Black teen executed for murder in 1944 may get posthumous retrial According to reports from execution witnesses the straps used to bind him to the electric chair were too big to fit around his tiny 95-pound frame. The request for a new trial includes sworn statements from two of Stinney's siblings who say he was in fact with them for the whole time on the day the girls were killed. Stinney's now elderly sister Annie Ruffner, who was seven at the time of the murders, said she and her brother were grazing their cow when the girls appeared and asked them where they could find flowers called maypops. According to Mrs Ruffner her brother told them he did not know and the girls left. She added: "It was strange to see them in our area, because white people stayed on their side of Alcolu and we knew our place." The girls' bodies were found the next morning in a water-filled ditch. They had both been beaten around the head with what was believed to be a railroad spike. Stinney's confession and the transcript from the trial have since disappeared. George Frierson, a local school board member campaigning for the retrial, told the Associated Press: "Why was George Stinney electrocuted? The state can't produce any paperwork to justify why he was.