You probably think of the gallows as a relic of the Old West. You’re picturing dusty towns, rough-hewn timber, and black-and-white photos of outlaws. But the reality is much more recent and, honestly, way more clinical than the movies suggest.
The last hanging in the United States didn't happen in the 1800s. It happened in 1996.
While the rest of the country was debating the ethics of lethal injection and watching the early days of the internet take shape, the state of Delaware was busy building a wooden structure for a man named Billy Bailey. He wasn't some 19th-century gunslinger. He was a double murderer who essentially forced the state's hand by choosing a method of death that most people thought had already been retired to the history books.
The Crimes of Billy Bailey
To understand how a man ends up at the end of a rope in the mid-90s, you have to look at what he did. In 1979, Bailey was already a man with a heavy record. He had escaped from a work-release center in Wilmington, and frankly, he wasn't looking to go back quietly.
On June 12, 1979, things turned incredibly dark. Bailey robbed a liquor store at gunpoint, but that was just the beginning. He eventually made his way to a farmhouse near Cheswold. There, he encountered Gilbert Lambertson, 80, and his wife Clara, 73.
It was a senseless, brutal scene.
He shot them both with a shotgun. After his arrest, Bailey’s defense team tried to point toward a life of trauma and limited mental capacity—he’d been in and out of foster homes and allegedly suffered horrific abuse as a child—but the jury wasn't having it. He was sentenced to die.
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Why Hanging?
You’ve probably wondered why someone would choose the gallows over a needle. In Delaware, the law changed in 1986 to make lethal injection the primary method. However, since Bailey was sentenced before that change, the law gave him a choice.
He could take the injection, or he could go with the original sentence: hanging.
Bailey was stubborn. He reportedly told people that he was just "complying with the law" as it was written when he was caught. He also had this grim, sort of defiant logic. He once said that asking a man to choose how to die was actually more barbaric than the hanging itself.
Basically, he refused to help the state make his death "cleaner."
Preparing for the Gallow
Delaware hadn’t hanged anyone in 50 years. By 1996, the institutional knowledge was gone. The guards didn't know how to tie the knot, and the engineers didn't know how to calculate the "drop."
If the drop is too short, the person strangles slowly. If it’s too long, the force can actually decapitate them. It’s a grisly, precise science based on the prisoner's weight.
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To get it right, Delaware officials actually traveled to Washington State. Why? Because Washington had performed the previous two hangings in the early 90s—Westley Allan Dodd in 1993 and Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994. They were the only ones left who knew the "military procedure" for a judicial hanging.
They built the gallows on the grounds of the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center. It wasn't a public spectacle. It was a black-painted wooden platform, hidden away, meant for a very small audience.
January 25, 1996: The Execution
The execution took place after midnight.
It was cold. Bailey had his final meal—steak, baked potato, butter, and rolls. He didn't have much to say at the end. At 12:04 a.m., the trapdoor opened.
It worked the way the manual said it should. His neck broke instantly. He was pronounced dead at 12:15 a.m.
Just like that, the last hanging in the United States was over. Interestingly, another execution happened just five days later in the same prison. William Flamer, another death row inmate, chose lethal injection. The contrast was stark—one man died by a method from the middle ages, the other by a medical procedure.
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The End of an Era
In 2003, Delaware finally dismantled the gallows. They realized that none of the remaining inmates on death row had the legal right to choose hanging anymore, so the structure was just a macabre reminder of a past they wanted to move away from.
Is hanging still legal today?
Kinda, but not really. Technically, New Hampshire still has a statute that allows for hanging if lethal injection is "impractical," but they’ve basically abolished the death penalty for future crimes. Washington State, the former "capital" of modern hangings, abolished the death penalty entirely in 2018.
Key Facts to Remember
- The Last Person Hanged: Billy Bailey.
- Date: January 25, 1996.
- Location: Smyrna, Delaware.
- The Last Public Hanging: That was much earlier—Rainey Bethea in 1936 in Kentucky. Around 20,000 people showed up for that one, and the media circus was so "ghoulish" it basically ended public executions in America forever.
What You Should Do Next
If you’re interested in the evolution of American justice, your next step should be looking into the current legal status of secondary execution methods in your specific state. Methods like the firing squad (recently brought back in Idaho) and nitrogen hypoxia (recently used in Alabama) are the modern equivalents of the Bailey hanging—rare, controversial, and legally complex.
You can check the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) website for the most current map of which states allow which methods as of 2026. Understanding the history of the last hanging in the United States helps put these current debates into context. It shows that the "old ways" often linger much longer than we expect.