The Last Gasp Read online

  Figure 9 Eaton’s new gas chamber arrives at Colorado State Prison with a woman inside. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of Best Collection, Cañon City Public Library.

  To encapsulate this steel trap, Warden Best enlisted some of his convict laborers to construct a tidy edifice in a corner of the prison yard. The death house, jocularly known as “Best’s Penthouse,” resembled a spruced-up version of Nevada’s converted prison barbershop. The small building was a one-story Mission-style stone structure with a slanted roof and long, low windows with brick parapet and sills that made it look almost like a hamburger stand, save for a series of curious pipes and wires that protruded from its roof. Best and some of his cohorts enjoyed posing for photographs beside it at various stages of its construction. Based on its outward appearance, an uninformed observer would never guess that its function was to snuff out human lives.

  The keepers of Best’s Penthouse didn’t have to wait long to receive its first guest. William Cody Kelley and an accomplice had been convicted of murdering a pig rancher with a lead pipe, binding him with barbed wire, and torching him inside his looted house to try to cover up the crime. His accomplice’s death sentence was commuted, but Kelley was too poor to pay the $200 needed to prepare a trial transcript, and the court itself was not about to oblige, so his case stood to become Colorado’s first death sentence not to receive a review by the state supreme court.42 Although he continued to insist he was innocent and his young wife publicly begged for mercy, citing the welfare of the couple’s four-month-old infant, nobody moved to stop his execution. Governor Johnson said, “I believe legal executions are barbaric and I am opposed to capital punishment, but I think that the prompt carrying out of sentences in cases such as this will do much to hold in check any possible outbreak of mob violence in Colorado.”43

  Figure 10 Warden Roy Best (left) and Dr. R. E. Holmes outside Colorado’s newly constructed death house. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of Best Collection, Cañon City Public Library.

  When word of the situation reached a passing tourist named Lorena A. Hickok, however, she prepared to donate the money—until a friend urged her not to do so, warning that her actions might embarrass President Franklin D. Roosevelt, since none of his supporters would want it revealed that Hickok was the intimate companion of Mrs. Roosevelt. Consequently, Hickok didn’t intervene, and she later wrote a private letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, confiding, “I feel as though we were living in the Dark Ages, and I loathe myself for not having more courage and trying to stop it, no matter what the consequences were.” By the time the first lady indicated she would not have wanted her friend to compromise her principles in such a way, it was already too late for Kelley.44

  With nothing to stop the state’s first gas execution, Best prepared to try out his new apparatus. After consulting a list of scientific advisors, he had his team run through their execution protocol using a crated hog. During its execution the pig squealed and squirmed, but two minutes and twenty seconds after the cyanide gas was released, the animal was pronounced dead. The technicians also tested the gas on an old dog, a pigeon, and a bunch of canaries, all of which also died in rapid order.45 Colorado was now ready to gas its first man.

  On the night of June 22, 1934, Kelley was stripped down to his shorts and socks (to prevent his clothes from absorbing any of the gas or prolonging his life) and marched into the death house. The guards seated him in the middle wooden chair and strapped him down tightly, putting a black blindfold over his eyes.

  Beneath the chair was a trough containing twelve potassium cyanide “eggs”—three more than Nevada had used. Under the trough was a pan of sulfuric acid. The guards quickly withdrew and sealed the door.

  Peering through the windows were fifteen physicians and a contingent of other witnesses. Somebody out of their sight pulled a lever and the “eggs” dropped into the bucket. White fumes boiled up from beneath the chair. In ten seconds Kelley was unconscious. In thirty seconds he appeared to be dead.

  “Warden Best,” a newspaperman reported, “pronounced the execution the most successful and painless one ever conducted at the penitentiary,” saying the materials for the execution had cost the state of Colorado only ninety cents.46 Again, the latest developments were reported worldwide.

  With the horse already out of the gate, some American state courts were pressed to decide if the new method was unconstitutional as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment. “The fact that it is less painful and more humane than hanging is all that is required to refute completely the charge that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” the Arizona Supreme Court declared.47

  Shortly after the court’s ruling and only two weeks after Colorado’s execution of Kelley, on July 6, 1934, Arizona moved to execute two Chicano brothers, Manuel and Fred Hernandez, aged eighteen and nineteen years old, who had been convicted of killing an elderly prospector. The pair went to their deaths at the new prison at Florence, their eyes covered with gauze. But as Fred Hernandez was being strapped into the double-sided chair, he continued to insist, “I am innocent. You are killing an innocent man.”48

  After the procedure was underway, some of the witnesses noticed a strange smell and the taste of metal in their mouths. “Stand back!” a prison official shouted. “It isn’t working—it isn’t safe!” The witnesses fled in panic, only to be told later that the smell had simply been from the ammonia they had stored to help neutralize the lethal vapors after the deed was done.49

  A week later Arizona went ahead with the gassing of nineteen-year-old George J. Shaughnessy. Six weeks after that, Louis Sprague Douglas, aged forty-seven, went to his death as well.50

  Like other states, however, Arizona soon found that each gas execution presented some new problems. For example, after Frank Rascon was successfully put to death at Florence and his corpse was about to be buried three hours later, his grieving widow opened the coffin lid to give him a parting kiss—and she quickly fell ill from inhaling too much cyanide, according to a Maricopa County physician.51 Prison officials did their best to meet each of these unexpected challenges.

  In Arizona, as elsewhere in those days, the process of condemning a prisoner to death moved at a brisk pace compared to today’s standards: executions were generally carried out within several months of the crime and only a few months after the verdict. For example, Burt Anderson, a white man in his fifties, was arrested for allegedly shooting to death Cecil Kuykendall outside the Antlers Pool Hall in Prescott on December 23, 1936. On February 4, 1937, he was convicted; on June 7, 1937, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his judgment and sentence; and he was put to death on August 13, 1937—less than eight months after the murder and six months after being found guilty. Usually the public could expect that a gassing would occur less than a year and a half after the capital crime had taken place.52

  Meanwhile, back in Colorado, the second execution in Best’s Penthouse did not take place until June 1935. It involved two Mexican-American brothers, Louis and John Pacheco, who had allegedly invaded a rancher’s home, killed two men, and sexually assaulted and shot the rancher’s wife before lighting the place on fire. A reporter at their execution described them as sitting in their adjoining chairs “as stolid as a pair of Aztec dolls.”53

  Three weeks after that, Leonard Lee Belongia went to his death in the same gas chamber after his conviction for killing a rancher and injuring the rancher’s wife and child. Witnesses testified that Belongia possessed the mental capabilities of a ten-year-old. After his arrest he had put up little defense and willed his body to a medical school for scientific study.54 The following February, Otis McDaniels was gassed to death there for allegedly robbing and murdering a rancher and later killing a deputy sheriff who was transporting him to jail.55

  With the Great Depression still going on and fear of crime running high, other states also jumped on the gas chamber bandwagon. North Carolina had never been known to be squeamish about punishing criminals, often resorti
ng to brutal chain gangs and other harsh penal methods. But some of its attitudes appeared to be softening. In 1935 North Carolina enacted a new law changing its official method of execution to lethal gas, making it the first state east of the Mississippi and the first southern state to authorize the use of the gas chamber. Dr. Charles A. Peterson of Mitchell County, a physician and popular Republican house member, wrote the legislation for what the Raleigh News & Observer said had “largely been his… pet project” for some time—starting after he had witnessed a gruesome and messy electrocution.56 Like many of the gas chamber’s early adherents, Peterson claimed to oppose capital punishment but favored a humane method of execution over lynching and other painful means of death. He convinced the Joint Committee on Penal Institutions to hold public hearings so that he and six others, including other physicians, two dentists, and a newspaper reporter, could attest to the advantages of lethal gas over electrocution and hangings.57

  One legislator, Representative U.S. Page, offered an amendment calling for “mobile executions” by means of a portable gas chamber that would be carried around by truck, in order to facilitate the process for local officials and residents and allow for public executions. But lawmakers rejected the approach as undignified, settling instead on Peterson’s original version of the bill. The state senate approved the bill and the governor signed it into law. The new measure left North Carolina with two legal methods of execution: electrocution and lethal gas.58 (In 1941 the Nazis would begin using gassing vans—hermetically sealed trucks with the engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment—to kill thousands of prisoners who were being transported to the crematoria at Chelmno in German-occupied Poland.)

  Supporters claimed the new stationary gas chamber method would result in quick, painless, odorless, and bloodless executions in North Carolina. One senator said he expected the gassing of two or three persons would take less time than a single electrocution, thereby saving time and expense. But building the new Eaton death device ended up costing taxpayers $2,800 instead of the $500 that was originally estimated.59

  Getting it right in North Carolina would not prove easy, however. After hydrocyanic gas was first tested on two dogs at Central Prison, Warden H.H. Honeycutt complained that he had witnessed all 160 electrocutions carried out at the prison since 1910 but the gas had caused the poor animals to howl piteously. He said he didn’t like it. Nevertheless, officials of the United States Public Health Service and the State Health Department pronounced the gassing equipment in order, and North Carolina went ahead with its first chemical execution.60

  Like Colorado’s gas chamber, the new North Carolina model was intended to incorporate technological improvements over previous versions. Eaton said that its latest changes would ensure that Honeycutt would not have to wait for more than an hour to clear the chamber of lethal gas in order to verify that death had occurred. And North Carolina’s physician in charge would have a closer vantage point than ever before, observing the execution from an inner window that would be in the last of a series of air-sealed doors leading into the death chamber, thereby permitting him to do his job more effectively. Special protective plate windows would better allow witnesses to observe the execution through a window that was nine feet long and three feet high, and this better view would enable more of them to follow the movements of the condemned, who would be sitting only a few feet away. The new gas chamber was sixteen feet long, seven feet high, and nine feet wide and conformed to the general contours of the existing death house structure. Its interior largely consisted of bolted and welded steel plates that were three-sixteenths of an inch thick. The exterior was covered with masonry of terracotta tile, with the exception of openings for the windows.

  Witnesses didn’t have to be exposed to the prisoner as he approached the gas chamber, for there was a special walkway connecting death row to the gas chamber. This connection point was sealed by heavy refrigerator-like doors that could be closed airtight to prevent any gas—or person—from escaping or entering. The condemned prisoner would be strapped to the chair. A jar containing hydrochloric acid (rather than sulfuric acid) would be placed beneath the chair, just below a rack containing five pellets or “eggs” of potassium cyanide. At the chosen moment, an electric button would release these eggs into the acid, and the chemical reaction would immediately cause deadly hydrocyanic gas to quickly fill the chamber in the area closest to the condemned. The first whiffs of the Prussic acid would cause unconsciousness and almost immediate death. Safety locks would prevent the doors from being opened until all of the gas had been exhausted by means of a fan and flue through the roof.61

  But North Carolina’s first use of its new machinery did not go well. On January 24, 1936, the tarheel state proceeded to kill Allen Foster, a mentally impaired black youth from Alabama who had been convicted of raping a white woman after straying from a Civilian Conservation Corps camp. Foster’s distraught mother had done all she could to save him, slipping desperate notes to Governor J.C.B. Ehringhaus. “I hate to worrie you so much but I just can’t help it Gov.,” she wrote in one of them. “If it is just some way [he] could get life sentence and not be killed. I want to him to live that all I got to live for in this world. Please save him from that Gas please. I taught him all I could and all I knowed about the white people law.”62 But Ehringhaus was unmoved.

  On the day of the scheduled execution, the bold headline in the Raleigh newspaper read: “TERRIFIED NEGRO FACES FIRST GAS DEATH HERE.” Foster was quoted as saying, “The soul can be ready, but the flesh ain’t, and I’m worried.” The story by reporter John Parris, who was allowed to spend the eve of the execution on death row with Foster and his fellow condemned inmates, recounted:

  Foster had a last word too, before he “catches the train to heb’n.”…

  “You all shore bin good to me,” he began. His voice was clear.

  “I certainly does appreciate everything you all’s done for me. You’ve been tellin’ me to find God. I’ve found God, and I’ll always keep him dere in my heart.”63

  Two dozen white newspapermen and other witnesses watched as the twenty-year-old prisoner—whom one reporter described as a “husky dusky Negro”—entered the freezing white chamber in cotton boxer shorts and was strapped, shivering, into the high-backed oak chair, as someone taped the cold stethoscope to his bare chest. The temperature in the death cell hovered at 32 degrees. His “kinky hair” had been shaved and his clothes removed to hasten his death and prevent any deadly cyanide from lingering after the execution. As everyone left the room, Foster said something that was inaudible to most of the witnesses, and he also appeared to raise a clenched fist in an uppercut. Then he said goodbye to his mother and shouted his innocence.

  The executioner, R.L. Bridges, pulled his string, releasing the eggs into the bath of sulfuric acid and discharging the gas. As fumes swirled around him, the youth drew in what one reporter called a mouthful of “concentrated hell” as if it were cigarette smoke. For the next ten minutes his head dropped, his eyes rolled, his body convulsed, and he continued to keep trying to speak. Halfway through the process, a horrified witness, Dr. Ransom L. Carr of Duplin County, exclaimed, “We’ve got to shorten it or get rid of it entirely.”

  Authorities later acknowledged it had taken more than eleven agonizing minutes to kill him. Foster’s heartbeats were monitored by Dr. George S. Coleman, the dean of Duke University’s School of Medicine. The physician later said Foster had been fully conscious for at least three minutes, thereby contributing to many of the witnesses’ anger and revulsion.64 One witness, the Raleigh newsman W.T. Bost, who in his day had observed 160 executions and five lynchings, said, “It was the most barbarous thing I have ever seen.” The coroner said, “Never again for me. It’s slow torture—that’s what it is.”

  In the end, what would be most remembered about the execution were the words the dying prisoner had called out. According to the most celebrated version of the story, he had pleaded, “Save me, Joe Louis! Save me, J
oe Louis! Save me, Joe Louis!” as if begging for the great African-American boxing champion to intervene. Decades later, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. would cite the episode in one of his books.65

  After death was pronounced, the witnesses were made to wait for another twenty-four minutes until the gas was removed from the chamber and the body was removed. A reporter said witnesses were so shocked and repulsed that “they forgot that the Negro in the chair was paying the penalty for raping a white woman.” But Dr. Charles Peterson, the father of the gas chamber law, stoically pronounced, “I am satisfied that Foster’s death was painless. I am positive that the new method is more humane than electrocution.”66

  In the wake of the botched Foster execution, the Raleigh News & Observer commissioned an organization known as Science Services to make a scientific report regarding the effects of execution by lethal gas on a human being. The resulting study reported:

  Internal asphyxia, or suffocation of the tissues, is what occurs in death by hydrocyanic acid gas…. The body, however, is not deprived of air as in ordinary suffocation, say by strangling. There is plenty of oxygen in the blood of a person poisoned by hydrocyanic acid. But the protoplasm—the essential of living cells—cannot absorb the oxygen that is available…. Cyanide poisons the central nervous system, first stimulating it and producing convulsions and then causing paralysis. Paralysis of the breathing center in the nervous system is the immediate cause of death. So persons poisoned by hydrocyanic acid stop breathing several minutes before their hearts stop beating.

  According to the expert report, electrocution was by far the more humane method of execution than hanging or lethal gas, for unconsciousness was immediate and death almost certainly followed very soon thereafter.67