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.
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
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