Paul Crump, ex-Death Row inmate who wrote `Burn, Killer, Burn!', dies at 72

Jet, Nov 4, 2002

Paul Crump, a former Death Row inmate spared from the electric chair 35 hours before he was scheduled to die in 1962, recently died of lung cancer at the Chester Memorial Hospital in Randolph County, IL. He was 72.

Crump's death sentence for fatally shooting a security guard during a 1952 robbery was later changed to 119 years and he was paroled in 1993 after serving 39 years.

He entered prison barely literate, but spent the next years reading books about the condemned.

The same year Crump was scheduled to die, his novel Burn, Killer, Burn! was published by Johnson Publishing Company.

The book was about a murderer who committed suicide to avoid being executed. Survivors include a wife, two daughters and a sister.