William Williams is hanged in a bungled execution in the Ramsey County jail for the murders of a teenaged boy, with whom he was sexually involved, and the boy's mother. Williams is the twenty-fifth man and the last person of twenty-six legally executed in the state, as capital punishment was abolished in Minnesota in 1911 following public revulsion and outcry caused by vivid newspaper accounts of his protracted sufferings, due to a too-long rope.