8

A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES—SIX NOTABLE AND UNUSUAL EXECUTIONS

Each execution follows a well-worn path. Procedures are laid down and followed by officials. Prisoners are prepared in roughly similar ways, and no matter what the method of execution—hanging, electrocution, needle, or bullet—the officials do their best to ensure that the process runs as smoothly as possible and that the prisoner meets a swift and relatively humane end.

But within these parameters, every execution is unique. Each prisoner has his or her own story, and the ripples of every action spread wide. In this chapter we will look in detail at some of the more unusual executions in the century-long history of Old Sparky. These are the stories of the youngest, the earliest, and the most unusual victims of the electric chair, from a fourteen-year-old boy to a three-ton elephant.

ONE: WILLIE FRANCIS, THE MAN WHO WAS ELECTROCUTED TWICE

One of the objectives of the electric chair was to produce an execution machine that would not permit revival. There were occasional stories of convicts being cut from the gallows and revived by their friends or families after the execution. That had to be made impossible.

Yet, in this, the electric chair failed at least once. One man survived his execution, battered, bruised, and badly burnt, but very much alive. But the story of the man who survived the electric chair had no happy ending. His execution was merely rescheduled, his survival buying him nothing more than a year of extra time.

Willie Francis was born in Louisiana in 1929. A poor African American, he finished high school early and became a clerk in a local drug store in St. Martinville. There is some suspicion, based on his later statements, that while he was employed there the store owner, Andrew Thomas, may have sexually abused the young teen. He did not remain long in the job, eventually moving on. But in 1946, an intruder broke in the home of Thomas and shot him five times as he lay in his bed.

Local cops investigated the crime but no leads showed up. Nine months passed and the crime became a cold case, unlikely ever to be solved. But then Willie Francis was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had moved to Texas and was in the vicinity of a drug bust. He was arrested and searched. While it was obvious that he had no connection to the drugs, the cops found a wallet in his possession which belonged to Andrew Thomas. The police in St. Martinville were called, and Francis was sent home.

During the course of an extensive interrogation, Francis, a quiet man with a pronounced stutter, tried to implicate several other local youths in the killing. But eventually he made two written statements confessing that he was the gunman. In one statement, he wrote, “It was a secret about me and him.” This ambiguous statement was taken by later researchers to imply that there had been some sexual abuse, though this has no other foundation than the statements of Francis.

One bit of evidence did not point to Francis: the gun used in the killing had been recovered and belonged to a cop, a deputy sheriff, who had a grudge against Thomas and who had once threatened to kill him. Conveniently, this gun, along with the bullets, disappeared from evidence shortly before the trial. To this day, motive is unclear and there is speculation that the deputy sheriff gave his gun to Francis or left it where Francis could get his hands on it. The victim was a well-known womanizer who had slept with the deputy sheriff’s wife.

The trial lasted eight days. This was a lengthy trial in that era, slowed in part by the fact that Francis pleaded not guilty, despite his two written confessions. Francis could not afford proper legal representation so was represented by a court-appointed lawyer who offered no witnesses and presented no rebutting evidence. The jury had no difficulty convicting Francis and he was sentenced to the electric chair. He would not turn seventeen until close to the execution date.

Louisiana used a chair nicknamed Gruesome Gertie. During the war years the state made the decision to make Gertie mobile, so that the chair would be brought to the prison where the condemned man was being held, rather than having all the condemned men waiting on death row in one facility. The chair was a 300-pound monstrosity of heavy oak construction. It was dismantled and transported by truck from prison to prison. Two men accompanied it—an experienced guard and a prison trustee who helped with the construction. State prison warden Dennis Bazer normally traveled from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola with the chair, but couldn’t this time as he had an important meeting with the state governor the same day as the execution. So he sent Captain Edward Foster, a prison officer, and Vincent Vinezia, an Angola prisoner who was a trustee.

The two arrived in St. Martinville two days prior to the execution and set up the chair, connecting it to a generator running off the van engine. They tested it, and it was delivering sufficient power to get the job done. Then they adjourned to a nearby tavern and went on a two-day bender. By execution day, according to witnesses, the two men reeked of whiskey, but they seemed to be methodically connecting all the wires and electrodes and all seemed to be in order.

On the morning of the execution, a prison barber came into the New Iberia Courthouse, which had a prison wing. This was where Francis had been held since the trial. The barber shaved Francis’s head. As he put away his scissors and razor afterward, he joked: “I guess that’s one haircut you won’t have to pay for.”

Francis laughed loudly. He knew that the barber, a fellow prisoner, was trying to break the tension and put some normality into the day, and he appreciated it. Although he was doing his best to make a good show, he was terrified. A few minutes later, the sheriff and a priest arrived and Francis was put in the back of a black Ford sedan for the ride from New Iberia to the St. Martinville Prison, where Gertie had been set up. The prison was a small, red-brick structure. Outside, as the church bells tolled the hour, a large crowd had gathered. The local Weekly Messenger had proclaimed, in large headlines, “Negro Murderer to Die Here Today.”

The sheriff did not drive directly to the prison, but took a brief detour so that Francis could see the home he had grown up in one last time. His mother was inside, but was in bed sick (perhaps from worry about her son). He did not see her, but he sighed nostalgically as the car cruised past. Then they turned towards the prison, and the final walk. Francis had been given a pair of shiny new leather shoes that morning and realized he was not going to get a chance to wear them for much more than a few yards.

The car drove past the crowd and into the prison, and then the terrified boy was led to the chair and strapped securely in. A black hood was drawn over his head and the guards left the chamber. The engine of the van outside was fired up to power the generator. The room got noisy. At 12:08 p.m. the switch was thrown and Francis’s body stiffened and convulsed as expected. There was the usual low hissing of the electrical circuits. Then the scene was shattered by a scream from the electric chair.

“Stop it! Stop it! Let me breathe!” shouted Francis, shocking the witnesses. One shot back: “You’re not meant to breathe.”

For about thirty seconds this went on. The chair shuddered and began to slide along the polished floor, despite weighing almost 300 pounds. Then the indicators on the voltmeter dropped to zero. Foster frantically shouted to Vinezia for more power and Vinezia gunned the van, but the dials were registering nothing. After a minute, the power was switched off and the prison authorities confirmed what everyone knew. Not only was the prisoner still alive, he was conscious and screaming in agony.

The first jolt normally produced unconsciousness and no one had ever heard someone cry out from the death chair. But clearly Francis was still very much alive. They decided to try one more time. This time, when they threw the switch Francis stiffened, but it was obvious this was fear. There was no electricity going through his body.

“I’m not dying!” he bellowed, as he struggled against his restraints.

It was decided immediately not to proceed with the electrocution. Something had clearly gone wrong. A subsequent examination of the equipment revealed what had happened. Those responsible had neglected to ground the chair. Francis had escaped death, but as Sheriff E. L. Resweber said, “This boy really got a shock when they turned that machine on.”

The first jolt had been sufficient to cause intense pain, leaving his heart racing. But it had not even burned his skin.

Following the failed execution, the prison governor informed Francis that they would reschedule the execution for six days’ time, before having the teen led back to his cell. But a local lawyer, Bertrand DeBlanc, stepped in and took over Francis’s case, lodging an immediate appeal. This was unpopular in the small Cajun town, especially as the lawyer had been a good friend of the murder victim. But DeBlanc had a strong sense of duty and knew that the young, black defendant was entitled to a proper defense. He took it all the way to the Supreme Court, arguing violations of Fifth, Eight, and Fourteenth Amendment rights (equal protection, double jeopardy, and cruel and unusual punishment). By a narrow margin his appeal failed. One of the judges who rejected the appeal actually tried to petition the governor for the sentence to be commuted to life in prison but was unsuccessful.

That Supreme Court ruling set an important precedent. It was not cruel and unusual punishment to have to be executed twice. If someone escaped the chair, the state could try again without violating the prisoner’s constitutional rights.

On May 9, 1947, Francis was once again prepared for the execution chamber. This time the men responsible were sober and had tested every wire and connection. There was a lot more public scrutiny on the whole procedure. A crowd of five hundred had gathered outside the prison. Most were in favor of the second execution, but some friends and family members of Francis were also there, including his tearful mother. For the first attempt, Francis had been in his prison uniform, despite his shining new shoes. This time he was dressed in formal slacks and a spotless white shirt. He was taken from New Iberia early in the morning and driven straight to St. Martinville Prison, where he was placed in a cell for a few hours. Several members of his family came to say their last good-byes.

His last meal was prepared mid-morning. He’d have loved to have had fried chicken, his favorite, but he was a Catholic and Catholics are not allowed meat on a Friday. Instead, he asked for fried fish and potatoes and finished the plate.

When he arrived at the death chamber there were unfamiliar faces in charge. The State of Louisiana was taking no chances and had brought in an expert. Grady Jarrett was a Texan who had overseen dozens of executions, and he would make no mistakes. Local priest Father Hannigan accompanied Francis, but at the last minute the condemned man asked the priest to leave him so that he could walk to the chair unaided. He did not want to show fear or weakness. He crossed the thirteen steps to the bulky wooden structure, turned, and sat. Jarrett quickly began preparing him, tightening the straps and cutting a slit in the new trousers so that he could attach the electrode to Francis’s leg. When all was ready he straightened up, then asked the prisoner if he had anything to say.

“Nothing at all,” replied Francis.

Francis had entered the death chamber at 12:02 p.m., two minutes behind schedule. It took three minutes to strap him in and secure the electrodes. At 12:05 p.m. Jarrett threw the switch. They had increased the voltage from the previous time, and 2,700 volts shot through the seventeen-year-old’s body. He stiffened, but nothing more. He didn’t move—didn’t struggle at all. It is probable that death came instantly the second time.

But the state was taking no chances. After a minute, the power was switched off, and then quickly a second jolt was administered to be sure. At 12:10 p.m. Jarrett pronounced the prisoner dead. The man who had escaped the electric chair was not able to repeat that lucky performance.

TWO: MARTHA PLACE—FIRST WOMAN TO THE CHAIR

More than a thousand people have sat in the hot seat but less than thirty have been women. America has always shown glaring bias when it comes to the death penalty. African-Americans were more likely to be executed than whites, though that is changing. Working class are more likely to fry than middle class, poor more than rich. But the most glaring inconsistency is when it comes to women. Only twenty-six have sat in Old Sparky.

The first was Martha Place.

Martha Garretson was born in New Jersey in 1849. At the age of twenty-three she was in an accident, being struck on the head by a sledge. It concussed her and family members said that she never completely recovered from the head injury. She became mentally unstable and was subject to mood swings. But it was not bad enough to seriously affect her life. She married and had a young son. But then she separated from her husband after four years and gave the young boy to an orphanage, unable to raise him herself. The abandonment of her son preyed on her mind for years.

She set up a dressmaking business with her sister, but upon her sister’s death she gave that up. At the advanced age of forty-four, Martha, a tall, sharp-faced woman, met a widower, William Place, and began working for him as a housekeeper. He had an eleven-year-old daughter, Ida, from his earlier marriage and was struggling to cope. Over the months, a friendship grew between employer and housekeeper and eventually romance blossomed. William asked Martha to marry him and the three set up home together in Brooklyn. He had hoped that Martha would help him raise his girl but from the start there were tensions in the house, and on at least one occasion things grew so tense that William had to call in the police. Martha had threatened to kill Ida. She was jealous of the affection William showed for his daughter, who never bonded with her stepmother.

That row blew over and William put it out of his head. Tensions remained, but things seemed to be going better. Then, on February 7, 1898, over breakfast there was a blazing row in the house and Ida sided with her father against Martha. William Place picked up his hat and left the house to go to work and didn’t think any more of it. He was growing used to the angry words.

But once he left the house, Martha turned on Ida, now seventeen. She got some acid and threw it into the face of the young woman, burning her eyes badly. Then she knocked Ida to the ground and tried to force the acid down her throat. When Ida struggled, Martha picked up an axe and used that to finish the job, hacking her stepdaughter to death. She then dragged her body under a bed.

When Place arrived home at lunchtime, Martha flew out the door at him, attacking him with an axe. Before he had a chance to react, she brought the axe down on his head, shattering his skull. But she failed to knock him out with that blow and he ran. Neighbors came to his aid and someone ran for the police. When they arrived, the police found Martha unconscious in the kitchen. She had turned on the gas in an attempt to kill herself. Upon searching the house they were shocked to discover the bloodied body of Ida under the bed. Her death had been horrendous. She had been forced to drink acid, then smothered, in addition to being struck with the axe. Her mouth and face were burnt from the acid.

Both William and Martha were brought to St. John’s Hospital in Brooklyn. William’s badly fractured skull needed surgery, with fragments of bone being removed from a hole cut in what remained of the skull. He eventually recovered. Martha was unconscious, but as the newspaper The World noted: “Doctors found that there was little the matter with her; that she had not inhaled enough gas to stir the pulse of a baby.”

The following day she made a partial confession, admitting to throwing acid at Ida, but stopping short of admitting the murder.

Despite this partial confession, from the start Martha pleaded not guilty. She claimed insanity, citing her earlier accident with the sledge. The horrific nature of the crime and her immediate attempt to commit suicide were considered, but she was declared sane. Once this was out of the way, the trial was uneventful. The chief witness for the prosecution was William Place, who had recovered enough to testify. The jury had no difficulty in finding Martha guilty. She was sentenced to die.

She was sent to Sing Sing Prison, on the banks of the Hudson River, north of New York City. She was held there for the weeks preceding her date with death. She did not handle her time in Sing Sing well, and she was often subject to hysterical outbursts and fits of weeping. When she heard that her request for a retrial had been rejected, she lost all hope and sank into despair. But she had constant access to a priest, and under his guidance she regained some self-control and accepted her fate.

There was no great public sympathy for her, given the nature of her crime. One newspaper cruelly described her as “homely, old, ill-tempered, not loved by her husband.” But no one was comfortable with the idea of a woman going to the electric chair—no matter how well deserving of it she was. Another journalist wrote: “It was a murder so shocking that nothing worse could be thought of—that is to say, only one thing worse could be thought of, and that was the electric killing of the old woman.”

There was an attempt to get a reprieve, but the governor of New York, Teddy Roosevelt, was adamant; there would be no last second change of heart. The sentence of the law would go ahead.

In a break from normal tradition, Martha was not given a time for her death. She was merely told that there was no hope for a reprieve and that she should ready herself for the call at any time. Whether this was done to show kindness is not known. She spent her last few days living an unusual life in the prison. She ate each day in the chief warden’s quarters, almost more like a guest than a prisoner, and she saw her priest regularly.

On March 20, 1899, a little over a year after the murder of Ida and attempted murder of William, the call came. The electric chair in Sing Sing, one of three in New York State at the time, was ready. State Electrician Edwin Davis was in place, and the execution was to be carried out immediately. Davis had overseen the first ever electric chair electrocution and actually held patents on some parts of the chair. He was the most qualified man to do the job at the time and would eventually oversee 240 executions before his retirement fourteen years later.

A female guard was assigned the task of leading Martha Place to the death chamber. She accompanied her to the chair, and Place sat calmly, not offering any resistance. She was dressed in a plain and drab dress and clutched a bible in her lap. As one guard stood behind her and began cutting her hair short, another slit the back of her dress so that they could attach the electrode to her leg. Once this was done, a patch on the back of her head was shorn. This was normally done several hours before the execution, not in the death chamber itself, but this was the first time any of the staff had overseen the electrocution of a woman.

The last woman to be executed in Sing Sing had been hanged, and the execution had been botched badly, leaving her to choke to death for over fifteen minutes on the noose. Nobody wanted another mistake with this execution.

Once both electrodes were in place, the death chamber was cleared and the generator fired up. When Davis threw the switch, 1,760 volts shot through Mrs. Place. This voltage was maintained for about four seconds, after which it was reduced for a further minute, before finally being switched to full power again for another few seconds. Then he switched the fearsome apparatus off.

Martha Place had not struggled or cried out. After the initial contraction of the body against the restraints, there had been no movement and when the current was switched off, she slumped. Geoffrey Abbott wrote in his Amazing True Stories of Female Executions that a female doctor, elegantly “dressed in the height of fashion, immaculate in a gray dress and a huge hat with pronounced crimson trimmings” stepped forward and placed her hand under the dark hood which concealed Place’s face. She felt on the neck for a pulse and found none.

The execution of the first woman to face the electric chair had gone flawlessly.

THREE: GEORGE STINNEY—THE CHILD WHO FRIED

The idea of sending a child to the electric chair is revolting. The added fact that he was probably innocent of the crime for which he was convicted makes it doubly so. Welcome to the world of Jim Crow America.

Opponents of the death penalty say that one of its problems is that it is unevenly applied. If you are black and educationally challenged, you are far more likely to go to the chair than if you are white, middle class, and well educated. The statistical evidence reflects this to this day—though in the past it was an even greater bias and a bigger problem. Another problem is that innocent people occasionally are wrongly imprisoned and executed.

Actually, innocent people go to the chair more often than people suspect. Independent analyses of the records bears this out. University of Michigan law professor Samuel Gross and his team looked at the statistics and estimated that 4.1 percent of the people on death row were and are innocent. One in twenty-five—that is a huge number of wrongful deaths to justify or ignore.

Abolitionists looking for ammunition need look no further than the case of George Stinney for their proof. Stinney was the youngest-ever victim of the electric chair, a child of fourteen wrongly convicted and executed in the Deep South during the old Jim Crow days.

Looking at the case today, one cannot avoid the conclusion that Stinney was not executed; he was lynched by the state of South Carolina.

It all began on the sunny afternoon of March 24, 1944, in Alcolu, a small town in Clarendon County, fifty miles east of Columbia. Two girls—eleven-year-old Betty June Binnicker and her friend, eight-year-old Mary Emma Thames, set out to pick flowers. They had a bicycle but walked as often as they pedaled. On their way along a forested path they saw a fourteen-year-old “colored” boy, George Stinney. They knew him well; it was a small community. They exchanged greetings and asked him for directions.

Stinney was the last person to see them alive.

Within a few hours, the families of both girls were becoming anxious. They were good children who did not stay out longer than they should. And they knew the local area well, so they could not have gotten lost. A search party was put together. The local lumber mill organized the search and the whole town got involved, black and white. Stinney was one of the many volunteers searching, along with members of his family. He told people that he had spotted the girls shortly before their disappearance. They searched through the night, with no success. But at seven thirty the following morning, as light slowly returned, one of the men spotted small footprints in the soft ground. They followed the trail and came across a pair of scissors belonging to Betty June. Within minutes they reached a waterlogged ditch where the undergrowth was broken and trampled. Under the water they could make out a small bicycle. Then one of the searchers screamed; the bodies had been found.

Men jumped into the muddy hole and both bloodied bodies were drawn forth. They had been savagely beaten with a blunt object and their skulls crushed in.

There were no clues and no indications of what had happened. But as the investigators began to piece together the events of the previous afternoon, they remembered that one person had seen the girls after everyone else. In a community where racial prejudice lurked very close to the surface, it did not take long for the cops to decide that the young black boy was not a witness; he was a killer.

George Stinney was arrested. The illiterate son of a local mill worker, he had just turned fourteen. There was no question of following due process. Stinney was questioned without his parents and without a legal representative. He was just a frightened black child facing a tough, white police force. They played good cop, bad cop. While some bullied the boy, others offered him ice cream if he admitted to the offense. In the end, confused and frightened, he gave the cops the confession they were looking for.

The police alleged that Stinney led them voluntarily to the murder scene and showed them where he had concealed the iron spike he had used to beat in the girls’ heads. The fact that he wasn’t strong enough to lift the twenty-pound spike over his head effectively didn’t bother the men; they were looking for a simple solution and a scapegoat. The crime had caused outrage, and the cops needed a quick arrest.

According to the confession they forced from him, Stinney had killed the younger girl, Mary Emma, because he wanted to have sex with Betty June. Then he killed Betty June because she struggled. When word of this version of the killing got out, a huge crowd gathered outside the county jail. There was going to be a lynching if the crowd had their way. In one of the few proper moves the authorities made, they got him out of the jail in time and into a cell in nearby Columbia.

On April 24, just a month after his arrest, Stinney was facing judge and jury. He faced them alone, as his parents had been driven from the locality by angry neighbors. His court-appointed attorney, Charles Plowden, had political ambitions, so he did the bare minimum and made no real attempt to defend the unpopular Stinney. There were fifteen hundred spectators—each one a potential voter. A jury was selected, without a single black member. The cards were stacked against Stinney. The prosecution presented their side. Plowden shrugged and said that Stinney was too young to be held responsible for his crimes. He offered no evidence in rebuttal of the state’s case. The case opened at two thirty in the afternoon and was finished, sentence and all, by five thirty.

“The jury [all white] retired at five minutes before five to deliberate. Ten minutes later it returned with its verdict: guilty, with no recommendation for mercy,” according to one contemporary account. Under three hours—the town was getting their lynching. Stinney would face the electric chair on June 16, 1944.

The town of Alcolu was happy, but as word of the travesty of the investigation and trial began to spread, pressure mounted for a review. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), churches, and unions petitioned the governor, Olin Johnston, to show mercy. The governor was unmoved, despite hundreds of letters and messages. Mercy is not part of the lynching process.

Stinney languished in prison in the South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia. During the two short months he had left, he wrote to his parents, assuring them of his innocence.

On the morning scheduled for his execution, Stinney made his last walk from his cell to the death chamber. A slight figure, at only five feet one inch and less than ninety pounds, he looked like a lost and bewildered child in the midst of the large guards. He clutched a bible to his thin chest as they shuffled him along. When they got to the chair, they realized they had a problem; he was too small for the device, which had never been designed to kill children. The guards struggled to strap him in place and were unable to tie his arms and legs as tightly as they normally would.

They lowered the electrode onto his shaved skull and secured it as well as they could. This was the moment of his last words, and all the witnesses waited tensely, expecting a final confession. One of the guards prompted him, asking whether he had anything to say to the families. But Stinney said nothing.

“Stinney refused to make any statement when given the opportunity by prison officials,” the Daily Item reported.

The guards pulled the death mask down over the young boy’s face, but it was too big and didn’t fit properly. They did their best to cover his face, and then stepped back. The order was given; the switch was thrown. Immediately Stinney’s thin body convulsed and jerked. Because he was tied so loosely, his body moved more than most convicts and his head moved sharply, dislodging the mask. His face was exposed to the viewing gallery. His eyes were wide and staring, with tears coursing down his face. Spittle dribbled from his mouth. The sight of the frightened eyes of the child about to die would haunt many of the witnesses for months to come.

Twenty-four hundred volts were applied three times in quick succession.

It took less than four minutes before a doctor stepped forward, did a quick examination, and pronounced Stinney dead. From the time of the crime he probably did not commit to the final execution had taken just eighty-one days, unseemly haste compared with today’s more careful trial and appeal processes.

George Stinney was the youngest person ever to sit in the electric chair and the youngest person to be executed in well over a hundred years. Unlike Britain, America had never had a culture of executing children. Since the seventeenth century, 365 juveniles have been executed—compared to thousands in the United Kingdom. The earliest was a sixteen-year-old, Thomas Graunger, hanged in Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts, in 1642 for the crime of bestiality, committed with a mare, a cow, two goats, two calves, several sheep, and a turkey. The youngest was a twelve year old Indian girl, Hannah Ocuish, hanged in 1786 for murdering a six year old girl.

Stinney was the youngest executed in the twentieth century, though currently there are approximately seventy juvenile offenders on death row. Following a Supreme Court ruling in 1988, those who committed a crime before reaching the age of sixteen cannot face the chair. That ruling came decades too late for Stinney. There is some speculation that the real killer was a well-off white man, who allegedly gave a death-bed confession. At this point there is no way of proving or disproving that. We do know, however, that Stinney was innocent. That has been acknowledged at last by a retrial granted in 2014. Surviving members of Stinney’s family testified that he had been with them on the day in question and had an alibi for the time of the murders. They also testified that they could not afford to mount a proper defense for the boy and had to leave town for fear of reprisals from their white neighbors. The case was heard before Circuit Judge Carmen Mullen in December 2014 and the judge vacated the boy’s conviction, effectively clearing George Stinney’s name.

The judge ruled that Stinney’s confession was likely to have been coerced and so was inadmissible, especially as he later denied it. She said the confession was: “due to the power differential between his position as a fourteen-year-old black male apprehended and questioned by white, uniformed law enforcement in a small, segregated mill town in South Carolina.

“This Court finds fundamental, Constitutional violations of due process exist in the prosecution of George Stinney Junior, and hereby vacates the judgment.”

She said that there had been a number of violations of the boy’s procedural due process rights, which tainted the prosecution. She listed these—the fact that the trial lasted just three hours and no witnesses were called on Stinney’s behalf; his court-appointed lawyer was a tax commissioner who had never worked a criminal trial before; no prosecution witness was cross-examined. On top of all that, no appeal was filed after the death sentence was imposed.

“It is never too late for justice,” said filmmaker Ray Brown, who is making a film on the Stinney case. “South Carolina got it right this time. During a period of time in our nation where we seem to have such a great racial divide, you have a southern state that has decided to admit they made a mistake and correct it.”

It was too late for one boy lynched by a corrupt and uncaring system. Executioners, like doctors, bury their mistakes. But at least, under current legislation, no child will ever be allowed go to the chair again.

FOUR: VIRGINIA CHRISTIAN—MAID FOR THE CHAIR

Many states show no scruples about executing juveniles. But under current legislation someone must be sixteen or older at the time of his or her crime to be in danger of the death sentence. It was not always the case, with children as young as fourteen being sent to the chair in the past.

As with most statistics, juvenile women are far less likely to face the chair than juvenile men. In fact, in more than a hundred years, only one girl has been given the frightful sentence. Virginia Christian made history by being the first woman to be executed by the state of Virginia in the twentieth century and the only juvenile girl to be electrocuted.

Born in 1895, Virgina came from a poor, black family. She had some education but left school at an early age, and in her teens was working as a maid and washerwoman for a well-off white widow, Ida Virginia Belote, of Hampton. Ms. Belote was the daughter of a prominent local grocer and was well respected in the community. A small, frail woman of fifty-one, she had a violent temper and often mistreated Christian.

On March 18, 1912, sixteen-year-old Christian was working for Ms. Belote when the widow accused her of stealing a locket and a skirt. Christian protested her innocence but Belote picked up a spittoon and struck the young girl across the face with it. As Belote continued to strike her, Christian ran into Belote’s bedroom and grabbed the first weapon to hand. Belote used two broom handles to prop her window open during the day, and the two women dived for the handles. Christian was faster and brought the broom handle down sharply on Belote’s forehead, knocking her to the ground.

The elderly woman began to scream, and in an attempt to stifle the screams Christian grabbed a towel and stuffed it into her mouth, using the broom handle to push the towel in deep. The cause of death was later determined to be suffocation. Belote’s throat was blocked completely by the towel and by chunks of her hair which had also become lodged during the scuffle.

Before Christian fled the house, she stole Belote’s purse and a ring. There wasn’t much money in the purse, certainly not enough to fund a getaway. Later the body of Ms. Belote was discovered. According to newspaper accounts of the time, she was: “lying face down in a pool of blood, and her head was horribly mutilated and a towel was stuffed into her mouth and throat.”

It did not take long for the police to track down Christian. She admitted that she had fought with her employer and openly confessed to having struck her with a broom. But she seemed genuinely shocked when she learned that Ms. Belote had died as a result of the assault. She was arrested and charged with murder.

From the start, it was a case dominated by the race of the victim and the accused. Black Americans were very much second-class citizens, and it mattered little to the local population that Christian had been struck first. Many felt that it was quite all right for an employer to strike a black servant. They were only two generations removed from the slave-owning days. There was an element of lynch-mob mentality in the town, and the police moved swiftly to prevent the law from being taken out of their hands. Christian was arrested.

She did little to cover up her crime, confessing soon after her arrest. The local papers were unabashed in the racial nature of their coverage, with one writing: “Christian is a full-blooded Negress, with kinky hair done up in threads, with dark lusterless eyes and with splotches on the skin of her face. Her color is dark brown, and her figure is short, dumpy and squashy. She has had some schooling, but her speech does not betray it. Her language is the same as the unlettered members of her race.”

The Daily News went on to report the confession, in their best pastiche of a negro accent:

She (Mrs. Belote) come to mommer’s house dat morning an’ say she want me to come an’ do some washin’. When I come home mommer say Miss Belote want me an’ I went ‘roun’ to de house. I wen’ in de back way an’ when she see me she asked me about a gold locket she missed. I told her I ain’t seen it an’ don’t know nuttin’ about it. She also say sumthin’ about a skirt but de main thing was the locket. She say ‘yes, you got it an’ if you don’t bring it back, I’m goin’ to have to put you in jail.

I got mad an’ told her if I did have it, she wasn’t goin’ to git it back. Den she picked up de spittoon and hit me wit it ain’t it broke. They wuz two sticks in de room, broom handles. She run for one, an’ I for de other. I got my stick furst an’ I hit her wit it ‘side de hade and she felld down. She kep’ hollerin’ so I took a towel and stuffed it in her mouth. I helt it there twel she quit hollerin’ and jes’ groaned. I didn’t mean to kill her an’ I didn’t know I had. I was mad when I hit her an’t stuffed the towel in her mouth to keep her from hollerin’. I never meant to kill her. When I lef’ she was goranin’ and layin’ on her back.

It is a certainty that a white girl’s confession would not have been written up like that.

The trial came just two weeks after the murder, and Christian was never put on the stand to give evidence. So the jury never heard that she had been attacked first. She was defended by a black lawyer who chose not to let her testify, perhaps fearing that her testimony might have inflamed the already tense racial situation in the town. His decision may have prevented rioting, but it also ensured that Christian received no effective defense. She was convicted and sentenced to death.

Her mother wrote to the governor, William Hodges Mann, appealing for clemency. Her letter read:

My dear mr governor

Please for give me for Bowing low to write you a few lines: I am the mother of Virginiany Christian. I have been pairalized for mor then three years and I could not and Look after Gennie as I wants too. I know she dun an awful weaked thing when she kill Miss Belote and I hear that the people at the penetintry wants to kill her but I is praying night and day on my knees to God that he will soften your heart so that She may spend the rest of her days in prison. they say that the whole thing is in yours Hands and I know Governer if you will onely save my child who is little over sixteen years old God will Bless you for ever … If I was able to come to see you I could splain things to you better but I cant do nothing but pray to God and ask him to help you to simpithise with me and my truble

I am your most umble subgeck, Charlotte Christian.

His heart was not moved by the appeal, and the governor declined to commute the death sentence.

On August 15, 1912, Christian celebrated her seventeenth birthday behind bars on death row in Richmond, Virginia. There is no record that the occasion was marked in any way. The following day she was scheduled to die. The Virginia electric chair was quite new, having only been built in 1908. The wood was still fresh and the fittings gleamed. The procedure then was almost as new as the chair, and the final protocol, now well established, had not been worked out fully.

The terrified teenager was led into the death chamber by female guards and strapped to the chair. Then the electrodes were attached to her right and left forearms, rather than the usual head and foot. This meant that the electricity, instead of traveling through the head (knocking out the brain), then through the torso and stopping the heart, would now travel across her body, just frying the internal organs. If death was not instant, the prisoner would remain conscious throughout the ordeal.

The Daily News reported: “The usual three shocks were administered by the officer in charge of the electric current. Each time the electric switch was touched, the body of the woman responded with fearful convulsions. Death, it is believed, was instantaneous.”

In a final poignant note, Christian’s family did not have the money to transport her body back to Hampton from Richmond for burial. So her body was turned over to the state medical school instead.

FIVE: MOST ELECTROCUTIONS IN ONE DAY

Multiple executions used to be a tremendous public spectacle. Crowds thronged Tyburn in London to see up to twenty people hang at a single time, and Madame Guillotine in Paris was always surrounded by her knitting acolytes during the height of the French Revolution. But with the electric chair and the decision to make executions private, such public spectacles became a thing of the past in the United States. Now there are only multiple executions if a number of people are convicted of the same capital crime. It has become rare, but is not unheard of.

Robert G. Elliott was the executioner for six states from 1926 to 1939, and wrote: “Eight times I have been the agent of death for a state which demanded that four men give up their lives on the same day. Thirty times the chair’s toll has been three, and on fifty-three occasions I have electrocuted two people within a few minutes.”

Elliott was probably the most prolific public executioner in US history, being responsible for nearly four hundred electrocutions, or 10 percent of the total number in the history of the punishment. On Thursday, January 7, 1927, he executed six men in two states, a very busy schedule. In the morning he executed Edward Hinlein, John Devereaux, and John McGlaughlin in Boston for the murder of a night watchman two years previously. Then he caught the train to New York, grabbed a quick dinner and a movie with his family, before heading out to Sing Sing where he executed Charles Goldson, Edgar Humes, and George Williams. The three, like the first three, had been convicted of murdering another night watchman. He was paid $150 per execution, making that a very lucrative day. In today’s money he earned nearly $12,000 on that day.

But Elliott was not in charge on the day that the most men ever went to the chair in the same place.

That happened on July 13, 1928, in Kentucky, when seven men were electrocuted, one after the other—all for murder. Three were black, four were white, and two had committed murder in the course of a robbery. The local Southwest Missourian recorded the event almost as a triumph for the state: “EXECUTIONS OF SEVEN SET NEW DEATH RECORD—Kentucky Extracts Supreme Penalty for Numerous Slayings.”

The executions were carried out in the state’s electric chair, Old Sparky, in Eddyville Penitentiary, and the entire process took just an hour and a half. The Southwest Missourian reported:

Four white men, three of them very young, and three Negroes made up the seven whose deaths in the electric chair set a record for Kentucky. Sullen, defiant, and prayerful by turns during their stay in the death house, the condemned men were reduced by fear to a condition bordering upon collapse as midnight approached.

Although there was no clock gong to sound the hours, the prisoners sensed the time and all talk died away long before the death march started at 12:15 a.m. With heads supported in cupped hands, they sat silent, their bodies shaken by chills despite the intense heat in the squat stone house that had been their home in the prison. In plain view was the execution chamber and the chair.

There was no somber darkness in the place. Instead, there was brilliant light and shadow and polished steel.

The men were held together in a cell block, and the order of the executions was revealed about eight o’clock the previous evening. Most of the prisoners were allowed visits from family and relatives that final evening, but a few hours before midnight everyone was removed, leaving just seven convicts and their guards. All possibilities of reprieves had been exhausted. All that day, and on the previous day, Governor Flem D. Sampson had been swamped with petitions for clemency. He reviewed all petitions conscientiously, but in the end rejected them all.

Even in the face of death, segregation was observed. The four white men went to the chair first. Milford “Red” Lawson led the way. A thirty-five-year-old mountain man from the rural county of Corbin, he had murdered a neighbor. He was taken to the chamber at 12:15 a.m., and quickly strapped into the chair. He looked up and said, “I am ready to forgive everybody.” Three minutes later he was dead, and a team of guards, holding their noses against the stench of burning flesh, rushed into the chamber and removed his body.

Next up was Orlando Seymour, just twenty-one. A native of Louisville, he was a factory worker who had murdered a local merchant during the course of a robbery. He had hopes of a last minute postponement of his sentence, and when he had heard a few hours earlier that the hoped-for reprieve was not coming, he had sunk into a stupor. He seemed to be in a daze as he was led into the chamber and strapped to the chair. The execution was swiftly concluded and his body removed to make way for the next victim.

The third man to face the chair was also just twenty-one years old. Hascue Dockery was from Harlan and had killed two women and a man. He remained brazen up until nearly the end. Four hours earlier he had been told by Warden Chilton that he was the first to face the chair that night, and he had merely sneered and flicked the ashes from his cigarette at the official. But just before the executions were due to start, as the hum from the electric dynamo filled the cell block, he panicked and asked to see the Catholic priest. He told the surprised cleric that he wished to convert to Catholicism before his death. This would require a few minutes, so he was switched to third on the list.

The priest had hastily performed the baptism. Catholic baptism does not require total immersion in water. A small amount of holy water is sprinkled over the acolyte’s head and a few prayers are said. It only takes a few minutes. Dockery was ready when his name was called.

But the cockiness of a few hours earlier was gone. He was silent when his time came, and unresponsive, and had to be dragged to the chair, where he sat without a word as the straps were tightened. Then, as the hood was lowered over his face, he began to mutter some prayers. Death came swiftly.

The final white man called was Charles Paul Mitra, twenty-three, from St Louis. He was a laborer who had murdered a grocer in the course of an attempted holdup. A punk to the end, he had a disdainful attitude towards the guards and was aloof from the other six who awaited their deaths. He was led into the chamber and sat without a word. He was strapped down, the electrodes placed, the switch thrown, and death pronounced in three minutes. It was clinical and precise.

Finally it was the African Americans’ turns. The newspaper noted: “The Negroes, apparently crushed earlier in the night by the nearness and certainty of death, recovered their spirits to a greater degree than the white men before the time came for them to pass down the corridor of steel and stone that connects the death house with the chair room.”

Willie Moore from Louisville, a forty-five-year-old, was the first to make the short walk. He said nothing, and the execution proceeded swiftly. Next to die was James Howard, a twenty-two-year-old also from Louisville. He was in remarkably good spirits, singing as he was led to the chamber. He had a rich voice, and the words of “Lily of the Valley” filled the chamber and the nearby witness room. He sat back in the chair and settled comfortably as the guards began securing the straps.

Looking over at the witnesses, he said, “Gentlemen, how are you all feeling tonight?”

A lot better than he felt moments later when the volts coursed through his body.

The final man to face execution was Clarence McQueen. The thirty-eight-year-old from Cynthiana was a moonshiner, a distiller of illegal alcohol. He hummed a song as he was led to the chair and seemed to show a great curiosity as the straps were tightened. He met his end with cheerfulness and dignity.

The last execution was concluded by one thirty in the morning, and the relatives, many of whom had spent their final few hours with the condemned men, were able to collect the bodies for burial the following morning.

On the same day in Mississippi, two convicts, both black, were hanged in Jackson. One, Green Kirk, had killed two cops, and the newspaper noted that he had been in fear of mob action—a lynching—since his arrest. So the hanging saved him from a hanging. And in Milledgeville, Georgia, two more men faced the electric chair, making that day in July 1928 the blackest day in modern US history for the death penalty.

SIX: TOPSY—ELECTROCUTING THE ELEPHANT

When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. That is the famous quote from John Ford’s “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance,” and it can be an accurate reflection on how the media works. Some stories gain such currency that they are accepted without question. We all “know” that there was a second man working with Lee Harvey Oswald when he assassinated President Kennedy in Dallas. He was hidden behind the grassy knoll. Many of us have a shaky grasp of what a “grassy knoll” actually is, but we know the guy was there. That is an example of the legend becoming fact.

Great men attract such embellishments: that Einstein invented the atomic bomb, that Dr. Guillotine was a victim of the execution machine he invented, that Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to prove the electric chair would work. The legends are believable because there is a grain of truth in them. Einstein was not a nuclear physicist, but he did write a letter to the president urging him not to fall behind in the development of the bomb. Dr. Guillotine was not executed (he also did not invent the beheading machine, just popularized it), but his nephew was guillotined. The grain of truth makes the legend believable.

The Edison legend is quite simple. During the current wars, Edison wanted to prove the danger of alternating current, so he regularly staged press conferences and public talks at which dogs, cats, donkeys, and other animals were sacrificed on the table of science. And according to the legend, he once electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate that even a big animal was susceptible to the dangers of alternating current.

So what is the truth behind the Edison legend?

An elephant was indeed electrocuted. And the Edison name was all over it. But it happened long after the current wars and Edison had no direct involvement in the affair. And it had nothing to do with proving his point.

The elephant in question was Topsy, a top attraction at the Luna Park Zoo on Coney Island, New York. And she was condemned to die after stomping a man to death.

Topsy was a female Asian elephant, born around 1875. As a calf she was captured by elephant traders and sold to Forepaugh Circus. The circus, ever conscious of a marketing opportunity, smuggled the baby animal into the United States. They then released the information that they had the only baby elephant born in captivity in America. Their rivals, Barnum and Bailey, might have had the biggest elephants, but Forepaugh had the cutest.

She was named Topsy, after a slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

But as Adam Forepaugh boasted that he had “the only baby elephant ever born on American soil,” the animal dealer who sold him the beast tipped off P. T. Barnum about the deception. Both sides milked the controversy for all it was worth. Topsy was a headliner from the start. Soon, she outgrew her cuteness, becoming a full-grown elephant. Her publicity material indicates she was ten feet high and weighed six tons. But the average height of Asian elephants is a little over seven feet and they typically weigh around three tons. So she was probably a bit smaller than advertised. Still, she was a big draw for the circus. But her temper could be uneven. Elephants are highly intelligent animals and can be trained to a surprising extent. In the Far East they are used as work animals, but early western circuses had a bad record for mistreating animals. Training was a matter of instilling fear into an animal, and the only way of instilling fear on an animal the size of Topsy was by beating her severely. No wonder she was prone to fits of temper. And when three to six tons throws a tantrum, it is best not to be there.

She gained the reputation as a killer in 1900 after two incidents in Texas. It was said that she killed two circus workers, one in Waco and the other in Paris, Texas. This reputation drew in the crowds when Forepaugh & Sells Brothers’ Circus came to Coney Island. However, like her size, there was an element of exaggeration. A circus worker had been injured in Paris, but he made a full and speedy recovery. And there was no injury in Waco. However, the bad temper was no exaggeration.

Things came to a head on the morning of May 27, 1902. The circus was in Brooklyn. A drunk keeper, James Fielding Blount, wandered into the menagerie where all the elephants were tied up together. As he staggered down the line, he teased the massive animals, waving a bottle of whiskey under their trunks. Not getting enough of a reaction, he threw sand into Topsy’s face, then offered her a treat—a lit cigar. The trunk of an elephant is highly sensitive, and this must have caused her agony. Topsy lashed out with her trunk, tossing Blount to the ground. She then stood on his head, crushing his skull and killing him instantly.

Newspaper accounts, of course, exaggerated the incident. The elephant had gone on a rampage and savaged Blount with her tusks. Female Asian elephants do not have tusks, but why let the truth spoil a good story. Accounts also surfaced claiming that Topsy had killed twelve people in total. The truth was one death and one injury. But it was enough to make the circus a huge draw. There were full houses for weeks after the death of Blount, with everyone eager to see the rogue killer elephant.

But a few weeks after the death, there was another incident. The circus had moved on and was pulling into Kingston, New York. The train stopped at the platform and the carriages opened. As the elephants were being led from the station to the field, a spectator with a stick, Louis Dodero, raised the stick and tickled Topsy behind the ear. She whirled rapidly and seized Dodero around the waist with her trunk. She hoisted the startled man into the air and slammed him into the ground. Immediately her handlers surrounded her and brought her under control. Beyond minor injuries, no harm was done. But the circus knew they could no longer tour with the temperamental elephant. The owners decided to sell Topsy.

Back then there was a demand for elephants. Coney Island’s Sea Lion Park was glad for an addition to their lineup. Topsy came with her handler, William Alt. But when the Sea Lion Park went bankrupt, the whole concern was sold to Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy, who wanted to develop a far larger attraction—Luna Park. Luna Park was a large amusement park with spectacular rides and attractions, as well as shows and animals. It was due to open in May 1903, and the owners wanted to stage a spectacular event to announce its arrival.

They decided that Topsy could help. They used the elephant during the construction phase, allowing newspaper men to photograph her hauling large loads of lumber. They said it was part of her “penance” for killing a spectator. But her handler, William Alt, was drinking heavily and was losing control of his charge. He turned the elephant loose in the streets one day, and on another day tried to break into a police station on top of the elephant. He was fired.

Now there was no one who could control the elephant who had a reputation for irascibility. The park owners decided that they would have to move her on, but with her reputation no one would take her. There was only one solution; they would have to put her down. This presented a tremendous marketing coup; they could make her execution a public spectacle.

The date was set for January 4, 1903. It would be a big after-Christmas attraction, an event for the whole family. Luna Park would charge twenty-five cents a head. Previous executions of elephants in other parts of the country had been big draws. Elephants had been hung, strangled by ropes tied to other elephants, poisoned, and shot. There had even been an attempt to electrocute an elephant, but the current didn’t seem to have any effect on the massive animal, so Luna Park dismissed that idea. They opted for hanging. An industrial crane would be used. Their press agent swung into action, publicizing the execution. Posters were put up all over the city, advertising both the hanging and the opening of the park a few months afterward.

But the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was horrified and protested. So Luna Park decided to use the more humane execution method of electricity, which had replaced hanging for people. Now it was going to replace hanging for animals. They also agreed not to charge for the spectacle.

Power in that part of New York was supplied by the local Edison Electricity Light Company. The power plant still bore the Edison name, but the inventor was no longer involved in the electricity supply business. But now his name was linked to the elephant execution. A team from the park liaised with the plant engineers. They began by stringing a wire the nine blocks from the substation to carry the power needed. Secretly, the park owners decided to administer a poison just to help things along. The previous attempt to electrocute an elephant had been a spectacular failure, and they wanted to get this one right.

On the morning of the execution, Topsy was led from her pen into the unfinished park. There was a raised platform near the edge of a lagoon where the execution would take place. The spectators—1,500 of them, alongside 100 press photographers—were on the other side of the lagoon. Topsy was led through the crowd and onto a bridge across the lagoon. But she refused to cross the bridge, even when bribed with apples and other treats. Someone was sent to fetch William Alt, the fired trainer, but he was too attached to the elephant and refused to come. They offered him twenty-five dollars, nearly $700 in today’s money. But he said he would not come for even $1,000.

Unable to get the elephant to the electrocution platform, the park was forced to improvise. They hastily tore down the platform and moved it across the bridge to the spectator side of the lagoon. The electricians managed to get a copper-lined sandal onto Topsy’s right forefoot and another on the rear left foot. Once these were connected, power would flow through the entire torso of the elephant, frying the vital organs. Then, at the last minute, Topsy was given a bunch of carrots—laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide.

The call went through to the power station nine blocks away and the power was turned on. Luna Park chief electrician Hugh Thomas threw a switch at his end, and 6,600 volts shot through Topsy’s body for ten seconds. The massive creature stiffened instantly and smoke billowed from both copper plates. Then the back leg flashed bright as it caught fire. The flames shot up about a foot high, and then the hind leg came up off the ground, and Topsy, her body rigid, fell over onto her side, her legs sticking up in the air. It took only seconds. Veterinarians on the scene ran forward and quickly gave assurance that the elephant had died instantly. But they were taking no chances. A noose was placed around Topsy’s neck and pulled tight, the pressure being maintained for ten minutes. At the end of that time it was obvious that the elephant would not be getting up again.

The Commercial Advertiser wrote the following day: “Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, was put to death in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon. The execution was witnessed by 1,500 or more curious persons, who went down to the island to see the end of the huge beast, to whom they had fed peanuts and cakes in summers that are gone. In order to make Topsy’s execution quick and sure, 460 grams of cyanide of potassium were fed to her in carrots. Then a hawser was put around her neck and one end attached to a donkey engine and the other to a post. Next wooden sandals lined with copper were attached to her feet. These electrodes were connected by copper wire with the Edison electric light plant and a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan.”

The entire event was filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company, who shot many shorts of animals and other subjects. The footage, entitled “Electrocuting an Elephant,” was shown in cinemas throughout the country but was not very popular, so it was eventually removed from circulation. It is now available on YouTube. That film forever linked Edison with the electrocution of an elephant, and eventually the legend replaced the truth—the truth being that Thomas Edison never killed an elephant to advance his cause during the current wars.