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.