Authorities said the three won’t be charged in Gregg’s death. James Fuller, a civil-rights attorney who represented the Georgia inmates for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, released a note in which the three men said they feared for their lives.
‘First that we will be shot while supposedly trying to escape on the return trip to Georgia,’ the note said. ‘And secondly, that we might be beaten to death once back at Reidsville in retaliation for the embarrassment caused to the state of Georgia because of the escape.’
This fear proved unfounded. The men were returned safely to Georgia, where they had to face the remainder of their sentences. Timothy McCorquodale was executed in the electric chair on October 21, 1987. Johnson and Jarrell had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
12
BACK WITH A BANG
The Furman decision highlighted deficiencies in death penalty legislation, resulting in a ten-year hiatus during which no one was put to death. The Gregg decision showed that states could eliminate those deficiencies and resume capital punishment. This, many of them did. The first man to face execution after the moratorium was Gary Gilmore.
Gary Mark Gilmore was born in McCamey, Texas, in 1940. He believed that he was the illegitimate grandson of famous magician Harry Houdini, but this was almost certainly not true. His father was physically abusive and emotionally distant, and the family relocated a lot during his childhood. By his teens, Gary had drifted into petty crime. It began with him setting up a car theft ring at the tender age of fourteen. By twenty-two, he had progressed to armed robbery and assault and was jailed for eight years in 1964. From then on he was in and out of prison.
On the evening of July 19, 1976, he carried out another armed robbery, this time of a gas station in Orem, Utah. The following evening he robbed a motel manager in Provo. In both cases he ordered the employees to do as he said, but despite their compliance, he shot and killed both men—Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell. After shooting Bushnell, Gilmore tried to dispose of the pistol but accidentally shot himself in the hand, leaving a trail of blood for investigators to follow. He was also seen throwing the gun into bushes near the service garage where his truck was parked. It did not take long for authorities to track him down.
Gilmore was charged with just one murder, that of Bushnell. He was convicted on October 7, 1976. The jury then sat again to consider sentencing and recommended the death penalty due to the special circumstances of the murder. This was all carried out in compliance with the Furman requirements set out by the Supreme Court. Gilmore was given the choice of being hanged or facing a firing squad, the two methods of execution available in Utah. He chose the firing squad, afraid that the hanging might be botched. Execution was scheduled for November 15th of that year. Gilmore announced publicly that he would not be appealing, but there were still inevitable appeals on his behalf, none of which he supported. The execution was put back and he tried to kill himself. Against his wishes, there were a number of stays of execution through the efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But the final stay was overturned at seven thirty in the morning on January 17, and he was due to face the firing squad later that morning.
Gilmore had made his feelings plain at a Board of Pardons hearing in November 1976, saying of the ACLU, “They always want to get in on the act. I don’t think they have ever really done anything effective in their lives. I would like them all—including that group of reverends and rabbis from Salt Lake City—to butt out. This is my life and this is my death. It’s been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that.”
The night before the execution, Gilmore had requested an all-night gathering of friends and family at the prison mess hall. That evening he was served the traditional last meal of steak and potatoes but was only able to face a glass of milk and a mug of coffee. But Gilmore’s uncle had smuggled three miniature bottles of Jack Daniel’s whiskey into the prison, which Gilmore did knock back.
The next morning, once news was received that the stay of execution was overturned, Gilmore was led to an abandoned cannery behind the prison, which served as the death chamber. He sat on a chair and was strapped to it. Behind the chair, a wall of sandbags had been set up to catch any stray bullets. He could not see the firing squad. They were behind a black curtain with five small holes in it. The five marksmen, all local police officers, would shoot through the holes. Gilmore was asked had he any final words, to which he replied, “Let’s do it.”
The local Catholic chaplain administered the last rites, the order was given, and five bullets thudded into the convict’s chest, killing him instantly. He was an organ donor, and after his execution his corneas were donated to two people. His body was then cremated.
Gary Gilmore had shown the world that execution was back on in America. His death was immortalized by British punk band, The Adverts, in their song “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” in 1977, and then by an inevitable television Movie of the Week, The Executioner’s Song, in 1982. This starred Tommy Lee Jones and was based on a popular factual book by Norman Mailer.
13
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 Semen
ov. 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 exami
ned 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.
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