Jesse Bishop

Jesse Walter Bishop (March 1, 1933 – October 22, 1979) was an American criminal convicted of the December 1977 murder of David Ballard during a robbery at a Las Vegas Strip casino. Bishop was executed in 1979 by the state of Nevada via gas chamber, becoming the first person to be executed in Nevada since 1961. He was also the first person to be executed in Nevada since the reinstatement of capital punishment, and the first person to be executed in the gas chamber since then. Overall, he was the third person in the U.S. to be executed since the reinstatement, after Gary Gilmore (who died by firing squad) and John Spenkelink (executed in the electric chair). Bishop had spent twenty years of his life incarcerated for various felony offenses and bragged about having committed an estimated eighteen homicides. Provided by Wikipedia