Today’s Amusing Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Watt Espy is American’s foremost historian of executions and here is a summary of his favorite execution stories:
One man willed himself into a coma and had to be carried to the chair; another strolled in blithely, saying, “I’d ruther be fishin'”; one came in with a cigar and a pink flower in his buttonhole; one man had printed the prison tattoo H-A-R-D L-U-C-K on his knuckles; another handed the electrocutioner a check for his $150 fee, signed “The Devil”; one asked for bicarbonate of soda before entering the gas chamber; one said the soup of his last meal was too hot; one complained from the electric chair, “I sick. I eat too much.” One read verse: “Hang me high/And stretch me wide/So the world can see/How free I died,” or quoted rap: “You can be a king/or a street-sweeper/But everyone gotta dance/with the Grim Reaper”. Some told their executioners, “Step on the gas”; or “I came here to die, not to talk”; or “I am Jesus Christ”; or “Hurry it up, you Hoosier bastard”; and a woman warned, “My blood will burn holes in their bodies”.
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row
I think the first album released by my band Chemical Entombment will be entitled, “My Blood Will Burn Holes In Their Bodies”.
Great stuff, isn’t it? As soon as I was granted a death sentence I’d start thinking of what to do at the execution. It really is the perfect last hurrah and you gotta do it right!
A fairly vicious NYC gangster of the early days, Francis “Two-Gun” Crowley, went to the chair just after his confederate, who had snitched him out, had gone to it. Crowley asked the warden for a handkerchief because “I want to wipe off the chair after that rat sat in it.” He also asked for and was given a cigar, which he puffed on briefly and then threw at the reporters, hitting one in the forehead.
Ha ha, my synthesized voice program sometimes pronounces things oddly, and at first I thought the guy, Watt Espy, was “what a spy.”
“Hurry up, you Hoosier bastard! I could kill ten men while you’re fooling around,” was Carl Panzram!
😉