Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (16 page)

In the prison kitchen, however, Dugan, having lost the woman he loved, drowned his sorrows in distilled prune juice and then proceeded to wreck the kitchen, breaking every dish in the place. Brought up before the warden later, he had his prison sentence increased by a further 90 days, and never went near the kitchens or the death-house ever again.

The execution procedure is more or less the same in any prison. The execution itself is timed to take place late at night, at 11 p.m. or midnight, but warders move the condemned person into a cell near the ‘dance hall’, into the ante-room of the death chamber, early that day. If a man, he is given a shave, a bath and a haircut. Choice of the last meals, breakfast, lunch and supper, is permitted, and as many visitors are allowed in as are asked for. After the relatives have left, a chaplain attends, bringing spiritual comfort. And at the fatal hour the prison warden or his deputy, together with four guards, enters the cell.

One officer wields scissors, slitting the right trouser leg, if worn, and the prisoner is then led by the arm into the execution chamber. The witnesses are already seated there, prison officials and reporters. Securing the victim in the chair, the straps are then tightened around the arms, waist and ankles, and the electrode is attached to the prisoner’s bare calf. The warden approaches the rear of the chair, taking care to stand on the rubber mat, and adjusts the hood over the victim’s head.

A final inspection of the connections is made by the executioner, who then returns to his control panel some little distance behind the chair and watches the warden for the fateful signal. Upon it being given, he operates the switch; instantly, to an accompaniment of a dull droning sound, the victim’s body lurches, thrusting hard against the restraining straps; the smell of scorching flesh fills the chamber; a wisp of smoke ascends from beneath the helmet, and the victim’s neck and hands turn bright red. Further jolts are administered as required and, although it seems an age to those watching, within moments the condemned person’s body goes limp and the chamber is suddenly quiet, deathly silent, as the current is switched off.

The doctor takes over, pressing his stethoscope to the victim’s chest and, after listening, pronounces that the sentence of death has been duly carried out. The corpse is then carried into the next room where the post-mortem is carried out.

In the 1920s, in Sing-Sing and other prisons, this procedure included not only the removal of the heart and vital organs but trepanning also took place – the top of the skull was sawn off and the brain removed for medical examination. This was not a great departure from the practice in England two or more centuries earlier, whereby the bodies of hanged men were handed over to the surgeons for analytical purposes.

Even in the death-house there was sometimes a touch of comedy. One of the most brutal gangsters Sing-Sing had known followed another member of the gang to the chair. When there, he asked for a cloth, then melodramatically wiped the seat clean, exclaiming: ‘I’ve got to rub it off after that rat sat in it!’ Some felons wanted to wear a white shirt in which to meet their deaths, others to wear a tie; one prisoner even tried to walk the last journey on his hands, with his feet in the air! And while a last intoxicating drink was absolutely forbidden, one pathetic young man managed to soften the warden to the extent that the official relaxed the rule and procured a 2-ounce bottle of pure rye whisky. Thirty minutes before going to the chair, the youngster asked the warden if he had brought it; on being passed the bottle, the condemned man turned and handed it back, saying: ‘You need this worse than I do, warden – please drink it.’ The warden did, and the prisoner went to his death smiling.

There was never any shortage of volunteers when the post of executioner became vacant. Hundreds of people wrote in to apply for the job. The reasons given were many. Some were opposed to capital punishment but needed the salary, others were ex-soldiers and had no compunction about killing people, especially those deemed to deserve it. The people who were finally appointed were dedicated and humane in their tasks, among them being the New York executioner Edwin Davis, who executed 240 people, including seven in one day in 1912, before retiring in 1914.

His post was then taken by his assistant, John Hulbert, who, during the next 13 years, went on to dispatch 140 people. He died in 1929 in tragic circumstances: he shot himself after severe depression overtook him following the death of his wife. Another assistant of Davis was selected to replace Hulbert, Robert G. Elliott. Elliott proved to be an able and expert executioner, achieving a total of 387 people executed, five of them women, during his long career.

In the hierarchy of murderers, assassins have a special place. Not because their skill with weapons was noticeably better – on the contrary, they weren’t particularly accurate – but because they murdered because of their principles rather than for personal gain. And most of them were more or less instantly captured and duly sentenced to death.

One such was Leon F. Czolgosz (he had no middle name, but his father liked middle initials). Of medium height and slight build, with light brown hair and heavy-lidded blue eyes, he was a man of moderate habits, drinking occasionally, swearing rarely. Kind-hearted to the extent that he would not step on a worm, he even preferred to catch flies and drop them through the window rather than kill them. Yet this was the man who was going to murder the president of the United States of America.

On Friday 6 September 1901 in Buffalo, New York, he donned his usual striped grey suit and cap, his nondescript appearance belying the fact that in his right hip pocket he carried a loaded .32 calibre Iver Johnson revolver, the hard rubber handle of which bore an owl’s head stamped on each side. He made his way towards the Pan-American Exposition where he joined the queue of people waiting to meet and greet President McKinley who, with his wife, had arrived two days earlier.

If omens were needed, they were present even as the presidential train pulled in to the station, for the officer in charge of the gun salute had positioned the artillery pieces too close to the railway tracks, with the result that, when fired, the explosions shattered some of the train windows, causing Mrs McKinley to faint with shock.

On the fatal day the Exposition was heavily guarded not only by the local police but also by soldiers of the Coast Artillery, who formed two lines between which visitors desirous of shaking their president’s hand had to pass under scrutiny. Detectives and Secret Service agents, and even more soldiers, formed a loose cordon about the president, making it apparently impossible for anyone to attack him.

When the doors to the hall opened, the queue moved in and, once inside, Czolgosz slipped the weapon out of his pocket and quickly wrapped a large white handkerchief both around it and his right hand, which he pressed hard against his side as if it were injured. Fortune favoured him: not only was it a warm day, many handkerchiefs being evident and brows being mopped, but a man some little distance ahead of him also had his right hand bandaged. On approaching the president, this man excused his injured hand, McKinley then shaking the proffered left hand.

Slowly the queue advanced, until at last Czolgosz came face to face with his prey. He extended his left hand and, as the president reached out to grasp it, the assassin fired twice through the handkerchief, at such close range that the president’s waistcoat was spattered with powder from the gun. One bullet struck McKinley in the breast-bone, failing to penetrate, but the other, more deadly, entered the left side of his abdomen, perforated the front and rear walls of his stomach and ended up in the muscles of the president’s back.

For a moment McKinley swayed, then collapsed into the arms of one of his escorts, while Czolgosz was felled by the guards before he could fire again. The shots had set his handkerchief on fire, and one of the men burned his hand in trying to extinguish the flames. Other guards, meanwhile, attacked the assassin with their fists and rifles as he lay on the floor. One threatened to use his bayonet, and a waiter, who stood 6 feet 6 inches tall, took out a knife and attempted to cut Czolgosz’s throat. These murderous attacks were stopped by the president, who called out: ‘Be easy with him, boys!’

McKinley was taken by electric ambulance to hospital, to be operated on by several surgeons for nearly two hours. During the next few days he appeared to be recovering, but at noon on 12 September his condition deteriorated. He later sank into a coma from which he did not recover, the autopsy deciding that death was due to blood poisoning brought about by gangrene of the pancreas.

Throughout America public condemnation was directed at those branded as anarchists. Societies suspected of left-wing tendencies were attacked; one woman under arrest was given the third degree, a sadistic form of physical interrogation, and was punched in the face by a policeman; a man who expressed sympathy for the assassin and his socialist views was tarred, feathered and ridden out of town on a rail, which meant that he had to straddle a rail and be carried by two of his tormentors, one at each end.

No time was wasted in bringing Czolgosz to trial. There was no question of a plea of insanity, nor was any defence sustainable. On the morning of 29 October the condemned man was escorted to the execution chamber. He showed no regrets – on the contrary, as the straps securing him to the electric chair were tightened, he shouted: ‘I killed the president because he was the enemy of the good people, the good working people. I am not sorry for my crime.’

And at twelve minutes past seven precisely, the switch was operated, sending the fatal charge through his body. Afterwards, because no one came forward to claim his body, it was buried, but not before a carboy of sulphuric acid, rather than the more usual quicklime, had been poured into the coffin, an error which caused 12 hours to elapse before the corpse had totally disintegrated.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1933, another president nearly lost his life in the same way, and all because a man suffered from stomach ache. This latter was Giuseppe Zangara, a slim, fit Italian with thick black hair and swarthy features. He attributed his chronic stomach trouble to heavy work, and so directed his anger against his employers and, illogically, all capitalists. In 1922, before emigrating to the United States, he planned to kill King Emmanuel III of Italy, but was deterred by the size of the crowd and the numbers of soldiers on duty.

However, by 1932, then domiciled in Miami, he renewed his murderous ambitions, later giving his reasons as: ‘I want to make it 50–50; since my stomach hurt, I get even with capitalists by kill the president. My stomach hurt a long time.’ And as the president-elect, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, was coming to the Bayfront Park in town to address a crowd of about 10,000 people, Zangara decided that this was his opportunity. He had already visited Davis’s pawnshop in downtown Miami, put his eight dollars on the counter and chosen a .32 calibre revolver. The weapon had been manufactured by the United States Revolver Company; it had a nickel-plated barrel and a black grip, similar to that used by Czolgosz, together with ten bullets. And on 15 February 1933, his stomach ache still plaguing him, Zangara stuck the loaded revolver into the pocket of his trousers and made his way to Bayfront Park.

The grounds were packed by the time he arrived, making it impossible for him to get near to the front of the amphitheatre where the car bringing Roosevelt would draw up. Frustrated, he had to watch from out of range as the motorcade arrived, his target then standing up in the limousine to broadcast a brief speech for the benefit of the audience and the radio.

On sitting down again, the president-elect noticed an acquaintance, Mayor Cermak, nearby and spoke to him. As the conversation ended, Zangara, still hemmed in by the crowd of spectators, suddenly became aware that a seat in the adjacent aisle had become vacant. Needing to see over the heads of those around him – he was only 5 feet tall – he scrambled on to the seat and, taking aim, fired five bullets at Roosevelt’s head, the sounds being transmitted across the country via the live microphone.

Whether the president-elect owed his life to the efforts, as later claimed, of a Mrs Lillian Cross, who swore she pushed Zangara’s gun arm up, or to a similar action taken by a carpenter, Thomas Armour, or more likely to the fact that the would-be assassin was aiming at a small target from a long range while balancing precariously on a wobbly seat – nevertheless, Zangara’s shots went wide. Missing Roosevelt entirely, one bullet struck Mayor Cermak, entering his right lung via the right armpit; four other people were also hit, one seriously. The mayor was rushed to hospital but his wound proved fatal, and he died on 6 March.

Meanwhile, police had rushed into the crowd and, seizing Zangara, threw him on to the rear of one of the official limousines, where three policemen sat on him. On arrival at the gaol, he expressed his regret that he had not succeeded in killing the president-elect. The officers on duty noticed that he continued to stroke his stomach.