EXECUTING ANNA
A wrenching Death Row saga after hubby is slain
AROUND DAWN on March 27, 1932, Easter Sunday, two law students were driving north toward Albany when their headlights illuminated what appeared to be a bloody corpse in the middle of the road. They got out to take a look. The corpse moaned. The boys loaded the wounded man into their car and sped toward Albany Memorial Hospital. But just moments after reaching the hospital, their passenger took his last breath.
It was a miracle that the victim, Salvatore Antonio, 42, a New York Central Railroad brakeman from Albany, held on as long as he did. Doctors found 15 stab wounds and five .38-caliber slugs in his body.
Detectives canvassed family, friends and acquaintances, trying to reconstruct Antonio’s final hours. In a month, police had found his companions that night, Vincent Saetta and Sam Feraci, a pair of dope dealers. Within one day the men confessed to the killing.
The night before the murder, Saetta, Feraci, and Antonio met at a downtown Albany eatery. From there, they took a drive, stopping about 30 miles away in Hudson, N.Y.
Early in the morning they were on the road between Castleton and Albany, heading home, when Feraci and Saetta insisted on a roadside stop. Saetta stepped out of the car, whirled around and began pumping bullets into his dinner companion.
Feraci followed with a hunting knife, as Antonio pleaded for mercy.
“Sam, you have got to help me out,” he cried. “I never did anything to you.”
Feraci continued his murderous attack. “I can’t help you,” he said. “I have to go through with this.”
What was the motive? Money. The men had been paid to kill Antonio. The horrifying surprise was the identity of the person who had arranged for the murder.
On May 5, police arrested Mrs. Anna Antonio, 28, the victim’s widow.
Feraci and Saetta said she had offered them $800 to kill her hus- band. The cash was to come from Antonio’s $5,300 life insurance.
“Little Anna,” only about 5 feet tall and 100 pounds, denied any knowledge at first. But, after a day of grilling, she spilled. Sal, 15 years her senior, was a terrible husband who filled her home with “dope and guns,” she said. Killing him was the only way to escape his beatings.
By the time she recited the story for a second time, one major detail had changed. It was true she had hired the two men, but only to mete out a “good beating.” Murder, she insisted, was never on her mind.
But all three were charged with first-degree murder, which could mean death in Sing Sing’s electric chair.
Only two women had gone to the chair in New York State since the method of execution was introduced in 1891. It seemed impossible that this dainty dark-eyed mother of three could become the third.
But the evidence was overwhelming. On April 15, 1933, the jury found the trio guilty. The executions were scheduled for May 29, and they were shuttled off to Death Row, where they stayed, their executions put off as their attorneys filed appeals.
Saetta was confident. “We’ll beat this case, yet,” he boasted to reporters, “because there’s a dame in it.”
Despite the dame, appeals fell flat and a new date was set for June 28, 1934. Antonio’s lawyer, Daniel Prior, visited Gov. Herbert Lehman, with Antonio’s young children in tow, to plead for mercy.
But Lehman remained unmoved.
THEN, 15 minutes before the scheduled executions, one of the condemned, Saetta offered a rambling statement. He insisted that the murder had been the result of bad debts and bad blood between the two men. “Mrs. Antonio was absolutely innocent of the crime,” he said.
Prior filed a motion for a new trial, but was denied. Yet another date, July 10, was set, and, again, there was an 11th-hour reprieve.
Waiting and wondering took a terrible toll on the frail young woman, who withered to 85 pounds by the dawn of her next scheduled date with death, Aug. 9. Still, her hopes rose briefly when a cricket entered her cell. “I’m sure that’s a sign of good luck,” she told her matron. It was also her daughter Marie’s seventh birthday, and the child was planning a party if the governor gave her mother the gift of life.
There would be no party for the little girl. By noon, word came that her lawyer’s last desperate efforts had failed, again. Antonio collapsed when she heard the news.
“I am almost dead now. I feel as if I am not breathing,” she murmured to a priest. “God alone can help me now. They have all gone back on me.”
At 11:11 p.m., Antonio entered the death chamber, and walked straight to the chair. Five minutes later, she was gone, followed in minutes by her accomplices.
It had taken about 16 months to carry out the sentence, as lawyers and the governor hunted for some way to avoid putting a lady in the chair.
The roller coaster of hope and despair was deeply distressing to everyone — prisoners, attorneys, the governor and the public.
“We in this country make horror spectacles out of murder cases, especially when the condemned killer is a woman,” the Daily News noted in an editorial the day after the executions. “We drag the thing out. We sob and wring our hands. . . .We play cat and mouse with the victim, until we have reduced her to the last extremity of woe; then we kill her.”