Executioners

by Phil Clarke

  Swift Justice

  This detachment and commitment to providing the prisoners with a humane and dignified death led Albert to develop the efficiency of his executions. An advocate of the variable drop method, he made his own calculations from the height, weight and physical condition of each convict as to the length of rope rather than blindly following the official table provided by the Home Office. These made-to-measure ‘designer’ ropes resulted in the clean separation of the second and third vertebrae, granting a quick and clean kill rather than slowly strangling the condemned with a rope that was too short or, if the rope was too long, causing complete decapitation.

  Albert also improved the speed of the ceremony. He believed there was no sense in prolonging the agony for either the condemned or the executioner and attendant witnesses. His father, Henry, had averaged a time of about thirteen seconds during his time as chief executioner but Albert soon smashed this time by almost half in a bid to lessen the suffering of all those present. From cell door to trapdoor, Albert dispatched James Inglis in seven and a half seconds on 9 May 1951 at Strangeways Prison.

  Nazi Hangings

  These humanitarian modifications soon came to the attention of the Armed Forces. With the defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and the resulting war trials, the military were in need of someone who could implement the punishments they had imposed and, at the behest of Field Marshal Montgomery, Albert was promptly called to Germany to apply his distinctive no-nonsense execution style. Flying out on the 11 December 1945, Albert Pierrepoint would face his biggest test as an executioner in just two days.

  The visiting executioner was taken to Hameln Prison in the heart of the British-controlled section of Germany, where those convicted of crimes against the Geneva Convention of 1929 were being held. Famous for the legend of the Pied Piper, Hameln once again saw another mass execution when, on 13 December, Albert Pierrepoint led thirteen war criminals to their deaths in just one day!

  The unlucky thirteen included three women. The pick of the bunch was Irma Grese. Known as the ‘Bitch of Belsen’, she was the supervisor at the Ravensbrueck, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen concen­tration camps. Despite being only twenty-two years old and the youngest guard to be executed for war crimes under English law, her sadistic nature was fully developed and had been wholly realised through the treatment of her prisoners, whom she randomly shot in cold blood or had mauled by half-starved dogs. She showed no remorse, calling for Pierrepoint to be quick with her fatal farewell. She clearly was not aware of Albert’s reputation!

  After the women came the men, and they took the gallows in pairs in an effort to stay on schedule. Albert came face to face with Josef Kramer who had been given the macabre moniker – ‘The Beast of Belsen’. He had been the commandant of Bergen-Belsen camp and remained at his post as the Allied Forces broke through the gates, even offering to give them a tour!

  As soon as the courts reached their verdicts the condemned were made ready for punishment with immediate effect. The convictions came thick and fast and over the next four years, Albert made a further twenty-five trips to Germany and Austria to act as executioner. In one day, there were thirteen hangings, which was followed by forty-seven in one week and by the end of this tour of duty he is thought to have executed as many as 200 Nazi war criminals.

  Not only did he have to cope with witnessing so much death so close at hand but throughout this purge of convicted war criminals, he had to endure the attention of the press back at home – something that appalled his plain and private sensibilities. These principles were not shared by the War Office and in 1946 it provided the British media with the name Albert Pierrepoint as a symbol of Great Britain’s professional handling of those responsible for the atrocities. Anonymity was a thing of the past for him now, no longer able to throw a veil over his profes­sion, he was lauded as a national hero – plain hangman to pseudo-super man.

  Friend and Foes

  One positive outcome from his own ‘war effort’ was the money which allowed Albert to quit the grocery delivery business once and for all. Still requiring a second job to make ends meet, the Pierrepoints decided to buy the lease on a pub called Help The Poor Struggler in Hollinwood, Oldham, which did a roaring trade. They were never short of patrons who no doubt yearned for a pint pulled by the hand which pulled the lever on the Beast of Belsen.

  Throughout the 1950s, Albert’s inimitable style of execution saw to the necks of some of the most infamous criminals in British history. He applied the last death sentence in Eire to Michael Manning and, two years later, saw to the death of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain.

  On 9 March 1950, Albert executed Timothy Evans for the murder of his daughter, despite subsequent discovery that in fact serial killer and self-confessed necrophiliac John Reginald Christie was the true perpetrator. Evans would eventually receive a post­humous pardon in 1966. Christie failed to escape the noose and Pierrepoint was available to oversee his execution on 15 July 1953. Earlier that year, Albert travelled to Wandsworth Prison to dispatch Derek Bentley for the murder of Police Constable Miles. Another case steeped in doubt, it was later realised that Bentley was in fact under arrest at the time of the killing, resulting in another belated pardon in 1993. These wrongful executions were to slowly alter Albert’s view on the efficacy of execution, although one specific moment in his career would go further than any other to affect a change in his belief.

  Throughout his career, Albert’s strategy for coping with the job was serving him well. With every prisoner he took to the gallows, he was always able to emotionally distance himself. This was business not personal. Yet in 1950, both sides of his double life were forcibly slammed together when he was entrusted with the execution of his friend, James Henry Corbitt. Corbitt was a regular in Albert’s pub and the two – known to each other as Tish and Tosh – would often perform songs to the crowds inside. On 28 November 1950, convicted of the murder of his mistress, Tish and Tosh met again at the gallows. No longer able to disregard the details of the condemned, as Corbitt’s body fell through the trapdoor, a tear must have fallen from Albert’s eye.

  Resigned

  In the winter of 1956, Albert was called to Strange­ways Prison to preside over the hanging of Thomas Bancroft. Leaving his wife to look after the pub, he made his usual trip and subsequent preparations for the convict’s smooth demise. He was then told that the condemned had been afforded a reprieve – a rare occurrence and Albert’s first experience of such a reversal in England. He claimed his full fee of £15 but this was denied and eventually a mere £4 was offered to cover his expenses. Suitably affronted, Albert appealed to a disinterested Prison Commission, prompt­ing him to tender his resignation. While this was the official reason, Albert was growing tired of the role. The combination of the aforementioned events must have all factored towards Albert’s resignation which came in a year in which not one execution was performed in Britain.

  After this decision to stand down from his post, he held talks with the press to run a series of articles entitled The Hangman’s Own Story but this was ulti­mately quashed by the Home Office. They even considered charging Albert with contravention of the Official Secrets Act. He did eventually get to tell his uniquely captivating story as Britain’s most swift and efficient executioner in 1974, with his autobiography entitled Executioner: Pierrepoint. In it, he revealed his concluding thoughts as to the validity of capital punishment declaring that it, ‘achieved nothing except revenge’.

  Executions continued in Britain for a further eight years after his resignation. Albert Pierrepoint’s tireless efforts would never be surpassed. During his twenty-four years of service, from 1932 to 1956, he was credited with an unverified 450 executions, including seventeen women and some 200 Nazis after World War II. He lived out his final years in a nursing home located in the coastal town of Southport in Lancashire and passed away on 10 July 1982 at the age of eighty-seven.

  PART NINE: THE ELECTRIC CHAIR

  The Electric Cha
ir

  During the nineteenth century hanging was the most common form of capital punishment in North America. How­ever, following a steady stream of gruesome deaths this execution technique had become out of touch with members of an enlightened society, who saw it as barbaric. While the executioners of Britain were mastering the long drop method, those in the United States were regularly decapitating prisoners or causing them to be slowly strangled to death. This was the case of poor Roxalana Druse who, in 1887, took a full fifteen minutes to perish.

  By 1887 the search for a new, more humane way of dispensing punishment was well under way, but we need to travel back to 7 August 1881 for the initial spark of an idea. It was on this day that a dentist and former steamboat engineer, Alfred P. Southwick witnessed a drunk old man named George Smith stagger towards a live generator in Buffalo, New York.

  He touched an exposed terminal, killing him instantly. Southwick’s imagination lit-up: perhaps electricity was the civilised alternative to hanging society had been looking for. After discussing the idea with fellow doctor George Fell, as well as conducting some preliminary tests on stray cats and dogs, Southwick visited his friend Senator McMillan. McMillan spoke with Governor David Bennett Hill regarding the prospect of presenting the idea to the state legislature (the authorising body responsible for the death penalty) for consideration. In 1885, Hill put forward the case for electricity as a suitable substitute to hanging, but the state legislature was deaf to the idea.

  AC vs DC

  The foremost pioneer of electricity was the Wizard of Menlo Park: Thomas Alva Edison. The inventor had managed to harness the power of electricity, building his first plant in 1879. While his DC (or direct current) was successful in controlling electricity, it was not without its drawbacks. Edison’s system was a complicated one. Direct current channelled electricity in only one direction, requiring commutators to ensure that the flow always went the right way. DC power was also a poor traveller; the necessary volts could only be maintained over small distances, necessitating countless expensive power plants. However, during the 1880s a replacement for direct current, called alternating current (or AC), was dis­covered. This negated the use of numerous generators to maintain voltage. The breakthrough was made by Nikola Tesla, a Croatian scientist who was employed by Edison and knew the inherent problems of direct current. AC offered a marked improvement because the current altered its direction many times per second, creating a magnetic field that allowed for a constant supply of power even over great distances. Tesla approached Edison with this new development, but the Wizard of Menlo Park dismissed the idea, and so Tesla left his employ to find a willing investor. It did not take him long. Shortly after securing patents for the AC system, a man named George Westinghouse, who had made his money with the invention of the railroad airbrake, revealed an interest in Tesla’s product. Westinghouse gave Tesla the necessary financial backing, making alternating current a true rival to Edison’s DC power.

  As Westinghouse was preparing to overtake Edison with his new improved current, Governor Hill had managed to stir up enough support from the state legislature to issue Chapter 352 of the Laws of 1886, authorising the appointment of the New York State Committee to explore potential alternatives to hanging. Electricity was high on this list of possible alternatives and this worried both Edison and Westinghouse, for neither man wished their product to be associated with death. They believed that consumers would not wish to have the same current in their homes as was used to fry violent felons in the death chamber. Edison was faced with another DC-specific problem. His technology used very thick copper cables to channel the current and, in 1887, copper prices were going through the roof. AC power was becoming more and more popular and the high costs and poor mobility of his DC power forced Edison to take action.

  Edison orchestrated a systematic and calculating attack on Westinghouse’s AC product by publicly associating it with danger, death and execution. He hired a man named Harold Pitney Brown to find a way to prove that AC was lethal in comparison with his ‘safer’ DC technology. Brown invited the press to watch AC tests performed at Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. Small animals were lured onto a metal plate wired up to a 1,000 volt AC generator. The fatal shocks these animals received were just the clear message Edison desired: AC power kills. The attending reporters had a field day. They coined the phrase ‘electrocution’ following the demonstration. The smear campaign was well and truly underway.

  Edison followed up this PR stunt with a publication entitled A Warning, which compared the two currents and included a list of all the AC victims. Early the following year the Gerry report was published. The commission appointed in 1886 to examine the ways in which execution could be made more efficient released their findings in what was a ninety-five page detailed analysis named after Eldbridge T. Gerry, who chaired the committee. It suggested that of all the methods, electrocution was the way forward and a proposed bill for the amendment of the Criminal Procedure Code was attached. On 8 May 1888, Senator Henry Coggleshell was able to get the bill passed. Less than a month later the New York State Legislature enacted chapter 489 of the laws of 1888, for the use of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death for capital offences committed after 1 January 1889. Electrocution was now a legal form of capital punishment, but how best to apply this power? In order to answer this question, the Medico-Legal Society was charged with finding a device fit for the purpose. But for Edison and Westinghouse, there existed a more pertinent question: which current would it use?

  Edison continued his denigration of Westinghouse’s alternating current with added fervour. Harold Brown sent an article to the New York Evening Post the day after the electric bill became law, in which he described the death of a boy who had touched an exposed telegraph wire using AC. From June to December 1888, Brown continued to conduct his public experiments, drumming up hostility towards alternating current in the home and promoting its use for capital punishment. They invited both the press and the Electrical Board of Control. Brown and his assistant, Doctor Peterson of Columbia University, began their demonstrations by administering a series of shocks to a large dog using direct current, illustrating that the power only tortured the animal. Brown then finished the beast off with a shock of AC power, proving that it was the more deadly. They claimed that Edison’s invention would not be up to the task of performing the pain-free execution the Medico-Legal Society was seeking. Brown and Peterson went on a multi-city tour throughout New York State, buying cats and dogs from school-children for twenty-five cents each to execute using AC power. Not only were domestic animals subjected to electrocution, in an increasingly theatrical show, calves, horses, a circus elephant and even an orang-utan were killed with electric shocks in a bid to persuade the public of AC’s lethality.

  The underhanded efforts of Edison and his associates finally paid off in 1889, when the com­mittee finally chose Westinghouse’s alternating current as the electricity provider for the electric chair – the device having being chosen ahead of a water tank and a rubberised table.

  In March, Harold Brown was commissioned to design and build three electric chairs for each of the state prisons – Auburn, Clinton and Sing Sing. He met with Austin Lathrop, the state prisons super­intendent, to organise the acquisition of the necessary AC generators from Westinghouse. Unsurprisingly, he refused to sell them these essential instruments, however Edison was too cunning for his competitor. He pretended that the generators were to be used in Brazil at a university, then had them shipped from South America to the prisons in New York to be fitted into the first death chambers the United States had ever seen.

  The First Electrocutions

  William Kemmler was an illiterate vegetable seller and raging drunk who killed his wife, Tillie Ziegler, with an axe in the city of Buffalo, New York. He would eventually be the first victim of the electric chair, though it took over a year for the death sentence to be passed by the State. Kemmler was sentenced to die on 13 May 1889, an
d the method of execution was to be the newly devised electric chair. Soon after the sentence was announced, an expensive lawyer named W. Bourke Cochran formed an appeal against the State, charging it with violating the eighth and fourteenth amendments of the American Constitution, asserting that no citizen should be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment.

  This application for a stay of execution was a surprise to all. Why should an expensive attorney concern himself with a man of such low status as Kemmler? It soon became apparent that this was part of George Westinghouse’s defence strategy. Edison’s opponent had funded the plea in a bid to postpone the use of his alternating current by calling the electric chair unconstitutional. The appeal was rejected by the Supreme Court on 23 May by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, but Westinghouse had not finished. He hired another pricey lawyer – Roger Sherman – to prevent the death of Kemmler and protect AC power’s domestic future. During this case, New York State called both Edison and Brown as witnesses to prove that the execution style was not a breach of United States law. On 23 July, Edison gave evidence which helped sway the decision in favour of the State. He dismissed accusations that electro­cution was too unpredictable to be used on mankind, while continu­ally associating the electric chair with Westinghouse at any conceivable point in the proceedings. Yet again, Westinghouse’s lawyers failed to convince the court and the appeal was formally denied on 9 October 1889, condemning both Kemmler as well as Westinghouse’s investment to a deadly fate.