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 closely 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.
To encapsulate this steel trap, Warden Best enlisted some of his convict laborers to construct a tidy edifice in a corner of the prison yard. The death house, jocularly known as “Best’s Penthouse,” resembled a spruced-up version of Nevada’s converted prison barbershop. The small building was a one-story Mission-style stone structure with a slanted roof and long, low windows with brick parapet and sills that made it look almost like a hamburger stand, save for a series of curious pipes and wires that protruded from its roof. Best and some of his cohorts enjoyed posing for photographs beside it at various stages of its construction. Based on its outward appearance, an uninformed observer would never guess that its function was to snuff out human lives.
The keepers of Best’s Penthouse didn’t have to wait long to receive its first guest. William Cody Kelley and an accomplice had been convicted of murdering a pig rancher with a lead pipe, binding him with barbed wire, and torching him inside his looted house to try to cover up the crime. His accomplice’s death sentence was commuted, but Kelley was too poor to pay the $200 needed to prepare a trial transcript, and the court itself was not about to oblige, so his case stood to become Colorado’s first death sentence not to receive a review by the state supreme court.42 Although he continued to insist he was innocent and his young wife publicly begged for mercy, citing the welfare of the couple’s four-month-old infant, nobody moved to stop his execution. Governor Johnson said, “I believe legal executions are barbaric and I am opposed to capital punishment, but I think that the prompt carrying out of sentences in cases such as this will do much to hold in check any possible outbreak of mob violence in Colorado.”43
When word of the situation reached a passing tourist named Lorena A. Hickok, however, she prepared to donate the money—until a friend urged her not to do so, warning that her actions might embarrass President Franklin D. Roosevelt, since none of his supporters would want it revealed that Hickok was the intimate companion of Mrs. Roosevelt. Consequently, Hickok didn’t intervene, and she later wrote a private letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, confiding, “I feel as though we were living in the Dark Ages, and I loathe myself for not having more courage and trying to stop it, no matter what the consequences were.” By the time the first lady indicated she would not have wanted her friend to compromise her principles in such a way, it was already too late for Kelley.44
With nothing to stop the state’s first gas execution, Best prepared to try out his new apparatus. After consulting a list of scientific advisors, he had his team run through their execution protocol using a crated hog. During its execution the pig squealed and squirmed, but two minutes and twenty seconds after the cyanide gas was released, the animal was pronounced dead. The technicians also tested the gas on an old dog, a pigeon, and a bunch of canaries, all of which also died in rapid order.45 Colorado was now ready to gas its first man.
On the night of June 22, 1934, Kelley was stripped down to his shorts and socks (to prevent his clothes from absorbing any of the gas or prolonging his life) and marched into the death house. The guards seated him in the middle wooden chair and strapped him down tightly, putting a black blindfold over his eyes.
Beneath the chair was a trough containing twelve potassium cyanide “eggs”—three more than Nevada had used. Under the trough was a pan of sulfuric acid. The guards quickly withdrew and sealed the door.
Peering through the windows were fifteen physicians and a contingent of other witnesses. Somebody out of their sight pulled a lever and the “eggs” dropped into the bucket. White fumes boiled up from beneath the chair. In ten seconds Kelley was unconscious. In thirty seconds he appeared to be dead.
“Warden Best,” a newspaperman reported, “pronounced the execution the most successful and painless one ever conducted at the penitentiary,” saying the materials for the execution had cost the state of Colorado only ninety cents.46 Again, the latest developments were reported worldwide.
With the horse already out of the gate, some American state courts were pressed to decide if the new method was unconstitutional as a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s ban against cruel and unusual punishment. “The fact that it is less painful and more humane than hanging is all that is required to refute completely the charge that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment,” the Arizona Supreme Court declared.47