Today’s Secretive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Florida takes the concept of keeping its executioner’s identity secret to a bizarre extreme. One of the last states to use a civilian executioner, the Sunshine State is also one of the last that hoods the man. Hired through classified ads, his name is known by only two people in the state, whose identities are also secret. At 5 a.m. on the morning of sentence, the executioner is picked up, hooded, at a designated spot by an administrative assistant of the Department of Corrections (DOC). The hood stays on for the drive to the prison farm at Starke, where the executioner is shown to a small room off the death chamber. He sits there until sunrise, when he’s summoned to another small room called the “executioner’s alcove,” which is visible to the execution participants but not the witnesses. After the condemned is strapped in, two electricians engage the circuits and a third man throws a switch activating the “executioner control panel”. When the moment comes, the warden nods to the hooded man, who hits a switch that begins an automated sequence of voltages or starts the administration of the lethal injection drugs. For reasons no one in the DOC can explain, this hooded man is the last to leave after sentence is carried out. Driven to the spot at which he was picked up, he’s paid $150 in cash.
Culled from: The Last Face You’ll Ever See: The Culture of Death Row
Wonder how the classified ads are worded? $150 isn’t even all that much. I would think that a job that’s as important and unpleasant as that should command more money than that.
The rumor going around for years now is that Ted Bundy’s executioner was a woman.