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This is Botched Executions from Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar.
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For nearly 400 years, states have been putting people to death,
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and some of those executions went horribly wrong. Trap doors
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wouldn't open, flames rose from the electric chair, and needles
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couldn't find a vein. In this series, I'm taking you
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through my book, Botched Executions, one chapter at a time.
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Everything you'll hear comes from the witnesses, the court records,
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and the state's own written reports. Where the accounts disagree,
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you'll hear both. Whatever you believe about capital punishment, these
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are the cases where a state set out to kill
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someone and got it wrong. A word of warning before
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we begin. These are real deaths described by the people
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who watched them, and some of the details are hard
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to hear. And now, botched executions, four centuries of failed hangings, electrocutions, gassings, injections,
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and firing squads. Chapter 11. Willie Francis Walks Away from
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Gruesome Gertie. St. Martinville, Louisiana. May 3rd, 1946. Late one
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night near the end of 1944, somebody shot Andrew Thomas
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five times at his home on the he owned the
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Thomas Drugstore in town. The law professor, Deborah Denno, in
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her history of the case, gives the date as November 7th,
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and other accounts put it on the 8th or in December.
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Two bullets went into his left side and two into
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his back, and the fifth went through his right eye socket.
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Thomas was a popular white Cajun pharmacist. He was also,
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the author Gilbert King wrote, one of the best friends
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of a young St. Martinville lawyer named Bertrand de Blanc.
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On the evening of August 3rd, 1945, police in Port Arthur, Texas,
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picked up Willie Francis, a black 16-year-old from St. Martinville.
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He had Thomas' wallet and identification card on him, Dano wrote,
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though Wikipedia says he was held instead on suspicion of
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drug trafficking because he was carrying a briefcase and talked
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with a stutter. On August 5th and 6th, in police
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custody and without a lawyer, he signed two confessions. I
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stole the gun from Mr. Ogies at St. Martinville, Louisiana,
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and kill Andrew Thomas, the first one said. It also said,
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It was a secret about me and him. And King
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said Willie would never discuss what the secret was. The
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trial came in September 1945, and by Denno's description, it
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lasted two days. Twelve white men sat on the jury.
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Willie's lawyers, James Randlett Parkerson and Otto J. Mesteyer, offered
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no evidence on his behalf. The jurors deliberated for just
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15 minutes, King wrote, before they convicted him, and he
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was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Years later,
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Denno pointed out that the state had no murder weapon,
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no bullets, and no fingerprints to show the jury, and
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that its case rested on those confessions. Louisiana's electric chair
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didn't stay in one place. It was a portable hardwood chair,
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300 pounds of oak and metal in King's description, and
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people called it Gruesome Gertie. On the morning of May 3, 1946,
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Captain Effie Foster of the Louisiana State Penitentiary drove it
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into St. Martinville in a large truck, and with him
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came Vincent Venezia, an inmate electrician. The two men from
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Angola arrived around 8.30, King wrote, and parked on St.
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Martin Street behind the jail. they set the chair up
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on the jail's second floor and ran its wires out
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a window and down to the truck. There, Venetia hooked
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them to a gasoline generator built by International Harvester. At
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ten minutes before twelve, by King's account, they started the generator,
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and at noon the bells rang at the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Perpere-Trois-Secours.
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Willie was seventeen, and a priest. Father Hannigan had told
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him the chair would tickle. Later that month, the official
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witnesses swore on affidavits, and Justice Harold Burton of the U.S.
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Supreme Court would print excerpts from them in a footnote.
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The Reverend Maurice L. Rousseff, the official chaplain, swore his
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on May 25th. After he was strapped to the chair,
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the Sheriff of St. Martin Parish asked him if he
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had anything to say about anything, and he said nothing,
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Rousseff said. Then the hood was placed before his eyes.
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Then the officials in charge of the electrocution were adjusting
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the mechanisms, and when the needle of the meter registered
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to a certain point on the dial, the electrocutioner pulled
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down on the switch and at the same time said,
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goodbye Willie. At that very moment, Willie Francis' lips puffed
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out and his body squirmed and tensed and he jumped
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so that the chair rocked on the floor. Then the
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condemned man said, take it off, let me breathe. Then
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the switch was turned off. Harold Resweber, another official witness,
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saw it a little differently. Willie groaned and jumped so
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that the chair came off the floor, he said, and
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he thought the switch had been turned on twice before
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Willie yelled, take it off, let me breathe. Ignace Doucet
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heard more. I saw the electrocutioner turn on the switch
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and I saw his lips puff out and swell, his
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body tensed and stretched, he swore. I heard the one
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in charge yell to the man outside for more juice
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when he saw that Willie Francis was not dying and
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the one on the outside yelled back he was giving
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him all he had. Then the same cry came from
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under the hood, and Doucette watched them take it off
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and unstrap him. This boy really got a shock when
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they turned that machine on, he said. King's account has
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Willie convulsing and screaming for more than a minute and
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shouting that he wasn't dying until the sheriff ordered the
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current shut off. None of the three affidavits has him
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say that. In Rousseff's version, the switch was turned off
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and some of the men left, and a few minutes later,
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the sheriff of St. Martin Parish, E. L. Resweber, came
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in and announced that the governor had granted a reprieve.
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Willie walked out of the room. For the first time
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in 24 tries, the chair failed to work, Time reported
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that July. The magazine called him stolid, stuttering Willie Francis
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and printed his own account of what it had been like.
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They walked me into the room and I saw the chair.
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I knowed it was a bad chair. All I could
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think was, Willie, you going out in this world. Everything
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began to look daisy, he said. It was like the
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white folks watching was in a big swing and they'd
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swing away and back and then right up close. The executioner,
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Time wrote, whispered, Goodbye, Willie. and Willie said the man
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could have been putting me on the bus for New
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Orleans the way he said goodbye. I tried to say goodbye,
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but my tongue got stuck in the peanut butter, and
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I felt a burning in my head and my left leg,
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and I jumped against the straps. When the straps kept
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cutting me, I hoped I was alive, and I asked
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the electric man to let me breathe. Death, as he
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described it, tasted like cold peanut butter, and had little
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blue and pink and green speckles, like shines in a
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rooster's tail. Afterward, he went back to his cell to
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pray and eat candy and remember, and he summed up
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the whole thing as plumb miserable. The next spring, Willie
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put his story into a pamphlet called My Trip to
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the Chair, written with a St. Martinville man named Sam
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Montgomery to help pay for his appeal, and Denno quotes it. Wham! Zist!
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Felt like a hundred and a thousand needles and pins
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were pricking in me all over, he wrote, and his
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left leg felt like somebody was cutting it with a
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razor blade. I heard a voice say, give me some
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more juice down there. He wrote that he cried out,
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I'm not dying, and take it off, take it off.
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As for the priest's promise, he wrote, if that was tickling,
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it was sure a funny kind. Governor Jimmy Davis's reprieve
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was for a week, and he issued a new death
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warrant for May 9th, 1946. On the day of the
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failed execution, Willie's father, Frederick Francis, went to see Bertrand
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de Blanc, Thomas' friend. De Blanc was 35 and just
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home from the war. Frederick told him he had no
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money and offered to work off the fee. De Blanc
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answered that money wasn't the point, Deneau wrote, because it
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wasn't human to make a man go to the chair
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twice and the only pay he ever took was vegetables.
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His grandfather, Alcibiades de Blanc, had founded the Knights of
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the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Bill of Rights Institute adds.
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In the days before the 9th, a wire story reported
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that a legal representative of the National Association for the
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Advancement of Colored People had hit snags at every turn.
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The date passed. DeBlanc took the case before the State
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Pardon Board on May 31st, and A.P. Turode helped bring
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it national attention. On November 18th, 1946, with Jay Skelly
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right beside him, DeBlanc argued it before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The court decided it on January 13, 1947, by five
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votes to four. Justice Stanley Reed announced the judgment in
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an opinion joined by Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Justice
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Hugo Black and Robert Jackson. The executioner threw the switch,
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but presumably because of some technical difficulty, death did not result,
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Reed wrote. When an accident with no suggestion of malevolence
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prevents the consummation of a sentence, the the state's subsequent
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course in the administration of its criminal law is not
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affected on that account by any requirement of due process.
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Running the current through Willie once, he went on, didn't
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make a second execution any more cruel in the constitutional
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sense than any other execution, he added. There is no
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purpose to inflict unnecessary pain nor any unnecessary pain involved
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in the proposed execution. Justice Felix Frankfurter supplied the fifth
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vote in a separate opinion. The fact that I reached
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this conclusion does not mean that a hypothetical situation which
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assumes a series of abortive attempts at electrocution or even
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a single, cruelly willful attempt would not raise different questions,
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he wrote. Burton wrote the dissent, joined by Justices William O. Douglas,
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Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. Louisiana's own law, he pointed out,
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called for the current to be applied until such person
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is dead. The contrast, he wrote, is that between instantaneous
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death and death by installments. Then he offered a hypothetical.
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If the state's officials deliberately and intentionally had placed the
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relator in the electric chair five times and each time
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had applied electric current to his body in a manner
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not sufficient until the final time to kill him, such
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a form of torture would rival that of burning at
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the stake. He wanted the case sent back so the
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Louisiana courts could look at what had happened in that room.
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By King's later account, the court's first vote had gone
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7-2 for Louisiana before the margin narrowed to 5-4, though
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the same article also described the court as deadlocked 4-4
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until Frankfurter, who opposed the death penalty, voted against his conscience.
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After the decision, King wrote, Frankfurter asked a lawyer friend
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in Louisiana to use his influence with Governor Davis to
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get the sentence commuted to life. Two months after the ruling,
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on March 19, 1947, a man named Louis M. Sire
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swore an affidavit that Denno cites. George Eadie had told
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him Sire said that Foster, the drunken executor, cursed Willie
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and said he'd be back to finish electrocuting him. Denno
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and King both wrote that Foster and Venezia had spent
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the evening of May 2nd drinking in bars in New Iberia,
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and King wrote that an onlooker would later testify he
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saw Venezia hand Foster a flask and both men drink
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from it. Denno's text says, gives Foster's threat as coming
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back for Willie with an iron bar. King and Sire's
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affidavits say a rock. No court ever ruled on any
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of it, and none of the three Supreme Court opinions
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mentions drinking. Willie spent his last months in a cell
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in the New Iberia jail. When he heard he had lost,
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Time reported, he was surprised. One Negro boy could get
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all those big men talking about him. No, leave it alone,
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Willie told his lawyer, who thought he could still get
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him another stay. Thank you, but leave it alone. I'm ready.
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In the same time story, he said, I'm wearing my
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Sunday pants and my Sunday heart to the chair. Ain't
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gonna wear no beat-up pants to see the Lord. He
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was 18. On May 9th, 1947, a year and six
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days after the first try, he ate a last meal
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of catfish and potatoes. At noon, time reported, the cell
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door opened and Father Charles Hannigan walked with him. We've
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been practicing, walking the way he wants to walk the
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last mile, the priest said. Willie says he's going to
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walk it steady, Time added. Willie did. The same portable
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chair was waiting in a crowded little room, and Willie smiled,
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wiped his palms on his pants, and sat down. He
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had nothing to say, the magazine reported. In the silence,
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the sheriff pulled the switch. He was pronounced dead at 12.10 p.m.
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And this time, Time wrote, Willie was carried away from
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the portable electric chair. Thanks for listening. I've been reading
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from my new book, Botched Executions, Four Centuries of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections,
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and Firing Squads. If you'd like a list of sources
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I used for this episode and for the book it's
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narrated from, you can find the full list at weirddarkness.com
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slash botched executions. Scroll to the bottom of the page
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for the sources used. If you'd rather not wait for
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the next section to be shared in the podcast, the
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whole book is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback,
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as well as Kindle Unlimited.
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This is Botched Executions from Weird Darkness. I'm Darren Marlar.
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For nearly 400 years, states have been putting people to death,
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and some of those executions went horribly wrong. Trap doors
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wouldn't open, flames rose from the electric chair, and needles
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couldn't find a vein. In this series, I'm taking you
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through my book, Botched Executions, one chapter at a time.
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Everything you'll hear comes from the witnesses, the court records,
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and the state's own written reports. Where the accounts disagree,
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you'll hear both. Whatever you believe about capital punishment, these
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are the cases where a state set out to kill
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someone and got it wrong. A word of warning before
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we begin. These are real deaths described by the people
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who watched them, and some of the details are hard
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to hear. And now, botched executions, four centuries of failed hangings, electrocutions, gassings, injections,
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and firing squads. Chapter 11. Willie Francis Walks Away from
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Gruesome Gertie. St. Martinville, Louisiana. May 3rd, 1946. Late one
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night near the end of 1944, somebody shot Andrew Thomas
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five times at his home on the he owned the
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Thomas Drugstore in town. The law professor, Deborah Denno, in
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her history of the case, gives the date as November 7th,
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and other accounts put it on the 8th or in December.
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Two bullets went into his left side and two into
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his back, and the fifth went through his right eye socket.
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Thomas was a popular white Cajun pharmacist. He was also,
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the author Gilbert King wrote, one of the best friends
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of a young St. Martinville lawyer named Bertrand de Blanc.
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On the evening of August 3rd, 1945, police in Port Arthur, Texas,
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picked up Willie Francis, a black 16-year-old from St. Martinville.
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He had Thomas' wallet and identification card on him, Dano wrote,
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though Wikipedia says he was held instead on suspicion of
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drug trafficking because he was carrying a briefcase and talked
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with a stutter. On August 5th and 6th, in police
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custody and without a lawyer, he signed two confessions. I
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stole the gun from Mr. Ogies at St. Martinville, Louisiana,
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and kill Andrew Thomas, the first one said. It also said,
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It was a secret about me and him. And King
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said Willie would never discuss what the secret was. The
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trial came in September 1945, and by Denno's description, it
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lasted two days. Twelve white men sat on the jury.
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Willie's lawyers, James Randlett Parkerson and Otto J. Mesteyer, offered
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no evidence on his behalf. The jurors deliberated for just
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15 minutes, King wrote, before they convicted him, and he
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was sentenced to die in the electric chair. Years later,
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Denno pointed out that the state had no murder weapon,
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no bullets, and no fingerprints to show the jury, and
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that its case rested on those confessions. Louisiana's electric chair
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didn't stay in one place. It was a portable hardwood chair,
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300 pounds of oak and metal in King's description, and
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people called it Gruesome Gertie. On the morning of May 3, 1946,
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Captain Effie Foster of the Louisiana State Penitentiary drove it
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into St. Martinville in a large truck, and with him
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came Vincent Venezia, an inmate electrician. The two men from
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Angola arrived around 8.30, King wrote, and parked on St.
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Martin Street behind the jail. they set the chair up
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on the jail's second floor and ran its wires out
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a window and down to the truck. There, Venetia hooked
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them to a gasoline generator built by International Harvester. At
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ten minutes before twelve, by King's account, they started the generator,
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and at noon the bells rang at the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Perpere-Trois-Secours.
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Willie was seventeen, and a priest. Father Hannigan had told
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him the chair would tickle. Later that month, the official
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witnesses swore on affidavits, and Justice Harold Burton of the U.S.
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Supreme Court would print excerpts from them in a footnote.
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The Reverend Maurice L. Rousseff, the official chaplain, swore his
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on May 25th. After he was strapped to the chair,
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the Sheriff of St. Martin Parish asked him if he
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had anything to say about anything, and he said nothing,
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Rousseff said. Then the hood was placed before his eyes.
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Then the officials in charge of the electrocution were adjusting
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the mechanisms, and when the needle of the meter registered
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to a certain point on the dial, the electrocutioner pulled
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down on the switch and at the same time said,
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goodbye Willie. At that very moment, Willie Francis' lips puffed
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out and his body squirmed and tensed and he jumped
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so that the chair rocked on the floor. Then the
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condemned man said, take it off, let me breathe. Then
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the switch was turned off. Harold Resweber, another official witness,
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saw it a little differently. Willie groaned and jumped so
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that the chair came off the floor, he said, and
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he thought the switch had been turned on twice before
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Willie yelled, take it off, let me breathe. Ignace Doucet
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heard more. I saw the electrocutioner turn on the switch
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and I saw his lips puff out and swell, his
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body tensed and stretched, he swore. I heard the one
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in charge yell to the man outside for more juice
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when he saw that Willie Francis was not dying and
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the one on the outside yelled back he was giving
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him all he had. Then the same cry came from
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under the hood, and Doucette watched them take it off
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and unstrap him. This boy really got a shock when
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they turned that machine on, he said. King's account has
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Willie convulsing and screaming for more than a minute and
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shouting that he wasn't dying until the sheriff ordered the
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current shut off. None of the three affidavits has him
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say that. In Rousseff's version, the switch was turned off
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and some of the men left, and a few minutes later,
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the sheriff of St. Martin Parish, E. L. Resweber, came
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in and announced that the governor had granted a reprieve.
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Willie walked out of the room. For the first time
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in 24 tries, the chair failed to work, Time reported
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that July. The magazine called him stolid, stuttering Willie Francis
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and printed his own account of what it had been like.
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They walked me into the room and I saw the chair.
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I knowed it was a bad chair. All I could
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think was, Willie, you going out in this world. Everything
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began to look daisy, he said. It was like the
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white folks watching was in a big swing and they'd
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swing away and back and then right up close. The executioner,
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Time wrote, whispered, Goodbye, Willie. and Willie said the man
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could have been putting me on the bus for New
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Orleans the way he said goodbye. I tried to say goodbye,
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but my tongue got stuck in the peanut butter, and
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I felt a burning in my head and my left leg,
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and I jumped against the straps. When the straps kept
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cutting me, I hoped I was alive, and I asked
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the electric man to let me breathe. Death, as he
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described it, tasted like cold peanut butter, and had little
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blue and pink and green speckles, like shines in a
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rooster's tail. Afterward, he went back to his cell to
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pray and eat candy and remember, and he summed up
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the whole thing as plumb miserable. The next spring, Willie
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put his story into a pamphlet called My Trip to
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the Chair, written with a St. Martinville man named Sam
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Montgomery to help pay for his appeal, and Denno quotes it. Wham! Zist!
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Felt like a hundred and a thousand needles and pins
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were pricking in me all over, he wrote, and his
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left leg felt like somebody was cutting it with a
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razor blade. I heard a voice say, give me some
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more juice down there. He wrote that he cried out,
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I'm not dying, and take it off, take it off.
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As for the priest's promise, he wrote, if that was tickling,
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it was sure a funny kind. Governor Jimmy Davis's reprieve
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was for a week, and he issued a new death
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warrant for May 9th, 1946. On the day of the
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failed execution, Willie's father, Frederick Francis, went to see Bertrand
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de Blanc, Thomas' friend. De Blanc was 35 and just
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home from the war. Frederick told him he had no
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money and offered to work off the fee. De Blanc
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answered that money wasn't the point, Deneau wrote, because it
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wasn't human to make a man go to the chair
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twice and the only pay he ever took was vegetables.
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His grandfather, Alcibiades de Blanc, had founded the Knights of
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the White Camellia in Louisiana, the Bill of Rights Institute adds.
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In the days before the 9th, a wire story reported
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that a legal representative of the National Association for the
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Advancement of Colored People had hit snags at every turn.
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The date passed. DeBlanc took the case before the State
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Pardon Board on May 31st, and A.P. Turode helped bring
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it national attention. On November 18th, 1946, with Jay Skelly
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right beside him, DeBlanc argued it before the U.S. Supreme Court.
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The court decided it on January 13, 1947, by five
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votes to four. Justice Stanley Reed announced the judgment in
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an opinion joined by Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Justice
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Hugo Black and Robert Jackson. The executioner threw the switch,
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but presumably because of some technical difficulty, death did not result,
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Reed wrote. When an accident with no suggestion of malevolence
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prevents the consummation of a sentence, the the state's subsequent
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course in the administration of its criminal law is not
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affected on that account by any requirement of due process.
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Running the current through Willie once, he went on, didn't
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make a second execution any more cruel in the constitutional
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sense than any other execution, he added. There is no
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purpose to inflict unnecessary pain nor any unnecessary pain involved
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in the proposed execution. Justice Felix Frankfurter supplied the fifth
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vote in a separate opinion. The fact that I reached
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this conclusion does not mean that a hypothetical situation which
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assumes a series of abortive attempts at electrocution or even
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a single, cruelly willful attempt would not raise different questions,
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he wrote. Burton wrote the dissent, joined by Justices William O. Douglas,
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Frank Murphy, and Wiley Rutledge. Louisiana's own law, he pointed out,
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called for the current to be applied until such person
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is dead. The contrast, he wrote, is that between instantaneous
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death and death by installments. Then he offered a hypothetical.
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If the state's officials deliberately and intentionally had placed the
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relator in the electric chair five times and each time
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had applied electric current to his body in a manner
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not sufficient until the final time to kill him, such
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a form of torture would rival that of burning at
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the stake. He wanted the case sent back so the
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Louisiana courts could look at what had happened in that room.
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By King's later account, the court's first vote had gone
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7-2 for Louisiana before the margin narrowed to 5-4, though
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the same article also described the court as deadlocked 4-4
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until Frankfurter, who opposed the death penalty, voted against his conscience.
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After the decision, King wrote, Frankfurter asked a lawyer friend
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in Louisiana to use his influence with Governor Davis to
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get the sentence commuted to life. Two months after the ruling,
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on March 19, 1947, a man named Louis M. Sire
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swore an affidavit that Denno cites. George Eadie had told
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him Sire said that Foster, the drunken executor, cursed Willie
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and said he'd be back to finish electrocuting him. Denno
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and King both wrote that Foster and Venezia had spent
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the evening of May 2nd drinking in bars in New Iberia,
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and King wrote that an onlooker would later testify he
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saw Venezia hand Foster a flask and both men drink
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from it. Denno's text says, gives Foster's threat as coming
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back for Willie with an iron bar. King and Sire's
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affidavits say a rock. No court ever ruled on any
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of it, and none of the three Supreme Court opinions
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mentions drinking. Willie spent his last months in a cell
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in the New Iberia jail. When he heard he had lost,
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Time reported, he was surprised. One Negro boy could get
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all those big men talking about him. No, leave it alone,
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Willie told his lawyer, who thought he could still get
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him another stay. Thank you, but leave it alone. I'm ready.
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In the same time story, he said, I'm wearing my
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Sunday pants and my Sunday heart to the chair. Ain't
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gonna wear no beat-up pants to see the Lord. He
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was 18. On May 9th, 1947, a year and six
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days after the first try, he ate a last meal
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of catfish and potatoes. At noon, time reported, the cell
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door opened and Father Charles Hannigan walked with him. We've
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been practicing, walking the way he wants to walk the
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last mile, the priest said. Willie says he's going to
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walk it steady, Time added. Willie did. The same portable
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chair was waiting in a crowded little room, and Willie smiled,
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wiped his palms on his pants, and sat down. He
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had nothing to say, the magazine reported. In the silence,
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the sheriff pulled the switch. He was pronounced dead at 12.10 p.m.
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And this time, Time wrote, Willie was carried away from
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the portable electric chair. Thanks for listening. I've been reading
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from my new book, Botched Executions, Four Centuries of Failed Hangings, Electrocutions, Gassings, Injections,
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and Firing Squads. If you'd like a list of sources
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I used for this episode and for the book it's
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narrated from, you can find the full list at weirddarkness.com
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slash botched executions. Scroll to the bottom of the page
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for the sources used. If you'd rather not wait for
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the next section to be shared in the podcast, the
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whole book is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback,
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as well as Kindle Unlimited.
