Irene Schroeder (February 17, 1909 - February 23, 1931) was an American criminal who became the first woman to be electrocuted in Pennsylvania, and the fourth woman to be executed by electrocution in the whole of the United States. She was given several nicknames by the press, including 'Trigger Woman', 'Iron Irene', 'Irene of the six-shooters', 'animal woman', 'the blonde tiger' and 'the blonde bandit'.

Irene Schroeder (née Crawford) was born in 1909 in Benwood, West Virginia. At the age of 15, she married Homer Schroeder, and they had a son Donnie a year later. She soon left Homer, becoming a waitress in Wheeling, West Virginia. Here, she met Walter Glenn Dague, who became her lover.

On 27 December 1929, Irene, Walter Glenn Dague and Irene's older brother Tom Crawford were involved in a grocery store robbery in Butler, Pennsylvania. While escaping from the scene of the crime, they were stopped by two police officers, Brady Paul and Ernest Moore. A shoot-out ensued: Paul was fatally shot and Moore was wounded.

Shrader, Crawford and Dague all escaped and went into hiding, leaving Irene's four-year-old son (who had been in the car at the time) with a family member. Irene changed the spelling of her name to Schroeder in order to muddy the trail the police were following.

Donnie was soon interviewed by the police, and his testimony was later used to help convict his mother. He stated:

"I saw my mama shoot a cop". Uncle Tom shot another one in the head. He shot right through the windshield.

Tom Crawford was never arrested; police believe he was killed in a shoot-out following a robbery in Texas. After a long manhunt, Dague and Schroeder were both apprehended following a shoot-out in Arizona. They were tried in Pennsylvania and sentenced to death by electrocution - Schroeder was the first female to be executed in this way in Pennsylvania.

Schroeder was electrocuted on February 23, 1931 at 7:05 a.m., wearing "a gray dress of imitation silk with white collars and cuffs, beige silk stockings and black satin slippers" to her death.

Her executioner remarked that she seemed particularly "composed and fearless". Her parting words to her then-seven-year-old son Donnie were, "I am going to die, my boy, but I am not afraid. Be a good boy and don't be afraid." Donnie was heard to remark, "I'll bet my mom would make an awful nice angel."

Schroeder case made history

By Megan J. Miller - TimesOnline.com

February 20, 2011

NEW CASTLE - Around 11:30 a.m. Dec. 27, 1929, Cpl. Brady Paul, 25, of the Pennsylvania Highway Patrol, answered the telephone call that would send him to his death.

Sgt. Martin J. Crowley of the Pennsylvania state police, who was on the other end of the line, would later remember saying, "We just had a holdup here, and we haven't got so much information for the time being, but we believe they are headed for New Castle on the New Castle Road. Will you take care of this right away?"

"He says, ‘All right, Sarge, I'll get out right away,' " Crowley recalled.

Paul and another highway patrolman, Pvt. Ernest C. Moore, also about 25, took Paul's motorcycle and headed east on what's now known as the Old Butler Road, with Moore riding in the sidecar.

Heading toward them on the same highway was a two-door Chevrolet "coach" carrying two men, a woman and a young boy, who was standing up in front of his mother in the front passenger seat.

Around 11:15 a.m., Irene Schroeder, her brother, Tom Crawford, and her paramour, Walter Dague, had robbed the P.H. Butler Co. grocery store in Butler at gunpoint, while Schroeder's 4-year-old son, Donnie, waited in the car. Schroeder said later that they'd driven up from Wheeling, W.Va., with no particular plan and decided to knock off the store on a whim.

Schroeder and Dague - known by his middle name, Glenn - had bound and gagged the store manager, Wish Angert, and an elderly customer, then emptied their pockets and cleaned out the cash register.

It wasn't their first such heist, Schroeder said. She and Dague had robbed gas stations and stores from Ohio to Tennessee as they roamed from state to state in the preceding months.

They were armed with handguns they'd purchased in September in pawn shops on the North Side of Pittsburgh.

Shootout on the Butler Road

Paul and Moore pulled into a farm lane about three miles east of New Castle and began stopping cars headed west from Butler. They were armed with their service pistols and a vague description that they were looking for two men and a woman.

Moore would later testify that they stopped about six cars without incident.

"The last car we stopped was a Chevrolet coach," he said. That was shortly before noon.

As Paul approached the driver's side window and asked the driver, Dague, for his license, Moore walked around to the rear of the car to look at the license plate.

Seconds later Paul bumped into him, backing away from Dague and Schroeder, who had both bailed out of the driver's side door and had their guns drawn.

"Pull your gun, Moore," he remembered Paul saying, and Moore ran around the passenger's side of the car for cover, reaching for his sidearm.

That's when the shooting started.

Crawford, sitting in the back seat, shot Moore across the tip of the nose as he was running past.

Moore made it to the front of the car but was pinned down, crouching by the radiator, under fire from Crawford and Dague,

Witnesses from the Baldwin family, watching from their nearby home, testified that Schroeder continued walking toward Paul. He had his hands half-raised, they said, and was backing away.

Then she fired a shot. His body shuddered, swayed, but didn't fall.

Samuel Baldwin, 17 at the time of the trial, said Paul continued to back up after the first shot, about 10 feet farther, and Schroeder fired again. After that shot, Paul went to his knees.

‘Tell them I did the best I could'

After the robbers sped away, George Book, a driver for Lawrence Bottling Works who also witnessed the incident, helped Paul into his truck and hauled him to town.

Doctors at Jameson Memorial Hospital could do little for Paul, they said later. He had been shot three times; once in the left arm, once in the left leg, and once in the abdomen - the fatal shot, through his liver and right kidney.

He died at 12:55 p.m., about 15 to 20 minutes after he arrived at the hospital.

The owner of the Colonial Hotel, Mollie Crowl, stayed with the young officer in the operating room as he was dying. She testified that he was in terrible pain but was able to speak to her as doctors and nurses bustled around them.

"Tell the boys I did my duty, tell them I did the best I could," Crowl recalled him saying. Then, "Mollie, you will soon see mother, because I am dying. Kiss mother goodbye for me."

Moore survived not one, but two gunshot wounds to the head - the one that cut a groove across the tip of his nose, and one that skimmed off his skull, knocking him unconscious.

Witnesses said Paul appeared to get off only a few shots at the fleeing robbers' car after he regained his feet and took cover behind a nearby telephone pole.

Moore would testify that he had no memory of even firing his gun. It was sometimes difficult to free from its holster, he said, and by the time he pulled it, he was pinned down by gunfire.

"That is part of your training, pulling your gun, and so on, is it not?" Schroeder defense attorney Thomas W. Dickey asked Moore.

"I never had any of it," Moore replied.

"You never had any training?"

"Not in pulling a gun," Moore said.

Fugitives

Schroeder and her companions drove into New Castle, ditching their bullet-riddled Chevrolet for a Chrysler carjacked from a passing couple.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time. But that would prove to be their undoing.

They drove south on Route 18, Schroeder said, into Beaver County.

Beryl Miller, owner of Miller's Restaurant in Monaca, testified that they stopped at her Ninth Street business around 5 p.m. and ordered soup for Donnie and about a dozen sandwiches to go.

"She said she was in a hurry and hurried the child in his eating," Miller said.

Schroeder and Dague later denied stopping there.

They made their way back to Wheeling that night around 9 p.m., stashing the stolen Chrysler in a rented garage and driving off in a Pontiac coupe. They dropped Donnie off at the home of Schroeder's father, Joseph Crawford, in Benwood, W.Va., and left Tom Crawford in downtown Wheeling.

Both said it was the last time they ever saw Crawford.

Then the fugitive couple headed west.

Back in New Castle, investigators were poring through a veritable treasure trove of evidence left inside the abandoned Chevrolet. The find included several Wheeling newspapers and a receipt from a Wheeling department store.

‘My mamma shot one cop'

The tale of Irene Schroeder's capture, trial and death was one of the most publicized crime stories of its day.

Accounts of how authorities were able to identify her differ, but the most probable seems to be that a clerk in the Wheeling store remembered her as a regular customer and was able to provide a name.

Investigators followed the clerk's information to Schroeder's family in the Wheeling area. They found Donnie at the home of Ray and Ruby Schroeder, Irene's sister and brother-in-law, in Bellaire, Ohio.

"My mamma shot one cop and laid back of the car groaning," Donnie told them, according to Francis Moran, chief of the Bellaire police. "Uncle Tom shot another one in the head. He shot right through the windshield."

Police finally had a name to go with their description of the chunky blond "gun girl," as media had dubbed her.

For weeks, Schroeder and Dague led police on a nationwide chase marked by shootouts and narrow escapes. Their trail finally ended in what newspapers glorified as an Old West-style standoff in remote mountains of the Arizona desert.

At the end of January 1930, they were extradited back to Lawrence County to stand trial for the murder of Brady Paul.

Schroeder was tried first, beginning on March 12. The prosecution paraded in 77 witnesses to build a case against her. She was found guilty of first-degree murder, punishable by death, on March 21.

Dague's case began March 24, and he received the same verdict on March 31.

While the trial and subsequent appeals dragged on, all the way to the state Supreme Court, media swarmed around Schroeder's young son, Donnie. His name and picture were splashed across practically every newspaper in the country as the boy who'd effectively signed his own mother's death warrant.

According to newspaper reports, he and his grandfather often went to prison to visit Schroeder, including on her 22nd birthday, six days before her execution.

Irene and Glenn

Schroeder was born in Benwood, W.Va., on Feb. 17, 1909. Her father, Joseph Crawford, had eight living children and seven dead, she testified, and she was the youngest. They were very poor, and she began working at a young age, managing to stay in school through all but two weeks of the eighth grade.

Her mother died when Schroeder was 8 years old, and she was sent to live with one married sister, then another, Ruby Schroeder.

When she was 15 she married Ruby's husband's brother, Homer Schroeder, who was significantly older than she. She lived with him only a year and a half before leaving and taking their young son, Donnie, with her.

She went back to living with her sister, then a brother. She was working as a waitress in a Wheeling-area restaurant when she met Dague, a salesman, in August 1927.

Schroeder testified that she first saw him as she was crossing 16th Street in Wheeling, that he almost hit her with his car.

"I walked on across the street, and he turned at the corner and stopped and took me to where I was rooming," she said. A few days later, he came to see her again at the restaurant where she worked.

They began an affair, and Dague left his wife, Teresa H. Dague, and their two children, a boy, Delmar, and a girl, Maryls, for good on April 6, 1929.

Dague and Schroeder began moving around frequently, working odd jobs for money. They sold washing machines in Buffalo, she said, and he pruned trees in Pittsburgh. He sometimes sold cars. Somewhere along the way, they began robbing gas stations and stores, starting on the path that led them to the Butler Road.

On Feb. 23, 1931, Irene Schroeder became the first woman to die in Pennsylvania's electric chair.

She was given "first contact" at 7:01 a.m., and pronounced dead at 7:05 a.m., according to the certificate of her execution. On the form her occupation was listed as "restaurant waitress."

Dague, 34, followed close behind. He was pronounced dead at 7:14 a.m. His certificate reads "auto salesman."

Donnie

The 4-year-old boy who said his mother killed a policeman spent the rest of his life working to conceal his past, according to two of his children.

Don Shrader (aka Don Schroeder) grew up shuffled among several relatives, living for a time with his father, Homer, who remarried.

He served as an Air Force gunner in Korea and was decorated for his service, said his daughter D.J. Everette. He made a career out of the military and took advantage of education programs to study engineering. Eventually he moved to Florida and worked for NASA on several space missions.

But his daughter Sharon Carter, one of Shrader's children from his second marriage, said that for years her family kept unlisted telephone numbers. She remembers one time that someone asked him about the Schroeder case, and he denied knowing anything about it.

Everette, Shrader's daughter from his first marriage, said she grew up believing her father was dead; that he had been killed in combat. That's what her mother and the rest of her family told her.

Her parents had married secretly in Cheyenne, Wyo., where both were living at the time.

"Mother was very close to her family, a large southern family, and you just didn't do those things," Everette said. "More importantly, my grandmother was quite the newspaper reader, and she was well aware of this high-profile situation (the Schroeder case). She was a very strong southern woman, and she made sure the whole family sang the same tune."

So, with the specter of Irene Schroeder between them, the couple separated and moved on.

Everette said she never knew the truth until just a few years ago when she was working on family genealogy and requested Don Shrader's military records.

What she received was a three-inch-thick envelope full of paperwork from a decades-long career. It was definitely not the paperwork of someone who had been killed in Germany in the 1940s, as she was told.

So she began doing research on the case and on Don Shrader's life. She found out that the legal spelling of the surname on Don's birth certificate and Irene and Homer's marriage license is "Shrader." Irene apparently adopted "Schroeder" at some point for a reason that remains unclear.

Through her research, she was able to meet her father and her two half-sisters shortly before his death in December 2009.

She's now working on a book about her father's experiences and their family history, Everette said. She's even hoping her research can clear Irene's name, or at least give some context for the choices her grandmother made.

"What was done was a devastating thing for the family," Everette said. "His whole life, and then mine, was affected by Irene. But then you go back to where Irene started, being raised in that poverty and that environment. ... Not that I'm giving excuses, but I want people to know the real Irene."