Satan's Circus

by Mike Dash

  The news was brought to Becker in his death-house cell at ten-thirty that evening, a little less than thirty-six hours before the scheduled execution. Assistant Warden Charles Johnson found the policeman hunched, waiting, on the edge of his cot and, leaning forward to place his head next to the bars, whispered, “Charley, I have bad news for you. Your appeal has been denied.” The deputy warden pushed an arm through the bars of the cell and took the prisoner’s hand in his, but Becker did not take his eyes off the floor. “Denied, denied,” he murmured. Johnson thought that he seemed “in a daze.”

  “Well,” Becker said, his grip on the warden’s hand tightening convulsively, “I’ll die like a man, anyhow.”

  In the Bronx, meanwhile, word of Justice Ford’s decision reached Mrs. Becker’s apartment. Helen did not hesitate. There was nothing now that her husband could do to save himself, but she had not yet exhausted her own arsenal of appeals. She picked up the telephone and dialed Manton’s private number.

  “I would like to see the governor,” she said when he replied.

  Charles Whitman was the one man who could still save Becker’s life. As governor he possessed the power to commute any death sentence handed down in New York to life imprisonment, or, moreover, to issue an outright pardon. There was even a recent precedent for the commutation of a disputed sentence: In Atlanta, a month earlier, Governor John Slanton had refused to sign the death warrant for a pencil-factory manager named Leo Frank, convicted on the most circumstantial of evidence of murdering a fourteen-year-old girl. Whitman no doubt knew all about the Frank case—newspaper coverage of the man’s arrest, trial, and conviction had rivaled that accorded to the Becker-Rosenthal affair—and he would certainly have been aware of the uncanny parallels between Leo Frank and Becker: Both men had been convicted on the unsupported evidence of confessed criminals who would otherwise have faced the death penalty themselves, and both bitterly professed their innocence. From Whitman’s perspective, however, the manner in which news of the commutation of Frank’s sentence had been greeted in Georgia must have weighed more heavily than any fine consideration of innocence or guilt. A howling mob had stormed the governor’s mansion in Atlanta, forcing Slanton to call out the National Guard and, a few days later, to flee the state for his own safety.

  Mrs. Becker cared little for all that, of course. All she knew was that Whitman could still reprieve her husband. For months she had rejected out of hand the mere idea of a personal plea to the governor, and Becker had said he would rather go to the chair than see his wife humble herself in such a manner. Now, though, with her husband’s execution a scant few hours away, fear and despair had altered Helen’s mind.

  Manton arranged for Mrs. Becker to see Whitman in Albany. She and John Johnson caught a train from New York early on the morning of July 29 and arrived at the governor’s mansion a few minutes before noon. Whitman was not there; he had overlooked an appointment to review a contingent of the National Guard at Peekskill, miles away. An aide placed nervous phone calls, and eventually Helen was told that the governor would still see her if she could meet him at Poughkeepsie, more than seventy miles from Albany, that evening.

  Mrs. Becker caught another train, and she and Johnson arrived at their destination a little before six. Helen appeared drawn and tightly wound, and her mood was not improved by the large crowd of curiosity seekers that assembled in the main street as word of her arrival spread. She was ushered away from the gawkers and shown into the parlor of a small hotel, where she waited for nearly two hours while her lawyer rehearsed his arguments for a stay of execution. Whitman listened impassively and denied Johnson’s application.

  It was dusk by the time the governor finally consented to see Helen, and then he was so drunk he had to be supported by two aides throughout their fruitless interview. Helen spent nearly twenty-five minutes pleading for clemency, even dropping to her knees to beg; Whitman slurred that there was nothing he could do. She retaliated in the press: “The governor was in no condition to understand a word I said,” she told one astonished journalist. Another reporter gained admission to the hotel room to get Whitman’s side of the story and found the governor just as Mrs. Becker had described him, “leaning limply over the side of a chair” in an alcoholic stupor.

  By then Helen was already gone. It was nearly 8:00 P.M., and the only available train would not get in until after 10:00, so Johnson hired a car to drive the forty miles to Ossining. The journey proved remarkably eventful. In his anxiety to get away, the driver stalled the engine outside the hotel, offering the bolder members of the waiting crowd the chance to clamber up onto the running boards and peer at the passengers sitting in the back. Then the party made a wrong turn and wasted more than an hour searching for the correct road. In the end it took three hours to get to Sing Sing, and throughout the frantic drive Johnson and Mrs. Becker grew increasingly apprehensive. The lawyer worried about the meeting he had scheduled with Warden Osborne. Helen feared that she would arrive to find the prison gates locked against her, and her husband would be forced to face his last few hours alone.

  Sing Sing had already prepared for Becker’s death.

  Invitations had been dispatched in the middle of July to those chosen to witness the execution. There were three dozen in total, and they went to doctors and to a sanitary engineer, to representatives of the press, and to the operators of several wire services. One, scarcely surprisingly, was sent to Swope of the World, but the reporter—doubtless to his chagrin—was recuperating from a bout of rheumatic fever, and his doctor had forbidden him to attend.*67 Swope sent another World reporter in his stead; the man arrived at Ossining bearing a large sheaf of handwritten instructions setting out in considerable detail exactly how the story should be covered. Preparations were also made to cater to the needs of the large body of newsmen expected to descend on Sing Sing without the benefit of invitations. Linemen spent several days installing additional telegraph wires and Morse-code senders in a shack opposite the death house.

  Inside the condemned cells, white curtains were fitted across the bars of all the cells that Becker would have to pass on his way to the execution chamber so that the other inmates would not be able to see him as he walked by. In the execution chamber, guards tested each piece of equipment. The lieutenant’s electrocution was scheduled to be the first at which a new system of signals would be used, as the New York Times reported:

  Instead of the old method, by which the executioner signaled with his arm to the man in charge at the power plant, there is a little electric button behind the chair, and above it is tacked a placard bearing the following gruesomely suggestive instructions: “Five bells, get ready; one bell, turn on the current; two bells, turn on more current; three bells, turn on less current; one bell, shut off current; six bells, all through.”

  New York’s newspapers remained predominantly hostile to the condemned man. The Times spoke for most of the Manhattan press when it observed that Becker’s death sentence was a punishment not just for Herman’s death but for the arrogance Rosenthal’s killer had displayed during his strong-arm days: “He paid for the times when ‘Big Tim’ called him ‘Charlie.’ He paid for his one-time power, that almost of a dictator, over the underworld of New York. And he paid for his pride in all this.” Several dailies had issued their reporters instructions to study Becker carefully for signs of weakness or incipient collapse; in the end, opinion seemed evenly divided between those who thought that the policeman continued to display an “iron nerve in the face of doom” and those who discerned the onset of a nervous breakdown.

  The lawyers were more generous. Bourke Cockran paid tribute to his client’s astounding self-control: “His hand is just as cool and his voice as steady as can be.” John McIntyre said that he had never previously doubted the verdict of a jury in a murder trial. “But in this case I say that if Becker is executed tomorrow I will carry to my grave the conviction that at least one innocent man has suffered the death penalty.” And Joseph Shay, another of the lieu
tenant’s old attorneys, released a statement of his own: “I believe that Becker is dying a martyr, and that his innocence will be established in time, perhaps by the deathbed confession of Vallon or Webber. Rose is too low to confess even on his deathbed.”

  Becker himself was woken early on his last morning. At 8:00 A.M. his prison clothes were exchanged for special black cotton shirt and trousers, made without metal buttons or wire stitching; he was given black felt slippers instead of shoes. A guard shaved a spot on his temple, ready for the electrode. Another appeared carrying a pair of shears and neatly slit Becker’s trouser leg almost to the knee. When the time came, this would allow the death-house guards to affix a second wire to the condemned man’s calf.

  The next portion of the day was passed in writing: a love letter for his wife, a final statement for the press. At two in the afternoon, the policeman saw his relatives for the last time. His brothers John, the detective, and Jackson, now a Wall Street broker, found him sitting in his cell gazing at a small photograph of Helen that he kept on the wall. The meeting was so difficult that the two men were relieved when one of the other prisoners along death row broke the awkward silence by singing “Rock of Ages.” Becker joined in with the chorus.

  Helen Becker reached Sing Sing, pale and breathless from her journey, soon after 11:00 P.M. Her husband had been waiting for her with increasing anxiety for most of the evening. Becker was so popular in the death house that he had received special permission to spend more than an hour and a half with his wife in the warden’s room. The guards, who had been given strict instructions to keep their eyes on the prisoner constantly, turned their backs as the couple embraced for the final time. “No condemned man at the prison had ever had such sympathetic treatment,” observed the World.

  Helen left the prison at 1:30 in the morning, and Becker was returned to his cell. “I am tired of the world and its injustice to me,” he told Father Curry, the New York priest. “My happy life has been ruined; I have not been given a chance a mere dog would get.” Warden Osborne, coming to say good-bye at 2:30 A.M., found his prisoner awake and sitting on the edge of his cot, “his chin sunk in his hands.” At 4:00, Father Cashin heard Becker’s last confession, which contained no admission of guilt and ended with the firm assertion, “I am sacrificed for my friends.”

  The execution was set for 5:45 A.M. Outside the walls a double line of guards poked long sticks through the fence that marked the limit of the prison grounds to keep back the crowds assembling there. Inside, the executioner—a small, sharp-faced, balding electrician dressed in a gray sack suit, a striped shirt, polka-dot tie, and pointed patent leather shoes—checked his equipment for the final time.

  Becker was the hundred and sixteenth prisoner to die at Sing Sing since electrocution was first used to execute a man in August 1890. The victim on that occasion had been an ax murderer named William Kemmler, who was accidentally subjected to “a far more powerful current than was necessary” and died “in convulsive agony,” flames jetting from the base of his spine and purplish foam spewing from his lips. The technique for electrocuting a man had been refined somewhat since then, but it was still common for the death house to fill with the odor of burning flesh and scorched hair as the moistened electrical conductors placed against the condemned man’s skin dried out. A lengthy electric shock could “turn blood into charcoal and boil a brain.” When a prisoner was ready to enter the chamber, he was issued thick muslin underwear, and little wads of cotton would be forced into his ears and nostrils to prevent scalding brain fluids from spurting forth uncontrollably when the current was applied.

  Thomas Mott Osborne, who had vowed never to be present when a man in his charge was being executed, walked away from the death house at 5:00 A.M., leaving Deputy Warden Johnson to bring the policeman from his cell. Becker, who was still awake when Johnson came for him, went quietly to his death. A dozen steps took him from his cot to the door leading to the execution chamber. At 5:42 the witnesses clustering inside saw a narrow red door swing open, and the condemned man entered the room. He walked with a strange, hobbled gait, his knees locking involuntarily. His face was a mask.

  The chair, surprisingly insubstantial, stood on a thick rubber mat almost in the center of the room. There was no glass and no partition to separate Becker from the witnesses who had come to watch him die, the nearest of whom sat only ten feet away. The electric chair itself, the man from the American observed, “had had a double coat of varnish and its metal fixtures had been burnished for the occasion.” Straps dangled loosely from its arms and legs, and a heavily insulated wire hung from a goosenecked fixture above it. The policeman’s guards, anxious to spare the condemned man the agony of a lengthy wait, hurried so much with the buckles that they neglected to secure one of the restraints that stretched over his chest. Becker’s last words, uttered as another leather strap was fastened across his mouth, were a recitation of the Catholic litany: “Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.”

  Five bells rang, then one. The executioner took his hands out of his pockets and threw a long wooden lever on the wall. The raucous drone of electricity filled the room, a green flash shot from the equipment, and Becker’s muscular body lurched forward against the straps, his head twisting sideways and upward as though attempting to escape the shock.

  Charley Becker was the largest man ever brought into the execution chamber at Sing Sing, and it may be for this reason that his electrocution was horribly botched. Too little current was applied at first, so that the death agonies became protracted. The temperature within the dying man’s body rose to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, the loose strap across his chest burst open, flames were seen to spurt from his temple, and despite the administration of 1,850 volts for a full sixty seconds, Charles Farr, the death-house doctor, found Becker’s heart “not only still beating, but pounding strongly.” In the end it took nine minutes and three separate jolts to kill the prisoner, though the representative of the World observed that “to those who sat in the gray-walled room and listened to the rasping sound of the wooden switch lever being thrown backward and forward, and watched the greenish-blue blaze at the victim’s head and feet and the grayish smoke curling away from the scorched flesh, it seemed an hour.” The whole affair was described in later years as “the clumsiest execution in the history of Sing Sing.”

  As the reporters who had gathered to witness the execution filed out of the chamber, they were handed copies of Becker’s final letters. The first was addressed to Governor Whitman:

  You have proved yourself able to destroy my life. But mark well, Sir, these words of mine. When your power passes, the truth about Rosenthal’s murder will become known. Not all the judges in this State, nor in this country, can destroy permanently the character of an innocent man.

  The second letter was a final testament. Becker had spent much of the night memorizing it, in the hope of being allowed to deliver it himself, but the guards had not permitted this.

  “I stand before you,” this statement began,

  in my full senses knowing that no power on earth can save me from the grave that is to receive me, and in the presence of my God and your God I proclaim my absolute innocence of the crime for which I must die. You are now about to witness my destruction by the State…And on the brink of my grave, I declare to the world that I am proud to have been the husband of the purest, noblest woman that ever lived, Helen Becker. This acknowledgment is the only legacy I can leave her. I bid you all goodbye. Father, I am ready to go.

  CHARLES BECKER

  When most of the reporters had left, Becker’s corpse was removed to the autopsy room for the usual examination, arms dangling, head hanging back, legs swinging. Dr. Farr stripped the black cotton shirt from the lieutenant’s hulking body and was startled to discover that it concealed the little photo of Helen that Becker had kept on the wall of his cell. The dead man had pinned it to his undershirt, with the face turned inward, over his heart.

  EPILOGUE

  THIRTY MILE
S AWAY, in New York City, Arnold Rothstein sat at his usual table in Jack’s twenty-four-hour café, just down the street from the Hotel Metropole. At twenty minutes to six, the conversation at the table slowed, then stopped, and each member of the gambler’s party fumbled in his waistcoat for a pocketwatch. Rothstein’s was large and made of gold. He set it on the table before him and gazed at it in silence, watching as the hands swept their way inexorably toward the time set for Becker’s execution.

  At 5:45 A.M. precisely, the gambler picked up the timepiece, snapped shut its cover, and led his friends out into another New York morning.

  “Well,” he said evenly, “that’s it.”

  Becker’s corpse was brought back to New York City late that afternoon. Three men heaved the heavy coffin up the steps to Helen’s new home at 2291 University Avenue in the Bronx shortly before 4:00 P.M. and laid it gently on a table in the parlor. A small crowd soon gathered outside, made up in part of girls who had been playing tennis on the nearby public courts. There was not much to see, but, one newspaperman reported, “from within the apartment house came the incongruous sounds of a woman crying and the faint tinkle of a piano.”