden Lewis Lawes logged her execution at Sing Sing—the fifth woman to die in that chair. Every woman in this story met the law. One woman was the law. Every rum runner, speakeasy owner, and brewery bookkeeper in America answered to one desk in Washington, and a woman from Kansas sat behind it.

Mabel Walker Willebrandt was sworn in as Assistant Attorney General of the United States in 1921 at 32, handling prohibition cases, federal prisons, and tax. The papers called her Prohibition Portia. She argued before the Supreme Court some 40 times, and in United States v. Sullivan, 1927, she helped establish that money from illegal business is still taxable income—the ruling that later put Al Capone in federal prison.

She went after George Remus, the Cincinnati bootleg king, and told Congress the Volstead Act could never be enforced by men paid $50 a week. She resigned in 1929 and took on the fruit industries, including the California grape outfit selling concentrate that turned into wine on a kitchen counter. She died in Riverside, California, on April 6th, 1963.

Prohibition died before almost every woman in this story.