The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  Years earlier, one of Scrugham’s political rivals had been acting governor Denver S. Dickerson, a fellow Democrat, Spanish-American War veteran, and former staff member at Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary, who represented a Colorado-based contingent in Nevada politics. Since leaving the governor’s office and later holding the position of inspector of pharmacies, in late December 1923 Dickerson had been serving as warden of the state prison in Carson City, where all of Nevada’s legal executions were supposed to be carried out.19 His predecessor as warden, R. B. Henrichs, had been openly opposed to capital punishment. But Dickerson was not an abolitionist. At least, not yet.

  Figure 4 Putting the finishing touches on the rear of Nevada’s new prison death house, 1924. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Nevada State Archives.

  In January 1924, a third prisoner—Thomas Russell, a Mexican American convicted of murdering his sweetheart, a Native American girl named Mamie Johnny—was also scheduled to die by lethal gas within the next thirty days, unless the board of pardons acted to save his life.20 Although the Humane Execution Law had been in effect for almost three years, Warden Dickerson had made no preparations to carry out a gas execution, since the law and the death sentences were still under legal review.21 On January 7, however, Dickerson said he could have the death cell ready for the executions in early February. Although some details remained to be worked out, he said he thought all three men might be executed together, and he didn’t anticipate any problems. He expected to prepare an airtight room where the execution would be conducted in full view of the assembled witnesses. Once the sentence had been carried out, the gas would be drawn from the room and fresh air would be injected to enable a physician to enter and pronounce death.22

  Figure 5 Workers at the nearly completed Nevada prison death house, 1924. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Nevada State Archives.

  With the date of the pardon review fast approaching, the governor’s office began to take the necessary steps to see that the law’s requirements were met. On January 22 state officials announced that construction of the death cell was underway at the prison. Later it was revealed that five convicts had to be placed in solitary confinement—the “black hole”—after refusing to participate in the building of the death chamber.23 Some said their leaders were two members of the International Workers of the World (IWW), who had been rounded up in the Red Scare.24

  Nevada’s history-making death house turned out to be extremely primitive: officials had simply converted the prison’s forty-year-old barbershop for the task. The single-story stone building was eleven feet long, ten feet wide, and eight feet high. Merely a stone-and-concrete shack with a small tank and a tangle of pipes against one wall and an exhaust fan on the roof, it had a single glass window on each side and an oval one in the back, as well as two windows and a door in front.25 The main renovation consisted of filling in noticeable cracks to prevent the poison gas from leaking out.

  Figure 6 Nevada death house, front view, 1924. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Nevada State Archives.

  Inside the sealed room, two shiny, high-backed wooden chairs with armrests had been positioned a couple of feet away from each other. They appeared to be almost exact replicas of the electric chairs used at Sing Sing, absent the wires, electrodes, and other electrical apparatus. In front of and between them, only a few feet away, stood a small metal device that resembled a mailbox on sticks—the spraying contraption that would dispense the poison gas.

  State officials announced to the world that the agent of death would be a form of hydrocyanic acid (HCN), commercially known as cyanogen. A state spokesman described it as being “invisible,” saying it would paralyze any condemned man’s respiratory organs, displace all of the oxygen in his body, and cause instant and painless death after one deep breath. Witnesses would be spared any painful outcries.

  The initial plan called for lethal gas to be piped from metal cylinders to the floors of two airtight cells. (From the start, the designers anticipated carrying out multiple gas executions at once.) Each cell was to have a glass observation window. The gas would quickly spread to all parts of the cell, rise to the ceiling, and eventually be discharged through a pipe that would be high enough to prevent injury to the witnesses. Three cylinders of gas and two cylinders of compressed air would be used. At the warden’s signal five guards would open the respective valves, each with the option of believing that his tank contained the harmless substance and thereby saving everyone from potential feelings of guilt.26

  On January 28, Frank Curran, the former district attorney who had written the Nevada lethal gas legislation in 1921, spoke out against the planned execution. He said the use of hydrogen cyanide gas would be as brutal as clubbing a man to death.27

  On January 30, Major Charles R. Alley, chief of the Technical Division of the Chemical Warfare Service in Washington and an aide to General Fries, wrote to Nevada’s attorney general to let him know that he was aware of news reports that “certain criminals” were slated to be executed soon by lethal gas. “As this is in line with the work of the Chemical Warfare Service,” he wrote, “it is requested that a report of these executions, covering the kind of gas used, the method of its application, and the physiological effects as noted by the physicians in attendance, be furnished.”28 State officials quickly moved to honor General Fries’s request.

  As the execution date drew near, controversy continued to surround the case’s racial aspects. The Fallon Standard said that Hughie Sing would not have been sentenced to death if he were white.29 Racism also suffused many of the news stories, such as an Associated Press report that claimed, “Gee Jon… [the] Chinese tong gunman, looks forward to the death behind a wrinkled, yellow mask of oriental indifference.”30 Even the pair’s own lawyer appealed for mercy partly due to their “racially inferior mental ability” that precluded their ability to distinguish between right and wrong. After weighing the evidence and appeals, the clemency board ruled to spare Hughie Sing’s life, but not Gee Jon’s.31 The Mexican-American youth Russell was still expected to die as well, so it seemed that the first two persons gassed would both be nonwhite.

  Once the pardon board made its decision, on January 27, Hughie was transferred from death row to a cell among the prison’s general population and assigned to work in the institution’s laundry.32 On Gee’s behalf, however, his lawyer was now reduced to trying a last-ditch series of pleas of insanity, none of which proved successful.33 After weeks of frantic efforts to stop the execution based on his mental state, on February 7, 1924, Frame ran out of legal avenues.

  Figure 7 Hughie Sing, NSP 2321, who was condemned to lethal gas execution but spared. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Nevada State Archives.

  Professor Sanford C. Dinsmore, the Nevada food and drug commissioner and a former member of the U.S. surgeon general’s staff who had overseen the federal Public Health Service, advised the prison board as to what specific type of poison gas and apparatus should be used. The PHS had been using hydrocyanic acid (HCN) for years. Dinsmore said he selected HCN because “it is the deadliest poison known,” as noted by no less an eminent authority on poisons than Dr. Taylor, the author of a leading treatise on the subject, who had said that, if respired, even the vapors of HCN would prove almost instantly fatal. Dinsmore said he had personally conducted “dozens of fumigating operations in this state for the extermination of bed-bugs in houses, weevils in warehouses, and the Mediterranean flour moth in flour mills,” so he professed to be well acquainted with the cyanide gas.

  At that time, the chemical companies were continuing to explore other applications of HCN. During 1923 and 1924, for example, the American Cyanamid Company conducted a series of experiments to test the use of liquefied hydrocyanic acid for the fumigation of grain elevators.34 As of January 1924, the only company west of the Mississippi that sold hydrocyanic acid gas was the California Cyanide Company in Los Angeles, which had just started manufacturing quantities of the liquid for killing parasites in
the California citrus groves. Dinsmore said that the gas, which was piped into heavy steel cylinders about thirty inches high and eleven inches in diameter at a temperature low enough to liquefy it, had to be transported in the cylinders under high pressure. However, due to the cylinders’ susceptibility to temperature changes, the company refused to transport them to Nevada, and no railroad or delivery service would bring the cylinders to Carson City. This meant the state would have to handle the transport itself.35

  Figure 8 Gee Jon, NSP 1310. First person in the world to be legally executed by lethal gas, 1914. Unknown photographer. Courtesy of the Nevada State Archives.

  Dinsmore arranged with the company to purchase a quantity of the substance sufficient for multiple executions, and Warden Dickerson announced that a vehicle would be dispatched to Los Angeles to haul the death-dealing equipment. The cyanide cost one dollar per pound, and twenty pounds were purchased, although only about one and a half pounds would be used for the initial execution.

  Authorities described the “agent of death” as a $700 mobile fumigating unit known as an “autofumer,” which was equipped with tanks of liquid hydrocyanic acid. Officials at the California Cyanide Company of Los Angeles were quoted as saying the sprayer could kill somebody within thirty seconds, or in two to three minutes if the gas were dispensed directly from the tanks (the extra time would be necessary because of the time it would take for the spray to vaporize).36 The company promised to send a truck driver’s assistant with the electrically powered machine as well as a gas expert who would be available on site to ensure that the equipment was properly installed and in good working order for the execution.37

  Warden Dickerson dispatched one of his most trusted staff members, Tom Pickett, on the dangerous mission to transport the gas from Los Angeles to Carson City. For company Pickett took along his wife, loaded the truck with several tanks of extremely deadly and partially gaseous liquid HCN, and carried them over rough and icy mountainous roads to the prison. It must have been a treacherous ride, but luckily for them the tanks did not explode or leak.38

  State authorities reported that the War Department, on behalf of the Chemical Warfare Service, had requested that a competent observer prepare a report on the mode, materials, and effects, psychological and other, of the execution.39

  Once the cyanide arrived at the prison, a chemical expert from the private sector, E. B. Walker, took charge of the poison. His orders were to ensure that the necessary precautions were taken to safeguard the executioners, attendants, physicians, and spectators.40 Walker inspected the death house and checked its newly installed vents and exhaust system. He explained that the gas had been reduced to a liquid form that would be used during the execution. Once it was pumped through the death chamber and turned into gas, it would rise up, kill the prisoner, and then float away harmlessly over the prison walls via an outlet pipe, he said. Therefore, there would be no need for anyone to wear a gas mask.41

  But others were not so sure. As preparations for the execution entered their final phase, four prison guards resigned from their jobs rather than participate, saying they “didn’t want to take a chance on being mixed up in it.”42 Undaunted, Walker went ahead and conducted a “dress rehearsal” of the death chamber using a stray white cat and two kittens. Warden Dickerson estimated that the cats died within fifteen seconds after the liquid was sprayed into the chamber through a hole in the floor.43 The tests also revealed a small leak in the chamber, which was quickly patched to avert the possible poisoning of the witnesses or staff. Although he still had his doubts about the chamber’s safety, Dickerson had no choice but to proceed.

  Guards described the twenty-two-year-old Russell as calm and apparently untroubled by his approaching death. Attended by a Catholic priest, he continued to maintain his innocence. Accounts pictured Gee as “very nervous,” solitary, and brooding. He reportedly hadn’t eaten for nine days and weighed a gaunt ninety pounds. Although authorities sometimes used an interpreter to explain the latest developments in his case to him, he often seemed confused or resigned to his fate.44 One reporter quoted him as saying, “Gas allesame lope or shootem gun—me no wolly.”45

  The day before the scheduled execution, prison authorities allowed a delegation of reporters into the prison to interview both of the condemned men. Gee had trouble understanding their questions and had little to say. He said he had emigrated from Canton, China, to San Francisco about eighteen years earlier and denied being a member of any tong. Russell, meanwhile, clung to his story that his girlfriend had been slain by her own mother after a quarrel over money, claiming that he had fled the scene out of fear he would be attacked by an Indian mob.46 Reporters described the other prisoners and guards as exhibiting horror and terror over the approaching execution, averting their eyes from the small stone barber shop that had been turned into a “death sepulchre.”47

  The night before the execution, Warden Dickerson received a last-minute commutation order from Governor Scrugham, saving Russell from death. But Gee was still doomed to face the lethal chamber.48 Now his execution was scheduled for only thirteen hours later. Two Chinese friends from Reno and a cousin from Garnersville visited Gee in his cell and talked with him in low tones for about half an hour. Nearby Hughie Sing and Thomas Russell counted their blessings.49

  At dawn on Friday, February 8, slate-colored clouds hung low over Carson City. The weather was humid and cold, with temperatures in the forties. In addition to the usual sounds of the prison awakening, the chilly air reverberated with the noises of approaching automobiles, shouted instructions, and clanging gates as waves of camera-toting newsmen and other participants converged on the scene with their engraved invitations. The excitement was growing. Finally the warden appeared at the door and said, “Come inside, gentlemen,” directing the group of about thirty men to file into the hard-baked prison yard.50

  The official physicians included Dr. Anthony Huffaker, the prison doctor; Dr. Joseph B. Hardy of Reno; Major Delos A. Turner of the Army Medical Reserve Corps; and others. Turner was an associate of Governors Boyle and Scrugham in the American Legion and acting as General Fries’s official representative on the scene.51 He already had caused a sensation before the execution by telling some members of the press that he wanted to revive the Chinese prisoner after the gas had been expelled from the room. Warden Dickerson, however, refused to comment publicly on such a plan, which he must have considered out of the question and bizarre.52

  Clusters of visitors gathered around as prison officials imparted to the reporters a few precious bits of information: After acting extremely nervous and restless for weeks, they said, Gee seemed to have braced himself last night, his last night on earth. For breakfast he had eaten ham and eggs, toast, and coffee. The warden also warned his guests that the cold temperature might slow the gas inside the room, and they would have to be especially careful not to break the glass separating them from the poison gas.

  Accompanied by two beefy guards clad in bulky overcoats, Captain Joe Muller headed over to Gee’s cell to fetch the condemned man. Finding the prisoner lying on his bunk, Muller unlocked the steel door and stepped inside. Gee was dressed in prison overalls and an old green sweater over a faded yellow shirt open at the throat. The captain wasted no time with pleasantries. “Get up, Gee; it’s time to go,” he said gruffly. When the prisoner stirred but didn’t rise, Muller tersely said, “Come, Gee; it’s time.”

  Gee stood up and gulped, appearing unsteady. But when Muller said, not very sympathetically, “Take it like a man,” Gee seemed to steel himself. He stepped into the corridor where Lieutenant Ducker and Officer Sheehan promptly buckled leather straps around his thighs and hands.

  Then, with Muller leading the way and one guard grasping Gee by each arm, they proceeded outside toward the death house.53 Soon they confronted the crowd gathered by the window. Upon seeing Gee, several witnesses shuddered at his small and vulnerable form, escorted by men twice his size. They noted the doomed man was bareheaded and rather s
habbily dressed. A thin patch of jet-black hair swept back from his forehead, and his red lips and black eyes accentuated his prison pallor. Stubble covered his expressionless face. His eyes flickered over the crowd before he passed by. At 9:35 A.M. two guards escorted Gee through the open door and into the death chamber.

  The witnesses grew more agitated. Although the warden had warned all of the visitors to stay behind a black line that had been painted on the stone floor outside the building, some of the correspondents kept pressing forward, scribbling onto sheets of paper that from time to time they would hand back to messengers, who would rush off to waiting telephones or telegraph.54

  Gee gazed at the plain, unpainted pine chair and quickly sat down. The guards immediately strapped him in, and he started to weep as they hurried out and sealed the doors.55 The seconds had ticked into minutes. As the witnesses crowded closer to the glass, they spied him seated in the death chair facing the observation window. Everyone fell silent.

  At 9:40 A.M. the silence was pierced by the terrifying hiss of the hydrocyanic acid that was being introduced into the chamber. Out of view from the witnesses, a technician had begun to spray a solution of the deadly liquid into the chamber from a small pressurized tank.

  “The gas is turned on,” said the warden, stopwatch in hand.

  Hydrocyanic acid becomes volatile at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, but the air temperature inside the execution chamber was only 49 degrees, prompting Walker to bring in an erratic electric heater that had raised the temperature to only about 52 degrees. As a result, most of the HCN had not vaporized but was instead accumulating in a widening pool of liquid on the floor beneath the chair.56 The witnesses’ eyes flared wide to see what would happen next. Everyone’s attention was focused on Gee.