The Last Gasp Read online

  In preparing for their second gas execution, North Carolina officials consulted with chemists in Colorado in a frantic effort to avoid a repeat disaster. One of the chief recommendations was for them to raise the death chamber temperature in order to achieve more vigorous vaporization and thereby reduce the amount of suffering. Another was to alter the mixture of the hydrocyanic solution to the “Colorado formula”—fifteen one-ounce pellets of potassium cyanide, three pints of sulfuric acid, and three quarts of water (in effect, a lot more cyanide, less acid and more water).68

  North Carolina’s second gassing, of Ed Jenkins, a forty-year-old white man convicted of murder, took seven and a half minutes from the springing of the trap until death was pronounced, thus amounting to a significant improvement, but still not an ideal standard. Nevertheless, most physicians and prison officials were later quoted as saying that Jenkins hadn’t suffered; his death was painless and humane. Oscar Pitts, the state’s acting director of the State Penal Division, announced, “Lethal gas has come to stay in North Carolina.”69

  Thus the state appeared ready to repair its tainted image and poised to proceed efficiently with smooth and rapid executions. Barely a week after the second gassing, three black men were scheduled to be put to death in the chamber, one by electrocution and the other two (J.T. Sanford and Thomas Watson) by lethal gas, thereby affording citizens some basis of comparison between the two methods and against the record of the previous two gassings.70 After the first subject, William Long, was dispatched in the electric chair, the electrical equipment was removed and the sulfuric acid and white cyanide pellets were readied. Sanford was brought into the chamber in his boxer shorts and strapped into the chair as stethoscopes were taped to his chest.

  But when the executioner pulled the lever to release the pellets, a mechanical malfunction delayed the drop and the ensuing vaporization for four minutes, during which time the puzzled inmate kept straining to detect the fumes. Twenty seconds later he appeared unconscious and his breathing “was rapid and violent, accompanied by groans and grunts so loud that they could be heard through the concrete-covered steel walls of the chamber.” Although his breathing stopped after two more minutes, his body continued to undergo spasms, until, finally, a witness wrote, “The Negro’s lips drew back over his teeth in a ghastly grin of death”—something one medical expert later called a “sardonic smile” that signified an involuntary reflex of the muscles around the mouth.71

  After the gas was cleared and Sanford’s lifeless body was removed from the chamber, the last prisoner was brought in. Watson was described as “one of the most intelligent looking Negroes ever executed at the prison here.” After the lever was pulled, he appeared unconscious within thirty seconds of taking his first breath, but his attempts to breathe and strains against the straps persisted violently for more than a minute until the same ghastly grin came over his face as well.72 Afterward, with four gassings on his record, Dr. Peterson defended his new method against any and all criticism, blaming the media for being uninformed laymen who had no background or training in executions of criminals.73

  Six weeks later North Carolina executed two more men.74 Then two more blacks, one of them seventy-three years old, were gassed on August 21.75 In December, Martin Moore, a twenty-two-year-old African-American who continued to repudiate his “confession” was pronounced dead twelve and a half minutes after entering the gas chamber, making him the twenty-third person executed and the nineteenth person gassed to death in North Carolina in 1936.76 At that pace, North Carolina was carrying out almost as many executions as New York, a much more populous state, did in its Sing Sing electric chair.

  North Carolina’s reliance on the gas chamber was unmatched among all the states in the 1930s. By the end of 1941 the gas chamber had claimed eighty-two lives, at least sixty-eight of them African-American—many of them for crimes other than murder. Several classic criminological studies would find North Carolina punished least severely whites who had killed, raped, or burglarized blacks and penalized most severely blacks who killed, raped, or burglarized whites.77 Its use of capital punishment also disproportionately targeted persons of low intelligence—a class of citizens the state also sought to curb through its strong eugenics program of compulsory sterilization and institutionalization.78

  By the late 1930s, however, many key players in North Carolina had grown uneasy with the gas chamber. Another horrible spectacle surrounded the double execution in February 1938 of Edgar Smoak and Milford Exum, both of which dragged on for interminable spans—thirteen and seventeen minutes, respectively.79 Former warden H.H. Honeycutt publicly favored returning to electrocution, saying, “The gas chamber is horrible. Gas is so long and drawn out…. I believe most of the men on death row would rather die by electricity than gas.”80

  In late 1938 Governor Clyde Roarke Hoey expressed concern that lethal gas asphyxiation was slower and consequently “far less humane” than electrocution.81 Clergymen, editors, physicians, and members of the general public also voiced their disdain for the painful and protracted nature of gas executions. Gruesome accounts of the gassings at Central Prison continued into the 1940s, leaving many North Carolinians ashamed of their state, particularly as they became more aware of what was happening in Europe.

  North Carolina was not alone in gassing mentally retarded persons. In 1936 Colorado experienced a case that would come back to haunt the state for many years; as late as 2007 groups were demanding a posthumous pardon and other remedies. The story began when Frank Aguilar, a thirty-four-year-old Mexican laborer, was arrested for the brutal rape and murder of a fifteen-year-old girl in Pueblo on August 15, 1936. He confessed after police found the murder weapon in his home, admitting that he had a grudge against the girl’s father. There was no mention or other evidence of an accomplice. Aguilar was quickly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. But police in Cheyenne, Wyoming, later arrested a twenty-year-old vagrant, Joe Arridy, who obviously was severely retarded but who claimed that he had participated in the crime in Pueblo with “Frank.” Arridy, a child of Syrian immigrants, had run away from the Colorado State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives and was picked up by Wyoming police sixteen days after the murder. The Wyoming State Tribune labeled Arridy a “feebleminded moron,” noting that his story changed every time he told it, but Cheyenne’s police chief insisted he was guilty. Despite doubts about his guilt, Arridy was charged with capital murder, and a trial was held to determine if he was sane. Although his IQ was measured at 46, authorities said he knew the difference between right and wrong, and therefore he was ultimately convicted and sentenced to death.

  Arridy’s appellate attorney, Gail Ireland, pleaded for Arridy’s life to be spared, saying, “Believe me when I say that if he is gassed, it will take a long time for the state of Colorado to live down the disgrace.” But the conviction was narrowly affirmed, and Aguilar went to his death without being called upon to testify about Arridy’s innocence or guilt.82 As the gas was being pumped into the chamber around Aguilar, one of the witnesses, Ed Hamilton, fifty-seven, of Pueblo, suffered a heart attack and died a short time later.83

  Meanwhile, on death row Warden Best and many of the convicts took a liking to the “simple-minded” youth, buying him toy trains and picture books, which led to a stream of heart-wrenching newspaper stories and pictures. One account included a transcript from this exchange that was tape-recorded on December 1, 1938.

  “Don’t you [Arridy] want to be killed?” somebody asked.

  “No, I want to live,” Arridy replied, “I want to live here with Warden Best.”

  “Don’t you want to go back to the home in Grand Junction [an institution he ran away from six years earlier]?”

  “No, I want to get a life sentence and stay here with Warden Best. At the home the kids used to beat me.”

  “Would you rather be here Joe?”

  “Yes I want to stay here, I can’t get in trouble here…”

  “Do you remember after the litt
le girls were killed, you ran to the train, and they arrested you in Cheyenne, Wyoming?”

  “No, I don’t remember that. But I remember the judge wanted to kill me.”

  “You know what it means to go to the gas house, don’t you Joe?”

  “Yes, they kill you there. But I don’t want to be killed. I want a life sentence and stay here all the time.”

  In the end, on January 6, 1939, Best and Father Albert Schaller accompanied Arridy to the gas chamber. Best asked the grinning youth if he still planned to raise chickens in heaven. “No,” Arridy replied, “I would like to play the harp like Father Schaller told me I could.”84 Then Best put him to death.

  Best continued to fine-tune his executions in an effort to show that they minimized suffering. On September 30, 1939, he personally put to death two convicted murderers by releasing the gas into the acid containers beneath their chairs. One of them—Pete Catalina, forty-one, a Salida pool hall operator who had supposedly shot a patron to death during an argument over a fifty-cent bag of poker chips—was hooked up to a cardiogram that recorded each of his heartbeats before and during the action. I.D. Price, the electrical expert who operated the cardiac instruments for the occasion, reported that Catalina’s heartbeat had appeared strong and even for one minute and ten seconds, then stopped abruptly when he inhaled the deadly fumes, supposedly showing that he had died quickly and without fear. The other executed man, Angelo Agnes, a thirty-one-year-old African-American from Denver who had been condemned for slaying his estranged wife, was pronounced dead exactly two minutes after the warden pulled his string.85 By the end of 1941, eleven men, at least six of them nonwhite, had died in Colorado’s lethal chamber.

  But Colorado’s death house stories became lost in the blur as more states joined in the movement to adopt lethal gas. At the start of 1935 Wyoming adopted legislation prescribing lethal gas as its official execution method. The editor of the Rawlins Republican, W.L. Alcorn, commended his local state representative, Senator I.W. Dinsmore, for introducing the bill following the newspaper’s revulsion over a hanging that had nearly decapitated George Brownfield in 1930.86 Their opponents put up a stiff fight, but the pro-gassing forces ultimately won.87 Wyoming officials sought guidance from Nevada and Colorado and from Eaton Metal Products in establishing their new system. A Cheyenne architect, William Dubois, oversaw the design and construction in collaboration with Eaton.

  In mid-November 1936, the Associated Press reported that Eaton had completed a “glistening, all-steel lethal gas chamber, guaranteed by the makers to ‘bring almost instant death.’” Earl Liston said his “tank” was completely airtight and should be “just as efficient” as the larger one in use in Colorado. “The gas swirls upward like smoke from a cigarette,” he said, “and the prisoner is unconscious at almost the first whiff.”88

  In August 1937 Wyoming inaugurated its new Eaton-built gas chamber by executing Paul H. (“Perry”) Carroll, a thirty-six-year-old white man who allegedly had murdered his boss, the superintendent of the Wyoming division of the Union Pacific Railroad, at Rawlins (seventy miles from the Colorado border), on October 27, 1935. A small black blindfold was placed over Carroll’s eyes and the guards shook hands with him before exiting the chamber. Warden Alex McPherson pulled a control lever dropping a cheesecloth sack containing thirty-two cyanide eggs weighing half an ounce each into a bucket containing a mixture of three quarts of water and three pints of sulfuric acid beneath the chair, sending deadly fumes swirling through the cell. After a few deep breaths, his head pulled back and he gasped, then his head fell to his chest; his body made further reflex spasms for about six minutes. As soon as death was pronounced, another switch was thrown to open a vent at the top of the chamber, and an electric fan helped evacuate gas from the room. Valves on four ammonia tanks were then opened to neutralize the lethal fumes. Finally, after fourteen minutes of the ammonia treatment, guards wearing gas masks unbolted the door and removed Carroll’s body.89

  In 1940 a thirty-eight-year-old Jewish rail worker, Stanley Lantzer, met the same end for allegedly murdering his wife. Lantzer’s executioner later said he preferred hanging to the gas chamber because the victim lost consciousness as soon as the trap fell, whereas lethal gas took several minutes to kill its victim. But Dinsmore, the author of the 1935 legislation that replaced hanging, was quoted as saying, “Lethal gas execution probably can be improved upon… but I’m sure now that it’s the most humane way of taking a life currently known to man.”90

  In April 1937, Missouri also voted in lethal gas. Missouri was a state rooted in both the Midwest and the South, reflecting yet another expansion of lethal-gas executions—several legislators expressed concern that local capital cases were “too dangerous” because they often resulted in “Roman holiday” lynchings. Like three of its predecessors who had moved to gas (Colorado, Oregon, and Arizona), it, too, had previously abolished capital punishment for a time, but then reinstated it.91 Defense attorneys complained the new method would make juries more likely to hand out death sentences in the belief that death was “painless” and “humane.”92 But their arguments fell flat, and lethal gas became the official method of execution. Missouri’s Eaton model, almost an exact duplicate of Wyoming’s, claimed its first victim, William Wright, a thirty-three-year-old black man, in September 1937.93 By the end of 1941, of the first thirteen persons executed, at least eight were black.

  Discussions about lethal gas went on in California for more than a decade. In 1930 Governor James Rolph vetoed a bill to substitute gas for hanging. But after members of the legislature continued to agitate for the new method, in 1932 the Republican Rolph ordered the wardens of the state’s two largest prisons to witness a gas chamber execution in Nevada and report back their impressions. James B. (“Big Jim”) Holohan of San Quentin and Court Smith of Folsom visited Carson City for the gassing of Everett T. Mull, and they brought back two sharply contrasting views.

  Warden Holohan, a former sheriff who had witnessed several botched hangings, said he preferred the Nevada system for being painless and less prone to mistakes. “Nevada authorities inform me that never in a lethal gas execution has there been the slightest slip up, the least error,” he claimed. “Every execution has gone off smoothly.” Smith, on the other hand, concluded the noose was more merciful than complicated and drawn-out gassing procedures.94

  The chemical companies dreamed up all sorts of publicity gimmicks to sell the image of the gas chamber in California. At the beginning of 1933 Wide World Photos distributed a photograph of a librarian at Pasadena’s famed Huntington Library poring over $50 million worth of rare books and manuscripts that were being processed through a specially built gas chamber designed to rid the paper treasures of the Sitodrepa panicea menace. The headline in the New York Times read “Lethal Gas Chamber for Book Worms.”95

  While Rolph was mulling over his wardens’ reports, he found himself the object of disdain as a result of his response to a November 1933 lynching of two alleged kidnappers in San Jose. The day after a mob broke into the jail and hanged the two suspects, Rolph responded, “If anyone is arrested for this good job, I’ll pardon them all. The aroused people of that fine city of San Jose were so enraged… it was only natural that peaceful and law abiding as they are, they should rise and mete out swift justice to these two murderers and kidnappers.” Governor Rolph added that he would like to release all the kidnappers and murderers in San Quentin and Folsom prisons and deliver them to the “patriotic San Jose citizens who know how to handle such a situation.”

  His comments created a firestorm of criticism. Editorial writers had a field day. In New York City, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders, including the president of the American Jewish Congress, launched an antilynching campaign. Some Jewish leaders complained that their efforts to protest Nazi persecutions in Germany had been weakened by the ability of Europeans to point to lynchings of African-Americans in America, and Reverend Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem warned, “If lynching is not stopped
the mobs will lynch not only Negroes, but white men, and not only white men, but Governors and newspaper reporters and photographers. If we don’t put a stop to the situation we will have mob rule right here in our city.”96 Such warnings struck a chord, as newspapers had recently pointed out that more than one thousand members of Hitler’s Swastika organization had recently immigrated to the United States and organized themselves into an American division of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (Nazi Party), based in New York.97

  Saddled with the new nickname “Governor Lynch,” Rolph died in office a few months later. But the California lynching situation continued to take on national and international implications. The San Jose lynching and its aftermath caused more embarrassment throughout the United States after a prominent Nazi magazine published photographs of the California necktie party to illustrate the decadence of American life, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer also released a feature movie, Fury (1936), which was based on the vigilante hanging.98

  Rolph’s successor, Frank F. Merriam, assumed office at the height of the Depression, and he immediately faced intense labor unrest that saw the police use tear gas and army troops from the Presidio to regain control. Such actions involving chemical agents and civil unrest were duly noted by agents reporting to the Nazi regime. German lieutenant general Friedrich von Boetticher, for example, served as Hitler’s military attaché in Washington from 1933 to 1941, and he often traveled around the country performing inspections at the Presidio and other sites and sharing his anti-Semitic views with sympathetic members of the U.S. Army Corps, Charles Lindbergh, prominent authors, and other key players.99

  During Governor Merriam’s third year in office, in May of 1937, he received a bill to switch the method of execution to lethal gas. The bill’s sponsor was Senator Holohan, the former San Quentin warden, who urged that California model its gas chamber on Wyoming’s and carry on the best in state-of-the-art technology. Merriam signed the bill into law, making California the eighth and the most populous state thus far to embrace lethal gas.100 The gas chamber had achieved a new level of acceptance. The latest developments were reported around the world.