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TOP TEN—THE MOST NOTORIOUS VICTIMS OF OLD SPARKY

In over a hundred years of use, well over a thousand people met their deaths on the electric chair. They ranged from a fourteen-year-old boy to hardened mafioso who had survived a lifetime of crime. Rapists, serial killers, hit men, traitors, and incorrigible repeat offenders all ended up frying for their crimes. It is impossible to outline every victim of the chair without turning this volume into an encyclopedia but some cases stand out.

They stand out because of the national interest they generated, or because of the depravity of the murderers, or the fame of their victims. Below, in no particular order, are the most notorious victims of Old Sparky.

JULIUS AND ETHEL ROSENBERG THE RED SCARE

The story of the Rosenbergs had everything for a country on the cusp of the space age. It had the red menace of a communist plot, the glamour of espionage, atomic bomb secrets, and a grisly execution of a husband and wife. The fact that they both looked two decades older than their given ages and looked like they would have been more comfortable in the 1850s than the 1950s didn’t take from the story of Old Sparky’s most famous victims.

The decision to fry the couple on June 19, 1953, has always been controversial. Were they guilty, or just innocent patsies in the Great Game that has always been played between competing superpowers? They became a cause célèbre for liberal opponents of the death penalty, as well as those who wanted greater cooperation between America and the Soviet Union.

Four decades after their execution, new research seems to indicate that Julius was spying at a low level for the Russians, while his wife Ethel was convicted in the wrong. Neither gave away the secret of the Bomb.

But the story begins far earlier than 1953.

Julius Rosenberg was born in New York in the dying months of World War I. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe and worked in a local shop. Julius attended the Seward Park High School before going on to pursue a degree in electrical engineering at the City College of New York. He was politicized at an early age, becoming a leader in the Young Communist League while in college.

Ethel Greenglass was three years older and from a similar Jewish background. In her teens she wanted to become an actress and singer but eventually took a secretarial job at a shipping company. While working there she became involved in labor disputes and joined the Young Communist League. In 1936 she met Julius at one of the meetings. She was instantly drawn to the serious young man. When he graduated in 1939, the couple married.

They settled in New Jersey and Julius got a job at the Army Signal Corps engineering lab at Fort Monmouth. The lab carried out important research on electronics, radar, and missile guidance systems throughout the war, and Rosenberg was an engineer-inspector. In 1942 the former Young Communist was approached secretly by Bernard Schuster, a high-ranking member of the American Communist Party, who introduced him to Soviet spymaster Semyon Semenov. Rosenberg began secretly passing over secrets, including a complete set of designs for the Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star, the very first jet plane used by the US Air Force.

Rosenberg also let his handlers know that his brother-in-law, David Greenglass, was working on the top secret Manhattan Project, which eventually produced the atomic bombs that ended the war. He helped recruit Greenglass to his spy ring. But near the end of the war, the army found out about Rosenberg’s membership of the Young Communist League, and he was fired.

After the war there was an uneasy balance of power between the Americans and the Soviets, but the Americans had the Bomb. However, by the end of that decade the Soviets had developed an atomic bomb of their own. Stunned at the startling speed at which they had caught up, the United States began an investigation and discovered that a German refugee physicist, Klaus Fuchs, had been passing along secrets. As the conspiracy unraveled, Greenglass was implicated. From this it was only a short step to his sister Ethel and her husband Julius.

Greenglass did his best to shield his sister for a while but eventually claimed that she knew all about Julius’s work as a spy and had actively participated, typing out reports for him to pass on. The Rosenbergs were arrested in early August. They weren’t even given time to allow Ethel to make arrangements for the care of their two young children. Another associate of theirs, Morton Sobell, attempted to flee to Mexico, where he was holidaying at the time, but he was apprehended by Mexican authorities and handed over to the United States for trial.

Sobell and the Rosenbergs came before a grand jury in August 1950, and Sobell’s wife did her best to blacken the Rosenbergs in order to paint Sobell in a better light. She testified: “Julius proceeded to tell me that he knew that David was working on the atomic bomb, that he felt there was not a direct exchange of scientific information among the Allies, and that it would only be fair for Russia to have the information too. He asked me if I would relate this to David. His wife said that I should at least relay the message, that she felt that David might be interested. She felt that even if I was against it, I should at least discuss it with him and hear what he had to say.”

Her testimony badly damaged the Rosenbergs but did not get Sobell off the hook. All three were indicted, along with Anatoli Yakovlev, General Counsel of the Soviet Delegation in New York. Bail was posted so high that the Rosenbergs had no possibility of getting out, and their two children were shunted among unwilling relatives before being finally placed in the Jewish Children’s Home in the Bronx. Ethel cried herself to sleep at night under the stress. But Julius didn’t break; no confession was forthcoming.

Believing that Julius was the linchpin, top government officials decided to go for the death penalty. They believed that if he was facing the chair, he would cut a deal and give up the other members of his spy ring. To racket up the pressure, they also went after the death penalty for Ethel, even though the evidence against her was very slim.

“It looks as though Rosenberg is the kingpin of a very large ring, and if there is any way of breaking him by having the shadow of a death penalty over him, we want to do it,” said Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Just ten days before the trial was due to begin, the Greenglasses were persuaded to change their original stories, strengthening the case against Ethel Rosenberg. They claimed that secret information was passed to Julius in front of Ethel and that she knew all about it. She even typed out the information for him to pass on. This new version of events got Sobell a reduction in his charges and got his wife off the hook entirely.

The trial opened on March 6, 1951. Sobell was tried alongside the Rosenbergs, before Judge Irving Kaufmann. The prosecution’s primary witness was now David Greenglass, and his evidence was damning. He told of handing over a drawing of the mechanism of the Nagasaki bomb to Julius and of seeing his sister type up notes of the secrets.

Throughout the trial Julius and Ethel did not crack. Not only did they refuse to divulge names—names that might have saved their lives—they refused to testify or answer questions, repeatedly asserting their Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate themselves when asked about the Young Communist League and their membership of the Communist Party.

On March 29, the Rosenbergs were convicted of espionage, and on April 5, Judge Kaufman sentenced them both to death. With their fate decided, the couple continued to maintain their innocence, denying passing on the vital atomic bomb secrets. But the judge had no sympathy, saying, “I consider your crime worse than murder. I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb, has already caused the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand, and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.”

Julius Rosenberg, a committed communist to the end, saw the death sentence as an inevitable result of a political frame-up and conspiracy, saying, “This death sentence is not surprising. It had to be. There had to be a Rosenberg case because there had to be an intensification of the hysteria in America to make the Korean War acceptable to the American people. And there had to be a dagger thrust in the heart of the left to tell them that you are no longer gonna get five years for a Smith Act prosecution [a prosecution for urging the overthrow of the government], or one year for contempt of court, but we’re gonna kill ya!”

There was scant public sympathy for this view at the time, but many people were concerned that there was little real evidence against the couple, particularly Ethel, and the sentence did seem very harsh. Morton Sobell, also convicted, had been sentenced to thirty years (he served seventeen) rather than the chair. Between the trial and the executions there were widespread protests and claims of anti-Semitism. But the mainstream Jewish organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union did not get behind the campaign. It received more sympathy abroad than at home.

Among those opposing the executions were Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Jean Cocteau, writers Bertolt Brecht and Dashiell Hammett, and artist Frida Kahlo. Pablo Picasso wrote, “The hours count. The minutes count. Do not let this crime against humanity take place.” Even the Pope voiced his concerns, but in February 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower rejected all appeals. The international outcry was to no avail.

The date was set for June 18, and the Rosenbergs were transferred to Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining where the New York State Executioner, Joseph Francel, was waiting. From Cairo, on the edge of the Catskills, he had been executioner since 1939, and this would be one of his final times on the switch. During his tenure he oversaw 137 executions.

There was a glimmer of hope for Julius and Ethel on June 17, when a Supreme Court justice granted a temporary stay of execution. But the new legal objection was dealt with quickly—the full court sitting the following day to ensure that this did not drag on for weeks or months. After a tense few hours, the Court, at noon on Friday, June 19, ordered the execution to go ahead. The new time was set for eleven o’clock that evening.

This immediately set the lawyers into a frenzy. The late hour—the normal time for executions in Sing Sing—brought the procedure into the Jewish Sabbath, and the Rosenbergs were Jewish. Desperately playing for time, their lawyer, Emmanuel Hirsh Bloch, argued that this offended their faith. His plan backfired; instead of postponing the execution, the court decided to bring it forward three hours. The Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday evening, so the execution was rescheduled for eight o’clock in the evening, two hours before sunset.

The execution of Julius Rosenberg went without a hitch. The protocol was for three jolts of electricity to be used in succession. From eyewitness testimony, Julius died immediately, making the final two jolts unnecessary. Then it was Ethel’s turn. Looking nervous but defiant, she was strapped into the chair and the electrodes secured in place. Her body jerked as the jolts ran through her. Then the door to the execution chamber opened, and a doctor examined the slumped body. Her heart was still beating. Another powerful jolt was discharged through her, then a fifth. Her head began to smoke as the final charge ran through her, and the small room reeked of burning flesh. But the doctor was able to confirm that she was finally dead.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were buried at Wellwood Cemetery in Pinelawn, New York.

So, were they guilty? Opinion is divided. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said he had been told that they helped Russia enormously. But Boris Brokhovich, one of the leaders of the Soviet nuclear program, was dismissive in a New York Times interview: “You sat the Rosenbergs in the electric chair for nothing. We got nothing from the Rosenbergs.”

It seems clear now that Julius Rosenberg was a spy for the Russians and did pass on valuable secrets, especially on US electronic systems and jet plane development. But he did not compromise the atomic bomb program.

The chief witness against the Rosenbergs, Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, was also prosecuted for espionage. Because of his cooperation with the authorities he received a fifteen-year sentence, of which he served nine. On his release he recanted his statement, saying he testified against his sister and brother-in-law in order to save his wife from prosecution.

The two children of the Rosenbergs, Michael and Robert, were rejected by their relatives but were eventually adopted by a high school teacher and his wife. They continued to protest their parents’ innocence, only finally acknowledging, in 2008, that their father had been a Soviet spy. They consider their mother an innocent woman, set up by the government. In the light of what is now known, it is difficult to dispute this view.

TED BUNDY THE BANAL FACE OF EVIL

Ted Bundy is the ultimate boogey man. We think of serial killers as loners—weirdos who cannot meet our eye. We think we can spot them easily. But no one spotted Ted Bundy. He was a friendly, engaging, and handsome young man, who had no difficulty getting a date. In fact, he was the sort of man any young woman would be happy to bring home to her mother.

Yet he stalked and hunted women as a hobby, killing at least thirty and maybe up to a hundred. His smiling face showed that evil can wear a mask of banal ordinariness. As he chillingly said of himself: “I am the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you’ll ever meet.”

But monster though he was, he cried like a baby on the eve of his execution and could not face his final meal.

Theodore Robert Cowell was born on November 24, 1946 to Eleanor Louise Cowell at the Elizabeth Lund Home for Unwed Mothers at Burlington, Vermont. His father is unknown—but might have been Eleanor’s abusive father. Eleanor’s parents raised Ted as their own son, to avoid the stigma of admitting that their daughter had produced a bastard. It was many years before Ted realized his true parentage.

Samuel Cowell, whom Ted thought was his father, was a tyrannical bully who injured animals and beat his family members regularly, once throwing one of his daughters down the stairs. He was a racist and bigot, a perfect role model for a future serial killer. From an early age Ted showed signs of abnormality. One family member recalled waking up from a nap to find herself surrounded by knives, while three-year-old Ted smiled down at her.

When Ted was five, his real mother married Johnny Bundy. But Ted and his adoptive father failed to bond, despite Johnny’s best efforts. Ted was a bit of a loner in high school but did not noticeably stand out. He was caught a few times for burglary and enjoyed peeping into uncurtained bedrooms. He was developing an obsession with dead and mutilated bodies.

After a year at the University of Puget Sound, Bundy transferred to the University of Washington where he studied Chinese. But he dropped out in 1968. He seemed immature and unambitious, and an early girlfriend dumped him for this reason. In 1969 he began a relationship with divorcée Elizabeth Kloepfer from Utah, who worked as a secretary at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He re-enrolled in college, this time as a psychology major. He even worked on a suicide help hotline. Ann Rule, a writer who knew him at the time, said he was “kind, solicitous, and empathetic.”

He switched to studying law and seemed to be getting his life on track. Along with his relationship with Ms. Kloepfer, he began to date the woman who had rejected him a few years previously. He juggled the two relationships without either woman realizing she was not the only one in his life. Then he ditched the woman who had ditched him, just to prove to himself that he could do it. In 1974, he began to skip classes. And women began to disappear. Ted Bundy had found his true calling.

According to his own testimony, Bundy had attempted his first kidnapping in 1969 and his first murder a few years later. But his accounts varied. He told one investigator he killed two women in Atlantic City in 1969, while another investigator was told he waited until 1971 in Seattle. No one knows for sure, and investigators suspect he may have begun killing in his teens. Eight-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma disappeared when Ted was fourteen and living in that town.

It is known that he began a kidnapping and killing spree early in 1974. It began when he broke into the basement apartment of eighteen-year-old Karen Sparks and beat her unconscious before raping her. She survived, but with permanent brain damage. From then on, female college students began disappearing at the rate of roughly one a month. The only thing they had in common was that they were young, white, and had their hair parted in the middle.

As authorities grew increasingly concerned, Bundy began to work at the Washington State Department of Emergency Services in Olympia, the government agency involved in tracing the missing women and tracking him down. He began to date Carole Ann Boone, a twice-divorced mother of two, as fear grew in the local community.

The Pacific Northwest murders climaxed on Sunday, July 14, when two women were abducted in broad daylight at a crowded beach at Lake Sammamish State Park, twenty miles from Seattle. A good-looking young man in tennis whites, with his arm in a sling, had introduced himself to the women as Ted, and asked for their help to unhitch a boat from his car. He approached many women that day and most refused to go back to his car. But two did. The two women were abducted four hours apart. He kept the first woman alive and forced her to watch as he murdered the second. He then killed the first.

It had been a risky thing to do, and many witnesses at the beach gave detailed descriptions, both of the man and his Volkswagen car. A number of people came forward to identify the subsequent police mug shot as Ted Bundy, but investigators did not believe the clean-cut and well-adjusted young law student could be their killer, so he was not detained.

In August 1974 Bundy moved to the University of Utah Law School, relocating to Salt Lake City and leaving his divorced girlfriend in Seattle. He remained in touch but dated many other women as well. The only fly in the ointment was that he was struggling with his course work, finding the intricacies of the law baffling. However, he had his hobbies …

A string of unexplained murders began in September, with women disappearing every three or four weeks. The murders were never linked to Bundy—until he confessed to them on the eve of his execution.

However, there were suspicions. Elizabeth Kloepfer, the girlfriend he had left behind in Seattle, phoned police to remind them that she had identified him as a suspect in the earlier Pacific North West murders. This time she was interviewed in detail, as Bundy began to rise in the list of suspects. But there was nothing beyond suspicion to link him to the disappearances and murders.

In 1975 Bundy began to concentrate on Colorado and women began to disappear in that state. He refined his MO, using crutches and pretending to be injured to present a less threatening face to potential victims.

Meanwhile cops in Washington had hit a dead end in their investigation of the string of disappearances, which had ended as suddenly as they began. So they tried an innovative new method. They commandeered the King County payroll computer and inputted the many data lists they had compiled—lists of acquaintances of the victims, Volkswagen owners, sex offenders, and so on. Out of the thousands of names, twenty-six showed up on four separate lists. One of the twenty-six was Ted Bundy. Detectives also manually compiled a list of their hundred hot suspects—and Bundy featured there as well.

But before they could make their move, Bundy was stopped at a routine checkpoint in Utah. The Highway Patrol officer noticed the front seat of Bundy’s Volkswagen was missing, so he searched the car and found handcuffs, ski masks, trash bags, and a full burglary kit. Bundy’s apartment was also tossed, but the investigators overlooked a stash of Polaroids Bundy had taken of his victims. They did not have enough to hold him, but the net was closing. Bundy was placed under twenty-four hour surveillance as Washington cops flew in to interview Kloepfer once more.

Eventually a forensic examination of Bundy’s car uncovered hairs that matched with some of his victims. There was still too little evidence for a murder charge, but on February 23, 1976, Bundy went on trial for the attempted abduction of Carol DaRonch, a victim who had managed to escape his clutches. He was sentenced to one to fifteen years in Utah State Prison. He immediately began to plan his escape but was transferred to Colorado to face a murder charge before he got his opportunity.

But on June 7, 1977, his chance came. As he was representing himself on the murder charge, he was not handcuffed in court. During a preliminary hearing at Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, he went to the law library during a recess and jumped through a second-story window. He sprained an ankle but got away. Six days later he was recaptured. But the trial was going his way; he was winning the pretrial motions, and the scant evidence was being thrown out as inadmissible. The prosecutors were getting worried. Bundy stood a good chance of acquittal if he could just remain calm and let the process grind to a conclusion. Instead, he made another break for freedom.

After months of sawing with a smuggled hacksaw blade, he cut a hole in the roof of his cell and wriggled into the crawlspace in the ceiling. Now he had his escape route. He waited until a few days after Christmas, when most of the staff were on holiday, then disappeared through the crawlspace. He dropped through the ceiling of the apartment of the chief jailer—who was out with his wife that evening—stole a set of clothes, and walked out the front door. By the time his escape was discovered, he was in Chicago.

He stole a car and arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, and on January 8, rented a room at a boarding house near Florida State University. It took him only a week to return to his psychopathic ways. He bludgeoned and sexually assaulted four young women in a fifteen-minute orgy of violence that horrified the community. Two survived; two died. And in early February he killed again. A few days after that he fled Tallahassee, but three days later he was stopped in a stolen car. After a brief struggle he was arrested. The arresting officer had no idea he had captured one of the FBI’s Most Wanted.

The trial was back on, with the two Florida murders substituted for the Colorado indictments. This time Bundy was not going to get off the hook so easily. The eyes of the world were on him now—250 reporters from five continents were in attendance, and it was the first trial to be televised nationally. Once more, Bundy chose to handle his own defense. But he had a strange notion of what a criminal defense involved. He focused on grandiose gestures and bluster, rejecting a more low-key and sensible approach. He was offered a deal: plead guilty to three homicides and get a seventy-five year sentence. The death penalty was off the table. But Bundy couldn’t bring himself to take the deal. It would mean pleading guilty before the whole world. So he fought the charges instead. The prosecution case was weak, but stronger than it had been in Colorado.

The jury took only seven hours to convict Bundy on two counts of murder, three of attempted murder, and two of burglary. He was sentenced to death on the murder charges. Six months later he was convicted of another murder, picking up a third death sentence.

In medieval and early modern times the gap between sentence and execution could be as short as a few hours. It still is in China. But in the United States the gap can be several years, as a lengthy appeals process is gone through. Bundy had several years to contemplate what he had done. During this time he began to open up to various interviewers, and a frightening picture emerged. He loved the idea of possession—especially of possessing things he should not have. So he shoplifted compulsively and enjoyed stealing cars. Rape was an act of possession, and he said that he began killing women as a matter of expediency—leave no witnesses. But then he discovered he enjoyed killing women.

“The ultimate possession was the taking of a life. And then the physical possession of the remains,” he told Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth (Ted Bundy: Conversations with a Killer). He also revealed that he enjoyed using the decomposing bodies of his victims as sexual toys, often visiting the remote disposal sites days or weeks after the murder. He also hacked off the heads and kept them as souvenirs.

The execution was set for March 4, 1986, but then put back to July 2. However, fifteen hours before sentence was to be carried out, it was postponed indefinitely as the full case was reassessed. One question that was being considered was whether Bundy had the mental capacity to be tried. Eventually the sentence was put back more than three years, being rescheduled for January 24, 1989. This might seem slow, but in terms of the normal appeals process and the legal minefield surrounding it, it was actually very fast. Facing the end of the road, Bundy began to talk more freely to investigators, admitting to the Pacific North West murders and a number of other ones he had not been connected with. He also confessed to murders in Idaho, Utah, and Colorado. Some of his confessions may have been fabricated to buy more time, but it became obvious that he had killed at least thirty women. The total may well be over a hundred. There was a move to get the families of potential victims to petition for a stay of execution to allow Bundy to reveal more details of his crimes, but the families refused to cooperate. There would be no further stays.

Bundy thought of one last ploy; suicide would deny prosecutors the satisfaction of seeing him fry. He spoke of it the night before his execution. But death row prisoners are monitored carefully to prevent them taking their own lives. He had no option but to face the chair. He was somber and depressed. Fred Lawrence, a Methodist minister from Gainesville, spent the night with Bundy, and the two men prayed together. Outside the gates of the prison a large crowd had gathered. This is common. Executions are no longer public events, but they generate huge public interest. Normally the crowd holds a candlelit vigil protesting what they see as state-sanctioned murder. Not this time. Five hundred people had gathered to celebrate the death of the man they regarded as a monster.

On the morning of January 24, 1989, Bundy was woken early and offered a last meal of his choice. But he turned this down. Instead the prison kitchen prepared the traditional fare given to condemned men with no special requests. He was presented with a medium-rare steak, eggs over easy, hash browns, and toast with butter and jelly. This was washed down with milk, coffee, and juice. But Bundy had lost his bravado. He couldn’t face the meal and didn’t eat any of it.

A little before seven o’clock in the morning, two guards led the ashen-faced prisoner into the death chamber. They strapped his chest and limbs to the shiny wooden chair. Bundy scanned the window to the witness room, looking for familiar faces. There were forty-two people crowded into the room and very few friendly faces. He recognized some of his prosecutors and gave a small nod in their direction. He appeared to be mumbling, and then he bowed his head. His head, shaven for the electrodes, glistened with the gel that had been applied to conduct the current.

Superintendent Tom Barton bent down and asked Bundy if he had any last words. The killer hesitated for a moment, and when he spoke his voice wavered. Looking at one of his lawyers, Jim Coleman, and at the Methodist minister who had spent the previous night with him, he said, “Jim and Fred, I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.”

The two men nodded. Then the final strap was secured across Bundy’s mouth and chin and the metal skullcap was bolted into place. The black veil fell across the front of Bundy’s face, and Barton signaled that it was time. An unnamed officer pushed the button, and 2,000 volts coursed through Bundy’s body. Through the window, the witnesses saw his body tense and his hands clench on the arms of the chair. A small puff of smoke rose from his right leg, where the second electrode was located.

After a minute the current was switched off, and Bundy’s body immediately relaxed and went limp. A paramedic walked up and pulled open his shirt, listening for a heartbeat. A second shone a light into his eyes. Both men nodded. The job was done.

It didn’t take long for word to get out, and at the gates of the prison a cheer welled up, as some in the crowd began to chant: “Burn, burn, burn!” Others sang and hugged and banged on pans and pots.

“I wish I could have been the one flipping the switch,” said Florida police officer David Hoar. Police chief Jim Sewell was more reflective: “Regardless of what Bundy did, he was still a human being.”

A number of hours later, a white hearse bearing Bundy’s remains left the prison, and those who were still outside the gates cheered once more. Bundy was cremated in Gainesville, and his remains were scattered at an undisclosed location on the Cascade Mountains of Washington State as he had requested.

The Boogey Man had been banished.

ANNA MARIA HAHN THE BLONDE BORGIA

Often dubbed angels of mercy, there is a breed of serial killer who preys on the elderly and vulnerable, often posing as a friend or caregiver of their victim. Some are motivated by the desire to be at the center of drama or have a God complex, while others are motivated by nothing but greed. They see the elderly as easy sources of income.

Anna Marie Hahn was the latter. She had a gambling problem and murder gave her the bucks to pay her bills. A German-American, she became notorious as the Blonde Borgia and Arsenic Anna. She showed no mercy for her elderly victims but begged for mercy before the switch was thrown at her execution.

Anna Filser, the youngest of twelve children, was born in Bavaria in 1906, but the family sent her to America in disgrace when she gave birth to an illegitimate son at the age of twenty-three. Anna stayed with relatives in Cincinnati and quickly married fellow German immigrant Philip Hahn. She found a job at a telephone exchange alongside him but soon grew bored of the hours and quit. The couple opened two delicatessens, but she grew bored of these too. There were three mysterious fires, resulting in three successful insurance claims. Anna was beginning to find ways of making money the easy way.

She desperately needed more though and hit on the ingenious method of taking out a large insurance policy on her husband. He fought her on this—perhaps remembering the mysterious fires—but was suddenly struck ill and rushed to the hospital. Doctors barely managed to save his life, which denied Anna her payout. It is not known whether the incident aroused the suspicions of Philip Hahn, but when he got out of hospital he also got out of the marriage.

It was the middle of the Depression, money was tight, and Anna had to support herself and feed her son. She also had a severe gambling problem. In an effort to make more money she began betting on the racetracks, but was not successful. She needed a way of making money and decided that she would take care of elderly men as a paid companion and live-in aide.

She chose her prey from within the tight German-American community. She began by befriending Ernest Kohler. She became indispensable to the elderly neighbor. Like all those who knew him, she seemed devastated when he died suddenly on May 6, 1933. But her grief was assuaged somewhat when he left her a house in his will. Life was looking up; when you have funds you don’t have a gambling problem, you just have a gambling habit.

Soon she began to look after another elderly man, seventy-two-year-old Albert Parker. Sadly he too passed away shortly after she began to look after him. He had loaned her $1,000 prior to his death, and she had given him an IOU. But that document mysteriously disappeared and she kept the money. In the summer of 1937, Jacob Wagner, seventy-eight, died and generously left his caring friend $17,000 in his will. She moved on to George Gsellman, who lasted a month and left her $15,000.

There was a rare survivor. George Heiss grew suspicious after Anna gave him a mug of beer. A few flies landed on the beer and promptly died. He asked Anna to take a sip, and when she refused, he swished it down the drain and ordered her from the house. But he didn’t go to the police about his suspicions, so Anna was free to continue her grisly business.

The deaths were becoming more frequent. Less than a month after Gsellman’s death, Georg Obendoerfer took a trip with Anna and her son to Colorado and got sick en route. He passed away in agony, and initially she tried to claim that she did not know the man. When it became clear that she had traveled with him, police began to look at her affairs and noticed a suspicious bank transfer from the dead man to her account. An autopsy was ordered. When the medical report indicated high levels of arsenic in Obendoerfer’s body, two previous victims of the Blonde Borgia were exhumed. They were found to have died of arsenic poisoning too. It was too much of a coincidence: Anna was arrested and charged with multiple murders.

Justice moved swiftly in those days. She had escalated her killing spree to one a month in mid-1937; by November of that year her trial was underway. It was a sensation, reported in the press all over the country. It lasted four weeks and Anna tried to claim that she was carrying out mercy killings, saving her beloved charges from long, lingering deaths. But at the end there was no hesitation on the part of the jury. Eleven women and one man found Anna guilty and refused to recommend mercy. This meant an automatic death sentence. It would be the first time a woman would be executed in Ohio.

There was little public sympathy for Hahn. She had killed at least five elderly men, but the number was suspected to be as high as thirteen. She had tried to poison her husband, and the relatives she stayed with in Cincinnati when she came from Germany had also died suddenly, leaving her their home. There was a pattern, and it was a disturbing one. The execution was set for March 10, 1938.

That date passed in the inevitable appeals morass but eventually all avenues were closed. On Tuesday, December 6, Ohio Governor Martin Davey said he would not offer a last minute reprieve and the execution was scheduled for eight o’clock the following evening.

On hearing final confirmation that she was to face the chair, Hahn was allowed to meet a number of newspapermen the day prior to the execution. During the meeting she maintained her poise and still claimed to be nothing more than an angel of mercy. She also gave a letter to her attorneys in which she confessed to a number of the killings.

That evening guards came to her cell and cut one of her blue pajama legs to permit the attachment of the electrodes, and a spot on the back of her head was shaved in preparation.

The following day, she was in hysterics as the enormity of what was to come hit her. She was an emotional wreck, pleading for one last sight of her son Oscar. He saw her for a while, about three hours before the execution. He tried to be brave but could not stop himself from crying. After the visit Hahn needed to be supported by two female guards on her walk to the death chamber. As they walked along death row, there were eleven condemned men whom they passed. Each man stood as the women led Hahn along the corridor, and as she passed they called out: “God bless you.”

Then they approached the death chamber.

“Oh heavenly father! Oh God! I can’t go!” she screamed.

“There was stark terror in her eyes as she looked from side to side, with the attendants half-dragging and half-carrying her across the floor,” the Pittsburgh Press reported.

She passed out and collapsed on the floor and had to be revived with an ammonia capsule then dragged into the chair, where she was secured with leather straps. The Pittsburgh Press went on:

The final minutes of her life were spent pleading for a last sight of her twelve-year-old son Oscar, who tried vainly all day to see Governor Martin Davey and make a last plea for her life.

She writhed as the guards adjusted straps to her legs. Warden James C. Woodard and a guard held her in the chair until she sank with a moan and did not move again until the shock of electricity hit her.

As the horrified witnesses looked on, she screamed, “Don’t do this to me. Oh no, no, no no. Warden Woodard, don’t let them do this to me. Please don’t. Oh, my boy. Think of my boy! Won’t someone, anyone, come and do something for me? Is there anybody to help me? Is nobody going to help me?”

Despite her crimes, the warden was moved to tears, but he said, “I am sorry, Mrs. Hahn. There is nothing I can do.”

As the black mask was lowered over her face, Catholic priest Father John Sullivan, the prison chaplain, approached Hahn and the two began to recite the Lord’s Prayer. He held her hand for a moment, but she said, “You might be killed too, Father,” and he let go.

Here is the Pittsburgh Press account of her final seconds:

Father Sullivan began slowly saying the Lord’s Prayer, phrase by phrase, as the straps were buckled on her legs, and as the electrode, clamped over a shaved spot on her head, was adjusted to the electric wires.

The woman repeated after him—‘Our Father, who are in Heaven—’

There was a sharp catch in her voice as she intoned the words. Phrase by phrase, while a hushed silence fell over the chamber, she said the prayer.

The attendants tied down the black mask. From its depth came her final words—‘But deliver us—’

A red light over the chair flashed on. The current raced through her body as she jerked convulsively once, and then was still. The current cut off the final few words of the prayer.

For one minute the red light glowed, and then went out. Dr. Keil pressed a stethoscope against her heart. He listened for several seconds, then put the stethoscope in his pocket and turned and faced the crowd in the chamber.

‘Sufficient current has passed through the body of Anna Hahn to cause her death,’ he said, and glanced at his watch. ‘At 8.13 and a half.’

It had taken the State less than two minutes to claim the life of Mrs. Hahn.

She was buried in non-sanctified ground at the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Columbus, Ohio.

The Cincinnati Enquirer bought her last confession, promising to fund Oscar’s education as payment. What became of Oscar is not known, though he was fostered in the Midwest and served in the navy in the dying days of World War II, before returning home to complete his education. The newspaper kept their side of the deal.

MURDER, INC. THE MEN OF THE MAFIA KILLING MACHINE

Everyone thinks of serial killers as the most depraved and evil people on the planet. They are not. They are damaged people who kill out of compulsion, unable to control their impulses. But far more chilling are the cadre of professional hit men who thrive in the world of organized crime. These monsters kill for a living and place the value of human life at $500, or $50,000, or whatever the fee is at that time and that place. They show no compassion—killing women and children if the price is paid. They will even turn on colleagues and friends if the bucks are right. And they are quite willing to make the victim suffer—if that is what the client requests.

For a while the hit men even became organized, with top mafioso hiring out jobs to the sociopaths who ran and staffed Murder Incorporated. One of the hit men clocked up one hundred kills while on a retainer from Murder Incorporated during the 1930s. He was on a wage and got a bonus for each kill carried out.

It was one of the most lawless periods in American history until the FBI, with the aid of Old Sparky, began to crack down on the crime families.

It all began with an idea of Johnny Torrio, a Brooklyn gangster who had moved to Chicago and risen high in the ranks during the profitable prohibition years. In the late 1920s he conceived the idea that the five main Mafia families of New York and the various crime syndicates throughout the rest of the country should get together and work for the common good. A meeting was convened in Atlantic City in May 1929, attended by leading underworld figures such as Lucky Luciano, Al Capone, Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Costello, Dutch Schultz, Louis Buchalter, and Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia. What emerged from the three-day conference was a loose confederation of mainly Italian and Jewish organized-crime groups nationwide. The National Crime Syndicate (a name given to the loose body by the press) would act as a mediator among different factions, deciding on matters such as territories and resolving disputes. Gang wars such as the one in Chicago that culminated in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were bad for business. The Syndicate would provide an alternative that was more cost efficient. The group needed to enforce its rulings, so an enforcement wing was established, dubbed by the press as Murder Incorporated, or Murder, Inc. Essentially, this was a group of gunmen, leg breakers, and hit men embedded in the Brooklyn Mafia, who were on call throughout the country. The members, from the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill, were paid a retainer each week and were given bonuses for jobs carried out. The group was initially headed by Louise “Lepke” Buchalter, and later by Albert “Mad Hatter” Anastasia.

They were active throughout the 1930s and were responsible for between four hundred and one thousand murders—many unsolved to this day.

Murder, Inc. consisted of two factions. The Jewish Brownsville Boys were headed by Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, reporting to Louis Buchalter and Jacob Shapiro. The Italian Ocean Hill Hooligans were led by Harry Maione, reporting to Albert Anastasia. But there was close cooperation between both groups.

One of their most feared killers was Abe Reles, a psychopathic product of the slums of Brownsville. He had no conscience, killing on the least provocation. Stories of his savagery abound. Despite his small size, he was fearless. His favorite method of killing was with a narrow ice pick, which he would ram through his victim’s ear, right into the brain. In the days of less sophisticated forensic pathology, these deaths were sometimes put down to natural cerebral hemorrhage. It is not known how many hits he carried out for Murder, Inc., but he killed frequently. Several of his kills had nothing to do with business. According to the legends that grew around him, he once killed a car-wash worker for leaving a smudge on his fender. On another occasion, he killed a parking lot attendant for failing to fetch his car fast enough. Once he brought a guest to his mother-in-law’s home for supper. When she left after the meal, Reles and another gang member murdered the guest and removed the body. He was never worried about being caught; who would cross him?

But in 1940 he was arrested and charged with a string of murders. Knowing he faced the electric chair when convicted, he decided to break the Mafia’s code of Omertà (code of silence) and snitch on his colleagues. It was the break the authorities needed and the end of Murder, Inc.

Reles’s testimony brought seven hit men to a comfortable seat on Old Sparky. The Department of Justice’s electricity bill rose sharply as the gangsters fried. It would take several books to outline the life and crimes of the men Reles snitched on, but here are the highlights.

Louis Buchalter was a labor racketeer and one of the bosses of Murder, Inc. His idea was that those ordering a kill could not be connected with the kill afterward because it would not have been carried out by one of their gang. Instead, they would contact Anastasia, who would pass the contract to Buchalter. Buchalter would then pick one of his Brownsville thugs and pass the assignment along. That meant that the killer had no idea who he was working for and the man who hired him had no idea who had carried out the hit, making subsequent investigations difficult.

Buchalter rarely took part in the murders. He was the facilitator and paymaster. But under the law, a party organizing a killing is guilty of murder. He was also heavily involved in other crimes and was indicted and convicted in 1936 on a charge of violating Federal antitrust laws. The trial took place in his absence, as he was on the run at the time. Convictions on drugs charges swiftly followed. He remained on the run until 1939.

In 1941 he went on trial for the murder of candy store owner Joseph Rosen. Reles testified that he had overheard Buchalter ordering the hit and the mobster was convicted, along with two lieutenants (Louis Capone and Mendy Weiss), and sentenced to death. The three men went to the chair in Sing Sing on March 4, 1944.

Harry Maione—nicknamed “Happy” because of his perpetual scowl—led the Ocean Hill Hooligans and was a leading Murder, Inc. hit man. He was implicated in several murders. His right-hand man was Frank Abbandando, a handsome man who liked fancy clothes, fast cars, and women. Abbandando was a sexual predator who favored rape over conventional dating and committed thirty killings around Brooklyn—at a fee of $500 per hit. His favorite method was to drive an ice pick through his victim’s chest.

In 1937 Louis Buchalter was worried that prosecutors were moving in on the group, so he ordered several people killed whom he feared were potential witnesses against him. One was a petty loan shark, George Rudnick. A three-man hit squad took him out in 1937. Maione and Abbandando were joined by Harry Strauss for the job.

The three men cornered the loan shark in a garage and beat him to death, crushing his head during the attack. At least they thought they did. When they opened the trunk of their car to put the body in, Rudnick began to cough and tried to sit up. So Maione picked up a meat cleaver and began hacking at his head, while Strauss took out his trusty ice pick and stabbed at their victim’s chest. He became frenzied, inflicting sixty-three stab wounds.

This was the crime for which Maione and Abbandando went on trial in 1941, and Reles’s evidence sent them to the chair on February 19, 1942.

Reles even testified against one of his closest friends, Martin “Bugsy” Goldstein. This thug had grown up in East New York, Brooklyn, and worked closely with Reles for many years. Reles testified that he had been one of the killers of Irving Feinstein. Feinstein was small fish, a gambler and loan racketeer, who had crossed a local crime boss and moved into territory that he should not have. Murder, Inc. took him out as a favor to the crime boss.

A three-man team arrived at Feinstein’s home on East 91st Street—Reles, Goldstein, and Harry Strauss. Reles and Goldstein subdued the gambler, while Strauss got out his ice pick. But the man struggled and managed to bite a chunk out of Strauss’s finger. This infuriated the hit man, who decided that Feinstein had earned a harder death. So the three men tied him up with a loop of rope around his neck and the end secured to his feet so that as he struggled he would slowly strangle himself. Then they stood back and laughed as he slowly and painfully expired. But Strauss was still unsatisfied, so they took the body to a vacant parking lot and set it on fire. Resisting the urge to roast marshmallows over the fire—they did consider this—the three men instead retired to a fish restaurant nearby to celebrate the successful hit.

This was the crime for which Reles’s testimony sent his friend Goldstein and also Harry Strauss to the chair. Both men were electrocuted on June 12, 1941. Asked if he had anything to say after being convicted, Goldstein, ever the joker, said, “Judge, I would like to pee on your leg.”

Strauss had been involved in a few of the murders Reles had testified about, and that is no surprise. Of the seven men sent to the chair by the informant, he was by far the worst. He was responsible for more than a hundred hits at a conservative estimate. That makes Ted Bundy look like an amateur in comparison.

Harry “Pittsburgh Phil” Strauss was born in Brooklyn and never did visit Pittsburgh. He just liked the nickname. His associates called him “Pep.” He developed a taste for killing at an early age and saw violence as a way of getting noticed. He believed that if it was known how good he was at the job, he would eventually move into crime’s big league. The call to work for Murder, Inc. was the big league for the young thug.

Once established in the group, he quickly earned a name as the most prolific of them all. His total kills exceeded the combined total of his nearest rivals, Abe Reles, Frank Maione, and Frank Abbandando. He didn’t wait to be asked, often volunteering to carry out jobs, and he was the mobster of choice for out-of-state hits. He packed simply for these hits—a clean shirt, a gun, and an ice pick. When not working he never carried a weapon, and often he would use impromptu weapons to carry out kills. That way he could not be caught with something incriminating on him.

His favorite methods included shooting, stabbing with an ice pick, and drowning. But he used a variety of murder methods, including strangulation, beating, and live burial. Some historians believe he may have killed as many as five hundred people (a figure that seems too high), but during all the years that he was active, he was arrested just eighteen times and never convicted of anything. He took care to leave no clues.

However, the testimony of Reles finally proved the undoing of the pint-sized killer. He went on trial with Goldstein for the killing of Irving Feinstein.

Knowing that the mood of the jury would be against him, and the testimony of Reles would be very damaging, Strauss decided upon a risky trial strategy. A dapper dresser always, he abandoned his good clothes and began wearing T-shirts. He stopped washing and grew his hair and beard out—not grooming either. He pleaded insanity and played it up to-the-full in the court, often babbling incoherently. Frequently he grabbed the briefcase of his lawyer and chewed on it. Finally it got too much for the court, and his hair was cut and his beard forcibly trimmed. It didn’t fool the jury either, and he was convicted of murder and sentenced to the electric chair.

He maintained his insanity pose through the entire appeals process, but shortly before his death he realized it was hopeless. He asked for a shave and a haircut and resumed his dapper dress. He would go out as himself, the Beau Brummell of organized crime. One of his last visitors was long-time girlfriend Evelyn Mittleman. He looked his best for her. He had always put forth an effort for the Brooklyn beauty; to win her affections in the first place he had murdered her previous boyfriend.

He had one last ploy. He offered to turn informant but on one condition. He had to be allowed a one-on-one interview with Abe Reles. The authorities declined this kind offer. They were right; he admitted shortly before his execution that he planned on attacking Reles and biting through his jugular.

“I didn’t worry about the chair, if I could just tear his throat out first,” he said.

He never got the chance, going to the chair moments after his accomplice Martin Goldstein.

As for the second most prolific killer of Murder, Inc., Abe Reles, he escaped the law, but he could not escape justice.

After his testimony had put away seven contract killers and broken Murder, Inc. forever, Reles was getting ready to give evidence against yet another mobster, Albert Anastasia. He was a big fish—like Buchalter, one of the bosses, rather than a foot soldier. Reles was prepared to testify that the gangster had been involved in the killing of union longshoreman Pete Panto. This had serious implications, because Anastasia was not just a leading figure in Murder, Inc. He was also a major player in the National Crime Syndicate. He would be by far the most senior figure brought down by Reles. He was also the figure with the most powerful influence.

The trial was set for November 12, 1941, with Reles as the only prosecution witness. The prosecution knew that their star witness had to be guarded diligently. So they had six police detectives constantly protecting him as he was holed up in the Half Moon Hotel on Coney Island. Three other mob informants were also in the hotel with their guards. So the place was crawling with police. Crime boss Frank Costello—an even more senior figure in the organization than Anastasia—raised up to $100,000, which he used to bribe three of Reles’s guards to kill the informant. One of the men he bribed had allegedly been involved in the disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Carter in 1930, so he had chosen well.

From here on the story becomes speculative. On the evening of November 11, Reles’s wife, Rose, visited the sixth floor room where her husband was being kept. The couple argued, and then she left for the night. The following morning the assistant manager of the hotel reported hearing a loud thud. He ran and discovered the body of the gangster on the concrete roof of an extension to the hotel, which lay four stories below Reles’s window. The body lay twenty feet from the wall of the hotel.

The New York Times carried the official account of the “accident:”

Sometime after daylight yesterday, Abe Reles … climbed out on a window edge of the sixth floor of the Half Moon Hotel, fully dressed but hatless. Strong wind from the gray sea tugged at his long, crisp black hair and tore at his gray suit.

Behind him, in his room, lights still burned. The little radio that had played all night, still blared and babbled … Reles let the two bed sheets down the hotel’s east wall, two windows north of the hotel’s Boardwalk front. Around one end of the upper bed sheet he had twisted a four-foot length of radio lead-in wire. He had wound the free end of the wire on a radio valve under the window.

He let himself down on the sheets to the fifth floor. One hand desperately clung to the sheet. With the other, Reles tugged at the screen and at the window of the vacant fifth-floor room. He worked them up six inches. He tugged again with his full 160 pound weight.

The strain was too much for the amateur wire knot on the valve. Little by little, it came undone. Reles tried to save himself. He kicked towards the fifth-floor window ledge with his left foot, but merely brushed the shoe leather from toe to heel. He plunged to the hotel’s concrete kitchen roof forty-two feet below. He landed on his back, breaking his spine.

It is a nice story, but the problem is that Reles landed on the roof well away from the wall of the hotel. Had he tried to escape—unlikely, given that he was the star witness, and avoiding prosecution for his efforts—he would have plunged straight down. Far more likely is that two or more of his guards picked up the violent killer and swung him vigorously through the open window, setting up the sheets afterward as a cover story.

His killers were never caught. The trial collapsed, and Anastasia went on to serve with distinction in World War II before returning to a life of crime. He was assassinated in 1957.

Although Abe Reles escaped the electric chair, no one can deny that justice of a sort was served that cold, misty morning on Coney Island.

ALBERT FISH THE BOOGEY MAN

“It will be the supreme thrill of my life,” sadistic sexual predator, child killer, and cannibal Albert Fish said, when hearing that he was going to die in the electric chair. He went to his death with a smile, unrepentant about the trail of death and misery he had left in his wake.

Hamilton Howard—known as Albert—Fish was born in 1870 and was one of the first known serial killers in the United States. He was known as The Gray Man, the Werewolf of Wysteria, the Brooklyn Vampire, the Moon Maniac, and simply as The Boogey Man. He boasted of killing children in every state, claiming a total of around one hundred. More likely his number was far smaller. He was an unreliable witness who loved to boast and shock. But whatever the final figure, Fish was a true monster.

A native of Washington, DC, his father was seventy-five when he was born, and the family had a history of mental illness. An uncle suffered dementia, a brother was confined to a state mental hospital, and his sister had a “mental affliction.” His mother heard voices and suffered hallucinations, and three other relatives had undisclosed problems. On his father’s death, his mother put Fish in an orphanage and the child discovered he enjoyed the physical punishment that was the norm in those institutions. “I was there till I was nearly nine, and that’s where I got started wrong. We were unmercifully whipped. I saw boys doing many things they should not have done,” he told investigators later.

At twelve, now home with his mother, Fish had his first homosexual experiences with a local telegraph boy. He was also introduced to deviant practices such as eating feces and drinking urine. In his late teens Fish became a rent boy and also began raping young boys. He was a deviant who enjoyed an unorthodox and destructive lifestyle. But at the age of twenty-eight his mother arranged a marriage for him and he settled down, having six children with his young wife. He was working as a house painter, often traveling extensively for jobs, but did not put his old ways completely behind him. He continued to molest young boys, generally under the age of six. In his thirties he began to fantasize about sexual mutilation, but it took a long time before fantasy merged into reality. He waited until he was aged forty-one before his assaults escalated. He was staying in St. Louis at the time and he began sexually molesting an intellectually disabled young man. He tied the nineteen-year-old up and tried to slice his penis with scissors. But he panicked when he saw the look of fear on his victim’s face. Leaving the youth ten dollars to cover his medical bills, Fish fled the city and returned to his home in New York. But the incident had turned a switch in Fish’s mind, and now he began going to brothels frequently, often engaging in sadomasochistic practices with others of similar inclinations. But this period of his life was cut short when he was convicted of larceny and sent to Sing Sing. This also brought on the end of his marriage. When he got out of prison his wife had abandoned him, leaving him the children to raise on his own. Around this time he began to hear voices in his head, as his mind began its degeneration. He began experimenting with self-harm, often embedding needles into his groin, pelvis, and abdomen for sexual gratification. He tried flagellation and also put wads of burning cotton up his anus. He stopped cooking his meat, as his obsession with cannibalism grew.

Fish chose victims who were powerless—handicapped, poor African-Americans, and children. He claimed to have attacked a man in Delaware in 1910 but no record exists of the assault. A few years later he stabbed a mentally handicapped boy in Washington. He was beginning to get a taste for torturing, mutilating, and murdering young children with his meat cleaver, butcher’s knife, and handsaw. He was prevented a number of times from attempting to abduct children but may well have succeeded as well. Records are scanty, and he claimed himself to have been killing regularly.

In May 1928 Fish saw a classified ad in the New York World from a young man looking for work in the country. Fish thought it would be fun to offer the guy a job, tie him up, mutilate him, and leave him to bleed to death. But when he made contact with Edward Budd, eighteen, he spotted Budd’s ten-year-old sister Grace and decided on a new victim. Telling the family that he was on the way to his niece’s birthday party, he asked whether the young girl would like to accompany him. He said he would have her back by nine. The girl’s mother, Delia, was reluctant, but her father said, “Let the poor kid go. She don’t see much good times.” It was a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

That evening there was no sign of the young girl and no word from the kindly man who had taken her away. After a sleepless night, they contacted the police, who quickly established that the name given by the man was false, and the address where he said his niece’s birthday was being held was bogus. Beyond that, they had nothing to add.

Several years passed for the confused and grieving family. A sixty-six-year-old suspect was arrested but found not guilty of the abduction. No one had any idea what had happened to the smiling girl. Then, in 1934, the family was horrified to receive an anonymous letter with graphic descriptions of cannibalism. The letter had come from Fish and recounted the experiences of a friend of his who had been stranded in China.

“At that time there was famine in China. So great was the suffering among the very poor that all children under twelve were sold for food in order to keep others from starving. A boy or girl under fourteen was not safe in the street. You could go in any shop and … part of the naked body of a boy or girl would be brought out and just what you wanted cut from it. A boy or girl’s behind, which is the sweetest part of the body and sold as veal cutlet, brought the highest price.”

The letter went on to recount how his “friend” developed a taste for human meat, and when he returned to America, he kidnapped, fattened, and ate children:

He told me so often how good human flesh was I made up my mind to taste it. On Sunday June the 3, 1928 I called on you at 406 W 15 St. Brought you pot cheese—strawberries. We had lunch. Grace sat in my lap and kissed me. I made up my mind to eat her. On the pretense of taking her to a party. You said, yes, she could go. I took her to an empty house in Westchester I had already picked out. When we got there, I told her to remain outside. She picked wildflowers. I went upstairs and stripped all my clothes off. I knew if I did not I would get her blood on them. When all was ready I went to the window and called her. Then I hid in a closet until she was in the room. When she saw me all naked, she began to cry and tried to run down the stairs. I grabbed her and she said she would tell her mamma. First I stripped her naked. How she did kick—bite and scratch. I choked her to death, then cut her in small pieces so I could take my meat to my rooms. Cook and eat it. How sweet and tender her little ass was roasted in the oven. It took me 9 days to eat her entire body.

Whether it was to soften the impact on the family or increase their sense of horror, he concluded: “I did not fuck her, though I could of had I wished. She died a virgin.”

Writing a letter to the family of a victim might seem like an unnecessary risk, but serial killers often have a need to insert themselves into an investigation. They get a vicarious thrill from closeness to the case. And sometimes they just like to torture the family. This was almost certainly an element of what Fish was doing.

He made one mistake, however. Although he did not sign the letter, he put it in an envelope with a small hexagonal emblem emblazoned with the letters NYPCBA—the New York Private Chauffeur’s Benevolent Association. A janitor at the company admitted stealing some stationery, but he left it at a boarding house at 200 East Street when he moved out. The next tenant in the boarding house was Fish. The cops finally had a suspect.

Fish initially agreed to be interviewed and then brandished a razor blade. He was swiftly disarmed, and the arresting officer, Detective William King, knew he had his breakthrough. Fish didn’t even attempt to deny the murder of the little girl. He admitted that her older brother was his initial target, and then he had switched. He said that it had not occurred to him to rape the girl, but he disturbingly admitted that he had ejaculated while strangling her.

Two more grisly murders were laid at the feet of Fish. On July 14, 1924, eight-year-old Francis McDonnell disappeared from Staten Island. After a search he was found hanging from a tree in a nearby wooded area. He had been strangled and sexually assaulted, and he had suffered extensive cuts. His left hamstring had been stripped of all the flesh. Fish claimed he had been trying to castrate the boy, but more likely he had taken the flesh to eat. Descriptions of an elderly man with a gray mustache seen in the area at the time matched Fish. There was no doubt of his guilt. After being convicted of Grace Budd’s killing, Fish admitted the McDonnell one.

The third monstrous killing he was definitely responsible for was that of Billy Gaffney. The four-year-old had been playing with friends in February 1927 when he and another child disappeared. When the other, three-year-old Billy Beaton, was found he told searchers that the Boogey Man had taken his friend. Gaffney’s body was never recovered. A man seen lurking nearby matched Fish’s description.

Fish was glad to admit his guilt, saying, “I took the boy. Stripped him naked and tied his hands and feet and gagged him with a piece of dirty rag I picked from the dump. Then I burned his clothes. Next day, about 2:00 p.m., I took tools, a good heavy cat-of-nine-tails. Home made, short handle … I whipped his bare behind until the blood ran down his legs. I cut off his ears, nose—slit his mouth from ear to ear. Gouged out his eyes. He was dead then. I stuck the knife in his belly and held my mouth to his body and drank his blood.”

He then took some choice cuts to eat and disposed of the rest of the body. He gave shocked investigators a detailed account of the recipe he used to cook the boy, gravy, onions and all.

On March 11, Fish went on trial for the murder of Grace Budd. He pleaded insanity, saying that he heard God in his head telling him to kill children. Several experts testified to his weird sexual fetishes, which included sadism, masochism, and more. His lawyer said that Fish was a “psychiatric phenomenon,” unique in the range of his sexual abnormalities.

Unbelievably, the former manager of the Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, where Fish had been treated during his second incarceration (for sending obscene letters), said that Fish was abnormal but sane. Menas Gregory said that urophilia (love of urine), coprophilia (a fetish for feces), and pedophilia were “socially perfectly alright,” and Fish was “no different from millions of other people.”

The twelve jurors looked at one another and shook their heads.

They had no doubt that Fish was insane—but as one explained to the press, they felt he should be executed anyway. Such evil could not walk the world.

After his conviction, Fish admitted to two more killings (McDonnell and Gaffney). Six other children, aged between four and seventeen, were almost certainly killed by the Gray Man. As to all the others he claimed, there is considerable doubt. For one thing, his confessions were imprecise and it was often not clear whether he was talking about molesting a child, killing a child, or eating a child. And the murder descriptions were not linked to actual missing children. It is probable that he killed less than ten, but raped and molested hundreds. That would be common with very active pedophiles.

A few days before his death, Fish requested pen and paper and wrote several pages, his final statement. This he handed over to his lawyer, James Dempsey, to distribute after his death. But on reading it, the lawyer immediately decided to suppress it. He told reporters, “I will never show it to anyone. It was the most filthy string of obscenities that I have ever read.”

Fish went to the death chamber in Sing Sing on January 16, 1936. He was eager for the experience and looked forward to the sensations that would follow once the current began to flow. It was the ultimate buzz for a masochist.

He entered the chamber at 11:06 p.m. and helped the guard position the electrode on his leg—unusual behavior for a condemned man. Then he sat back and allowed them to fit the skullcap with the other electrode. As the death mask was lowered over his head, he muttered, “I don’t even know why I am here.”

One concern the prison authorities had was that Fish had a large number of metal pins in his leg, which he had inserted over the years as part of his spectrum of sexual fetishes. Would these affect how the electrocution went? It was an unfounded fear. Within three minutes of entering the death chamber, Fish was pronounced dead. The electrocution had gone perfectly. Fish had found the perfect climax to his life of depravity.

BRUNO RICHARD HAUPTMANN THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY

In the days before fame became debased by fifteen-minute wannabes, reality television stars, and pop-idol winners, Charles Lindbergh was the real deal. A dashing airman in the early days of flight, he achieved worldwide fame overnight—but he earned it.

At the age of twenty-five the US Air Mail pilot and Air Corps reservist won the Orteig Prize for flying solo nonstop from America to Europe. He took off from the Roosevelt Field in Garden City, Long Island, on May 20, 1927, and landed in Paris, France, the following day. This was the first solo crossing of the Atlantic, a breakthrough in the new and glamorous field of aviation. Lindbergh was front page news on both sides of the Atlantic.

He had been interested in machines for as long as he could remember and had dropped out of college to learn to fly. For two years he had supported himself as a barnstormer, performing in flying circuses all over the country. He did it all—stunts, wing walking—every crazy thing you could do in the air. Then he had done a year of training with the fledgling Army Air Service. On completion he was a second Lieutenant in the Air Service Reserve Corps. By then he was one of the most experienced fliers in the country and picked up a job as one of the first Air Mail pilots.

He also applied to be one of the fliers on Admiral Richard Byrd/Donald McMillan’s North Pole expedition of 1925, but the team was already chosen.

Life in the Air Mail was exciting. Twice he had to bail out and parachute to land, but both times he managed to locate his wrecked plane and ensure that the mail was delivered—not on time but at least safely. Early in 1927 he went on leave, to oversee the building of his transatlantic plane, Spirit of St. Louis. Financing the project with a loan, a donation from his employers, and his personal savings, Lindbergh was not considered a serious contender for the prize for the first solo crossing.

When he made it, the world sat up and took notice. In Paris the American flag was flown above the Foreign Office, the first time that honor had been accorded a non-president. He was awarded the Lêgion d’Honneur, the highest award the French goverment gives. Back home he got a ticker-tape parade in his honor and was awarded the nation’s highest military decoration, the Medal of Honor, for his historic exploit. He was a hero. The Jazz Age valued its heroes, and he was feted everywhere.

He married well two years later and had six children. He settled in a large mansion in rural East Amwell, New Jersey, near the town of Hopewell. Life seemed idyllic.

Until it all came crashing down on March 1, 1932, when his life intersected with that of a man from a completely different background, with a completely different destiny.

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was just three years older than Lindbergh but born a world away, in the old German empire, in the village of Kamenz, not far from Poland. He had a normal enough childhood, attending school to fourteen and participating in the local scout movement. He trained as a carpenter for a year, and then switched to machine building. But in 1917, his father died and two brothers were killed in the war. Bruno was conscripted the same year. He ended up on the Western Front, where he was gassed, and then hit on the helmet with flying shrapnel during a shelling. The blow knocked him out and he was left for dead by his comrades. When he finally came to, he managed to crawl to safety—but was sent back up the line only hours later.

Many soldiers were traumatized by the war and found settling into civilian life difficult. Hauptmann turned to crime, perhaps looking for the excitement of action. He robbed two women, and then burgled a house, earning himself three years in prison. On his release he continued breaking into houses and was rearrested. To escape a further prison term he stowed away on a liner and entered the United States illegally. He landed in New York in September 1923 and disappeared into the German community in the city. He worked as a carpenter and married a waitress in 1925.

But the economy crashed in 1929, plunging America into the Great Depression. Hauptmann had a wife to support and began to look for easy money. Crime seemed the answer. This time he decided on the big score, a crime so audacious and profitable that if he pulled it off, he could retire on the proceeds. He began to look for a suitable target. One man was in the news all the time. Fame and glamour—he must have money to go with it. And he lived in an isolated rural spot. Lindbergh was the perfect victim.

On March 1, 1932, the family nurse tucked twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Junior into his crib. She wrapped him in a blanket and pinned it to the sheets to prevent him moving during his sleep. Charles Senior was often away on business, but that evening he was at home. At nine thirty at night he heard a noise which he assumed came from the kitchen but thought nothing more of it. Half an hour later the nurse discovered that the crib was empty. She ran to check if the baby was with his mother but Anne Morrow Lindbergh did not have him. During the subsequent search of the house, Charles Lindbergh found a white envelope on the windowsill above a radiator. Grabbing a gun, he went around the house looking for intruders, while his wife phoned the police. They arrived twenty minutes later—followed swiftly by the newspapermen and by Lindbergh’s lawyer.

There were clues. Tire prints were found, and a three-piece ladder hidden in a nearby bush. But no sign of the baby. The envelope that Lindbergh had found in the nursery confirmed their worse suspicions. This was a kidnapping. They were ordered to pay a ransom of $50,000; delivery instructions would follow. That was all.

It was, as newspaperman H. L. Mencken described it, “the biggest story since the Resurrection.” Immediately, the full force of the American justice system was mobilized. Even President Herbert Hoover got involved, ordering the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI), the Coast Guard, Customs Service, and Immigration Service, to join the hunt for the missing toddler. Leading underworld figures such as Al Capone offered to help, though their motives were far from pure. Capone suggested that he be released from prison to liaise with the kidnappers—an offer that was rejected as soon as it was made.

This flurry of activity showed how highly Lindbergh was regarded; the president did not make it a habit to involve himself in kidnapping incidents, which were seen as matters for the local police.

A few days later, with no sign of the missing child, the first of a number of ransom notes arrived. The notes appeared to be written by someone whose first language was German. A Brooklyn teacher, John Condon, became the agreed-upon intermediary between the kidnappers and the Lindberghs.

In early March, Condon had his first meeting with the man sending the ransom notes, who said he was a Scandinavian sailor and that the child was on a boat, safe. But, worryingly, he asked if he would “burn” if “the package were dead.”

On April 2, $50,000 was handed over to a cab driver, who gave Condon a note explaining that the child was with two women, who had no involvement in the kidnapping. But nothing came of that—the child was not returned and the agony for the Lindberghs continued. Then, on May 12, a delivery truck driver pulled to the side of the road about four and a half miles from the Lindberghs’ home to relieve himself. He disappeared into a grove of trees and was horrified to find the body of a tiny child. Charles Lindbergh had been found.

An autopsy revealed that his skull had been badly fractured. It was probable that he had been killed within a very short time of his abduction. He may have been killed straight away or he may have struck his head during the abduction, possibly falling down the ladder and dying accidentally. Whatever actually happened, during the entire ransom process the child was already dead.

The news shocked Congress into passing legislation that made kidnapping a federal offense, allowing the Bureau of Investigation a freer hand in the case. The investigation became heavy-handed as they searched for an inside man in the Lindbergh household. Their focus fell on Violet Sharp, a British servant. They questioned her so vigorously that she took her own life—ingesting silverware polish that contained potassium cyanide. Subsequently it became apparent that she had no involvement.

The press dubbed the kidnapping “the Crime of the Century.” Unfortunately it was not the investigation of the century. Thirty months dragged on with no fresh leads. The investigators focused on tracking the notes in the ransom drop; they had recorded the serial numbers. They used a map to record where the bills showed up and a pattern began to emerge. The notes were being passed along the rouge of the Lexington Avenue subway, right through the German-Austrian neighborhood of Yorkville.

The ransom had also included gold certificates. These had been used as a sort of alternative currency in the United States up until 1933. One of the gold certificates from the ransom had been used by Richard Hauptmann—a German with a criminal record. When Hauptmann was arrested, a search of his home uncovered over $14,000 of the ransom money.

Under a vigorous interrogation—which included physical beatings—Hauptmann stuck to his story. He had been left the money by a friend and former business partner who had returned to Germany and conveniently died.

But equally damaging was the discovery of a drawing of the ladder used in the kidnapping and also that Hauptmann had the address and phone number of John Condon, the intermediary with the Lindberghs. It was too much of a coincidence. He was charged with kidnapping and murder.

The trial was a sensation. Reporters swarmed the town of Flemington, New Jersey, and every hotel room was occupied. One paper, the Daily Mirror, paid for Hauptmann’s defense—in return for rights to publish Hauptmann’s story.

The evidence against him was solid. In addition to having the ransom money in his possession, his handwriting was suspiciously similar to that of the kidnapper’s. Wood from his home matched the wood used in the ladder that was found at the Lindbergh home. There was too much evidence against him, and the jury had no difficulty convicting. Hauptmann was sentenced to death.

The inevitable appeals followed and were rejected. The execution would go ahead. Near the end, intense pressure came on Hauptmann to confess. A newspaper offered him a large sum for his story, but he turned it down. Even the prosecution got in on the action. An offer was made that the death sentence would be commuted to one of life imprisonment if Hauptmann confessed and gave the Lindberghs closure. He refused. He maintained his innocence right up to the end.

Shortly before facing “Old Smokey,” as the electric chair at New Jersey State Prison in Trenton was called, Hauptmann wrote his final statement:

I am writing this literally within the shadow of the electric chair. For upward to fourteen months I have been confined in the cell nearest to the execution chamber in the New Jersey penitentiary. The courts have now said that I shall die on the night of April 3, and that I shall die in the chair that is just beyond the door that faces me and has faced me every waking hour of my life these past fourteen months. The courts have said that on the night of April 3, I shall be prepared to leave the cell which has been my home; walk through the door which has been facing me these weary months; tread the few steps that lead from that door to the electric chair; that on that night I shall be led out on a walk from which I shall never return.

When I rise to join in that last deathly procession, I shall walk as any man walks, striding along one foot ahead of the other. I shall breathe the air my guards are breathing. I shall hear things that are being said, with ears that are as the ears of other men. I shall say with a voice that is the same as voices of other men that a tragedy is being enacted, that a life is being wantonly taken, that I am innocent of the crime of which I have been convicted, as innocent as any one in the world; and then, if the decision of the court is carried out, I shall be strapped into the chair, and in a few fleeting seconds this body that is mortal will be no longer living and breathing but just a mass of clay.

And I ask, WHY? Why must this thing be? Why should this thing happen? Why should the State of New Jersey take from me that which is most precious to all men—life? Why should they widow my loyal wife and orphan my lovely baby? Every hour, every day, since the Flemington jury rendered their verdict, I have asked myself that question. I am as innocent of the crime of killing the Lindbergh baby or even the slightest participation in that or any crime like it, as any one who reads this.

… unexpected like a lightning bolt or earthquake, came my arrest for the murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr. It is impossible to describe how I felt when I realized that I was being charged with that most dastardly crime of all times. It must all be a joke, it must all be a farce, all some horrible mistake! I knew nothing about the Lindbergh baby. I knew nothing about the ransom money. I knew nothing about that crime or any crimes in connection with it, and I confidently expected that within a day or two I would be returned to my home, my wife, and my baby.

That didn’t happen.

And so I sit, ten feet removed from the electric chair, and unless something can be done to aid me, unless something can be done to make some one tell the truth, or unless some one does tell it, I shall at eight o’clock Friday evening, in response to the call from my keepers, raise myself from my cot for the last time and shall walk that ‘last mile.’ I suppose there will be in that chamber some of those who have had part in the preparation of my case for the prosecution. It is my belief that their suffering, their agony, will be greater than mine. Mine will be over in a moment. Theirs will last as long as life itself lasts.

On the afternoon of April 3, 1936, Hauptmann had a last visit from his wife and baby son. Then he enjoyed his final meal. Unlike many who refuse the meal or opt for the standard one, Hauptmann chose some of his favorites. He had a salmon salad, corn fritters, sliced cheese, olives, and celery, followed by a fruit salad and cake. He washed it all down with milk and finished with a coffee. His spiritual adviser, Reverend James Matthiesen, remained in the cell with him. A few minutes before the guards came to take him to the death chamber, he reverted to his native German, saying, “Ich bin absolut unschuldig an den Verbrechen, die man mir zur last legt.” (“I am absolutely innocent of the crime with which I am convicted.”)

When the guards arrived he walked with quiet dignity to the chamber and sat calmly in the chair. He said nothing and made no gestures to the fifty-two witnesses.

“He sat down just like he was going to eat dinner at his table at home,” said one of the reporters present. “He certainly did die a brave man.”

The execution was flawless. The time from when he entered the chamber at 8:40 p.m. to the official pronouncement of his death was just seven and a half minutes—perhaps helped by his calmness. He was cremated and his ashes scattered in his native Germany by his widow. In the years that have passed there has been considerable controversy about his conviction and about the heavy-handed methods used by the police. But however they got the result, there is little doubt that Hauptmann was the Lindbergh kidnapper.

SACCO AND VANZETTI ANARCHISTS CONVICTED IN THE WRONG

Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were dangerous armed anarchists who believed in the violent overthrow of the American government. They were labor agitators and strike organizers who were members of a group that bombed and killed to further their political aims. When they went to the electric chair in August 1927, twenty thousand people gathered on Boston Common. But they were there to protest the execution. They knew that the man who went to the electric chair a few minutes before the two anarchists did was probably the real guilty party and that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent scapegoats.

It was a massive miscarriage of justice that is controversial to this day.

Both anarchists were Italians. Vanzetti was a fishmonger, born in the Piemonte region of northern Italy in 1888. Sacco was a cobbler from the poorer far south of the country, born three years later. They did not meet until they had both moved to America. Their paths first crossed at a strike in 1917. By that stage they were both involved in an anarchist group inspired by Luigi Galleani, an Italian anarchist who advocated revolutionary violence and published a periodical, Subversive Chronicle, to further these aims. He also published a practical guide to bomb making. At the time Italian anarchists were regarded almost as we regard Al Qaeda cells today. The group was suspected of several bombings and assassination attempts, including one attempted mass poisoning. Two years later Galleani was deported.

But the cells remained active, with up to sixty anarchists waging a campaign against politicians and judges. A friend of Sacco and Vanzetti’s was killed when the bomb he was planting to kill Attorney General Mitchell Palmer went off prematurely. But such political activity requires funds, and, like all terrorist groups, the anarchists were also involved in robberies and conventional crime.

On the afternoon of April 15, 1920, two men were bringing the payroll to the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company factory in Braintree, Massachusetts. The cash was in two steel boxes when the guards were approached by two men. One guard attempted to draw his pistol but was shot and killed. The raiders also killed an unarmed paymaster, shooting him in the back as he attempted to flee. The robbers jumped into a dark blue Buick and drove off, shooting randomly into the crowd of workers as they escaped.

This was the second factory robbery in a few months. In December, a shoe factory in Bridgewater had been targeted, but no one was killed in that attempted robbery. Police immediately suspected local anarchists of being behind the two robberies. Sacco and Vanzetti were known agitators, and despite having no criminal records they were in the frame from the start. During a roundup of local activists, the police found a car that they thought might have been a second getaway vehicle and they impounded it for examination. They waited to see who would turn up to reclaim the car. Four men showed up, including Sacco and Vanzetti. But the men smelled a rat and escaped before the cops could capture them. However Sacco and Vanzetti were identified and were soon in custody.

When questioned they both denied owning guns—a denial that rang hollow when they were searched and the guns taken from them. Not only were they carrying, the guns were loaded. The bullets taken from Sacco matched those at the crime scene, and the gun taken from Vanzetti was identical to the one stolen from the guard who had been murdered during the robbery. It was enough; both men were charged with murder.

Immediately the anarchists began a campaign of retaliation. Two days after their arrest, the Wall Street bombing occurred. Dynamite was used in a horse-drawn cart. The huge bomb was loaded with shrapnel to maximize the damage. Thirty-eight people were killed, and 134 wounded. The group also began worldwide embassy bombings.

Vanzetti was tried for the attempted robbery and attempted murder in Bridgewater. The robbery had happened on Christmas Eve, 1919. There was not enough evidence to charge Sacco or any of the other anarchists. Several witnesses put Vanzetti at the scene of the robbery, but their descriptions varied. Some said he had a big bushy mustache, others said it was smaller, or more shaped. “Man with a mustache” was the only thing the descriptions had in common. But there was also physical evidence, including a shotgun shell retrieved at the scene which matched several shells found on Vanzetti when he was arrested.

To counteract this, the defense paraded sixteen separate witnesses, all of whom testified that they had purchased eels from Vanzetti during the period that the prosecution alleged he was carrying out the robbery. Eels were a traditional festival food for some sections of the Italian community. But not all the witnesses spoke good English, and the succession of people talking about foreign traditions did not go down well with the jury. The prosecution found it easy to make the witnesses appear confused and inaccurate.

Though he was losing the case, Vanzetti chose not to testify on his own behalf. His team felt that he would not come across well under cross-examination, being a committed anarchist and enemy of the state. He was convicted and was sentenced to twelve to fifteen years in prison. Strike one for the state.

This trial was followed by a second one—for the Braintree robbery. This time Sacco was also on trial and the charge was murder. It was a tense time; fearing a bomb attack on the courthouse, the courtroom was fitted with cast-iron shutters and heavy sliding doors. Police ringed the building, and Sacco and Vanzetti had an armed escort at all times.

The evidence was ambiguous at best. Sacco had been absent from work on the day of the robbery and the two defendants had been seen in the vicinity on that morning. One witness did say that he had seen Sacco shoot the paymaster, Berardelli, as he was trying to escape. Another testified that as the getaway car was driving off, Sacco had leaned out the window and waved a gun at him.

If the prosecution relied heavily on ever-unreliable eyewitnesses, so did the defense. Both men provided alibis, backed up by witnesses. But were the witnesses fellow anarchists? This was what the prosecution alleged.

The actual physical evidence was inconclusive. Experts agreed that one of the fatal bullets could have come from Sacco’s gun. But the prosecution could not say for certain, even after firing test shots and comparing them to the recovered bullet. The defense said that the bullet did not match the gun. That should have been a score for Sacco.

The case against Vanzetti was that he had been present during a felony murder, so he was as guilty as the man who pulled the trigger. There was no suggestion that he had fired on the day. But he had been seen, according to witnesses, in the vicinity, and one put him in the getaway car.

In a theatrical gesture near the end of the trial, the district attorney produced a flop-eared cap which had been left at the crime scene. Many people had said it was similar to a hat Sacco once owned. He threw the hat at Sacco and told him to put it on. Despite the fact that it was clearly several sizes too small for the Italian shoemaker, District Attorney Frederick Katzmann continued to refer to the cap as his.

The evidence was very poor, but Sacco and Vanzetti had made a negative impression on the jurors. No one liked radical anarchists. The jury retired for three hours, ordered dinner, and then returned with guilty verdicts.

The death sentence was automatic. So were the protests that followed around the world. There were demonstrations in sixty Italian cities alone. Leading left-wing intellectuals, artists, and writers jumped on the bandwagon. There was doubt about the guilt of the two men and even more questions over the conduct of the trials, which had been slipshod. A number of motions for a retrial were made and denied. Unless there was some dramatic new development, they were going to the chair.

Then there was a sensation; a man came forward and claimed it was he who had killed the guard and the paymaster.

Celestino Madeiros was a career criminal awaiting trial for murder. The case against him was strong and he knew he was facing the chair. He told the police that he had been part of a criminal gang drawn from the Italian community in Providence, Rhode Island. The group was led by Joe Morelli and had a history of attacking shoe factories. They also used a car similar to that seen in the vicinity of the Braintree robbery. They ticked all the boxes.

This new version of what happened also explained one troubling thing: why so many witnesses had put Sacco at the scene. The leader of the gang, Joe Morelli, could have been Sacco’s twin. The resemblance was uncanny. But the latest motion for a retrial based on this new evidence was turned down. The judge felt that Madeiros was not a credible witness. Public reaction was shocked, but the judiciary was unmoved. Now, nothing short of a pardon could save Sacco and Vanzetti.

Many petitioned. Those adding their names to the campaign for clemency included John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Albert Einstein, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and even Benito Mussolini. Ordinary workers got involved as well. In August 1927 the Industrial Workers of the World, a trade union, called for a three-day nationwide walkout to protest the executions. In the Walsenburg coal district of Colorado, 1,132 of 1,167 miners left their posts, sparking the Colorado coal strike.

Sacco and Vanzetti remained defiant while in prison, calling on their supporters for revenge on the powers of the state that they blamed for their incarceration. They wrote dozens of letters protesting their innocence. Their demeanor convinced many of their innocence. But innocent or not, an aura of violence hung around them. On August 15, just a week before the scheduled execution, a bomb destroyed the home of one of the jurors who convicted them.

The day before the execution twenty thousand people thronged Boston Common, calling for a last minute reprieve. In their cells at Charlestown State Prison, both men refused to see a priest on their last day. Although they were Italian Catholics, they had chosen a different path and stuck to their principles to the end. Vanzetti, through his lawyer, asserted the pair’s innocence one last time and asked that no violence should follow their deaths.

That evening the death chamber was busy. The man in charge was Robert Greene Elliott, who held the title of State Electrician for the State of New York. He also worked for the neighboring states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts. He had been appointed in 1926 and would hold the post until 1939.

A devout Methodist, his parents had hoped he might enter the ministry. But as a child he had read about the electric chair and began to wonder what it would be like to throw the switch. A qualified electrician, he joined the prison service. At the time the state electrician was Edwin Davis, who passed the torch to John Hulbert in 1913. Hulbert was a nervous man who became depressed over the work he was expected to do. He oversaw 140 executions, and only the fee of $150 per job kept him at it. But he finally suffered a nervous breakdown in 1926 and retired. “I got tired of killing people,” he said. Three years later Hulbert, still brooding over the 140 executions he had carried out, put a gun to his head and took his own life.

Elliott applied for the vacant job and got it. He had assisted both Davis and Hulbert and was ready for the responsibility.

Elliott had a detached attitude to the job and tried his best to perfect the method. He began with 2,000 volts for three seconds, and then lowered the charge to 500 volts for the rest of a full minute. This cycle was repeated until the process ended with one more high voltage jolt. The first high voltage charge was designed to render the victim immediately unconscious so that he would not suffer during the process. The lower voltage would heat the vital organs, cooking them to the point where life was extinguished, without causing too much bodily burning. A higher voltage would have caused burning, leaving terrible smells, smoke, and other unpleasant side effects (for the watcher—not the victim!). The oscillating cycle of shocks would also cause the heart to go into arrest, bringing death quickly.

During the time he was state electrician, Elliott also ran an electrical contracting business on the side. The night he executed Sacco and Vanzetti he collected a fat fee of $450—roughly $6,000 in today’s terms—for his grisly work. But this was not his busiest night. Though he was opposed to the death penalty himself, he executed 387 people during his career. Once (January 6, 1927), he carried out six executions in two different states in a single evening.

On August 22, 1927, he knew he had to get everything right because of the high profile of the case. In his memoir, Agent of Death, he wrote: “I knew that the eyes of the world were on Boston that night, that the least thing out of the ordinary or the slightest mishap in the death chamber would be inflated into a sensation that might result in serious repercussions.”

The first to enter Elliott’s chamber was Madeiros, who still maintained that he was guilty of the crime for which Sacco and Vanzetti would later meet their deaths. His electrocution, at eleven o’clock at night, was carried out flawlessly, and the chair was readied for its next victim. Sacco walked calmly to the chair and sat down, waiting patiently as the electrodes were strapped in place. Then he said, “Farewell, Mother.” A few minutes later, he shouted, “Long live anarchy!” They were his final words; he died on the first attempt, at eleven thirty.

The final man to enter the chamber at midnight that night was Vanzetti. He was as calm as Sacco had been. A bookish man, he quietly shook hands with the guards and thanked them for their kind treatment of him in his final days and hours. In a controlled voice, he said, “I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.”

Sacco and Vanzetti, wrongly convicted and executed, became poster boys for anarchists and communists worldwide. There were violent demonstrations in many cities throughout Europe and Asia, and wildcat strikes closed factories worldwide. Three died in demonstrations in Germany and ten thousand people turned out for the funerals of the two men in Boston.

“It was one of the most tremendous funerals of modern times,” reported the Boston Globe.

Controversy reigned for decades and opinion is still divided. Were the killings carried out by Madeiros and his gang or by Sacco with Vanzetti present? We will never know, but there is enough doubt to make their conviction unsafe. This was the view of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, who asked for a review in 1977 on the fiftieth anniversary of the executions. Based on that review, he took the bold decision to declare that both men had been unfairly tried and convicted, and that “any disgrace should be forever removed from their names.”

He did not issue a pardon, because that would imply they were guilty. But significantly he did not assert their innocence. That is a question that may never be answered.

CHARLES STARKWEATHER REBEL WITHOUT A CLUE

The teen culture did not emerge until the fifties, with the arrival of Elvis Presley, Bill Haley, and James Dean, the original rebel without a cause. But James Dean did not invent the moody teenager kicking against authority. He just reflected what was already out there—a youth culture growing up on postwar austerity who felt alienated and out of touch with their parents’ generation. The old certainties were gone and kids felt they did not fit in. So they sought their own music, their own clothing, and their own way of belonging.

And some just never fit in.

If you are looking for the ultimate teen idol, he is not James Dean but Charles Starkweather, the Rebel Without a Clue.

Starkweather decided to impress his young girlfriend by shooting her father; then the two lovers went on a road trip across the Badlands of Nebraska, leaving a trail of dead bodies in their wake. And like Dean, Starkweather came to a violent end. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair, guilty of eleven murders.

The story was immortalized in the movie Badlands, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.

Charles Raymond Starkweather was born in 1938 in Lincoln, Nebraska. He came from a good working-class family and was raised well. But he had a medical condition which left him slightly bowlegged and he had a speech impediment. So his school years were marred by bullying and misery. But in his teens he grew physically strong and began to hit back at his tormentors. In a matter of months he went from well-behaved child to troubled and troublesome teenager. He developed a James Dean obsession and styled his hair to match the pint-sized actor. But though he had the look and the swagger, he did not have the confidence. He was a misfit and a loner, prone to violent outbursts.

As an eighteen-year-old dropout, he was introduced to thirteen-year-old Caril Ann Fugate. Her older sister was dating one of Starkweather’s few friends. Caril was the ideal girlfriend for Charles. So many years his junior, she looked up to him and fed his ego. She was impressed by his looks, his car, and the fact that he seemed to have endless money to spend on her. The fact that he stole the money and the gifts he gave her was not immediately apparent. He worked minimum wage as a garbageman, but she only saw the James Dean look-alike. He, in turn, felt that Caril gave him a reason to live.

But it was not all roses. Starkweather’s father threw him out, forcing the young man to fend for himself. He felt depressed, believing that his life would amount to nothing. The only solution to his difficulties seemed to be crime.

On November 30, 1957, Starkweather went into a service station and tried to buy a stuffed dog for Caril. He had no money and was refused credit. Furious, he returned later on that bitterly cold night with a shotgun and robbed the store. He took the attendant, Richard Jensen, away in his car, stopping in a remote area. The attendant struggled and in the scuffle the gun went off, hitting the attendant in the knee. As Starkweather stood over the injured man, he decided this was the moment his destiny changed. For once he was the one in charge. He shot Robert Colvert in the head. Afterward, he claimed that he felt he left his former self behind that night and was now a new man, facing a new future.

He told Caril Ann Fugate about the shooting but said that an accomplice had actually pulled the trigger. She wasn’t fooled, but like her boyfriend she seemed to exult in the violence. He had killed without remorse, and he felt powerful and euphoric. He had money in his pocket. He was not one of the suspects and their secret seemed to bind the couple more closely together. All was good.

Good, apart from the fact that he was fired as a garbageman and thrown out of his apartment for falling behind on the rent. All was about as bad as it could get. On top of that, he knew that Caril’s parents did not like him and were against the relationship. But the relationship was the only thing that gave his life meaning. He was nuts about his girl and felt he could win over her parents. In late January 1958, he called on them while Caril was still at school. He had a rifle with him, and he said he had been planning on inviting Caril’s stepfather, Marion Bartlett, out hunting. But Marion and Velda (Caril’s mother) immediately began arguing with him, telling him firmly to leave their daughter alone. He was thrown out of the house. He returned some time later for his gun and was thrown out again.

When Caril returned from school she was shocked at the way her boyfriend had been treated. She went in and argued with her parents. Starkweather followed her in, and the argument became physical. Velda struck Starkweather, and then Marion came at him with a hammer. Starkweather shot him in the face and then turned his rifle on Velda, shooting her too. In his rage he turned the gun around and battered her head with its butt. Her two-year-old child, Betty Jean, began to cry and Starkweather turned, driving the butt of the gun into the child’s head.

Starkweather later claimed that Velda had tried to attack him with a knife. He went on, “I picked up that knife that the old lady had … started to walk in the bedroom … and the little girl kept yelling, and I told her to shut up, and I started to walk again, and just turned around and threw the kitchen knife I had at her. They said it hit her in the throat, but I thought it hit her in the chest. I went on into the bedroom. Mr. Bartlett was moving around, so I tried to stab him in the throat, but the knife wouldn’t go in, and I just hit the top part of it with my hand, and it went in.”

The teenage lovers cleaned up as best they could. They stuffed Velda’s body into the toilet in the outhouse. Marion was dragged into the chicken coup. And the dead baby, Caril’s sister, was put in a cardboard box and left in the outhouse with her mother. Caril and Charles spent the next six days living in the house as if nothing had happened, telling callers that they could not come in because of an outbreak of flu. But they fled hours before the police, their suspicions aroused, raided the house.

Starkweather and Fugate were now on the run. They drove to the remote farmhouse of seventy-year-old August Meyer, a friend of Starkweather’s parents. They shot the old man and stole his car, but they crashed and had to abandon the vehicle. Two teenagers picked them up and were killed for their troubles. The body count now stood at seven and would grow over the coming hours.

They drove back to Lincoln, breaking into a house in one of the wealthier sections of town. They killed the owners of the house and their maid, stole their jewelry and money, and made off in their car. It was time to leave Nebraska.

With a manhunt in full swing in their home state, they drove into Wyoming. They needed a new car, one whose plates were not known to the cops, so they stopped outside the small town of Douglas, where they had spotted a salesman asleep in his car. They shot him where he slept in the passenger seat. Two days, seven kills. Caril got into the rear and Starkweather got behind the wheel, and they tried to drive. But the car had an emergency brake, unusual in those days, and Starkweather was unable to get it started. A motorist stopped to help, but when Starkweather pointed the gun at him, he knew he was in trouble. He grabbed the barrel and struggled with the teen killer.

Just then, Deputy Sheriff William Romer drove by and stopped to check out the commotion. At that point Caril Fugate could see the writing on the wall. Their car would not start, the cops were here, and Starkweather could not wrestle the gun from the motorist who had stopped to help. So she decided to abandon her lover and jump to the side of the angels. She ran from the car, shouting, “He killed a man,” as if she was completely innocent of the murder spree.

Starkweather let go of the gun and ran from the stolen car, getting back into his first car. He turned the key and took off at a high speed. Immediately Romer set off in pursuit, calling for reinforcements as he gave chase. Douglas Police Chief Robert Ainslie and Sheriff Earl Heflin of Converse County, Wyoming, were in a car together and joined the chase. As Starkweather zoomed by at over 100 miles per hour, they got in behind him, their lights flashing. As Ainslie drove, Heflin leaned out the window and took careful aim, shooting out the back window of Starkweather’s car. As the window exploded in a cloud of glass shards, the fleeing car suddenly came to a dead stop in the middle of the road. The flying glass had cut Starkweather’s ear and he believed he had been shot. He thought he was going to bleed out.

He kept the James Dean swagger to the end. As the cops covered him with their guns, he got out of the car. They ordered him to put up his hands, but he ignored them. They shot at the ground and ordered him to lie down. He ignored them. Then he put his hands behind his back. Thinking he was about to pull a gun, they fired another warning shot at his feet. Finally he got the message and brought his hands back into view. All he had been trying to do was to tuck in his shirt so that he would look right for the arrest.

The mug shot would be an iconic teen image. Starkweather was bloodied and in chains; stubble was on his chin and a cigarette dangled nonchalantly from his lips. He wore a black leather biker’s jacket and tight jeans with pointy-toed cowboy boots.

Right to the end Starkweather continued to show the poor judgment that had characterized his short life. He had the choice of being tried in Wyoming or Nebraska. The difference was that in Wyoming he would go to the gas chamber, while in Nebraska he would face the electric chair. He chose the chair. Had he elected to be tried in Wyoming he would have received a life sentence, as the governor was vehemently opposed to the death penalty. The governor of Nebraska had no such qualms.

Fugate claimed that she was an unwilling captive, forced to go along with Starkweather because he had threatened to kill her family. This defense had a flaw; she had been there when her family had been killed, right at the start of the killing spree, and she had helped clean up after the event. But once Starkweather realized his beloved Caril was abandoning him, he began the same game. He claimed that she had been the most trigger-happy person he had ever met and was the chief killer.

Both were convicted. They were only tried for one killing, that of Richard Jensen, the teenager they had killed at the start of the two day spree. Starkweather received the death penalty. Because of her age (at fifteen she was the youngest female ever tried for first-degree murder), Fugate was sentenced to life. She was paroled in 1976, making a new life for herself. In 2013 she was seriously injured in a traffic accident which killed her husband. She is still recovering from those critical injuries.

Starkweather went to the chair at Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln at 12:04 a.m. on June 25, 1959. To the end he was defiant. When asked to donate his eyes after his death, he said, “Nobody ever did anything for me when I was alive. Why should I help anybody when I’m dead?”

The day before his execution he gave a brief interview, in which he said, “I don’t know why I killed folks. I don’t have an answer for that. The people were just there and I killed them and I don’t know why.”

Asked had he any regrets, or would he do anything differently, he said, “Not really, ’cos my life has been a failure and if I could go back in time I am sure I would do the same thing all over. I know I am crazy. I know I am a monster. People laugh at me and tell me how ugly I am, all of my life. I just got mad. All that anger inside of me, all my life it has been building in me. I just despise people and I hate people because they just laugh at me and call me ugly names. I just had to kill them. If I could go back into time I would kill as many more people as I could because I hate people. I know they are going to kill me in the electric chair and I don’t really care, because I am going to be famous for all time just like my idol James Dean. I am looking forward to dying so that I can go to heaven and meet my idol James Dean.”

Minutes before the execution, the doctor who was meant to pronounce death suffered a fatal heart attack. But that did not delay proceedings. The execution went ahead as scheduled. Afterward, Starkweather got his final wish. With six films and a television miniseries inspired by his story, he did become famous for all time.

LEON CZOLGOSZ ANARCHY IN THE USA

William McKinley was a popular president. The twenty-fifth man to hold that honor, he was a veteran of the Civil War and successful lawyer before entering politics for the Republican Party. A native of Ohio, he did well in Congress but lost his seat in the Democratic landslide of 1890. The following year he changed direction, being elected governor of Ohio. He gained a reputation for fairness and moderation, appealing to both the laboring classes and the moneyed classes. This proved a springboard for a presidential bid in 1896.

The country was in the depths of an economic depression. He campaigned on a commitment to retaining the gold standard and promised protective tariffs against foreign competition which would support business and restore prosperity.

He won the election and his policies slowly saw a return to prosperity. He also won the Spanish-American War of 1898 decisively, gaining the territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The United States also annexed the independent Republic of Hawai’i. With those achievements behind him and being a popular figure, he had no difficulty winning a second term in the Oval Office in the 1900 election. He looked forward to continuing his economic policies and his overseas expansion.

Like all politicians, he had to keep an eye on the future. He listened carefully to public opinion, and often his policies were formed on that basis. A man of the people, he liked to mingle and press the flesh at every opportunity. He was not a difficult man to approach.

Following his inauguration in March, McKinley went on a tour of the nation, traveling by train with his wife and team of advisers. The trip would end in Buffalo, New York, at the massive Pan-American Exposition. It was a great success. No president had ever officially toured the west and he was rapturously received. But he canceled the last leg of the tour when his wife became ill and returned to Washington. After taking care of some state business he retired to Canton, Ohio, to prepare for an important public speech he would still give in Buffalo. Now the visit was not the end of his nationwide tour, but part of a ten-day trip which included a visit to Cleveland to visit an army camp.

On Thursday, September 5, he arrived in Buffalo and was paraded through the fair. The plan was to deliver a major speech that day, and then the following day he would visit the Niagara Falls before returning to the fair for a meet and greet at the Temple of Music in the Exposition. His security people were unhappy with the meet and greet, feeling it would be difficult to guarantee his safety.

“No one would wish to hurt me,” he assured them.

The gates of the fair were opened at six o’clock on the morning of Thursday, September 5, and the crowd began to gather early, eager for a glimpse of the popular president. Of the 116,000 who passed through the gates that day, at least 50,000 of them filled the space in front of the esplanade to see the president deliver his address. After a brief introduction and a call for silence, he began to speak.

Not everyone in the crowd was a supporter of President McKinley. That is the nature of politics. The audience had a fair sprinkling of Democrats, a few socialists, and an occasional anarchists. One of the anarchists was there with a purpose.

Leon Czolgosz was a native of Ohio, like McKinley. But he had not been born into privilege. Born in 1873, he was the son of a poor Polish Catholic emigrant who had arrived in the United States a decade previously. When he was five, the family moved to Detroit, and by fourteen he was working in a glass factory in Pennsylvania. At seventeen he switched employment, joining the Cleveland Rolling Mill Company, but during the economic crash of 1893 the workers went on strike and Czolgosz found himself out of work. At times of great stress, people often fall back on their ethnic community but Czolgosz found no comfort among the Polish Catholics. Instead he began to associate with members of the labor movement, joining a workingman’s socialist club. But they were not radical enough for him, so he moved on to the Sila organization, where he was introduced to anarchism. Anarchism was always more popular in Europe than America. They advocated overthrowing the existing government, often by violent means, and returning power to the people. In the United States, the anarchist movement was dominated by people of recent European descent. There is no doubt that Czolgosz held radical views, but he was also an awkward man trying to fit in. This often led to him appearing desperate, which aroused the suspicion of the secretive anarchists.

Czolgosz attended a number of strikes, showing his support for the workers. But he developed a respiratory problem and had to curtail his activities. He retreated to the farm in Ohio that his father had purchased. But his new beliefs often clashed with the more traditional Catholic views of his family, and the time he spent on the farm was a tense one. He became reclusive, burying himself in his socialist books. In 1901, the radical heroine of the anarchist movement, Emma Goldman, delivered a speech in Cleveland. Czolgosz was in the audience and approached Ms. Goldman afterward, speaking to her briefly. She introduced him to some local socialists.

But his social awkwardness, his shifty ways, and his indiscreet inquiries about the movement aroused the suspicion of some. In fact, an Anarchist newspaper, Free Society, issued a warning about him: “The attention of the comrades is called to another spy. He is well-dressed, of medium height, rather narrow shoulders, blond and about 25 years of age. His demeanor is of the usual sort, pretending to be greatly interested in the cause, asking for names or soliciting aid for acts of contemplated violence. If this same individual makes his appearance elsewhere the comrades are warned in advance, and can act accordingly.”

Czolgosz did not fit in, even among the marginalized. But he wanted to be taken seriously by the anarchist movement. He had to make a big statement.

By the summer of 1901, he was living in Buffalo and when he heard the president was visiting, he knew this was his opportunity. On September 3, he went to Walbridge’s Hardware Store on Main Street and bought a small 32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver for $4.50. Two days later he was waiting when the presidential train pulled into the station. As the locomotive slowed, a canon was fired in salute but the canon was so close to the track that it blew in the windows of the train. Luckily no one was hurt. At the station the crowds were too big to allow Czolgosz any sort of shot, so he abandoned that plan. But not the idea as a whole. As he later stated to police, “It was in my heart. There was no escape for me. I could not have conquered it had my life been at stake. There were thousands of people in town on Tuesday. All those people seemed to be bowing to the great ruler. I made up my mind to kill that ruler.”

Later that day the president gave a speech before thousands as scheduled. Czolgosz tried to elbow his way to the front of the crowd where he could get a clear shot, but he never got close enough. There was no point in firing randomly towards the stage; he wanted to hit his target. After the presidential speech McKinley went backstage and Czolgosz tried to follow him but was blocked by security guards. He had to go back to his boarding room that night with the job undone.

The following morning, Friday, September 6, he was at the fair early, but McKinley boarded a train for a tour of the nearby Niagara Falls. The assassin waited impatiently as the hours passed before the presidential party returned. Finally, McKinley was back in the grounds of the fair—but could Czolgosz get close enough this time?

At three thirty in the afternoon, McKinley stopped for refreshments before proceeding to the Temple of Music, where he was to do a meet and greet, shaking hands with as many people as he could in the brief time allocated. He could shake fifty hands a minute and was scheduled to be there for ten minutes, so five hundred people in the crowd would get to press the presidential flesh. Czolgosz stood in line, his hand wrapped in a handkerchief as if it were injured. Unknown to the security detail, the bandage actually concealed his revolver.

Security was tight. Police were at the doors and detectives lined the aisles. A dozen soldiers in full dress uniform were not there for decoration. McKinley took his place at the top of the aisle that had been blocked off for the reception and the crowd began to stream by as the organ belted out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After five minutes the doors of the room were closed to cut off the crowd, and the remaining people streamed in a line past the president, most getting just a few seconds and a radiant smile. One twelve-year-old girl, Myrtle Ledger, asked for the president’s red carnation, which he cheerfully handed over. The Secret Service watched carefully as a tall, scowling man approached, but he shook hands grimly and moved on. At 4:07 p.m. Czolgosz reached the top of the line. Seeing his injured hand, McKinley instinctively reached out his left hand to shake, to spare the man pain. But Czolgosz violently struck away the proffered hand and drew up his bandaged hand to reveal the revolver.

Before anyone could react, he fired off two rounds, striking the president twice in the torso.

As McKinley staggered back Czolgosz prepared to take a third shot. But an African-American man next in line, James Parker, bravely rushed forward and slammed into the assassin, making a grab for the gun. Two of the security detail rushed in as the men struggled and soon Czolgosz disappeared beneath a pile of men, many of whom were getting in blows with fists and rifle butts. As the beaten man muttered, “I have done my duty,” the swarm of people were infuriated and the beating increased.

McKinley had staggered but was caught and guided to a nearby chair. Believing he was not seriously injured, the president immediately assumed control of the situation, calling for a halt to the beating that was going on a few feet from him. But as Czolgosz was being led away, an agent struck him to the ground with a single punch. Blood was running high.

As the panicked crowd attempted to flee the Temple of Music the president was put on a stretcher and taken out back to where an ambulance was waiting. He was rushed to the hospital. On the way, he loosened his suit and a bullet fell out. It had been deflected by a button and had only grazed him. Unfortunately, the other bullet had entered his abdomen, causing considerable damage.

Today McKinley would have been on his feet in a matter of weeks. The wound was serious but not life threatening. The bullet had torn through his stomach and lodged in the muscles of his back. But the big problem was infection. In the days before penicillin an abdominal wound generally meant a lingering death from gangrene. An operation was performed which closed the holes in McKinley’s stomach, but the surgeon was unable to locate and remove the bullet, in part due to McKinley’s obesity. For a day or two it appeared McKinley was recovering. His strength returned and he was able to sit up and chat with visitors. Despite being nearly sixty and overweight, he had a very strong constitution. But gangrene was creeping slowly along the path of the wound, infecting his stomach and other organs. It was only a matter of time.

Within a few days McKinley was eating lightly but suffering terrible indigestion. This was the effect of the infection on his stomach. A day after this he was drifting in and out of consciousness, and at 2:15 a.m. on Saturday, September 14, he passed away. Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt was sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. He said, “When compared with the suppression of anarchy, every other question sinks into insignificance.”

The whole country was horrified. Czolgosz was transferred to Auburn State Prison to await trial. Justice moved swiftly; on September 16, the grand jury indicted him on a count of first-degree murder. The only thing of note about the indictment was that Czolgosz refused to talk to the lawyers appointed to defend him—sticking to his anarchist principles of refusing to recognize the court and its officers. When it came to trial—just nine days after President McKinley succumbed to his injuries—Czolgosz pleaded guilty and then ignored the court. The judge, Truman White, did not accept the guilty plea and entered a plea of not guilty on the assassin’s behalf.

Even if he had spoken to his defense team, nine days was hardly sufficient time to prepare an adequate defense. In the absence of any communication from their client, his lawyers were left with no option but to plead insanity. They presented no witnesses and Czolgosz said nothing on his own behalf. This left the field open for the prosecutor to play up the anarchist angle.

The insanity plea did not wash and the jury took just an hour to convict, returning their verdict on September 24, 1901. From fatal shot, to death of the president, to trial and conviction had taken less than three weeks, unseemly haste by modern standards. Two days later, the jury was asked to consider punishment and recommended the death penalty. Asked if he had anything to say, Czolgosz still would not speak, just shaking his head.

The execution was scheduled for October 29—just forty-five days after his victim’s death. There were no last-minute appeals and no postponements. He entered the death chamber between two guards calmly and unafraid. The time was seven o’clock in the morning.

Witness Charles R. Huntley told the Buffalo Commercial:

Czolgosz did not show any signs of fear and he did not tremble or turn pale; he walked into the death room between two men, and walked with a firm step. He stumbled as he came into the room but did not fall, nor did his knees weaken. I was quite surprised at his demeanor, as was everyone else, I should say. He was perfectly strong and calm. He just slid himself into the chair exactly as a man might who expected to enjoy a half hour’s repose. The fact that in a moment a death current was to be forced through him did not seem to perturb him in the least.

He spoke very plainly and in a voice which did not waver in the slightest degree. He said first that he was not sorry for having killed the President, and, as the straps which bound his jaws were put in place, he said that he was sorry he could not see his father. It was a general surprise to hear his voice after the men had begun to affix the electrodes. The witnesses were somewhat startled and were amazed at the man’s calmness. But the men at work beside him and in front of him did not pause. They kept on affixing the appliances. There was no spirit of bravado manifest at all. He said a few things just as if he felt it his duty to say them …

The majesty of the law was perfectly sustained. There wasn’t a hitch anywhere and not an incident which could merit the faintest criticism. Czolgosz was sentenced to die in the electric chair, and his death was effected quickly and certainly. It was but an incredibly short time after the murderer walked into the death chamber when the doctors in attendance pronounced him dead. There had been no scene; no one had fainted or grown excited. Everyone conducted himself with remarkable sang-froid. The attendants were busy right up to the moment of turning on the current, and had but stepped back when the body of the assassin was in the grasp of the powerful current. As I have said, not a thing marred the formality. Everything went off smoothly.

Sheriff Samuel Caldwell agreed, saying:

I was impressed with the idea that the assassin was a man of great nerve. Although guards had hold of his arms, the prisoner could have walked unaided to the chair. Aside from the prisoner’s last words, there was not a sound in the death chamber, and the prisoner himself gave no evidence of fear.

As soon as he had been seated in the chair and his face covered so that his nose and month were alone exposed, Warden Mead raised his hand and Electrician Davis turned on the current which snuffed out the prisoner’s life as with a snap of the finger. The electrician then felt the prisoner’s jugular vein. Dr. MacDonald did the same, and was followed by Prison Physician Gerin. The doctors then stepped back, and Warden Mead again raised his hand. Again the current was applied and was continued about 50 seconds.

When the electricity was again shut off, the physicians examined the body by the usual means, and at the end pronounced that the man was dead. The prisoner’s nerve was evidenced by his conduct from the moment he entered the death chamber. No groan escaped him, and his lips did not even move except when he was making his final statement to the effect that he did not repent his crime. When the electricity entered the assassin’s body it stiffened with successive jerks, but death was so quick that he did not have time to groan.

Czolgosz’s last words were an expression of regret that he would not meet his father again and a defiant declaration, “I killed the President because he was the enemy of the good people—the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.”

After the execution the prison authorities refused to release the body to the family. Instead it was placed in a plain wooden coffin, which was then filled with sulfuric acid. The remains were dissolved within hours. There would be no body for the anarchist movement to create a martyr.

THE CHAIR TRAVELS OLD SPARKY IN THE PHILIPPINES

Execution methods become associated with different countries and different cultures. The guillotine is as French as a beret or a burgundy, the garrote as Spanish as paella. Stoning is indelibly associated with the Middle East, and the electric chair with the United States. In fact, the electric chair, despite seeming to be a high tech and modern solution to the execution problem, has been taken up by no other countries.

Every single country in the world decided the chair was not for them. The closest it came to traveling was during the war when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill suggested that once Hitler was captured and tried, he would be executed on an electric chair in Trafalgar Square, London. He may well have been joking.

The Philippines were the only country outside of the United States that decided to give the chair a try, and the only reason they did was that they were under American control at the time. A while after the United States pulled out, they unplugged the chair.

Capital punishment has been a controversial topic in the Philippines, a predominantly Roman Catholic country. Many oppose it. The country was ruled by the Spanish until 1898. Under colonial rule, firing squad, garrote, and hanging were the methods of choice. This remained the case in the early years of American rule. But in 1926, the US authorities introduced the electric chair. It was used for a number of years but when the government changed to a commonwealth in 1935 executions were suspended.

In 1946 the Philippines became a sovereign independent state and executions resumed. Rape, murder, and treason were capital offenses. Political assassinations were common and many of the executions were political. Fifty-one people were electrocuted in fifteen years. Once President Ferdinand Marcos came to power, the number of electrocutions rose sharply. Ironically Marcos had been sentenced to death himself in 1938, but was acquitted on appeal.

The electric chair was used until 1976, when it was replaced by firing squad. In 1986, the Philippines introduced a new constitution which made it the first Asian country to drop capital punishment. It was briefly reintroduced in the nineties, but on April 15, 2006, the sentences of 1,230 death row prisoners were commuted to life imprisonment. The death penalty is no longer part of the Philippines justice system.

During the years of the electric chair, the most famous case was the trial of three men accused of the brutal gang rape of a popular actress. Maggie dela Riva was born in 1942 and appeared in over thirty films. She still works in television. She graduated high school at sixteen and trained as a secretary, but then she began getting work as an actress. In addition to her movies, she also became a regular feature on ABS-CBN, the main commercial radio and television station in the Philippines. This work made her a household name and by the time she was twenty-five, everyone in the country knew her face. It was 1967 and she was on every television screen. A group of rich kids used to prowl the posh hotels in Pasay City, a suburb of Manila. Pasay is a well-off section of the capital, famous for its entertainment and its restaurants. The nightlife there is second to none and it is a tourist magnet. The group used to prowl the streets and the hotels, drinking and looking for women. Some of the members—a sort of Philippine Rat Pack—were well known, including Jaime Jose Y Gomez. He came from a wealthy and politically well-connected family and was well known in his own right as a band leader.

In the small hours of June 26, 1967, Maggie dela Riva was on her way home from the television studio. She was accompanied by her maid, Helen Calderon. They drove down 12th Street in the Quezon district and were very close to home. Just then, four men in a convertible drove up behind them and came abreast of dela Riva’s car. They tried to bump her from the side and she had to break sharply to avoid a collision, and then she hit the gas and tried to pull to the left to evade them. She was right outside her own house. The other car tried to bump her again, and dela Riva swore at the driver. Then he got out and rushed towards her. In panic, she began blaring the horn of her car. He grabbed her and pulled her from the car. His three companions each reached out and pulled her by the legs and neck into the convertible, and then they took off, leaving the maid behind.

The four men in the convertible were Jose Y Gomez, Basilio Pineda Jr., Eduardo Aquino Y Payumo, and Rogelio Canal Y Sevilla. They swiftly drove to the Swanky Hotel in Pasay. The hotel staff knew what was going on and turned a blind eye as the terrified woman was dragged in.

The men led dela Riva up to the second floor where they had a room. Dela Riva was forced to sit on the bed, surrounded by Jose and Canal. Aquino and Pineda stood in front of her. Pineda ordered her to do a striptease for them. Once the actress was completely naked, Jose stripped and pushed her backwards onto the bed. He then raped her. She struggled violently and he struck her several times to subdue her. After that, the others took their turns. Twice during the rape she passed out, which took from their enjoyment. So they paused to throw water over her face and slapped her to revive her. During the ordeal, they also threatened to shoot her and to throw acid in her face. They also threatened to seek her out and disfigure her if she spoke to police afterward.

At six o’clock in the morning, after an hour of rape and torture, they were finished with her. They took her out onto the street and put her in a taxi, then walked away, laughing.

When she got home, the shocked actress was confronted by a large crowd, including police officers and reporters. Her maid had raised the alarm. She fell into her mother’s arms and sobbed, “Mommy, mommy, I have been raped. All four of them raped me.”

The trial took place at the end of September, and dela Riva bravely stood on the witness stand to deliver her damning testimony. Pineda pleaded guilty. The other three denied the rape. But all were found guilty on October 2, and were sentenced to death. Four hotel employees who aided the rapists were given lesser sentences.

Canal did not live long enough to face the electric chair. While on death row he overdosed on drugs and passed away in 1970. The other three were electrocuted in 1972. Because of the celebrity status of the victim, it was one of the most notorious trials in Philippine history and attracted huge interest. President Marcos ordered that the executions be televised.

The three men went to the chair on May 17, 1972. The Manila Times wrote that the three men were given a mild sedative to help them through the final day. Then they were transferred from the prison hospital to the anteroom of the death chamber at midnight. Weeping relatives were allowed spend the final few hours with the men.

At seven o’clock in the morning, the official death sentence was read out, and then the men got their final breakfast: fried chicken, bread, and coffee. Lunch was their last meal and consisted of chicken, lobsters, and ice cream, along with side dishes. Pineda and Aquino ate. But Jose could not, even when his sister tried to spoon feed him.

At three o’clock that afternoon, silence descended on the prison. The paper noted: “A pale and dazed Jose was the first to walk the final steps to the execution chamber. He had just recovered from shock and had to be placed under sedation. His eyes stared blankly and unseeing as he walked between two priests with lips repeating their prayers.”

The execution did not go well. Witness Basil Caranting wrote: “Three guards pulled down three switches, of which only one is the live switch. Everybody in that chamber witnessed how a human body contorts when 2,000 volts of electricity is coursed through it. There was a smell of burning flesh. When the initial shock was over, the duty doctor approached the chair and examined the body. He shook his head and in a loud voice proclaimed: ‘Sir, the condemned man is still alive.’”

A second jolt was needed.

Then it was Pineda’s turn.

The Manila Times wrote: “Pineda came next. He had a minor hassle with prison guards when, owing to a slight confusion, they started to lead Aquino to the death chamber ahead of him. He was strapped into the chair at 3:40 p.m., and pronounced dead at 3:55 p.m. Aquino came last. He died at 4:10 p.m. While he was in the death chamber, his mother, who had been keeping him company since morning, fainted into the arms of her eight other children.”

The very public nature of the executions made a deep impression across the country. Dean Jorge Bocobo, a Filipino journalist, wrote: “As a young man my family lived just blocks away from the Swanky Hotel in Pasay City where the incident took place. I remember vividly the newspaper pictures of those men with shaven heads just before they were fried from brain to balls in the electric chair. For many of my generation, that seared in our young minds forever this message: Rape is Evil! The victory of justice in this case was self-evident in the grace, bravery and enduring humanity that lives in Maggie dela Riva.”