Seventy-five years after Corrine Sykes walked the “last mile” at Pennsylvania’s Rockview Prison, her case still stands as a stark illustration of how race, class, intellectual disability, and political chance can decide who lives and who dies under the death penalty.
On the afternoon of December 7, 1944, 20-year-old African American housemaid Corrine Sykes (sometimes spelled Corinne) was on her third day of work for Freeda (or Freda) Wodlinger in a house on leafy North Camac Street in Philadelphia’s West Oak Lane. Harry Wodlinger returned home early from his real-estate office, planning to drop off meat for dinner and collect his golf clubs. He found the front door ajar on a cold day, heard the family dog barking from the basement, and discovered his wife’s body on the bathroom floor. The scene showed signs of a violent struggle. Missing were her rings (including a two-karat diamond), a string of pearls, and about $100 in cash. The new live-in maid was gone.
Sykes was quickly arrested the same day. She confessed, telling police in a naive, almost childlike manner: “After I stabbed her, I took the rings off her fingers. I sure like jewels.” Evidence included her bloodstained clothing found at the apartment of her boyfriend, Jaycee (or Jayce) Kelly, a man with a long arrest record. Relatives claimed Kelly had orchestrated the theft and sent her alone. Kelly was later convicted as an accessory and received a prison sentence measured in years, not death.
Sykes was no ordinary defendant. She was illiterate, described as slow-witted and prone to hysteria. A school-district evaluation at age 13 had given her an IQ of 63 and a mental age of roughly 7. At the time of the crime and trial she was widely said to have the mental age of an 8-year-old. Her mother told reporters she was “tender and mild” but “wasn’t very smart.” Word circulated that a school principal had recommended institutionalization years earlier, yet no suitable facility in Philadelphia would take a Black child. Defense psychiatrist testimony labeled her a “constitutional psychopathic inferior.”
Her court-appointed lawyer was Raymond Pace Alexander, one of Philadelphia’s leading African American attorneys (later the city’s first Black judge). He did not seek acquittal. Instead he framed the case as a social problem and asked the all-white jury for life imprisonment without parole, emphasizing her intellectual limitations and the influence of her older boyfriend. Judge Vincent A. Carroll, known as a strict “hanging judge,” repeatedly interrupted the defense, overruled objections, and advised a witness not to answer certain questions. The jury deliberated just over five hours and returned a first-degree murder verdict carrying the death penalty. Appeals failed.
On the night of October 14, 1946, the 22-year-old walked to Pennsylvania’s electric chair—“Old Smokey,” installed in 1913—at Rockview Prison. She wore a gray jumper and white bobby socks. Only a small patch of hair was shaved for the electrode. Contemporary accounts describe her as composed: she walked steadily, sat without resistance, looked around the chamber, and did not flinch when the hood was placed or the switch thrown. She was pronounced dead at 12:31 a.m. Her last meal had been prepared in the superintendent’s kitchen. Thousands lined up in vain for a public viewing of the body; only family and close friends were admitted. She remains the last woman executed in Pennsylvania.
Sykes was only the second woman ever electrocuted in the state. The first was Irene Schroeder in 1931, executed for her role in the shooting death of a state highway patrolman during a robbery. Before Sykes, several other women had been sentenced to death in Pennsylvania; most had their sentences commuted to life, including at least one white woman with intellectual disabilities who had smothered her own infant. The difference in outcomes—race, the identity of the victim (a prosperous white employer), public fear among domestic-employer households, and the political climate of the moment—underscored how little consistency the system offered.
The case divided Philadelphia along racial lines in ways later compared to the O.J. Simpson trial. Many in the African American community believed Sykes was a vulnerable, intellectually limited young woman used by a manipulative partner, or even that she might not have been the sole or primary actor. Rumors of a later deathbed confession by the victim’s husband circulated for decades but were never substantiated with documentation. What is documented is the speed of the process: crime in December 1944, conviction and death sentence in 1945, execution in October 1946.
Today the constitutional landscape has changed. In Atkins v. Virginia (2002) the U.S. Supreme Court held that executing people with intellectual disabilities violates the Eighth Amendment because they have diminished moral culpability and face heightened risk of wrongful conviction. Sykes’s documented IQ and mental age would almost certainly have barred her execution under current law. Pennsylvania itself has had a formal moratorium on executions for years; the electric chair was replaced by lethal injection decades ago, and no woman has been executed in the state since Sykes.
Yet the deeper lesson of her case endures. Capital punishment has always been applied unevenly—shaped by the race of defendant and victim, the quality of counsel, the temperament of the judge and prosecutor, the political incentives of the moment, and the presence or absence of intellectual disability. Lives are not supposed to turn on such contingencies. When a young woman with the mental functioning of a child can be rushed to the electric chair while others with comparable deficits are spared, the system reveals itself as arbitrary rather than just.
Corrine Sykes’s fate does not merely record a historical tragedy. It demonstrates why the death penalty, dependent as it is on chance, politics, and human frailty, remains incompatible with equal justice. The chair claimed her on October 14, 1946. The questions her execution left unanswered still demand an answer: why do we continue to trust a punishment so vulnerable to the very inequalities it claims to transcend?
Educational purpose only. This post documents historical practices related to executions and aims to educate about historical procedures. We do not glorify violence or hate.