A trial was held in White Plains County Court in June 1941 . . Riordan and McGale were sentenced to death. Their accomplices received life sentences . . . On June 11, 1942, Riordan and McGale were executed in the death chamber, just yards away from where they shot and killed Correction Officer John Hartye . . . It was [Riordan's] 28th birthday. . . .

One of the most reviled killers to ever sit on death row at Sing Sing was a teenager. His name was Edward Haight. His shocking story . . . began in the tranquil village of Bedford in Westchester County. On September 15, 1942, two girls, Margaret Lynch, 7, and her sister Helen, 9 were seen getting into a Ford station wagon that was reported stolen in nearby Stamford, Connecticut. They were never seen alive again . . .

The very next day, a Connecticut state trooper was driving along a road in north Stamford when he observed Edward Haight, 16, drive by . . . When Haight was pulled over, police found a gas ration book from the stolen Ford station wagon in his pocket. He was taken into custody and soon confessed to the murder of both Lynch sisters. . . . Helen's body was fished out of the Kensico Reservoir. Margaret had been strangled and her body was located in the woods near the reservoir. . . .

Haight was charged with two counts of first-degree murder and locked up in the Bedford jail . . . . During the trial, which opened on October 29, both the prosecution and defense psychiatrists offered conflicting opinions on the defendant's sanity . . . . On November 5, Haight was found guilty of first-degree murder . . . . Deliberations lasted less than one hour . . . .

Edward Haight.

He was taken immediately over to death row in Sing Sing. Ironically, Edward's father, Arnold Haight, once did four years at Sing Sing for a burglary back in 1932 . . . . On July 8, 1943, [Edward at 17] became the youngest person to be executed in Sing Sing's electric chair. His father was unable to claim his body and Edward Haight was buried in a plot of quick lime in nearby Peekskill.

. . . . . . Sing Sing's roll call of the condemned includes . . . Martha Beck and Raymond Fernandez, the so-called Lonely Hearts Killers. . . [whose] shocking crimes, resulted in the deaths of 17 women . . . . During a lurid murder trial in 1950, crowds gathered daily outside the Bronx courtroom . . . .

But [they] were not the most famous couple executed at Sing Sing. That distinction undoubtedly belongs to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg . . . Because they were convicted of federal crimes, the Rosenbergs were actually not prisoners of New York State. Found guilty of espionage and sentenced to death in 1951, Sing Sing was given the responsibility of their execution. . . . [They] were executed at Sing Sing on the night of June 19, 1953, the only nonmilitary prisoners in American history executed for espionage.

The oldest prisoner executed at Sing Sing was Albert Fish, 66, a demonic child killer and cannibal who murdered 11-year-old Grace Budd in the City of Peekskill in 1928. Fish was a deeply disturbed individual . . ."What a thrill that will be, if I have to die in the electric chair," he said . . . . He received his wish on January 16, 1936 . . . .

The last person to walk the "longest mile" was Eddie Lee Mays, 34, on August 15, 1963. He was convicted of the murder of a female bar patron during a robbery in Harlem in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, however, there was a growing dissatisfaction with capital punishment in America. . . . By the 1970s, there was an unofficial moratorium on executions in New York.