by Odell, Robin
Fortified with two shots of whisky, the prisoner was strapped into the chair and the switch was pulled. A doctor applied a stethoscope to his chest and determined that a second charge should be delivered. When this failed to make death certain, a third charge was ordered. Official witnesses were treated to the sights, sounds and smell of smoke and burning flesh. One of those present was reported as saying, “It is un-Christian. It is barbaric.”
Following the chaotic nature of Spenkelink’s last moments, there were rumours that he had fought with prison guards on his way to the death chamber and was already dead or unconscious when he was put in the chair.
After a moratorium of fifteen years, Florida was back in the execution business. Opponents of capital punishment feared an upsurge of judicial killings. Spenkelink’s death raised many controversial issues, including the suggestion that convicted persons from underprivileged backgrounds attracted the greater number of death sentences. Spenkelink was often quoted as commenting, “capital punishment means those without capital get the punishment”.
Another issue was the conduct of the execution process, which had been particularly gruesome in Spenkelink’s case. This led in 1981 to an order to exhume his body in order that an autopsy could be carried out to establish whether he was indeed dead or unconscious at the time he was electrocuted.
“His Eye Did Not Quail”
John Any Bird Bell, aged fourteen, was convicted of murder in 1831 and publicly hanged before a crowd of 10,000 people at Maidstone, Kent in the UK.
On 4 March 1831, thirteen-year-old Richard Taylor was sent on an errand by his father. He had been instructed to collect a parish allowance due to his family. He had done this on numerous occasions and his habit was to safeguard the money by keeping the coins in his left hand on which he pulled a mitten.
When the boy had not returned by nightfall, his father went in search of him but he remained missing for many weeks. Then, on 11 May, a man out walking near Bridge Wood at Stroud, Kent, found his body lying in a ditch. Richard Taylor was dead from a stab wound to the throat. A search in the undergrowth nearby turned up the presumed murder weapon, a horn-handled knife. The mitten had been cut off his hand and the money was missing.
The knife was traced to the Bell family who lived in a poor house close to Bridge Wood. Fourteen-year-old John Any Bird was the owner of the knife. He and his eleven-year-old brother, James, were taken into custody. The coroner’s court decided that the dead boy’s body, which had been interred almost immediately after discovery, should be exhumed. The purpose was to search the clothing.
The two boys in custody were taken to the graveyard to witness the exhumation so that their reactions could be observed as possible indications of guilt. John Any Bird declined to take part in the macabre incident that followed. But his brother accepted the invitation to climb down into the grave and search the pockets of the corpse. No money was found, confirming that Richard Taylor had been robbed and murdered.
John and James appeared before the magistrates at Rochester when the younger boy made a confession. He said that he kept watch while John ambushed Taylor and robbed and killed him. The eleven-year-old said that they had noticed Taylor’s regular errand to collect money for his father and hatched a plan to rob him. For his part in the enterprise, James was rewarded with one shilling and six pence.
John Any Bird Bell was convicted of murder at Maidstone Assizes and, while being transported from the court to the prison, acknowledged his crime. He even pointed out a pond in which he had washed off his victim’s blood. The judge who sentenced him to death told him that his body would be given to surgeons at Rochester for dissection.
The Kent and Essex Mercury reported that the execution on 1 August 1831 drew “an immense concourse of people to witness the sad spectacle”. Half an hour before the time of the execution, 10,000 people had gathered near the gaol. John Any Bird Bell had made a full confession to his crime on the eve of execution. Accompanied by the chaplain, he walked steadily to the scaffold and it was reported that, “. . . his eye did not quail, nor was his cheek blanched”. After the rope was placed around his neck, he exclaimed in a loud voice, “All the people before me take warning by me!”
“. . . The Toes Moved Briskly”
When Sylvester Colson enlisted as crew aboard the US schooner Fairy at Boston in August 1820, it was for a voyage that turned him into a mutineer and murderer.
The tone of the voyage to Europe was set at the quayside before sailing when the ship’s mate, Thomas Paine Jenkins, had an argument with Charles Marchant, who was reluctant to take orders. Having loaded a cargo of timber, the Fairy slipped her moorings and headed out to sea under the command of Captain Edward Selfridge.
From the start, Marchant’s rebellious nature affected other members of the crew and he found a willing ally in Colson. They proved to be a troublesome pair, arguing with both the mate and the captain. Matters came to a head when Colson was caught asleep on duty. He and fellow crew member, John Hughes, complained that their watches were too long.
On the night of 24 August 1820, Colson and Marchant resorted to murder. When Hughes enquired as to the whereabouts of the mate he was told casually that both the mate and the captain had been killed and thrown overboard. Marchant had blood on his clothes and he and Colson made preparations to scuttle the ship.
On 29 August, once they had sighted the coast of Nova Scotia, the mutineers sank the ship and rowed ashore with Hughes and another seaman called Murray. They related an implausible tale to the captain of a US ship, requesting him to take them on to Halifax. At this point, Murray decided to inform on the mutineers and they were taken into custody by the Canadian police.
Colson and Marchant were returned to Boston where, in November 1826, they were charged with revolt, piracy and murder. They were tried separately and each was found guilty and sentenced to death. Marchant escaped execution by taking his own life while Colson died on the scaffold. The bodies were taken to Harvard Medical School for anatomical examination.
In February 1827, the corpses were handed over to Dr John White Webster, who, in the fullness of time, would stake his own claim to criminal immortality. Webster was engaged in experiments with galvanic apparatus to observe reactions to electrical stimulation on the nerves and muscles. What happened next was reported in excruciating detail in the Columbian Sentinel on 3 February 1827.
Colson’s body was connected to a powerful galvanic battery by means of wires inserted in his mouth and urethra. The report noted that, “. . . convulsive motions ensued. Applied to the eye, the organ opened and rolled wildly . . .”. Also, “. . . the leg was much agitated at every contact . . . and the toes moved briskly”. Dr Webster, whose expertise lay in chemistry and mineralogy, declared the experiment “a great success”.
Whatever the doctor may have learned it did little to assist his own criminal ambitions when he murdered fellow academic, Dr George Parkman, in 1850. Like Colson, he felt the hangman’s noose around his neck.
Manufacturing Lightning
William Kemmler’s crime was that he took an axe to Tillie Ziegler, his mistress, and ended her life. He paid for it by forfeiting his own life in the electric chair, the first murderer to be killed by this new method of electrocution. Kemmler told the witnesses gathered to observe the judicial use of electricity that he believed he was “going to a better place”. While that thought might have comforted him, the manner of his going was a woeful spectacle.
The details of Kemmler’s crime were lost in the blizzard of publicity accompanying his execution. There was a great deal of press speculation about the new method that was supposed to be more humane than hanging. The authorities debated the type of electrical supply that was to be used. Would it be Edison’s direct current (DC) or Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC)? Meanwhile, carpenters in Auburn Prison’s workshop were building the wooden chair in which Kemmler was to spend his last moments on Earth.
The date of execution was fixed for 6 August 18
90. The prison warden brought Kemmler into the execution chamber and introduced him to the assembled witnesses. Among them was a group of doctors, sitting around the chair. Kemmler gave a bow and sat down. He made a brief statement: “The newspapers have been saying a lot of things about me which were not so. I wish you all good luck in the world. I believe I am going to a better place.”
Prison officials began preparing him by buckling his arms and legs to the chair and placing the electrodes to his back and to his skull. A mask was then placed over his head and the warden said, “Goodbye William”. The executioner, waiting behind a screen, was given the signal and he pulled a switch sending 1,000 volts AC through Kemmler’s body. The surge of current lasted seventeen seconds.
To the consternation of those present, Kemmler was not dead and his body arched against the restraints that bound him to the chair. Frantic signals were given to the executioner to send another charge through the chair. This lasted for four minutes before officials decided that Kemmler was dead.
The bungled execution using the new method was universally criticized. One US newspaper declared that Kemmler would be the last man executed in such a manner. The New York Globe took the view that, “Manufactured lightning to take the place of the hangman’s rope for dispatching of condemned murderers cannot be said to be satisfactory.”
Implements Of Hell
Albert Fish was a house painter in New York and father of six children who acquired numerous titles as a result of his perverted sexual activities, including “The Moon Maniac”, “Inhuman Monster” and “Cannibal”.
Fish was brought up in an orphanage where he grew accustomed to the brutal regime of disciplining children with whips and acts of sadism. He became addicted to pain, subjecting himself to flagellation and other sado-masochistic practices. He burned himself and inserted needles into his body. When there was a full moon, he would eat raw meat.
Not surprisingly, his wife left him and he was abandoned to his perverted practices. He assembled a collection of newspaper cuttings relating to cannibalism, including reports about the German mass murderer, Fritz Haarmann, convicted of twenty-seven killings in 1924.
Over a period of twenty years, Fish was believed to have molested hundreds of children. He had a family cottage in Westchester County where he took his own and neighbours’ children and encouraged them to abuse him. His life of perversity came to a crisis point in 1928. He befriended the Budd family who lived in Manhattan, New York, and took a particular interest in Grace, their twelve-year-old daughter.
On 3 June 1928, on the pretext of taking the child to a party, he took her instead to his cottage in Westchester. Grace was strangled by Fish and using what he called his “implements of hell”, a butcher’s knife, saw and cleaver, he dismembered the child’s body. Over a period of several days, he sliced pieces of flesh off the corpse and ate them in a stew with vegetables. This act of cannibalism kept him in a state of sexual fervour.
Grace Budd was reported missing by her family and her fate would have remained a mystery but for Fish’s action in writing to her family. Six years after Grace disappeared, he wrote a letter in 1934 informing her mother that he had killed her daughter. The police traced his whereabouts through the letter and he was arrested.
Fish made an extraordinary confession, admitting to six murders and a catalogue of other atrocities, the precise details of which he could not recall. The remains of Grace Budd were recovered from a shallow grave at Westchester.
His trial in March 1934 at White Plains, Westchester County, was a battle of the psychiatrists. His defence contended that he was insane, with ample evidence pointing to that conclusion. He was interested in religion and especially what he saw as the need for purging and physical suffering. He said, “I am not insane, . . . I am just queer. I don’t understand myself.”
After protracted arguments in court, Fish was judged to be sane; he was duly found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. This meant death in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. While awaiting his fate on Death Row, he professed to be looking forward to being electrocuted because that was one thrill he had not previously experienced.
On 16 January 1936, the sixty-six-year-old child molester and cannibal readily made his way to the electric chair. The first electrical charge failed, apparently short-circuited by the needles still in his body. A second charge extinguished the life of the oldest man to be electrocuted at Sing Sing.
“Amazing Grace”
The convicted killer of an elderly couple in Smyrna, Delaware, USA, was given the choice of death by hanging or by lethal injection. He chose hanging and became the first person to be executed in the state by that method for fifty years.
Billy Bailey left a work-release centre in Wilmington on 21 May 1979 and held up a liquor store. He then moved on to a farm occupied by Gilbert and Clara Lambertson, intent on stealing their pick-up truck. In the course of his theft, he killed the couple with a shotgun. Asked later why he did it, he said, “I don’t really know. I just know that I feel bad about it . . .”.
Bailey was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by hanging. During the time he spent on Death Row, the state of Delaware changed its policy on execution and in 1986 adopted the use of lethal injection. After the appeals process had been exhausted, Bailey was scheduled to be executed in January 1996 and because his original sentence had specified death by hanging, he was given the choice of the noose or injection. The gallows built to hang him in 1980 was still in place and Bailey elected to die by the rope.
Forty-nine-year-old Bailey was taken to the gallows erected in the yard of the Delaware Correctional Center shortly before midnight. The traditional hood was placed over his head and he was attended by two hooded prison guards. He was duly hanged in a manner which his lawyer described as “medieval and barbaric” and witnessed by the children of his victims. Supporters of the death penalty had gathered outside the prison protesting that violent crime deserved violent punishment. Opponents of execution sang “Amazing Grace”.
Bailey’s execution came at a time when violent crime was on the increase in the US and coincided with a debate about the methods used. This was highlighted by Bailey’s decision to be hanged rather than die by lethal injection and by what had happened a day earlier in Virginia. A man who had been on Death Row for twenty years was subjected to lethal injection. It took those administering the fatal chemicals twenty minutes to find a vein into which to insert the needle. In light of this bungled method, death by hanging appeared to be a humane option.
Love, Loot, Lust And Loathing
The secret execution of a White South African woman in Botswana in 2001 was unusual and controversial. Mariette Bosch was hanged at 5.30 in the morning at Gaborone prison without the knowledge of her family or lawyers.
Like many South Africans, fearful of the increase in crime in their country in the 1990s, the Bosch family moved to neighbouring Botswana. They established a new life in a suburb of Gaborone where they became friendly with fellow South Africans, the Wolmarans family. Tragedy struck in 1995 when Justin Bosch was killed in a car accident. Being a good friend, Maria Wolmarans immediately came forward to support the grieving widow and her children.
Tragedy struck a second time in 1996 when Maria was found shot dead in her home. The police investigation into the shooting appeared to make little headway. Meanwhile, Mariette and the widower, Tienie Wolmarans, became close and told their children they intended to marry.
Mariette breathed new life into the stalled enquiry into Maria’s death when it became known she had borrowed a handgun from a friend during a visit to South Africa, which she later gave to her brother-in-law for safe-keeping. She had also ordered a wedding dress. Mariette was arrested and charged with murder and, while in custody, married Tienie, whose wife she had allegedly killed.
She went on trial in Botswana in 2000. The prosecution claimed that Mariette was intent on marrying Wolmarans who had promised to divorce his wife. When that did not happen quick
ly enough for Mariette, she took matters into her own hands by acquiring a firearm and killing Maria. The gun retrieved from Mariette’s brother-in-law was tested and proved to be the murder weapon. The prosecution described the case as an example of “the four L’s of murder – love, loot, lust and loathing”. The trial judge described her as a wicked and despicable woman who had tried to shift the blame for the murder on to a third party. She was found guilty and sentenced to death.
In January 2001, Mariette’s appeal was heard by judges from four Commonwealth countries sitting in Botswana’s appeal court. She was represented by Desmond de Silva QC, a British barrister with an international reputation. His appeal was dismissed and in the words of Justice Isaac Aboagye, the court could not find “one moral extenuating circumstance”. The only lifeline left for her was an appeal to the President of Botswana for clemency.
When Tienie Wolmarans arrived at Gaborone prison on 30 March 2001, he was turned away and told to come back on the following Monday. When he did so, it was to learn that Mariette had been executed. She was the first woman to be hanged in Botswana for thirty years. An application for clemency was apparently being prepared and the fact that a mere two months had elapsed between rejection of her appeal and execution was distressful for her lawyers and family.
“Plop, Plop, Fizz, Fizz”
In 1992 the State of California carried out its first execution for over twenty-five years. Events surrounding the death of a double murderer in the gas chamber at San Quentin Prison were described at the time as the nearest thing to a public execution. Forty-eight people witnessed the death of Robert Harris whose sentence was reprieved and restored four times during the last twelve hours of his life.
Harris entered the gas chamber on 21 April 1992 to be released when his third appeal was granted on the grounds that gassing violated his constitutional rights. In less than an hour, the US Supreme Court overruled this local decision and Harris was returned to the gas chamber where, after fourteen years on Death Row, he was finally executed.