Newjack

by Ted Conover

  At the same time, doctors and scientists were aware of electricity’s power to kill. In Buffalo in 1881, Dr. Albert Southwick, a dentist, saw an elderly drunkard touch the terminals of an electrical generator; he was amazed by how quickly and apparently painlessly the man was killed and described the episode to a friend, state senator David McMillan. Also in Buffalo—soon to be dubbed the Electric City of the Future—Dr. George Fell developed a method to help the ASPCA electrocute unwanted dogs. McMillan spoke to Governor David B. Hill, who asked the state legislature to consider whether electricity might somehow replace hanging.

  Around this time, in 1887, a New York murderer was put to death the old way—on the gallows. Roxalana “Roxie” Druse, of Herkimer County, New York, had murdered her husband in 1884 in a particularly grisly way. Following an early morning argument, she had enlisted their daughter to help her get a rope around his neck and then fired two shots into him. The bullets did not kill the man, and Roxie somehow intimidated a fourteen-year-old neighbor boy into shooting him again. Still her husband lived. This time she wielded an ax, and despite his cries of, “Oh, Roxie, don’t!” she chopped his head off. After further dismembering him, she spent several hours burning the pieces in a stove.

  Despite the lurid details, Roxie Druse became something of a cause célèbre—no woman had been executed in New York in thirty-nine years. Petitions arrived in the governor’s office, asking him to commute her sentence to life imprisonment. The governor postponed the hanging but ultimately refused to reduce her sentence, and in February 1887, Roxie Druse was hanged in the Herkimer County jail.

  The hanging did not go well. In front of a large crowd of reporters and others, Roxie Druse, wearing a pretty dress decorated with roses sent by her daughter, began to moan, weep, and then, when the black hood was pulled over her head, to shriek. When the trapdoor fell, Druse was killed not by a quick snapping of the neck, as was supposed to happen, but instead by slow strangulation as she dangled and writhed, conscious, for fifteen minutes at the end of her rope.

  The death of Druse gave new life to efforts to reform New York’s capital punishment, and in 1888 the legislature, hoping to burnish the reputation of the Empire State, established “electric execution” (electrocution was not in common usage yet) as the state’s official method. The law went into effect on January 1, 1889. In March of that year, a Buffalo fruit vendor named William Kemmler, enraged at his common-law wife, murdered her with a hatchet in front of her young daughter, and he soon became the first person in the world sentenced to die by electricity.

  By this time, Thomas Edison was locked in a fierce fight with George Westinghouse over their competing technologies: Edison’s direct current (DC) was quickly losing ground to Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC), which, time would prove, held many advantages for long-distance transmission. Unlikely to win the battle on its merits, Edison devoted considerable resources to trying to discredit AC in the realm of public relations: AC, he and his supporters asserted, was much more lethal than DC.

  In Kemmler’s death sentence, Edison heard the knock of opportunity. He wanted to make sure that what he called “the executioner’s current” would be George Westinghouse’s AC. Worried by the plans to use his company’s equipment in the execution of Kemmler, Westinghouse apparently underwrote an expensive legal appeal of Kemmler’s conviction, which went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued that electrocution would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment.” Kemmler’s appeals were denied, however. On August 6, 1890, he entered the new AC-equipped execution chamber at Auburn prison.

  Public excitement and controversy over the execution were said to approach that of a presidential election. Awaiting Kemmler in the chamber were twenty-six witnesses, including six doctors, the district attorney who had prosecuted him, and many journalists; they were arrayed in a semicircle around the electric chair. Kemmler appeared with the warden from a side door, dressed in yellow trousers, a gray jacket, and a black-and-white-checked bow tie. The top of his head had been recently shaved and “had the appearance of a great scar,” according to The New York Times. “Gentlemen,” the warden said, “this is William Kemmler.”

  Kemmler bowed and said ceremoniously, “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck. I believe I am going to a good place and I am ready to go.” He bowed again and started to sit in a normal chair next to the heavy three-legged oak electric chair. The warden redirected him, then cut a hole in the back of Kemmler’s shirt, near the base of his spine, where an electrode would go. He began to attach the electrode, and another, on top of Kemmler’s head, with leather straps.

  “Now, take your time and do it all right, Warden. There is no rush,” said Kemmler, urging the warden to make the straps on the head electrode a bit tighter. “I don’t want to take any chances on this thing, you know.”

  “All right, William,” answered the warden. When he was finished, he walked to a door behind the chair and whispered to the electrician working the generator, “Is all ready?” Then he turned back to the room and said, “Good-bye, William,” the words being a signal to the technician to throw the switch.

  To the horror of the witnesses, the first seventeen-second shock did not kill Kemmler. Doctors thought it had, but then they noticed blood pulsing from a wound where his index finger had contracted and cut deep into his thumb—a sign that his heart was still pumping. Two minutes after the current had been shut off, Kemmler began to gasp and gurgle.

  “Great God, he is alive!” someone cried as the witnesses rose from their seats.

  “Start the current! Start the current again!” someone else shouted. This time the current was left on for more than two minutes, during which witnesses heard the grinding of Kemmler’s teeth and saw blood drops from burst capillaries form on his cheeks. The power occasionally ebbed due to problems with the generator, so Kemmler’s body would unpredictably slump, then sit upright again, every muscle straining against the straps. The D.A. ran for the door, gagging. A newspaperman from Washington fainted. The room smelled like cooking meat, and then like feces. Kemmler’s head started smoking and his clothes began to catch on fire. A blue flame flickered at the base of his spine.

  The power was finally cut. For a long time, the body of Kemmler was left to cool; when finally it was taken from the chair, rigor mortis had frozen it in a sitting position.

  Though the doctors later assured everyone that Kemmler had lost consciousness immediately, the newspapers were unforgiving. “An awful spectacle,” opined The New York Times, a “sacrifice to the whims and theories” of a “coterie of cranks and politicians.” “It is obvious that Kemmler did not die a painless death nor did he die instantly,” reported the Buffalo Express. “It would be impossible to imagine a more revolting exhibition,” said The Times of London. “The man was really killed by a clumsy stun,” reported Scientific American, “for which a dextrous blow from a pole ax would have been an expeditious substitute.”

  Amidst the recriminations and finger-pointing from the doctors, scientists, and prison officials, one might have expected the demise of electrocution technology. Instead, it persisted and indeed at Sing Sing (which soon became the official execution site), the technology was refined. No newsmen were allowed in Sing Sing at the electrocutions of four men on July 7, 1891; prison officials claimed that each was dead within six minutes of entering the execution room. At the following execution, the electrodes were attached to the head and the calf, instead of the small of the back. A witness, though sworn to secrecy, revealed that “on the fourth application of current, the prisoner’s eyeball broke and the aqueous fluid ran down his cheek.”

  Experimentation continued. In hopes of reducing the singeing of hair and flesh, a new electrode system—one originally proposed by Thomas Edison and Harold Brown to demonstrate the lethal nature of AC—was tried on the chair’s seventh victim: Instead of forcing electricity to pass from head to leg, officials immersed both of the inmate’s hands in a conductive water solution. The
first and only inmate to be subjected to this method endured fifty seconds of torture before the power was turned off and he was found to be very much alive. The staff then removed his hands from the water, attached electrodes as previously, and killed him the old way.

  Slowly, the problems were solved. Voltage was increased to deal with the highly various resistances of different individuals, amperage was reduced so as not to “cook” the flesh, wet natural sponges were employed to improve the connection between scalp and skin, and diapers were placed on the condemned. In 1958, a New York State Department of Correction (as it was then called) history asserted that “the method of execution has been carefully worked out and standardized over the years.” As though in evidence, it offered a degree of detail that could have been of little use to anyone other than an executioner. “An initial shock of 2000 volts is given for 3 seconds, dropped to 500 volts for 57 seconds, built up rapidly again to 2000 volts, dropped again to 500 volts for another 57 seconds, and again instantly raised to the initial voltage. The entire application takes two minutes.” Over time, twenty-five states, plus the District of Columbia, adopted the chair. (Lethal injection has since become the preferred method; as of early 2000, only Alabama, Georgia, and Nebraska still use electrocution as their sole means of putting inmates to death.)

  Of course, there had to be somebody to run these machines, to check the nuts and bolts of executions, to study it like an art. In New York and New Jersey in the years 1890–1914, it was Edwin D. Davis, a quiet man of “high cheekbones and drooping black mustache” who would arrive at Sing Sing wearing “a Prince Albert coat and black felt hat.” Perhaps because of threats on his life, Davis changed his address frequently and refused to be photographed. While electrician at Auburn prison, he designed both the first electric chair and testing procedures for it that involved large slabs of meat. Davis patented the helmet and leg electrodes, and always brought with him to executions a black satchel of secret equipment, which he would let nobody see. In fact, the state tried to purchase his patents and secrets, afraid that he might die before passing them along. The hangman of the age of electricity appears in accounts of Sing Sing history as a character out of the movies, coming in from a foggy night to perform his gruesome work, then leaving without a good-bye.

  Davis’s eventual successor was his former assistant, an electrician named John Hulbert. Though Hulbert was as close-mouthed as Davis and similarly averse to being photographed, more is known about him thanks to a memoir entitled Sing Sing Doctor, by Amos Squire, M.D., who presided over the executions of 138 men between 1914 and 1925, working closely with Hulbert, who actually pulled the switch.

  Though Hulbert lived in Auburn and the two were not friends (Squire refers to him as Hilbert throughout), Squire observed him closely. He describes Hulbert as “short and stocky, apparently a man with perfect nerves and excellent constitution,” which would seem to be another way of saying that he could perform his job without letting his feelings get in the way. When he read newspapers, Squire noted, Hulbert “studiously avoided all crime news, lest he stumble upon something relating to a person he might afterwards have to execute.”

  Over time, though, Squire saw Hulbert grow depressed, and says he urged him to stop doing executions. Hulbert replied that he needed the money, the $150 he got for each electrocution. “I never questioned that,” wrote Squire, “but I felt that perhaps the very horror of the occupation of executioner had a dreadful fascination from which he could not escape. Otherwise he would have found a way to readjust his life—before it was too late.”

  The beginning of the end for Hulbert came on a night when, three hours before a scheduled 5 A.M. execution, two inmates escaped from another part of the prison. The escape “upset the entire staff and disrupted routine,” a routine upon which Hulbert evidently depended, because, Squire wrote,

  Shortly before the time for the execution I received a call to rush to the death chamber. Hilbert was critically ill. I found him stretched out on one of the spectators’ benches, colorless, and his pulse scarcely perceptible. For a while I thought I would have to throw the switch myself. But after working over him and giving him stimulants, I brought him around, so he could go on with the executions—which were delayed half an hour by his sinking spell. He said he was suffering from ptomaine poisoning—but his symptoms indicated a nervous collapse. His condition was so serious I took him into the hospital after he had completed his work that morning and kept him there for a week. Hilbert eventually resigned his post as executioner—but he had waited too long. Not so long after his resignation, he committed suicide in the cellar of his home.

  According to the 1929 obituary in the Ossining Citizen Sentinel, John Hulbert used his prison revolver to shoot himself in the chest and temple. His family said he had been despondent over the heart attacks he had suffered recently and the death of his wife the year before. The obituary writer commented, “Mr. Hulbert never could be induced to relate incidents pertaining to the electrocution of criminals. He was averse to notoriety and his comings and goings from the Sing Sing death house were always cloaked in secrecy.

  “Whether his work preyed upon his mind no person ever was able to observe from his actions.”

  Except, perhaps, Squire and others inside the close-lipped world of the Death House. Squire’s Sing Sing Doctor concerns one of the more interesting periods in the prison’s history, the years between 1910 and 1930, which saw the abolition of the lockstep, striped clothing, and the rule against talking at work, as well as the practice of keeping inmates locked in their cells from noon Saturday until Monday morning. This era saw baseball teams organized among inmates, as well as the groundbreaking establishment of an organization of inmate self-government, the Mutual Welfare League.

  Squire recognized that readers would want to know about the thing that made Sing Sing increasingly famous as an object of fascination and horror: the Death House. His impossibly conflicted role as prison doctor and co-executioner is an extreme example of the ambiguity inherent in many prison jobs, including guard, but it put Squire in a perfect position to tell the Death House story. His work began with making sure that Death Row inmates stayed healthy—not just for their own good but, perversely, so they couldn’t succeed in suicide and thereby “cheat the chair.” It continued, on execution day, with his certifying that the inmate scheduled to die was sane. (He excepted only one.) Next, he sat with the condemned man as he was strapped into the chair and gave a hand signal to the executioner, hidden from observers behind a partition, to throw the switch. After a period of time, usually less than thirty seconds, Squire would order the power turned off while he checked for a pulse. As most men still had one, he would then signal for power to be turned back on one or more times, until he judged the man to be dead.

  Finally came the autopsy. At the time the electric-execution law was passed, questions persisted about whether electric shock would always prove fatal. Two cases were on record of men having been accidentally electrocuted and then revived by physicians, after several hours’ work. To make sure the chair had done its job, legislators required that the brain of execution victims be autopsied.

  Grotesquely, the autopsy room was situated in the Death House, next to the cells of Death Row. Inmates there, having seen their acquaintance marched to his execution through an infamous little green door at the end of the hall and then hearing the sounds of the generator, next had to hear the sound of his skull being sawed open. Squire portrays himself as aghast—though he can hardly have been surprised—when one famous condemned murderer, Shillitoni, interrupted an autopsy by going mad in his cell, breaking his furniture, and tearing his bedding to shreds.

  Though Squire didn’t touch on the larger principle of the Hippocratic Oath (First, do no harm …) and the matter of whether doctors should have anything to do with executions, he expressed discomfort about almost every aspect of his work. He regretted that he was “the only member of the prison staff who was compelled to watch the man in the chair ev
ery second,” and revealed that many times while listening for a heartbeat in the body strapped into the chair, “I have been so overwrought I was alarmed by the thought that what I heard was my own pulse rather than that of the dying man.” He conceded that

  Even though I had the respect and cooperation of the prison population in general, there were times when I knew the inmates had a deep, inexpressible feeling of revulsion toward me—owing to the fact that I was about to take part, or had just taken part, in an electrocution. Never with words or overt act would they reproach me, but they did with their eyes—which was worse—and by an unaccustomed silence. … It was as if they were accusing me of having betrayed them, after leading them on to believe that I was their friend.

  Squire devoted two chapters to arguing against capital punishment (“Each time a person is executed, the effect upon the public is infinitely more degrading than deterrent”), and he told of one sardonic man who on the eve of his execution said, “‘Boys, this is going to be a powerful lesson to me.’” So the reader gets a sense of a man who spent his professional life participating in something that he loathed and that—at least at the end—he did not believe in.

  Squire’s Hulbertian decline began in a similar way—with disruption of the routine. One of the murderers scheduled for execution had had to be kept constantly in a straitjacket, and Squire, for apparently the first time ever, had sent the governor a letter expressing his doubts that the man was sane. When the day of the execution arrived, the governor still had not responded.

  Panicked, Squire boarded a train to Albany to try to speak to him personally, only to learn that the governor was out of town and for the time being unreachable. Two hours later, though, Squire finally got him on the phone, and the governor ordered a two-week reprieve, during which experts reexamined the man and sent him not to the chair but to an asylum.