Old Sparky

by Anthony Galvin

  The elderly woman began to scream, and in an attempt to stifle the screams Christian grabbed a towel and stuffed it into her mouth, using the broom handle to push the towel in deep. The cause of death was later determined to be suffocation. Belote’s throat was blocked completely by the towel and by chunks of her hair which had also become lodged during the scuffle.

  Before Christian fled the house, she stole Belote’s purse and a ring. There wasn’t much money in the purse, certainly not enough to fund a getaway. Later the body of Ms. Belote was discovered. According to newspaper accounts of the time, she was: “lying face down in a pool of blood, and her head was horribly mutilated and a towel was stuffed into her mouth and throat.”

  It did not take long for the police to track down Christian. She admitted that she had fought with her employer and openly confessed to having struck her with a broom. But she seemed genuinely shocked when she learned that Ms. Belote had died as a result of the assault. She was arrested and charged with murder.

  From the start, it was a case dominated by the race of the victim and the accused. Black Americans were very much second-class citizens, and it mattered little to the local population that Christian had been struck first. Many felt that it was quite all right for an employer to strike a black servant. They were only two generations removed from the slave-owning days. There was an element of lynch-mob mentality in the town, and the police moved swiftly to prevent the law from being taken out of their hands. Christian was arrested.

  She did little to cover up her crime, confessing soon after her arrest. The local papers were unabashed in the racial nature of their coverage, with one writing: “Christian is a full-blooded Negress, with kinky hair done up in threads, with dark lusterless eyes and with splotches on the skin of her face. Her color is dark brown, and her figure is short, dumpy and squashy. She has had some schooling, but her speech does not betray it. Her language is the same as the unlettered members of her race.”

  The Daily News went on to report the confession, in their best pastiche of a negro accent:

  She (Mrs. Belote) come to mommer’s house dat morning an’ say she want me to come an’ do some washin’. When I come home mommer say Miss Belote want me an’ I went ‘roun’ to de house. I wen’ in de back way an’ when she see me she asked me about a gold locket she missed. I told her I ain’t seen it an’ don’t know nuttin’ about it. She also say sumthin’ about a skirt but de main thing was the locket. She say ‘yes, you got it an’ if you don’t bring it back, I’m goin’ to have to put you in jail.

  I got mad an’ told her if I did have it, she wasn’t goin’ to git it back. Den she picked up de spittoon and hit me wit it ain’t it broke. They wuz two sticks in de room, broom handles. She run for one, an’ I for de other. I got my stick furst an’ I hit her wit it ‘side de hade and she felld down. She kep’ hollerin’ so I took a towel and stuffed it in her mouth. I helt it there twel she quit hollerin’ and jes’ groaned. I didn’t mean to kill her an’ I didn’t know I had. I was mad when I hit her an’t stuffed the towel in her mouth to keep her from hollerin’. I never meant to kill her. When I lef’ she was goranin’ and layin’ on her back.

  It is a certainty that a white girl’s confession would not have been written up like that.

  The trial came just two weeks after the murder, and Christian was never put on the stand to give evidence. So the jury never heard that she had been attacked first. She was defended by a black lawyer who chose not to let her testify, perhaps fearing that her testimony might have inflamed the already tense racial situation in the town. His decision may have prevented rioting, but it also ensured that Christian received no effective defense. She was convicted and sentenced to death.

  Her mother wrote to the governor, William Hodges Mann, appealing for clemency. Her letter read:

  My dear mr governor

  Please for give me for Bowing low to write you a few lines: I am the mother of Virginiany Christian. I have been pairalized for mor then three years and I could not and Look after Gennie as I wants too. I know she dun an awful weaked thing when she kill Miss Belote and I hear that the people at the penetintry wants to kill her but I is praying night and day on my knees to God that he will soften your heart so that She may spend the rest of her days in prison. they say that the whole thing is in yours Hands and I know Governer if you will onely save my child who is little over sixteen years old God will Bless you for ever … If I was able to come to see you I could splain things to you better but I cant do nothing but pray to God and ask him to help you to simpithise with me and my truble

  I am your most umble subgeck, Charlotte Christian.

  His heart was not moved by the appeal, and the governor declined to commute the death sentence.

  On August 15, 1912, Christian celebrated her seventeenth birthday behind bars on death row in Richmond, Virginia. There is no record that the occasion was marked in any way. The following day she was scheduled to die. The Virginia electric chair was quite new, having only been built in 1908. The wood was still fresh and the fittings gleamed. The procedure then was almost as new as the chair, and the final protocol, now well established, had not been worked out fully.

  The terrified teenager was led into the death chamber by female guards and strapped to the chair. Then the electrodes were attached to her right and left forearms, rather than the usual head and foot. This meant that the electricity, instead of traveling through the head (knocking out the brain), then through the torso and stopping the heart, would now travel across her body, just frying the internal organs. If death was not instant, the prisoner would remain conscious throughout the ordeal.

  The Daily News reported: “The usual three shocks were administered by the officer in charge of the electric current. Each time the electric switch was touched, the body of the woman responded with fearful convulsions. Death, it is believed, was instantaneous.”

  In a final poignant note, Christian’s family did not have the money to transport her body back to Hampton from Richmond for burial. So her body was turned over to the state medical school instead.

  FIVE: MOST ELECTROCUTIONS IN ONE DAY

  Multiple executions used to be a tremendous public spectacle. Crowds thronged Tyburn in London to see up to twenty people hang at a single time, and Madame Guillotine in Paris was always surrounded by her knitting acolytes during the height of the French Revolution. But with the electric chair and the decision to make executions private, such public spectacles became a thing of the past in the United States. Now there are only multiple executions if a number of people are convicted of the same capital crime. It has become rare, but is not unheard of.

  Robert G. Elliott was the executioner for six states from 1926 to 1939, and wrote: “Eight times I have been the agent of death for a state which demanded that four men give up their lives on the same day. Thirty times the chair’s toll has been three, and on fifty-three occasions I have electrocuted two people within a few minutes.”

  Elliott was probably the most prolific public executioner in US history, being responsible for nearly four hundred electrocutions, or 10 percent of the total number in the history of the punishment. On Thursday, January 7, 1927, he executed six men in two states, a very busy schedule. In the morning he executed Edward Hinlein, John Devereaux, and John McGlaughlin in Boston for the murder of a night watchman two years previously. Then he caught the train to New York, grabbed a quick dinner and a movie with his family, before heading out to Sing Sing where he executed Charles Goldson, Edgar Humes, and George Williams. The three, like the first three, had been convicted of murdering another night watchman. He was paid $150 per execution, making that a very lucrative day. In today’s money he earned nearly $12,000 on that day.

  But Elliott was not in charge on the day that the most men ever went to the chair in the same place.

  That happened on July 13, 1928, in Kentucky, when seven men were electrocuted, one after the other—all for murder. Three were black, four were white, and two had commit
ted murder in the course of a robbery. The local Southwest Missourian recorded the event almost as a triumph for the state: “EXECUTIONS OF SEVEN SET NEW DEATH RECORD—Kentucky Extracts Supreme Penalty for Numerous Slayings.”

  The executions were carried out in the state’s electric chair, Old Sparky, in Eddyville Penitentiary, and the entire process took just an hour and a half. The Southwest Missourian reported:

  Four white men, three of them very young, and three Negroes made up the seven whose deaths in the electric chair set a record for Kentucky. Sullen, defiant, and prayerful by turns during their stay in the death house, the condemned men were reduced by fear to a condition bordering upon collapse as midnight approached.

  Although there was no clock gong to sound the hours, the prisoners sensed the time and all talk died away long before the death march started at 12:15 a.m. With heads supported in cupped hands, they sat silent, their bodies shaken by chills despite the intense heat in the squat stone house that had been their home in the prison. In plain view was the execution chamber and the chair.

  There was no somber darkness in the place. Instead, there was brilliant light and shadow and polished steel.

  The men were held together in a cell block, and the order of the executions was revealed about eight o’clock the previous evening. Most of the prisoners were allowed visits from family and relatives that final evening, but a few hours before midnight everyone was removed, leaving just seven convicts and their guards. All possibilities of reprieves had been exhausted. All that day, and on the previous day, Governor Flem D. Sampson had been swamped with petitions for clemency. He reviewed all petitions conscientiously, but in the end rejected them all.

  Even in the face of death, segregation was observed. The four white men went to the chair first. Milford “Red” Lawson led the way. A thirty-five-year-old mountain man from the rural county of Corbin, he had murdered a neighbor. He was taken to the chamber at 12:15 a.m., and quickly strapped into the chair. He looked up and said, “I am ready to forgive everybody.” Three minutes later he was dead, and a team of guards, holding their noses against the stench of burning flesh, rushed into the chamber and removed his body.

  Next up was Orlando Seymour, just twenty-one. A native of Louisville, he was a factory worker who had murdered a local merchant during the course of a robbery. He had hopes of a last minute postponement of his sentence, and when he had heard a few hours earlier that the hoped-for reprieve was not coming, he had sunk into a stupor. He seemed to be in a daze as he was led into the chamber and strapped to the chair. The execution was swiftly concluded and his body removed to make way for the next victim.

  The third man to face the chair was also just twenty-one years old. Hascue Dockery was from Harlan and had killed two women and a man. He remained brazen up until nearly the end. Four hours earlier he had been told by Warden Chilton that he was the first to face the chair that night, and he had merely sneered and flicked the ashes from his cigarette at the official. But just before the executions were due to start, as the hum from the electric dynamo filled the cell block, he panicked and asked to see the Catholic priest. He told the surprised cleric that he wished to convert to Catholicism before his death. This would require a few minutes, so he was switched to third on the list.

  The priest had hastily performed the baptism. Catholic baptism does not require total immersion in water. A small amount of holy water is sprinkled over the acolyte’s head and a few prayers are said. It only takes a few minutes. Dockery was ready when his name was called.

  But the cockiness of a few hours earlier was gone. He was silent when his time came, and unresponsive, and had to be dragged to the chair, where he sat without a word as the straps were tightened. Then, as the hood was lowered over his face, he began to mutter some prayers. Death came swiftly.

  The final white man called was Charles Paul Mitra, twenty-three, from St Louis. He was a laborer who had murdered a grocer in the course of an attempted holdup. A punk to the end, he had a disdainful attitude towards the guards and was aloof from the other six who awaited their deaths. He was led into the chamber and sat without a word. He was strapped down, the electrodes placed, the switch thrown, and death pronounced in three minutes. It was clinical and precise.

  Finally it was the African Americans’ turns. The newspaper noted: “The Negroes, apparently crushed earlier in the night by the nearness and certainty of death, recovered their spirits to a greater degree than the white men before the time came for them to pass down the corridor of steel and stone that connects the death house with the chair room.”

  Willie Moore from Louisville, a forty-five-year-old, was the first to make the short walk. He said nothing, and the execution proceeded swiftly. Next to die was James Howard, a twenty-two-year-old also from Louisville. He was in remarkably good spirits, singing as he was led to the chamber. He had a rich voice, and the words of “Lily of the Valley” filled the chamber and the nearby witness room. He sat back in the chair and settled comfortably as the guards began securing the straps.

  Looking over at the witnesses, he said, “Gentlemen, how are you all feeling tonight?”

  A lot better than he felt moments later when the volts coursed through his body.

  The final man to face execution was Clarence McQueen. The thirty-eight-year-old from Cynthiana was a moonshiner, a distiller of illegal alcohol. He hummed a song as he was led to the chair and seemed to show a great curiosity as the straps were tightened. He met his end with cheerfulness and dignity.

  The last execution was concluded by one thirty in the morning, and the relatives, many of whom had spent their final few hours with the condemned men, were able to collect the bodies for burial the following morning.

  On the same day in Mississippi, two convicts, both black, were hanged in Jackson. One, Green Kirk, had killed two cops, and the newspaper noted that he had been in fear of mob action—a lynching—since his arrest. So the hanging saved him from a hanging. And in Milledgeville, Georgia, two more men faced the electric chair, making that day in July 1928 the blackest day in modern US history for the death penalty.

  SIX: TOPSY—ELECTROCUTING THE ELEPHANT

  When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. That is the famous quote from John Ford’s “The Man who Shot Liberty Valance,” and it can be an accurate reflection on how the media works. Some stories gain such currency that they are accepted without question. We all “know” that there was a second man working with Lee Harvey Oswald when he assassinated President Kennedy in Dallas. He was hidden behind the grassy knoll. Many of us have a shaky grasp of what a “grassy knoll” actually is, but we know the guy was there. That is an example of the legend becoming fact.

  Great men attract such embellishments: that Einstein invented the atomic bomb, that Dr. Guillotine was a victim of the execution machine he invented, that Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to prove the electric chair would work. The legends are believable because there is a grain of truth in them. Einstein was not a nuclear physicist, but he did write a letter to the president urging him not to fall behind in the development of the bomb. Dr. Guillotine was not executed (he also did not invent the beheading machine, just popularized it), but his nephew was guillotined. The grain of truth makes the legend believable.

  The Edison legend is quite simple. During the current wars, Edison wanted to prove the danger of alternating current, so he regularly staged press conferences and public talks at which dogs, cats, donkeys, and other animals were sacrificed on the table of science. And according to the legend, he once electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate that even a big animal was susceptible to the dangers of alternating current.

  So what is the truth behind the Edison legend?

  An elephant was indeed electrocuted. And the Edison name was all over it. But it happened long after the current wars and Edison had no direct involvement in the affair. And it had nothing to do with proving his point.

  The elephant in question was Topsy, a top attraction at the Luna
Park Zoo on Coney Island, New York. And she was condemned to die after stomping a man to death.

  Topsy was a female Asian elephant, born around 1875. As a calf she was captured by elephant traders and sold to Forepaugh Circus. The circus, ever conscious of a marketing opportunity, smuggled the baby animal into the United States. They then released the information that they had the only baby elephant born in captivity in America. Their rivals, Barnum and Bailey, might have had the biggest elephants, but Forepaugh had the cutest.

  She was named Topsy, after a slave in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  But as Adam Forepaugh boasted that he had “the only baby elephant ever born on American soil,” the animal dealer who sold him the beast tipped off P. T. Barnum about the deception. Both sides milked the controversy for all it was worth. Topsy was a headliner from the start. Soon, she outgrew her cuteness, becoming a full-grown elephant. Her publicity material indicates she was ten feet high and weighed six tons. But the average height of Asian elephants is a little over seven feet and they typically weigh around three tons. So she was probably a bit smaller than advertised. Still, she was a big draw for the circus. But her temper could be uneven. Elephants are highly intelligent animals and can be trained to a surprising extent. In the Far East they are used as work animals, but early western circuses had a bad record for mistreating animals. Training was a matter of instilling fear into an animal, and the only way of instilling fear on an animal the size of Topsy was by beating her severely. No wonder she was prone to fits of temper. And when three to six tons throws a tantrum, it is best not to be there.