America’s gassings of the 1950s reflected the times. A week before Christmas in 1953, Missouri followed the Rosenbergs’ example when Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Headley (known as the Greenlease Kidnap Killers) were gassed together at Jefferson City. Like the Rosenbergs, they went to their death without revealing their secret—in this case, the whereabouts of the $600,000 ransom they had received after allegedly snatching and killing a six-year-old boy. Justice for them proved swift, and there was no appeal. Before the pair died they chatted together and shared a cigarette while manacled in a detention cell and shadowed by an anxious federal marshal. When it came time for them to be strapped down, however, Hall seemed to be cracking under the pressure while Headley shouted obscenities at their executioners. “Shut the fuck up and take it like a man,” she told her partner.17 After they were bound into their chairs, Bonnie asked her lover if he had enough room.
“Are you doing all right?” she asked.
“Yes, Mama,” he replied.
The guards who had watched over them on death row came by and shook their hands, and then left them alone. They were still talking with each other after the door was shut and the fumes were swirling around them. The woman took ten long minutes to die. “Death of the dissolute playboy and his drunken paramour climaxed the nation’s most horrible kidnapping in twenty years,” wrote one national reporter, trying to milk the sex scandal nature of the case for all it was worth.18
But in the 1950s it was California’s gas chamber that attracted the most attention. Leandress Riley was a thirty-two-year-old one-eyed black man who weighed less than one hundred pounds. One of eleven children of an abusive father and a mentally ill mother who believed her children were possessed by demons, he had run away at age fourteen to fend for himself. On July 18, 1949, Riley allegedly shot an innocent bystander who got in his way, for which he was later convicted of robbery and murder. After he was sentenced to die, however, six psychiatrists couldn’t agree if he was sane. Therefore, he had to undergo a special trial. Upon the jury’s nine-to-three vote that he was sane, state law didn’t allow any appeal, and he went to the gas chamber on February 20, 1953.
To everyone’s horror, however, Riley didn’t cooperate, and he even tried to hold onto his cell bars while making “a long shrieking cry.” One prison official who was there later said, “The poor devil [had] slashed his wrists. They couldn’t keep his handcuffs on because his arms were slippery with blood, and we had to almost literally carry him in there, set him in the chair while he was screeching and yelling.” Once inside the chamber Riley became the first inmate in California gas chamber history to wrest himself free from the restraining straps. Guards had to reenter the room to subdue him, after which he held his breath for several minutes before finally expiring. His execution was a nightmare for staff and witnesses alike.19
Gas chamber guards rehearsed their roles in dread of making a mistake. Their supervisors sometimes assigned them to walk selected members of the press through the procedures in advance as well, both to minimize confusion and to try to make the procedures seem more clinical and bureaucratic.20 But errors and the unexpected invariably happened. San Quentin’s prison personnel became accustomed to two or three witnesses fainting during each execution, and others vomiting or otherwise breaking down under the stress.
For one San Quentin staff member the prospect of having to participate in a lethal gassing was especially distressing. John M. Steiner was a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau who had taken a position at the prison as a psychiatric counselor. However, he refused to witness an execution and, reminded of the horror of the death camps, he ultimately decided he could not work in an institution that executed people by the use of lethal gas.21
Throughout the United States appeals lawyers were becoming more involved in trying to prevent executions, and California received some of the highest-profile media attention into the agonizing delays and suspense that the lawyers’ maneuvering produced. In one San Quentin incident the condemned man nodded off from the fumes just as Governor Goodwin J. Knight’s secretary telephoned in a frantic effort to relay a last-minute stay. Asked if he could halt the execution, the warden could only reply, “No.” He had already released the cyanide pellets.22
Sometimes an execution came back to haunt the executioners long after the gassing was done. For example, the public’s views about the San Quentin execution of Barbara Graham, a thirty-two-year-old white woman, changed dramatically over time as attitudes toward capital punishment evolved. Described as a former B-girl and petty criminal, Graham, who had been married four times and had three young children, got hooked on drugs and was convicted with two male accomplices of suffocating an elderly widow during a robbery. After gaining several stays, she finally entered the gas chamber on June 3, 1955. A hard-boiled wire service reporter who covered her death described her as “deceptively demure” and characterized her demise as “one of the most confused executions in California history” due to all the last-minute machinations.23
Three years after Graham’s gassing United Artists released the movie I Want to Live! directed by Robert Wise. The black-and-white film classic re-created her execution with clinical precision. The film featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Susan Hayward and a background score of cool jazz, but the main subject seemed to be the gas chamber itself. Wise had his production designer, Victor A. Gangelin, photograph the holding cells and gas chamber in complete detail so that his crew would be able to reproduce every aspect back in the studio. Wise’s team also interviewed the prison nurse who had been with Graham that night. The result was extraordinarily powerful. Cleansed of sap, the film’s documentary-like quality contributes to its sense of authenticity. “As the minutes tick off and the tension of last-gasp appeals is sustained through the pacing of death-house formalities against the image of the near-by telephone,” one critic wrote, “attendants go through the grisly business of preparing the gas chamber for its lethal role. Anyone who can sit through this ordeal without shivering and shuddering is made of stone.” It was, he said, “a picture to shake you—and give you pause,” which is exactly what the film did for the image of the gas chamber.24
By 1955 American attitudes toward capital punishment seemed to be changing. Some historians would later attribute this to the early rumblings of the American civil rights movement. From a historical peak in legal executions of 199 in 1935, the nation’s total fell to eighty-two in 1954, and twenty-seven states had no execution at all. Six states—Michigan, Rhode Island, Maine, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin—didn’t have a death penalty law in force. And while no state had abolished capital punishment since 1918, leaders of America’s anti–death penalty coalition that year had managed to get abolitionist legislation introduced in thirteen states. None was successful.
But that September Sara R. Ehrmann, executive director of the American League to Abolish Capital Punishment and wife of a prominent Boston attorney, Herbert R. Ehrmann (formerly an associate counsel to Sacco and Vanzetti), announced she had detected a “change of attitude” toward the death penalty in the United States. As a result, she decided to step up the campaign against capital punishment by taking her case before the annual meeting of the American Correctional Association held in Des Moines. At the time, twenty-four states used the electric chair, and seven still used the gallows or firing squad, but eleven—more than ever before—had opted for the gas chamber. Interviewed at her tiny office above a print shop, Ehrmann said, “More public officials are speaking out against it. There aren’t as many executions. Juries seem more inclined to recommend leniency. The gas chamber is being substituted for hanging in some states because people think it’s more humane.” She added that whenever a shocking or brutal crime was committed, efforts were made to increase the severity of punishment. “But this brings only a temporary emotional satisfaction,” she concluded. “The fact remains that killing criminals has never succeeded in lessening crimes.”25