NOV. 28, 1942

Annie Beatrice (Toni Jo) Henry, smiling but silent in the end, paid with her life early this afternoon in the electric chair for the brutal slaying nearly three years ago of Joseph P. Galloway, 43 year old Houston salesman. At exactly 12:12 the big switch was thrown home to lend 20,000 volts of current flowing through her body.

Three minutes later she was pronounced dead. She died in the dim corridor of the parish jail house where the state’s portable electric Chair had been set up. The legal number of witnesses and officers stood a few feet away as her body trembled slightly when the current was turned on.

Outside the jailhouse wall some 300 persons gaped, hoping to catch some glimpse of what was going on. Peering down the wall and standing across the street on the courthouse steps, they managed to see the sheet-draped body being carried to the waiting hearse and whisked away.

At 12:05, the first woman ever to die in the electric chair in Louisiana and the second to be executed in the state left her cell on the second floor of the jailhouse. With her were Father Richard, with whom she spent the last minutes alone, and Deputy Sheriff Henry A. Reid Jr.

Quickly she came down the 22 steps to the first floor and marched straight to the chair that was wedged along with the master switch and other equipment in the eight-foot-wide first-floor corridor.

She had a smile on her face and she kept it there till the end.

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 the switch that sent the current surging through her body.

Her body trembled slightly, her fists became tightly clasped, a small handkerchief crammed into one of them. A blue spiral of smoke arose from her head. Two minutes later the switch was thrown, the current was switched off and the mask taken from her face. First Dr. E. L. Clement, the parish coroner, and then Dr. H. B. White, examined her carefully with a stethoscope. At 12:15 they looked at Deputy Sheriff Reid and nodded. Toni Jo Henry, the woman who said she was a prostitute at 13, a drug addict at 16 and a killer at 24. was dead. Nasty Job “It’s just a nasty job, the unidentified executioner had said earlier. “It has to be done and I happen to be the one who does it ” “However, I’m not ashamed of it a bit but I don’t want to brag about it, either.”