The Last Face You'll Ever See

The Culture of Death Row

Ivan Solotaroff

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062041531
• Print ISBN:
  9780060931032
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies

In fascinating detail, Ivan Solotaroff introduces us to the men who carry out executions. Although the emphasis is on the personal lives of these men and of those they have to put to death, The Last Face You'll Ever See also addresses some of the deeper issues of the death penalty and connects the veiled, elusive figure of the executioner to the vast majority of Americans who, since 1977, have claimed to support executions. Why do we do it? Or, more exactly, why do we want to?

The Last Face You'll Ever See is not about the polarizing issues of the death penalty -- it is a firsthand report about the culture of executions: the executioners, the death-row inmates, and everyone involved in the act. An engrossing, unsettling, and provocative book, this work will forever affect anyone who reads it.

CHAPTER ONE
THE DEATH BELT: FLORIDA TO TEXAS

THERE WERE 358 EXECUTIONS between 1976 and 1996, the first twenty years after the death penalty returned to America. Sixty percent were carried out within a two-hour drive of Interstate 10, the southernmost of the coast-to-coast highways. The five eastern states of I-10 are called the Death Belt because of the disproportionate number of executions carried out in their prison farms: in “Old Sparky,” Florida’s three-legged brown electric chair, which sits in a small, bright room in the state prison at Starke; in “Yellow Mama,” the chubby yellow electric chair at Holman State Prison in Atmore, Alabama; in “Black Death,” the metal chair in Parchman State Penitentiary’s silver gas chamber; in Louisiana’s lime-green death house, five miles deep into the woods of Angola, an hour north of Baton Rouge; on the lethal-injection gurney in the midnight-blue death chamber of the “Walls Unit,” the massive brick prison that occupies much of downtown Huntsville, Texas. Run a finger down a list of the condemned and notice the three-part names: John Louis Evans III, Jimmy Lee Gray, Robert Wayne Williams, James Dupree Henry, Alpha Otis Stevens, Robert Lee Willie, Edward Earl Johnson, Connie Ray Evans, Arthur Lee Jones, Andrew Lee Jones. That’s when you know you’re in the Death Belt.

A large, unpainted wood-frame house in Headland, Alabama, fifty miles from I-10, is a de rigueur first stop on any trip through the Death Belt. The ancestral home of Watt Espy, America’s foremost historian of executions, it also serves as the offices of his Capital Punishment Research Project. An unfunded, unaffiliated, one-man attempt to collect every available fact about the American death penalty, it is a project to which he has devoted most of his adult life.

Espy, who greets me at the door, is a tall, thin man in black frame glasses, a polo shirt, khaki pants, and tennis shoes with prim anklet socks. He smiles a lot when he speaks, heavy, preoccupied smiles filled with a mournful irony. “These are the condemned,” he says, pointing to the head shots, mug shots, wire photos, and book and magazine clippings, all individually framed, that fill the walls. Many hang at derelict angles, others have a crack in the frame glass, and a few show the yellow discoloration that comes with prints taken too soon from the hypo bath, but there’s no mistaking the passion with which they were assembled.

Espy tells me their stories, one at a time: a man who willed himself into a coma and had to be carried to the chair; another who strolled in blithely, saying, “I’d ruther be fishin’”; one who came in with a cigar and a pink flower in his buttonhole; a man who had printed the prison tattoo H-A-R-D L-U-C-K on his knuckles; another who handed the electrocutioner a check for his $150 fee, signed “The Devil”; one who asked for bicarbonate of soda before entering the gas chamber; one who said the soup of his last meal was too hot; one who complained from the electric chair, “I sick. I eat too much.” Ones who read verse: “Hang me high/And stretch me wide/So the world can see/How free I died,” or quoted rap: “You can be a king/or a street-sweeper./But everyone gotta dance/with the Grim Reaper.” Those who told their executioners, “Step on the gas”; or “I came here to die, not to talk”; “I am Jesus Christ”; “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard”; a woman who warned, “My blood will burn holes in their bodies.”

A thin strip of wall in Espy’s office bears the house’s only images of the living. Six are of his family, including three of an older brother who runs the local savings bank. The other is a head shot of Mario Cuomo, who vetoed every capital punishment statute drafted by the New York State Legislature in his twelve years as governor. “As you might guess,” Espy boasts, “I’m a bit of an abolitionist myself.” He’s also proud to be a recovering alcoholic. “I stayed drunk for the only execution that I will ever attend. It made me physically ill. I vomited.”

“Which was that?”

“That would be the botched electrocution of John Louis Evans the Third, State of Alabama, April twenty-second, nineteen eighty-three.”

The office, once the living room, has a cranky old copier, a low-end computer, a magnificent library of books on the death penalty, a few dozen photos of the condemned, and a row of file cabinets from the Dewey decimal era, which Espy uses to store execution quotes, names, and factoids on four- by five-inch index cards. The large room is otherwise given entirely to shelves stacked with loose-leaf binders formerly used by traveling salesmen. The binders, which Espy buys for a dime apiece in close-out sales, are mystifying at first, as they have their original logos on the spines and covers—everything from Coca-Cola to local hardware companies. Inside each, Espy tells me, are the details of an era’s executions, arranged alphabetically state by state. “That’s Indiana behind you”—he points to a half dozen binders—“then over into Idaho, Kansas on the far side, down into Louisiana, Mississippi, up through Nevada, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and down again into Texas, which is taking up its share of my attention these days.”

I tell Espy I’m headed to Huntsville to see a condemned man, Noble Mays, with whom I’d exchanged letters, then to Louisiana to attend the lethal injection of a man named Antonio James. Espy asks how I feel about corresponding with a condemned man.

“It’s a little creepy,” I admit.

“I’ve learned to avoid all contact, though they write me often.” Espy seems to have mixed feelings about my attending an execution as well, though his eyes light up when I mention I’ll be going through New Orleans. “I haven’t been there for ages,” he says. For the first time, I notice the room has no windows. The house is extremely dark.

Espy has supported the project with odd jobs—selling cemetery plots or the Encyclopaedia Britannica door-to-door. Once a year, he borrows against stocks held in trust, and he says he’s having a hard time keeping the project going. At the time we meet, he has chronicled the details of 18,812 American executions—by hanging, shooting, electrocution, gassing, lethal injection, burning, beheading, entombment, gibbeting, breaking on the wheel, boiling in oil, roasting, drowning, etc.—more than 10,000 of which were unknown to posterity before he tracked them down. Uncollected is the word Espy prefers. “Virginia leads by far,” he says. “Two thousand and forty-nine thus far.”

“Why Virginia?”

“Because they executed so many slaves. The closer you get to the Mason-Dixon Line, the more perilous it’s been, historically, to be of color. My records show that clearly.”

Truly grotesque executions tended toward the north of the Mason-Dixon Line, Espy emphasizes, though he has collected a fair share of Death Belt horror stories. He waxes particularly eloquent on Louisiana, where slaves and mutineers were nailed into boxes and then sawed in half, roasted on cannon barrels, or sewn into a leather sack with a dog, viper, monkey, and cock and thrown into the river. “But the worst was of a slave in colonial New York who poisoned her master. Spit-roasted on a slow fire for hours and hours”—Espy gets up to enter a name in a massive accountant’s ledger on an old lectern—“with a horn full of cool water held inches from her lips, to accentuate her agony. In the modern era, we’ve lost sight of the fact that executions were meant to inflict not only death but pain.

“Make that eighteen thousand, eight hundred, and thirteen.” He inscribes the man’s name, speaking phonetically as he writes: “Nelson Shelton, Midnight, March the seventeenth, nineteen hundred ninety-five. State of Maryland. I’ve been busy all morning and forgot to put his name in. It was going to be eighteen thousand, eight hundred fourteen, in a double execution, rare for the State of Maryland, but his brother received a stay, so he could leave a kidney to their ailing mother.” He returns to his desk. “And he doesn’t have long, does he?”

“Is that your Book of the Dead?”

“I just call it Ledger Number One. So tell me what brings you down here.”

I’m ten words into quoting Camus’s sentences when Espy smiles by way of interruption. “There’s a problem with that very beautiful quote,” he says. “Camus meant it as a challenge, of course, but society actually kills best and most frequently when it knows exactly what it is saying and doing. If my research bears out any one truth, it’s that.”

As Espy speaks, I remember some difficulty I’d had verifying a story Charles Manson told of his mother witnessing a hanging in the late 1930s in Kentucky’s Moundsville Prison, when he was four years old. In Manson’s telling, his mother had been hiding near the gallows, trying to avoid her work detail, when the hanged man’s head was ripped off by the fall from the gallows and rolled past her. “That would be the Hyer case,” Espy says without blinking. “And given security conditions in Moundsville in that period, yes, it would have been possible for her to have witnessed an execution she had no right to. And who knows but what effect seeing that had on her, and eventually had on her four-year-old progeny? See, I believe that more than one person dies with each execution. They exert a horror and a fascination that never really goes away.”

Espy dates his fascination with executions to a UPI wire sent out on the morning of June 20, 1953, when he was the teletype operator for the U.S. Navy base in French Morocco. The subject was the Rosenbergs’ electrocution, and much of the crew was waiting outside his office for the message. “Six bells from the teletype,” Espy remembers. “Then it came: ETHEL HAS HOT PANTS. It was just some wire stringer’s puerile joke, but I’ll never forget it.”

Years before evidence emerged that Julius Rosenberg had in fact delivered military secrets to the Russians, Espy had investigated the case and come to the decision that Julius, and perhaps also Ethel, didn’t belong in his file of Wrongful Executions—Confirmed Innocents. “That was a painful conclusion,” Espy says, handing me the file, “because their deaths put me on my life’s work.” It’s that honesty, however, that enables Espy to earn an occasional, much-needed fee as an expert witness in capital punishment trials. As every lawyer learns from Espy, the difficulty in assembling accurate execution data comes from the mixture of sensationalism and obscurity that surrounds the practice. “Executions tend toward glaring headlines,” he says, “but the details have a way of being omitted, gotten wrong, misinterpreted, hidden, whatever.”

An abolitionist from Brooklyn Law School, for example, has hired Espy to determine the races of every criminal killed in New York’s three electric chairs, as well as the races of their victims. “The assignment, simple on the face, has already taken the better part of two weeks,” says Espy. An explanation of his difficulties leads to a long digression on William Kemmler—the first person to die by electrocution, in Auburn, New York, on August 6, 1890. I learn much about the man that is nowhere in the vast literature on his case: from the alias he lived under to the little-known fact that his victim, almost universally misidentified as his wife (whom he had abandoned), was in fact a mistress. “His story,” says Espy, “was dramatic, to say the least.”

“Why?” I ask. “Wasn’t he just a drunk who killed someone with an ax in a stupor?”

“A hatchet,” he corrects. “And, no, I don’t believe he was just a drunk. Murder, of the state-sanctioned type I fight, or the crimes that it is meant to fight, is never just anything. It is an unspeakable drama. Its impact is of the religious variety.”

Espy’s Confirmed Innocents file is thinner than the list given in the authoritative 1987 study by professors Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael L. Radelet. “Theirs,” Espy says, “includes Bruno Hauptmann, executed for the death of the Lindbergh baby, which I’m afraid I can’t concur with. They were right about Sacco, though perhaps not Vanzetti. But in their case, confirmed innocence isn’t the issue so much as the conduct of the trial judge, Webster Thayer, who announced to the courtroom, ‘I’m gonna burn those anarchist sons of bitches.’ Bartolomeo Vanzetti may have been an anarchist, but he was not a son of a bitch. He was a beautiful man. Webster Thayer was the son of a bitch. You’ve come to ask me about executioners. Sometimes you really don’t have to look further than the trial judge. Now do you?”

Espy’s Executioners file is also very thin. “They’re a rare breed. There’ve been dearths in this country, where the lesser of two criminals hanged the other, or where a condemned escaped death by becoming the hangman. That scenario is typical throughout history.” The file’s contents are mostly clippings from pulp detective magazines of the first half of the century, one of Espy’s major tools for researching executions. The house is stacked with them: Official Detective. Best Detective. True Detective. Fast Detective. Best True Fast Detective. “These articles are of uneven reliability, but they’re all I have to offer,” Espy says as he hands me the file. “You’re headed into terra incognita. A lot of stuff is unknown and a lot of what’s ‘known’ is just plumb made up.”

“I Executed Miles Fuller,” the oldest clip, is the anonymous account of how an out-of-work steward from the Montana Cooks and Waiters Union became a hangman. It provides “no facts otherwise unknown” (at least to Espy), and “none of the real flavor of a nineteenth-century hanging,” but it introduces a first, simple motive for wanting to execute: curiosity.

Other men were waiting there [in the Union headquarters] … smoking, reading, playing cards and talking. The topic of conversation, for the most part, was the approaching execution of … Miles Fuller. Rumor had it that Sheriff O’Rourke needed an executioner: a man to cut the rope at the hanging.

No one there seemed to want the job. … One man said he wouldn’t do it for all the money in the world [and] that if he did, he knew he would never get another night’s sleep. I laughed at that. And then, suddenly, it put a thought in my mind.

How would it feel actually to kill a man?

“Electric Death Wears a Mask,” from the January 1928 Startling Detective, an unintelligible meditation on electrocutioners by “author-historian and award-winning academic” Curt Norris, conveys the prurient odium and garishness that have always surrounded the perception of executioners. “My good friends within these ivy walls are sheltered men and women, wise in theory and isolation, and far removed from the horrors of a blood-soaked room and the dismembered aberration of what was once a human being.” A more common shade of purple is found in “Man of Doom,” an account of Rich Owen, a “hard-as-nails” prison screw and former boxer, miner, and electrician who worked his way up to sergeant at the Oklahoma State Prison at McAlester. Owen designed the electric chair in the prison’s basement death chamber, then took charge of the death house in 1917, when the state’s traveling executioner showed up too drunk to pull the switch. He kept the job until 1948, when a “malignant disease began to burn inside him, gnawing away his vital organs. … But even on his deathbed the old guard’s jaw still thrust forward pugnaciously. He died planning to leave his bed and perform the execution of Lewis Grayson, a Negro.” The article offers a second clue as to why anyone would want to kill for the state: Most modern executioners were hobbyists, men who came to the work largely because of their interest in machines, physiology, electrical current, contemporary plumbing, etc.

For example: “I Help Them Die,” from the April 1937 issue of Front Page Detective, an as-told-to confession of George Philip Hanna, “Humanitarian Hangman” from Epworth, Illinois. Hanna was obsessed with nooses, gallows, hoods, and restraints as a teenager. He spent his days binding, masking, and hanging dummies and sandbags from the hayloft in the family’s barn, teaching himself the proper ratios of body weight to rope length: Too short a drop led to strangulation; too long, to decapitation. Hanna was “unexpectedly given the opportunity to show the world what [he] had learned” when, at age eighteen, he attended a hanging in a nearby county. Horrified by the sheriff’s bungling, he made his way through the crowd and walked to the foot of the gallows.

“Could I lend you a hand, sir?” he asked. “You’re doing this the wrong way.”

His perfect hanging that day became legend among sheriffs and wardens across the nation, and he carried on as a traveling hangman and execution adviser for forty years, touring the country with his ropes, handcuffs, and hoods, as well as a collection of weapons used by murderers he’d hanged—the only compensation Hanna asked. He was a gentleman farmer, well off by all accounts. One story has him living in a hunting cabin in a northern Illinois virgin forest; another, in the January 1933 Master Detective, has him owning “2500 acres of the finest land in Southern Illinois.”

A jaundiced description of the executioner’s house, I notice, is always offered. The man in question may have been goonish, like Frank “The Human Butcher” Johnston, a miserable hangman who was eventually executed for horse thieving, or highly esteemed, like Robert Greene Elliot, “America’s Executioner,” whom we’ll meet below—but the dwelling must be dark, obscure, the locus of a pariah, where strange things are said and done. In “The Macabre Career of Henry the Hangman,” a cub reporter from the New Orleans Item tracks down the squalid quarters of state hangman Henry Meyer: “two rooms behind a vacant store … sparsely furnished [with] an oil lamp, a table, a bench, and a walnut double bed. … Meyer was lonely [and] did not want the reporter to go. He said: ‘I had rather ride a street car than anything.’ A neighbor accosts the reporter after he leaves: ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t put it in the paper. People around here don’t know he is the hangman. Everybody will move out if you put it in the paper.’”

Also invariably offered is the man’s compensation. If the capital crime involved a theft, embezzlement, or some other scheme for money, the sum is compared to the executioner’s fee—the implication, clearly, that both the condemned and his executioner are murderers, looking for a payday. Most ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• CONTENTS
• PROLOGUE
• INTRODUCTION: THE “PECULIAR INSTITUTION” OF AMERICAN EXECUTIONS
• CHAPTER ONE - THE DEATH BELT: FLORIDA TO TEXAS
• CHAPTER TWO - LOUISIANA: THE EXPULSION OF TABOO
• CHAPTER THREE - THE MISSISSIPPI GAS CHAMBER: A SPECIAL KIND OF PERSON
• CHAPTER FOUR - THE EXECUTION OF JIMMY LEE GRAY
• CHAPTER FIVE - RANDOMNESS: THE MAKING OF A MODERN EXECUTIONER
• CHAPTER SIX - AS FATE WOULD HAVE IT: THE MAKING OF A RELUCTANT EXECUTIONER
• CHAPTER SEVEN - “I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE”: THE EXECUTIONS OF EDWARD EARL JOHNSON AND CONNIE RAY EVANS
• CHAPTER EIGHT - “HAVE YOU EVER THOUGHT ABOUT CHANGING JOBS?”: THE EXECUTION OE LEO EDWARDS
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• About the Author
• PRAISE FOR THE LAST FACE YOU’LL EVER SEE
• Also by Ivan Solotaroff
• Copyright
• About the Publisher