WAYNESBURG - The last time someone from Greene County was sentenced to death, the county courthouse still had gallows where the offenders were hanged.
Jeffrey Robert Martin on Wednesday became the first person to receive a death sentence from Greene County Court in 114 years.
Martin raped and strangled 12-year-old Gabrielle Miranda Bechen of Greensboro two years ago. A jury convicted him and recommended he die for his crimes after a trial in May, and on Wednesday, President Judge H. Terry Grimes formally sentenced Martin to death.
The county only imposed such a punishment on three other men in its history, and all were executed in the late 1800s, according to G. Wayne Smith's "The History of Greene County Pennsylvania."
Two men from Cumberland Township, George W. Clark and his brother-in-law Zacharias Taylor, were executed for the same murder in 1890. The men were convicted of robbing and shooting William McCausland, a livestock trader from Pittsburgh, in 1887. Both men proclaimed their innocence even as they were led to the gallows.
John Eisiminger of Waynesburg was the last person to be sentenced to death in Greene County. He robbed and shot Samuel McCoy, a traveling peddler, in West Waynesburg in 1894, and he was convicted and sentenced to die several months later. He was hanged at the courthouse in 1895.
The state prison system took over all executions in 1915, but until Martin, Greene County sent no one to the state's death row, according to a search through several decades of newspaper archives.
The county saw several murders over the years, and some were quite gruesome, but none apparently warranted a death sentence.
In 1946, a returning veteran of World War II, William Franklin Headlee, committed what was called the most brutal crime in the county's history, but he ended up with a 10-to-25-year prison sentence.
Headlee broke into an elderly woman's apartment in Waynesburg and attacked the woman in her sleep. Headlee stabbed the woman, Harriett Montgomery Walker, at least 20 times in the throat and then raped her either just before or just after she died.
The next morning, the woman's sister found Walker dead, with Headlee sound asleep beside her corpse. Headlee later claimed he was too drunk to remember the incident, so jurors convicted him of second-degree murder.
Judge John I. Hook said in court that he would have sentenced Donald Grover Molleanaux to death for another 1946 murder, if "it were not for his extreme youth," according to a Waynesburg Republican account.
He was a 14-year-old farm boy when he stabbed his employer, Katherine Inghram Fletcher, at her farm near Graysville. He later told police he killed her just for the thrill.
He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder, and Hook sentenced him to life in prison.