THE SPREAD OF THE CHAIR
Despite the evidence furnished by their eyes, ears, and noses, the observers at Auburn proclaimed themselves satisfied that William Kemmler had not suffered during the botched execution. Electrocution was given the green light to be rolled out across the prison system in New York. Following Kemmler, six more convicts were executed over eighteen months as authorities perfected the system. The gag order on the press was still in effect, so executions were carried out in secret. Little is known about them aside from the official reports, which, like the first, show them proceeding smoothly.
But in February 1892, new governor Roswell Flower repealed the gag order. Now the warden could invite members of the press to be among the twelve neutral observers at each execution.
The seventh victim of Old Sparky was Charles McElvaine, a nineteen-year-old hoodlum from one of the rougher neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York. On August 21, 1889, he got married. Two days later, he met with two young associates and broke into a neighborhood grocery store. The store owner, Christian Luca, who lived above the shop, woke up and disturbed the three burglars. He confronted them, but McElvaine had a knife. He ran at Luca and drove the knife repeatedly into his chest. The grocer was stabbed several times before falling to the ground, dead.
McElvaine turned to Luca’s wife, who was screaming at the sight of her dying husband on the ground. He was about to attack her too when the noise alerted a passing patrolman, and McElvaine was arrested at the scene.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported the crime like this:
McElvaine had entered the passageway to the bedroom when Mr. Luca was awakened by the noise. He went out into the passageway where he came face to face with McElvaine. He grappled with the burglar and would have easily overpowered him, as Mr. Luca was a large, powerful man, while McElvaine was small and weak, had he not been met with a murderous knife. As soon as Luca seized the intruder a terrible struggle ensued. The noise awakened Mrs. Luca, who rushed into the room only to see her husband down on his knees by the window, and McElvaine literally hacking him to pieces with a big knife.
Caught red-handed, his conviction was a formality. But the appeals process took a full two years, during which time he was granted a retrial and once again convicted and sentenced to death. Finally the day loomed for the execution, which was to be held in Sing Sing, about thirty miles up the Hudson River from New York. The warden, W. R. Brown, invited eight reporters to witness the event, on February 7, 1892.
Once again Edwin Davis was the executioner. He was being paid his usual fee of $150 for pulling the switch. Davis was a reclusive man, unwilling to speak to reporters or allow his picture to be taken. As the years passed, he became odder and odder, as his concern for his personal safety grew. He was so worried about relatives of Old Sparky victims seeking him out that he changed his address frequently. He did not even allow the prison authorities to know where he lived by the end of his tenure as New York State Electrician. When they had a job for him, they had to post a cryptic personal advertisement in a newspaper and he would get in touch. He had an arrangement with the rail company that he would not get on board at the platform but would jump on the slowly moving train a bit outside the station.
Despite his oddities, Davis was conscientious about his job and determined to do his best to execute men cleanly and painlessly. He carried his own electrodes, which were always in immaculate condition, and he made several refinements to the chair to improve its efficiency. In fact, to this day he is the only person who has patents registered on the chair. It is very much old technology; it has not changed in over a hundred years.
For the execution of McElvaine, the authorities decided to try an experiment to improve the device. Since Kemmler’s execution, the only change that had been made was the positioning of the bottom electrode. Instead of placing it at the base of the spine with the second electrode attached to a shaven spot on the victim’s skull, they were now attaching the lower electrode to the victim’s calf. This seemed to improve the efficiency of the device, as the skin was thin and there was nothing to impede the flow of current through the body.
But for McElvaine’s execution they tried a suggestion of Edison’s. He had always felt that the key to an execution was making clean contact with the electrodes. From the start Edison had suggested that the prisoner have his hands in two basins of brine. The salty water was a very good conductor of electricity but would also keep the temperature at the point of contact with the electrodes down. The theory was that the current would flow from hand to hand across the torso, stopping the heart but preventing the burning and the horrible smell of cooking flesh that was a feature of the first six electrocutions.
The chair had been modified to accommodate the new method. The arms of the chair were higher up and sloping downwards. Instead of McElvaine’s arms being strapped on top of the chair arms, they were to be strapped beneath them, hands dangling free. Both his hands would then be placed in small jars containing salt water. But the electrodes for the head and legs were also in place, in case the new method did not work.
Dr. Carlos McDonald, who had been present at Kemmler’s execution, was the main medical man now. He quickly explained to reporters that the new method should result in a swift and painless death: “The current will not be applied this time as before. Edison and other men have suggested that the current should be applied through the arms. We are going to test that method.”
McElvaine had appeared relatively unconcerned when woken that morning and had his last breakfast of toast and milk, which he only picked at. But by execution time, his nerves were showing.
The room went quiet as McElvaine was led into the death chamber and across to the chair. He was accompanied by two Catholic priests and seemed to be nervous. He walked to the chair, clutching a brass crucifix tightly in clenched fists, mumbling, “Oh Jesus, help me. Oh Lord, I am sorry that I have offended thee. Oh Almighty God, I despise my sins. Oh Christ, have mercy. Help me, Oh Lord,” a simplified version of the Catholic Act of Contrition.
As the guards began strapping him to the chair, he pressed the crucifix to his lips one final time. He appeared terrified by now; his hands were placed in the two jars of cold water. The warden dropped his handkerchief—the agreed signal—and Davis threw the switch.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported:
‘Let her go,’ shouted McElvaine and he braced his body for the shock. There was a slight grating sound as the lever moved. Electric sparks flashed up, indicating that the current was there. Then the lever passed to its last notch. The current of 1,600 volts passed into the boxes of salt water and into McElvaine’s arms.
There was a convulsive movement. The prisoner’s chest and body raised up an inch or two. The chest expanded. There was no sound. Part of the face that was visible turned first white, then blue. McElvaine looked like a statue. The current was kept on 43 seconds, as near as could be judged by witnesses. The official time was not announced.
‘Shut it off,’ cried Dr. McDonald. The lever was switched back There was a wonderful effect upon the body. From its rigid, statue-like appearance it collapsed and seemed to sink back in the chair, limp and lifeless. The chest relaxed, and foam began to drip from the mouth.
The silence in the execution room lasted ten seconds. Then there was a rattling in the dead man’s throat. Was it a reflex action, or was there still life? The doctors said the former, but it was evident they were not certain, for the electrician stepped forward and, disconnecting the wires that ran into the boxes of salt water, fastened them to the head and the leg.
The prisoner’s wrist was felt, and there was a pulse.
The current was now applied in the traditional way and quickly steam began to rise from the leg and head of the prisoner. But Dr. McDonald assured the witnesses that it was not burning flesh, just steam from damp electrodes.
When the power was switched off, the attending doctors pronounced McElvaine dead. McDonald concluded: “I think Mr. Edison is right. The current should be applied through the arms. This is certainly the most successful execution that has yet taken place. Death was instantaneous and painless beyond question. The current was turned on the second time only to make certain.”
However, in hindsight the execution was not judged such a success, and the experiment of driving the current across the body through the arms was never repeated. From then on, the electrodes would always be placed on the lower leg and the crown of the head.
In addition to the eight press witnesses at the execution, there were four civilian witnesses. One of these was Assemblyman Myer J. Stein, who said, “It was horrible, the most sickening sight I ever witnessed.”
He was so shocked that he tried to introduce a bill to the Assembly replacing electrocution with hanging, but this failed. Electrocution had become the accepted method of execution in the state. Soon the method began to spread. In 1896, Ohio was the second state to build an electric chair. Massachusetts followed two years later. It was a decade before another state switched, but the floodgates were opened. In 1907, New Jersey built their own chair. Virginia followed in 1908, and North Carolina in 1909. Kentucky began electrocutions in 1910, South Carolina in 1912, and Arkansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Nebraska in 1913. It spread throughout the Union, with West Virginia becoming the twenty-sixth and final state to replace the gallows with the electric chair in 1949.
However, aside from a brief period in the Philippines during US rule, the electric chair was never used outside the United States. It remains a peculiarly American innovation.
New York was the state that used the electric chair more than any other. It began there, and the state initially built three chairs, one for Auburn, one for Sing Sing, and one for Dannemora. The three chairs were used until 1914, when it was decided to have only one death row prison. Sing Sing was chosen. From then on all executions took place there, with prisoners being moved to Sing Sing for their final months.
There are many rumors about what happened to the two other chairs. One of the most intriguing is that the famous magician and escape artist, Harry Houdini, bought the chair that fried Kemmler—the original electric chair. The story was widely reported.
Houdini had begun his career in the carnivals and freak shows in places like Coney Island and had always retained a love for that form of entertainment. He used to visit shows all the time, even when he became a world-famous name. One day, after performing with his wife and assistant, Bess, at Huber’s Dime Museum on Coney Island, he mingled with the freaks and specialty acts—Big Alice, the Fat Lady; Emma Schaller, the Ossified Girl; and Unthan, the Legless Wonder were among the company. That day, the company was fascinated with a new exhibit, an electric chair. They were told that it was the original chair from Auburn, which had been used in Kemmler’s execution. Houdini was fascinated with death and with new technology. It appealed to him on both counts. So when Huber’s Dime Museum closed in 1910, he stepped in and purchased the chair, which he put in his Manhattan home. Bess hated the chair and put it out of sight whenever he was away.
After a number of years, Houdini gave the chair as a gift to a fellow magician. Walford Bodie was a Scottish showman who did a bit of everything—hypnotism, ventriloquism, and magic. But he was best known for his electric show. As part of this show, he would stage a mock execution in a replica electric chair. While the current was supposedly flowing through him, his hair would stand on end and sparks would fly. He would hold bulbs and they would light. He was a close friend of Houdini and, perhaps at Bess’s insistence, Harry gave Bodie the Auburn chair in 1920. The Scottish man exhibited the chair, and during his show he condemned the practice of electrocuting prisoners, instead urging people to return to the humanity of the English gallows.
What neither Houdini nor Bodie realized was that the chair from the Huber Dime Museum was not the original chair. That was still in Auburn. During its years of use, it claimed the lives of fifty-four men and one woman. It was stored in the prison, unused, after 1914. But during a prison riot in 1929, it was destroyed by fire. Houdini’s chair was a well-made fake.
In all, New York electrocuted 686 men and 9 women, with the last victim going to the chair in 1963. That was Eddie Lee Mays, an African-American from North Carolina. He had shot to death a female customer at a bar in New York during an armed robbery on March 23, 1961. She was slow to open her purse and once opened, it was empty. So he calmly put the gun to her head and killed her. He was executed on August 15, 1963, by State Electrician Dow Hover, who had held the position for a decade. A reserved man (who died by suicide several years after his retirement), Hover oversaw forty-four executions in Sing Sing, as well as a number of outside jobs for neighboring states. He was paid $150 per execution, the same as his predecessors. Not only had the chair not changed with advancing technology, the executioner’s fee had not kept pace with the modern world either.
In 1965, New York removed the death penalty. It was not put back on the statute books until 1995, after a thirty year absence. But Old Sparky was never used again in the state. Now the death chamber is located at the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora and lethal injection is the approved method. Since 1971, Old Sparky has been lying idle in storage at the Green Haven Correctional Facility. It will never be used again.
Throughout the United States, more than 4,300 people have been electrocuted via the chair. Through most of the twentieth century it was the most popular form of execution. But since the lifting of the moratorium on executions in 1976, it has gradually been replaced by lethal injection, which is seen as a more humane alternative. Every time someone opts for electrocution—some states give prisoners the choice of either that or the needle—the press speculation grows that this might be the last judicial electrocution. A betting man would not wager on Old Sparky ever being fired up in anger again.
A colorful though brutal period of American history is now almost certainly consigned to the past.