“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.
“A startled expression appeared on his hitherto calm face,” one reporter observed, “and he threw his head back, [filling] his lungs with the first of the gas to reach him.” The faces at the window grew tense, as the witnesses could hear his labored breathing. Then his chin dropped to his chest. After a suspenseful moment passed he threw his head back and took another breath. Again, his chin dropped to his chest. The reporters were recording every movement they could detect.
Some spectators thought they began to smell the deadly gas, with its fragrance like almond blossoms, and a few of them lurched back from the window in terror, but the warden and the newspapermen and most of the physicians steadfastly remained at their posts. This time, two long minutes passed. “He’s unconscious,” someone finally whispered. But Gee’s head pulled back and his mouth opened, showing his crooked teeth. His eyes rolled back until his pupils disappeared and his head jerked forward.
“He’s dead now,” one physician said, leaving the spectators to scour Gee’s body for any movement, any sign of life. For an entire minute they saw none, but just when it appeared over, Gee suddenly raised his head again and extended it all the way back, causing many of the onlookers to gasp in horror. His chin dropped again and rested on his chest. The witnesses craned their necks to look, but nobody saw any stirring. The gas clouding the window made it difficult to see inside with perfect clarity, but it appeared that Gee had not ceased to move until 9:46 A.M. After that he remained motionless.
Dickerson cleared his throat and abruptly said, “The execution was a success, but the method of application is dangerous…. You will leave the prison yard, gentlemen.”
Once the spectators had been removed from the area, at 10 A.M., the warden ordered the ventilator gate opened and the suction fan was turned on, while inside the guardroom the men talked excitedly about what they had just witnessed.57 Under advice from his experts, however, Dickerson decided to wait until the liquid pool on the floor had evaporated before allowing anyone to enter. The chamber door was not opened until noon, more than two hours after the gassing had started, and the visitors were allowed back into the prison yard to witness the final act.
At long last, at 12:20 P.M., Captain Muller, clutching a jar of ammonia salts to his nostrils but not wearing a mask or any other protective gear, stepped into the death cell. He and Dan Ranean, an inspector for the state police, gingerly unfastened the straps, removed Gee’s inert body from the chair, and lugged it to the prison hospital. At 12:30 P.M. they deposited the body faceup on a table, where it was perfunctorily examined by a ring of excited physicians including Dr. Huffaker, Dr. Hardy, Dr. Turner, and Dr. Edward E. Hamer of Ormsby County.58
Nobody wanted to get too close. Huffaker held his stethoscope to Gee’s heart and listened as best he could. Although he and the others agreed that Gee was dead, Turner continued to insist he was still alive enough to be resuscitated and he wanted to inject the body with camphor to bring him back to life, “in the interests of science.” But Warden Dickerson refused to allow it.59
Gee Jon was officially pronounced dead at 12:25 P.M. Seven doctors—M.H. Gray, Leo C. Owen, Harry C. Lang, Dr. Hamer, Dr. Hardy, Dr. Turner, and Dr. Huffaker—signed the death certificate.60 No autopsy was performed because cutting open the body was deemed too dangerous due to the poison gas that might have accumulated within. This would make gas chamber executions different from electrocutions, for which an autopsy was legally required. Nobody saved his brain as a souvenir. Instead, the intact body was simply slipped into a plain pine box, and after a quick Christian ceremony it was buried in the cemetery behind the prison.61
Turner later startled some reporters by saying lethal gas represented “an extremely dangerous method” of execution because the victim might come to consciousness or be brought to consciousness, and also because a witness or observer could be accidentally killed (which he characterized as “an idiosyncrasy”). He also considered it “dangerous because the amount of HCN used would kill or suspend animation to the entire community, and as accidents will happen, any or all persons present are liable to an overdose.”
Nevertheless, he pronounced it “a wonderful and humane way of execution.”62 “Even under the handicaps of improper equipment,” he later said, the lethal gas method was the “quickest and most humane method of putting a human to death.” Compared to hanging, where the doomed victim might suffer for seven to fifteen minutes after the trap was sprung, or electrocution, which was so shocking to watch, particularly if it took three or four jolts to finish the job, and even shooting, which sometimes didn’t cause instantaneous death, lethal gas produced instantaneous unconsciousness and practically instantaneous death, so there was no chance of suffering.
Still, he acknowledged, there had been some problems in carrying out the world’s first gas execution. First, the heater had failed to warm the stone execution chamber to the required 70 or 80 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, “the lethal gas was liquefied instead of vaporized into fine particles. It also took a full minute and a half to pump the death chamber full of gas. With proper equipment and a specially constructed glass-lined chamber, death could be made both instantaneous and painless.”63 Turner also claimed that when Gee’s body was removed from the death cell two and a half hours after his execution, it was still warm and lacking any signs of rigor mortis, which led him to believe it would have been possible to resuscitate Gee using a little electric shock, some warm blankets, and a pulmonator.64 Turner later startled an audience at the Reno Lions Club by suggesting that Gee probably “died of cold and exposure.”65 He also suggested in his report to General Fries that all bodies removed from gas chambers in the future should be shot or hanged to ensure they were dead.66 Many regarded his comments as bizarre.
Warden Dickerson commented as little as possible in public. “I am in favor of the lethal gas execution if spectators are not subjected to the death dealing fumes,” he said.67 However, Dr. Huffaker, the prison physician, conceded that future gas executions at the prison probably would require the addition of a specially constructed glass canopy to prevent any gas from seeping out and endangering the witnesses—in other words, a lethal chamber to be encapsulated within the death house.68
A correspondent for the Consolidated Press Association reported, “Those who witnessed the first lethal gas execution here Friday were unanimous in declaring that if they had to suffer capital punishment they would prefer to die that way.”69 The state’s biggest newspaper, the Nevada State Journal, began its extensive coverage by pronouncing, “Nevada’s novel death law is upheld by the highest court—humanity.”70
But others took a dim view. Some critics complained that the new execution method “robs capital punishment of its horror.”71 The San Jose Mercury Herald warned, “One hundred years from now Nevada will be referred to as a heathen commonwealth controlled by savages with only the outward symbols of civilization.”72 An editorial in the New York Times noted that a white man had been spared at the last moment, “and the new method was tested on a Chinaman,” adding, “That will need a good deal of explaining.” The editorial concluded, “The details of the execution are not such as to prove the superiority of this innovation, and it obviously involves the possibility of some terrifying accidents.”73 The Philadelphia Record called it the worst piece of official barbarity since the dark ages, and the New Haven Journal-Courier observed, “Nevada is the first state to take human life by this means, and we hope it will be the last.” Said the Philadelphia Public Ledger, “Nevada sought a way to make executions more humane. In her seeking she stumbled into new refinements and depths of cruelty.”74 The Women’s Peace Union, a disarmament group based in New York, condemned Governor Scrugham for the execution, saying, “As opponents of all capital punishment, because we believe that violence and the destruction of human life are never justified, we strongly denounce the execution of Gee Jon by lethal gas. We expressly protest against this experiment having been tried against a defenseless Chinese.”75