This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

His neck was not broken, physicians said, and his death was produced by strangulation, Dr. C. M. Shipp, county health officer, assisted by “Drs. C. L. Horton, N. W. Fountain, D. H. Ward, and W. S. Speer made the examination and pronounced Richardson dead 14 minutes after the trap was sprung. The body was turned over to relatives of the deceased for burial.
Richardson walked to the gallows unassisted in a calm and calculated manner and the Rev. Leo Fahey, Bay St. Louis Catholic priest performed religious rites after he took his place on the gallows. He had spent nearly the whole of Thursday and a large part of Friday morning in company with Rev. Fahey and Rev. John Koehler, Catholic priest of St. Augustine Seminary at Bay St. Louis.
“I am going to a world unknown” he said. “God will forgive my sins and save my soul.......(page torn)...he breathed his final prayer on the gallows.
Richardson’s execution was the first legal hanging in Hancock county in 20 years, the last having been in 1909 a negro, Joseph Douglas. At that time Albert J. Carver was sheriff.
Other prisoners in the county jail were taken from their cells and carried to the jail yard under guard a few minutes before the execution of Richardson and were returned after his body was removed.
Dambrino, the victim of a bullet from Richardson’s piston had gone to the city jail at Bay St. Louis on August 14 in company with Police Officer Mark Oliver to obtain from Richardson an automobile key, it was believed he had in his possession and belonging to a car that had been stolen. Richardson resisted the officers search and opened fire upon him wounding him and killing Dambrino. Following the shooting he escaped and after a man hunt of several weeks in which hundreds of citizens joined with county officers was captured underneath the house of relatives at Bay St. Louis. He was convicted in circuit court, the state supreme court affirmed the conviction and death sentence and later overruled a suggestion of error. An unsuccessful attempt was made Thursday before the hanging by Jackson attorneys for Richardson to get Governor Bilbo to commute his sentence to life imprisonment.
After the body was removed from the rope it was taken in charge by relatives and an undertaker from Gulfport prepared it for burial. The funeral was held in Perlington.