James Morelli

In mid-January 1949, Morelli and Fentress went on trial for the murder of Emil Schmeichel, the second trial to take place. In a similar strategy to the first trial, Morelli and Fentress attempted to blame the murders entirely on Daley. The jury deliberated for nine hours before finding both guilty of Schmeichel's murder. This time, Fentress received another 199-year sentence in prison to be served consecutively with the first sentence, while Morelli was sentenced to death.

After Morelli's appellate attorney Charles Bellows announced his intention to file an appeal challenging Morelli's conviction and death sentence to the Supreme Court of Illinois, a district court judge stayed Morelli's execution, delaying it from March 19 to May 14. The state Supreme Court ultimately rejected Morelli's appeal. Two days prior to the May 14 execution date, a judge granted Morelli a reprieve until August 12 to give him time to prepare for a July hearing before the Illinois pardon and parole board. On July 12 1949, Morelli's hearing took place, in which he attempted to earn a commutation of his death sentence to life imprisonment. At the hearing, Morelli's attorneys attempted to argue for a new trial by claiming that Morelli's frequent characterization in local newspapers as a "mad dog" unfairly prejudiced him in the eyes of the jury. On July 25, the pardon and parole board rejected his plea for clemency, but Morelli soon received a second reprieve delaying his execution until September 23. Overall, Morelli received five stays before his execution date was finalized at November 25, 1949.

Morelli was executed in the electric chair in the Cook County Jail at 12:08 a.m. on November 26, 1949, and pronounced dead two minutes later. He spoke no words in the death chamber, and his last words, spoken from his cell before he embarked on his walk to the execution chamber, were, "I have nothing to say." Morelli's execution had 154 official witnesses, the most out of any executions to occur at the Cook County Jail.

Forty-year-old Thomas Daley was the leader of a small street gang in which Morelli and 19-year-old Lowell Fentress were members. Daley decided to exact revenge against 33-year-old garage operator John Kuesis because Kuesis turned into a police informant and tipped police off to an $800 robbery that Daley and Fentress committed in September 1947. Daley and Fentress went to trial on robbery charges based on Kuesis's statement, but they were acquitted. After his arrest for the mass murders, Fentress confessed to the September robbery.

Daley brought Morelli and Fentress to Kuesis's garage on the night of December 12, 1947, initially with the intent to only beat Kuesis. Four other men who were friends and associates of Kuesis were present: Theodore James Callis, Emil Schmeichel, Frank Baker, and Kuesis's brother Nick. Morelli held the four men at gunpoint while Fentress and Daley beat John Kuesis. When Kuesis fought them both off, Daley ended the fight by shooting and killing Kuesis. Daley, Morelli, and Fentress decided to kill the other four men to eliminate all witnesses to the murder. They forced the four witnesses into their car and drove them around the Chicago suburbs for eight hours, shooting each one by one and then throwing their bodies out of the car to leave them for dead. Callis and Schmeichel died from their gunshot wounds, while Nick Kuesis and Baker survived with critical injuries. After his arrest, Fentress explained that he, Daley, and Morelli shot the other victims to eliminate witnesses to the murder of Kuesis.

In 1944, Morelli was placed under a year of court supervision after being convicted of assault and battery. On February 23, 1945, Morelli was placed on five years of probation for armed robbery. Morelli was still on probation at the time of the murder.

Morelli's execution was one of very few electric chair executions to ever be photographed, with others including Ruth Snyder in New York's Sing Sing Prison in 1928, and Willie Bragg, Mississippi's first electrocution in 1940.

James Morelli (March 18, 1927 – November 26, 1949) was a gangster based in Chicago, Illinois, who was executed for participating alongside gangsters Thomas Daley and Lowell Fentress in the mass murder of three people. Several newspapers called the killings the "Mad Dog" murders. Although Morelli participated in three murders, he was only sentenced to death for the murder of one of the victims, 30-year-old Emil Schmeichel. Some reporters described Morelli's crime as "the worst Chicago mass killing since the Saint Valentine's Day massacre."

James Morelli was born to Fred Morelli and Dorothy Palermo on March 18, 1927, in Chicago. Prior to his death, he was married to Genevieve Morelli, with whom he had one daughter. Morelli reportedly held his infant daughter for the first time while he was in jail awaiting execution.