‘A sexual psychopath with caveman-like tendencies’ was the last person executed by electric chair in Pennsylvania

On Jan. 7, 1960, Elmo Smith of Bridgeport in Montgomery County was charged with the murder and rape of a 16-year-old girl.

Maryann Theresa Mitchell of the Manayuk section of Philadelphia was an 11th grader at Cecelian Academy.

She disappeared on Dec. 28, 1959, when she was returning home after going to the movies with a friend.

Her body was found on Dec. 30 in a muddy gully.

Smith was the last person to be executed in Pennsylvania by the electric chair. He was executed on April 2, 1962, after being found guilty of the rape and murder of Mitchell.

According to stories in The Patriot by the Associated Press, Smith was on parole at the time of his arrest for the murder. He also was being charged with burglary, larceny and arson in connection with the theft of a car from a Norristown couple. Their car was found abandoned on a Bridgeport street with “bloodstains on the back seat and on a bumper jack found in the car trunk. Embedded in the blood on the jack were three strands of auburn hair.

Philadelphia police chemists established those hairs were similar to Maryann’s hair and that the blood stains were of Type A blood. Maryann had Type A blood.” The district attorney said the car was used in the murder of Mitchell.

In January 1960, the Associated Press reported that Smith confessed.

“In his confession, Smith said he spotted Maryann alone on a street corner as he drove a stolen car. He told police he snatched the girl, attacked her, crushed her skull with five blows then dumped her body an hour later, still alive and begging to be taken home, into the ravine.”

One psychiatric exam at the same time, revealed Smith showed “sexual tendencies which led to caveman tactics.”

Smith was scheduled to trial on the charges on Aug. 22 in Gettysburg. He had been granted a change of venue because of pretrial publicity and he had changed his plea.

According to news stories, Smith was a handyman who had been convicted twice for sex offenses.

On the first day of the trial on Aug. 25, 1960, the Associated Press reported that Montgomery County District Attorney Vincent A. Cirillo said Smith “struck the girl over the head with a bumper jack and dragged her into a stolen car as she waited on a foggy, rain-drenched street corner for a bus.

Cirillo said the defendant threw her clothes from the car as he drove her to a lonely spot, parked the car, raped her and viciously beat her again over the head several times,” and dumped her body down an embankment. “He also marked her body with lipstick, putting on it the symbols TB and 101. We will show that after Elmo Smith dumped her body there, he drove home to Bridgeport, where he discarded her underwear.”

On Sept. 1, 1960, Smith was convicted after the jury deliberated for just 90 minutes.

The Associated Press reported, “tears streamed down the cheeks of the 39-year-old Bridgeport handyman, after the verdict.”

Smith had served 10 years of a 10-20 year sentence for a series of burglaries and assaults on women in January 1946. He was released on parole then sent back to prison for violating parole. He was paroled again on Oct. 1, 1958.

On Sept. 3, 1960, Smith was sentenced to death. The state asked for the death penalty “to make an example of Elmo Smith to deter all others who would commit rape and murder.”

Multiple appeals by Smith were rejected. In February 1962, the governor of Pennsylvania ordered Smith be executed the week of April 2.

The electric chair and control panel at the State Correctional Institution at Rockview, Dec. 5, 1990. (Allied Pix for The Patriot-News)

On March 22, 1962, the Associated Press reported that Smith had asked the state Board of Pardons to commute the death sentence saying the state was partly to blame. One of Smith’s lawyers said that the state knew that Smith was “a sexual psychopath with caveman-like tendencies.”

The board denied the request.

On April 1, 1962, the Associated Press reported, “Elmo Lee Smith, 40-year-old convicted murdered, waited silently in a prison cell yesterday, less than 48 hours away from death in the electric chair.

The Bridgeport handyman, spending his last hours in the state correctional institution at nearby Graterford, refuses to see or talk to anyone.

Today, being April Fool’s Day, he’ll be transferred under heavy guard to Rockview Penitentiary at Bellefonte, Centre County. Barring a last-minute reprieve, it’ll be his last Sunday on earth.

Late Monday night he is scheduled to die in the electric chair for the 1959 Christmas week killing of Maryann Mitchell …”

His last meal was potatoes, lima beans, peach short cake and coffee.

On April 3, 1962, the Associated Press reported that Smith “remained calm and cool” as he was strapped into the electric chair. He was pronounced dead two minutes later at 9:04 p.m.

The electric chair was dismantled and put into storage in 1971 by Gov. Milton J. Shapp’s administration, just before the death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in 1972. It was reassembled in 1985. In 1990 it was replaced with death by lethal injection. The electric chair, nicknamed “Old Smokey,” is in storage at the State Museum.

The last execution in the state of Pennsylvania was July 6, 1999, when Gary Heidnik was put to death by lethal injection.

Source: pennlive.com, Deb Kiner, April 2, 2020

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