The Last Gasp

by Scott Christianson

  So far, no records have turned up to document why prison authorities opted against the more commonly available sodium cyanide. However, given the widespread use of that material in fumigation, the companies involved may not have wanted to have their product identified in the public mind as being highly lethal to humans. Instead, the decision makers may have preferred to utilize a form of cyanide that was already known to be lethal; indeed, the newspapers had long reported it had figured in many suicides and murders. And besides, potassium cyanide was not presently manufactured in the United States.

  As it would turn out, potassium cyanide eggs would prove to be the type of cyanide used exclusively in American executions from 1930 onward.

  The late 1920s and early ’30s witnessed some intense jockeying among the major chemical firms for more control over the world cyanide market, sometimes pitting German interests against American and British ones. William Bell, whom Fortune magazine described as “the precise, unobtrusively autocratic gentleman” who had guided American Cyanamid through its most prosperous period of growth to become America’s fourth-largest chemical company, was one of industry’s leading opponents of the New Deal and a staunch supporter of the economic policies of Mussolini and Hitler. He further expanded the firm’s business into other cyanide-related products, including cyanogas calcium cyanide for use as a rodenticide and insecticide.14 Bell also entered into agreements with the international cartel, doing business with the German dye trust controlled by IG Farben. Indeed, during World War II American Cyanamid would face federal prosecution for allegedly conspiring with the Germans to suppress competition and monopolize the manufacture of dyestuffs, including cyanide.15

  In 1930 DuPont, the immensely powerful American corporation, purchased Roessler & Hasslacher. DuPont had dominated U.S. gunpowder sales for more than a century, earning the moniker “merchant of death”; it was also America’s leading chemical company and a major producer of synthetic rubber and cars. Prior to 1926 DuPont was run by the U.S. industrialist Irénée du Pont, a strong supporter of eugenics, right-wing political groups, and IG Farben. In 1934 he would help lead an attempted coup d’etat against President Franklin Roosevelt—a plot that was exposed and short-circuited, but never prosecuted, even though it amounted to high treason and involved plans to kidnap and murder the president and subvert the Constitution. His equally conservative brother, Lammot du Pont Jr., succeeded him as president in 1926 and guided the company through the turbulent 1930s. The du Ponts were not the only leading capitalists involved in the coup conspiracy; they were joined by representatives from J.P. Morgan, General Motors (which they controlled), and other oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical interests, as well as such well-known politicians as National Democratic Party chairman John Raskob and former New York governor Al Smith.16 But as happened with so many other investigations into the company’s misdeeds, the du Ponts managed to evade criminal accountability.

  DuPont said it had purchased Roessler & Hasslacher “primarily to ensure a steady supply of raw materials for the manufacture of dyes and tetraethyl lead.” The acquisition also provided the company with high-grade cyanide for insecticides and other uses.17 One of its products was “cyanegg,” briquettes or egg-shaped pellets of high-grade (96–98 percent) sodium cyanide the size of pigeon eggs that were used to generate hydrocyanic acid gas for the fumigation of flour mills.18

  Roessler & Hasslacher had long produced cyanide eggs for DEGUSSA, using the Castner-Kellner process, during which hightest sodium cyanide was produced by reacting sodium, glowed charcoal, and dry ammonia gas to form sodamide, which was converted to cyanamide before then being converted to cyanide with charcoal. (Cyanamide or cyanamid is an amide of cyanogen, a white, caustic, acidic crystalline compound.) In 1926, however, the American chemist James Cloyd Downs invented for DuPont a new process for the commercial preparation of sodium directly from salt, which proved a less expensive way to manufacture cyanide. Shortly after DuPont became a major producer of high-grade cyanide, which held all kinds of industrial applications, it would bolster its position by coming out in 1932 with a new synthetic process for making hydrogen cyanide.

  Starting in the early 1930s, the giant chemical firms—DuPont, American Cyanamid, IG Farben, DEGUSSA, and Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and the German-controlled London Fumigation Company—would begin to play the cyanide cartel game for several years, enmeshed so tightly that it was difficult to tell them apart.19 In 1934 they reached a patent and processes accord (amended in March 1935) concerning research in cyanides, formaldehyde, and derivatives. The 1935 Farben project involved ICI, DEGUSSA, London Fumigation Company, and others for the “manufacture and sale of [the] fumigation product known as Zyklon.”20 After 1935 the DuPont Company increased its holdings in Nazi Germany, purchasing 3.5 percent of DEGUSSA, among other investments.21 American Cyanamid was also a big player. In 1936 Harry J. Langhorst of Larchmont, New York, assignor to American Cyanamid, applied for a U.S. patent for an improved fumigant carrier combination related to the Zyklon discoids product, reflecting some of the collaboration that was going on between American and German chemical interests at that time.22

  American Cyanamid would continue to manufacture Zyklon-B discoids under license from DEGESCH through 1943, selling large quantities to the U.S. Army for fumigation.23 In short, the Germans, British, and Americans were in business together, at least as far as cyanide was concerned.

  Nevada’s shiny new gas chamber was inaugurated on June 2, 1930, on Bob White, a sturdy two-hundred-pound man who had been condemned for killing a fellow gambler at Elko. Instead of the unwieldy liquid cyanide that had posed so many problems in Gee’s execution, the state had prepared ten one-ounce “eggs” of cyanide of potassium in a screen container, to be dropped into a jar of sulfuric acid and water to form lethal HCN. Government officials insisted that their new system was superior to the old one in many key respects, and now they were ready to try it out.

  Fifty-three spectators crowded close to witness the execution. Two were women: Mae E. Kenney of Carson City and Margaret Skeeter of Reno, both of them trained nurses. Warden Matt Penrose escorted White into the chamber. The condemned man seemed composed, and he smiled at the faces gaping at him through the thick glass. After the guards had strapped him into the straight-backed chair, he gave each of them a firm handshake. Off to the other side and out of view of the spectators, Dr. Edward E. Hamer, the uniformed state health officer, stood at his station, monitoring the sounds of White’s beating heart from a specially built stethoscope that was connected to the condemned man’s chest—another innovation that was designed to avert some of the problems encountered in the first gas execution, when the prison officials were unable to pronounce death or remove the body from the chamber for hours.

  This time the executioners expected to be able to proceed much more quickly. When all of the guards had left the cell, Warden Penrose glanced at the two-gallon jar of acid. Then he turned to the condemned man, grasped his hand, and said, “Good-bye, Bob.”

  “Good-bye, Matt,” said White with a broad grin.

  Penrose then stepped out of the cell and shut the heavily insulated door. His next nod signaled a hidden staff member to cut the string holding the cyanide container, and ten eggs plopped into the acid, giving off their warning like a cobra hissing before it delivers its deadly venom.

  “As the first cloud of gas arose from the jar,” the correspondent for the Associated Press wrote, “White looked at the crowd. With his head held high he took a deep breath. Then his eyes closed, his head fell back, the muscles of his arms and legs moved and a convulsive movement shook his entire body. This movement ended after three more breaths and his head dropped forward.”

  Everyone waited for White to die. At first it seemed that the end had come very quickly, but it was several more minutes before the doctor declared White dead and unfastened his stethoscope. Afterward, Warden Penrose told the assembled reporters that they had just witnessed “by far the simplest and
most humane method yet devised…. The prisoner is subject to no torture or violation of any kind. The prisoner’s body is not disturbed or distorted in any way, and there is absolutely no chance for any slip up. Death by gas is quick, sure and painless.”24 His official report would later claim that the execution had gone off without a hitch and been a perfect success. Hamer later published a brief article about the execution that appeared in the widely circulated Journal of the American Medical Association.25

  News reporters, however, learned that there was more to the story. In fact, Dr. Hamer’s stethoscope had indicated that White’s heart had stopped beating shortly after he first inhaled the gas, but it had resumed beating ten seconds later and not stopped for more than seven minutes.26 As a result, some lingering questions hung over the new process, and the warden’s credibility had become somewhat suspect.

  Throughout the 1920s and early ’30s newspaper syndicates and newsreels circulated graphic accounts of American crime and punishment throughout the country and across the globe. By virtue of the nation’s long track record of lynching, legally sanctioned hangings, and modern electrocutions, the United States was known as a world leader in capital punishment. The postwar invention of the gas chamber further cemented its reputation and added some new dimensions. Coming on the heels of rampant chemical warfare in Europe that had helped revolutionize the nature of warfare itself, and amid continued calls by the eugenicists for governments to initiate the lethal chamber for euthanasia, the selection of lethal gas to intentionally kill civilians in peacetime must have struck some people as a harbinger of more deadly things to come—a signal, perhaps, of future state-sanctioned mass killing, and even extermination.

  At first many Americans viewed the adoption of the new method as a sign of progress, since it helped to replace distasteful images of gruesome hangings or electrocutions with a modern scientific procedure that was called “humane.”27 In the face of new refinements in gas-chamber design and fumigation, other states also began to consider switching to gas.

  Arizona was one of them. In February of 1930 Arizona had legally hung a fifty-two-year-old woman, Eva Dugan, for the slaying of a Tucson rancher. But when Dugan’s body dropped from the gallows and plunged through the trapdoor, her head snapped off and rolled away, to the horror of those who saw it and others who later heard the grisly accounts. George W.P. Hunt, a liberal Democrat who said he personally opposed the death penalty, used the ghoulish incident in his campaign to win back the governor’s post, then upon his election he called for the state to institute a means of capital punishment that was “more humane than the rope.” A fellow Democrat, Bridgie M. Porter, introduced legislation to substitute lethal gas, and the senate approved it. With input from the biology department at the University of Arizona, state officials settled upon hydrogen cyanide as the poison of choice, saying the gas had often been used as a fumigator and was known to have caused plenty of accidental deaths. (One of the most common causes involved victims who employed it to clean their mattress but failed to allow the mattress to dry sufficiently before sleeping on it, after which their body heat would release a fatal dose of poison gas.)28 Its killing power had also been demonstrated in the first four Nevada executions.

  Arizona amended its constitution to provide for the death penalty to be inflicted by administering lethal gas, effective on October 28, 1933.29 But from the time of the last hanging until the new change could be legally tested and administered, from August 21, 1931, until July 6, 1934, Arizona didn’t conduct any official executions.30

  This hiatus gave Colorado the chance to become the next state to make history. A mining state, like Nevada and Arizona, Colorado also had an ugly history of frontier justice and vigilantism. During the 1920s the Ku Klux Klan had dominated the state Republican Party, resulting in a governor, a U.S. senator, the Denver mayor, and a majority of judges who were pro-KKK, prompting the Denver Post to observe, “Beyond any doubt the KKK is the largest and most cohesive, most efficiently organized political force in the state.”31 The Klan had an especially strong chapter (Klan No. 21) in Cañon City, where the prison was located, and many of its prison employees were klansmen.32

  Colorado had been the scene of at least 175 recorded lynchings from 1859 to 1919 alone. By 1930 there had been fewer than half that number of legal hangings, though many of the government’s productions had proved ugly spectacles as well.33 As in Arizona, official hangings prompted some revulsion. During an official execution on January 10, 1930, the authorities had set out to dispatch a black convict, Edward Ives, who had been convicted of killing a policeman during a raid on a Denver brothel. Instead of using a conventional trap door, however, the state had relied on its “Do It Yourself Hanging Machine,” a complicated contraption involving weights and pulleys that often went awry. But when it came time to jerk Ives, who weighed only eighty-two pounds, the system functioned more like a catapult, causing his body to sail through the air and land in the prison yard without breaking his neck. Ives survived well enough to argue, “You can’t hang a man twice,” but his captors strung him up again anyway, leaving him to slowly strangle to death after a protracted struggle.34

  Colorado had briefly abolished the death penalty around the turn of the century, but it had been brought back to prevent mobs from taking the law into their own hands. Too many residents feared a return to “necktie parties.” But now, like Arizona’s embarrassing decapitation of Eva Dugan, the Ives execution would provide the impetus for some citizens to finally change their state’s capital punishment policy.

  In 1933 Colorado’s new governor, anti–New Deal Democrat Edwin C. (“Big Ed”) Johnson, came out for a new approach—one that would overcome abolitionists’ claims about cruelty by making executions “humane” and efficient. The legislature went along with it. On March 31, 1933, Johnson signed legislation making Colorado the third state in the nation and the world to adopt lethal gas as its official method of legal execution.35 With Arizona and Colorado both preparing to start gassing prisoners, the question of which state would move first took on a competitive spirit.

  Roy Best recently had become the warden of the Colorado State Penitentiary at Cañon City, the place where all of the state’s executions would have to be carried out. A former rodeo cowboy who had once performed at Madison Square Garden, Best had been in the state police and served as the governor’s driver. The warden’s vacancy occurred when Best’s father was killed in a train accident, and the governor, William H. Adams, had appointed the thirty-two-year-old former broncobuster to run the hard-rock institution that only three years earlier had been the scene of one of the worst riots in American prison history.36 Roy Best set about making all kinds of high-profile changes. The assignment to modernize the prison’s execution machinery was just one more challenge, and he took to it with aplomb.

  In March of 1933 Best drove out to Carson City to inspect Nevada’s death house in order to learn as much as he could about gas executions. Despite the improvements that had been made since 1924, some of the staff there told him privately that they still considered executions dangerous for the executioners and bystanders alike.37 Based on his study of the situation, Best supported the idea of a specially constructed, leakproof apparatus resembling a diving bell, which would eliminate the risks to staff and witnesses while ensuring the chamber’s maximum effectiveness. It would be housed in a separate building designed to blend in with the prison decor (critics would later dub the building “Roy’s Penthouse”). Like Nevada’s new model, Best’s design contained enough room for three seats.

  At Governor Edwin Johnson’s request, Warden Best hired a Denver firm for $2,500 to design and build a state-of-the-art gas chamber that would improve on Nevada’s model.38 The move would prove to have national ramifications. Founded in 1919, Eaton Metal Products was a leading steel plate fabricator that manufactured gasoline tanks, grain bins, and other industrial items. It also had experience in working with cyanide, by virtue of its metal-processing work. Best worked clos
ely with Eaton’s Denver plant superintendent, Earl C. Liston, to design a suitable apparatus.39

  The Colorado gas chamber prototype would turn out to be a signature specialty item that would enable Eaton to enjoy worldwide dominance in that line of products for several years. Although later generations of Eaton managers might come to wish that their employer had never gotten into the business of building death devices, during the 1930s the company’s bosses seemed pleased to be associated with such a cutting-edge product.40 Eaton took to the task with unbridled enthusiasm.

  The result was a wonder to behold, and when it was completed photographers were assembled at the prison to record its arrival for posterity. Through the Cañon City Penitentiary’s gate and into the prison yard came a truck towing a long trailer on which sat a strange boxlike structure that looked like something straight out of a Jules Verne fantasy. Measuring eight feet in diameter and seven feet high, it had eight sides, with walls of painted corrosion-resisting steel that were half an inch thick, and oddly shaped vents on top. Its wheel-operated, oblong door appeared fit for a submarine, and its small, square windows contained bulletproof viewing glass that had been specially sealed and riveted to prevent leaks.41 Against the side of the trailer somebody had placed a printed sign that proudly announced “MANUFACTURED BY EATON METAL PRODUCTS CO., DENVER, COLORADO,” and the door also bore the company’s stamp.

  As curiosity seekers approached the object with its door flung open and peered in, they were surprised to see an attractive young woman (Margaret Fliedner) wearing an office dress. (She had been placed there for laughs.) Somebody pointed out that the very plain-looking metal chair she was sitting in would soon claim a murderer’s life. Closer inspection revealed that Eaton’s creation was a complicated apparatus, painstakingly made to perform all the necessary functions of a modern killing machine and carefully constructed to deliver and remove the most lethal type of gas that American ingenuity could manufacture.