Shortly after the court’s ruling and only two weeks after Colorado’s execution of Kelley, on July 6, 1934, Arizona moved to execute two Chicano brothers, Manuel and Fred Hernandez, aged eighteen and nineteen years old, who had been convicted of killing an elderly prospector. The pair went to their deaths at the new prison at Florence, their eyes covered with gauze. But as Fred Hernandez was being strapped into the double-sided chair, he continued to insist, “I am innocent. You are killing an innocent man.”48
After the procedure was underway, some of the witnesses noticed a strange smell and the taste of metal in their mouths. “Stand back!” a prison official shouted. “It isn’t working—it isn’t safe!” The witnesses fled in panic, only to be told later that the smell had simply been from the ammonia they had stored to help neutralize the lethal vapors after the deed was done.49
A week later Arizona went ahead with the gassing of nineteen-year-old George J. Shaughnessy. Six weeks after that, Louis Sprague Douglas, aged forty-seven, went to his death as well.50
Like other states, however, Arizona soon found that each gas execution presented some new problems. For example, after Frank Rascon was successfully put to death at Florence and his corpse was about to be buried three hours later, his grieving widow opened the coffin lid to give him a parting kiss—and she quickly fell ill from inhaling too much cyanide, according to a Maricopa County physician.51 Prison officials did their best to meet each of these unexpected challenges.
In Arizona, as elsewhere in those days, the process of condemning a prisoner to death moved at a brisk pace compared to today’s standards: executions were generally carried out within several months of the crime and only a few months after the verdict. For example, Burt Anderson, a white man in his fifties, was arrested for allegedly shooting to death Cecil Kuykendall outside the Antlers Pool Hall in Prescott on December 23, 1936. On February 4, 1937, he was convicted; on June 7, 1937, the Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his judgment and sentence; and he was put to death on August 13, 1937—less than eight months after the murder and six months after being found guilty. Usually the public could expect that a gassing would occur less than a year and a half after the capital crime had taken place.52
Meanwhile, back in Colorado, the second execution in Best’s Penthouse did not take place until June 1935. It involved two Mexican-American brothers, Louis and John Pacheco, who had allegedly invaded a rancher’s home, killed two men, and sexually assaulted and shot the rancher’s wife before lighting the place on fire. A reporter at their execution described them as sitting in their adjoining chairs “as stolid as a pair of Aztec dolls.”53
Three weeks after that, Leonard Lee Belongia went to his death in the same gas chamber after his conviction for killing a rancher and injuring the rancher’s wife and child. Witnesses testified that Belongia possessed the mental capabilities of a ten-year-old. After his arrest he had put up little defense and willed his body to a medical school for scientific study.54 The following February, Otis McDaniels was gassed to death there for allegedly robbing and murdering a rancher and later killing a deputy sheriff who was transporting him to jail.55
With the Great Depression still going on and fear of crime running high, other states also jumped on the gas chamber bandwagon. North Carolina had never been known to be squeamish about punishing criminals, often resorting to brutal chain gangs and other harsh penal methods. But some of its attitudes appeared to be softening. In 1935 North Carolina enacted a new law changing its official method of execution to lethal gas, making it the first state east of the Mississippi and the first southern state to authorize the use of the gas chamber. Dr. Charles A. Peterson of Mitchell County, a physician and popular Republican house member, wrote the legislation for what the Raleigh News & Observer said had “largely been his… pet project” for some time—starting after he had witnessed a gruesome and messy electrocution.56 Like many of the gas chamber’s early adherents, Peterson claimed to oppose capital punishment but favored a humane method of execution over lynching and other painful means of death. He convinced the Joint Committee on Penal Institutions to hold public hearings so that he and six others, including other physicians, two dentists, and a newspaper reporter, could attest to the advantages of lethal gas over electrocution and hangings.57
One legislator, Representative U.S. Page, offered an amendment calling for “mobile executions” by means of a portable gas chamber that would be carried around by truck, in order to facilitate the process for local officials and residents and allow for public executions. But lawmakers rejected the approach as undignified, settling instead on Peterson’s original version of the bill. The state senate approved the bill and the governor signed it into law. The new measure left North Carolina with two legal methods of execution: electrocution and lethal gas.58 (In 1941 the Nazis would begin using gassing vans—hermetically sealed trucks with the engine exhaust diverted to the interior compartment—to kill thousands of prisoners who were being transported to the crematoria at Chelmno in German-occupied Poland.)
Supporters claimed the new stationary gas chamber method would result in quick, painless, odorless, and bloodless executions in North Carolina. One senator said he expected the gassing of two or three persons would take less time than a single electrocution, thereby saving time and expense. But building the new Eaton death device ended up costing taxpayers $2,800 instead of the $500 that was originally estimated.59
Getting it right in North Carolina would not prove easy, however. After hydrocyanic gas was first tested on two dogs at Central Prison, Warden H.H. Honeycutt complained that he had witnessed all 160 electrocutions carried out at the prison since 1910 but the gas had caused the poor animals to howl piteously. He said he didn’t like it. Nevertheless, officials of the United States Public Health Service and the State Health Department pronounced the gassing equipment in order, and North Carolina went ahead with its first chemical execution.60
Like Colorado’s gas chamber, the new North Carolina model was intended to incorporate technological improvements over previous versions. Eaton said that its latest changes would ensure that Honeycutt would not have to wait for more than an hour to clear the chamber of lethal gas in order to verify that death had occurred. And North Carolina’s physician in charge would have a closer vantage point than ever before, observing the execution from an inner window that would be in the last of a series of air-sealed doors leading into the death chamber, thereby permitting him to do his job more effectively. Special protective plate windows would better allow witnesses to observe the execution through a window that was nine feet long and three feet high, and this better view would enable more of them to follow the movements of the condemned, who would be sitting only a few feet away. The new gas chamber was sixteen feet long, seven feet high, and nine feet wide and conformed to the general contours of the existing death house structure. Its interior largely consisted of bolted and welded steel plates that were three-sixteenths of an inch thick. The exterior was covered with masonry of terracotta tile, with the exception of openings for the windows.
Witnesses didn’t have to be exposed to the prisoner as he approached the gas chamber, for there was a special walkway connecting death row to the gas chamber. This connection point was sealed by heavy refrigerator-like doors that could be closed airtight to prevent any gas—or person—from escaping or entering. The condemned prisoner would be strapped to the chair. A jar containing hydrochloric acid (rather than sulfuric acid) would be placed beneath the chair, just below a rack containing five pellets or “eggs” of potassium cyanide. At the chosen moment, an electric button would release these eggs into the acid, and the chemical reaction would immediately cause deadly hydrocyanic gas to quickly fill the chamber in the area closest to the condemned. The first whiffs of the Prussic acid would cause unconsciousness and almost immediate death. Safety locks would prevent the doors from being opened until all of the gas had been exhausted by means of a fan and flue through the roof.61