Heady is one of only four women to have ever been executed by federal authorities, the others being Lincoln assassination conspirator Mary Surratt in 1865 and Ethel Rosenberg, who, along with her husband Julius, was convicted of being a Soviet spy and executed by electric chair on June 19, 1953, just months before Heady. The fourth woman is Lisa Montgomery of Kansas, who was executed by lethal injection on January 13, 2021, for the 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett.