Hartford, Connecticut was the scene of another murder 15 years earlier, when Frank Grela, 41, who lived with his wife Nellie, 25, in one of the town’s crowded tenements, complained to Nellie that she wasn’t behaving with due modesty in front of the other male lodgers. In order to get away from the bothersome situation, Grela took a job in New Jersey, leaving his wife with a little more space in the tenement.

After three months he returned unannounced to Hartford – and to gossip that led him to believe Nellie had been sexually exploiting his absence. Without bothering to confront her, he crept into the tenement late one night and fired two shots into her face as she lay asleep.

He was caught running away, the gun still in his hand, by a policeman. “I killed her,” he said at once. “And I couldn’t care less about the consequences.” On Friday, August 13th, 1915, he was hanged at Connecticut State Prison.