“Agent of Death”
Eight times I have been the agent of death for a state which demanded that four men give up their lives on the same day. Thirty times the chairs toll has been three, and on fifty-three occasions I have electrocuted two people within a few minutes.
Robert G. Elliott, 1940
One of the most fascinating documents in the annals of true crime is the memoir of Robert G. Elliott, executioner for six states, who, as he so dramatically states, has
“thrown the switch which has hurled into eternity three hundred and eighty-seven occupants of the electric chair.
Of the 4,000 or so inmates electrocuted from 1890 to the present, Elliott executed about 10 percent. Of those executed during his career in the states that he served, he was responsible for two-thirds of all convicts executed.
That alone is fascinating, but what is even more remarkable is that five of those he electrocuted were among the most famous individuals ever to be executed in the United States: Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Ruth Snyder, Henry Judd Gray, and Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Aside from the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953, some 15 years after the end of his career, Elliott was the designated agent of death in the most famous cases in the United States in the 20th Century.
Elliotts autobiography has long been out of print. It was published in 1940, a few months after he died on October 10, 1939. Copies of the book are difficult to find. This report is based on a Xeroxed copy of one in the Library of Congress. One would think that the books historical significance and grim subject matter would have kept it in print. But they have not.
References to Elliott appear in accounts of these three cases that constituted the five famous executions, often reporting Elliotts behavior and thoughts from a considerably different perspective than that he presents in his book. Despite his long career as an executioner and his personal account of the practice of his profession, Elliott remains a footnote in the history of crime, linked forever with those three famous cases.
The history of the electric chair in America has been well reported in Crimelibrary articles by Marlee MacLeod (The Electric Chair ) and Marc Gado (The Last Stop: Women in the Electric Chair and Stone Upon Stone: Sing Sing Prison). In this article, we will consider the executioner himself. What can we know about such a man? How did he view his profession? What kind of man was he?
I have been, intentionally or otherwise, painted as some kind of ogre.
Even pictures of me have been retouched so I would resemble something akin to the loathsome Mr. Hyde.
Robert G. Elliott, 1940
Elliotts book, with the provocative title of Agent of Death, has a frontispiece portrait of him. It is an older man, perhaps nearing 70 years old — the picture is undated — smoking a pipe, looking off to his right, unsmiling. The fact that the man in the picture appears to be almost 70 is interesting, because he was only 65 when he died, and the photograph was probably taken when he was not yet 60. His face is careworn, older than his years, but it is not a cruel face. It has the look of a small-town lawyer or doctor, or perhaps the towns electrician. He fulfilled this appraisal, for he was indeed a leading electrical contractor in Richmond Hill, N.Y.
He was not often photographed, and enjoyed considerable anonymity. As his career developed over 30 years, he was a bit more recognized, but, in general, he walked through life unnoticed. Even after the notoriety of his famous executions, he was still considered by an association of newspaper photographers as the most difficult man in America to photograph.
Elliott was born in 1874 in Hamlin, N.Y., the son of an Irish immigrant who ran a large fruit farm. His pious parents had hoped that young Robert would one day be a Methodist minister. Elliott retained his parents devoutness, and, as he says self-effacingly in his memoir, Although I have many faults, profanity is not one of them.
His father died when he was 7 years old, and a year later, the orchard was sold, and Robert was sent to live with cousins until he was 16. About that time, he became interested in electricity, and was taught by an old farmhand who had once been a telegraph operator.
This newfound interest in electricity coincided with the first electrocution in the United States on August 6, 1890. Elliott was 16 years old at the time. The first man to be executed in the electric chair was William Kemmler, who had killed his mistress with a hatchet. Robert Elliott read the newspaper accounts of Kemmlers execution. Who the executioner was for this historic event was not recorded, although it was likely Edwin Davis. The construction of the first electric chair was carried out by a Westinghouse employee, Harold Brown, and Edwin Davis, who would one day be Elliotts mentor in the fine art of execution, supervised the switchboard.
Fascinated with electricity, Elliott was determined to become an electrical engineer. The only college nearby that offered instruction in mathematics and physics was the Brockport Normal School, a teacher-training college. Elliott learned what he could about the physics of electricity in the two-year program, and soon got a job at the Brockport Electric Light Plant. Fundamentally, although employed, he was very much an apprentice. With time on his hands at night, he says that, The first murder case in which I became intensely interested was that of Lizzie Borden. The preparation for his profession had begun. Shortly after, he read about a man condemned to the electric chair, Bartholomew Shea, and, to a friend, uttered the prophetic words, Think of the executioners great responsibility. Thats a job Id like to have. Elliott was 18 years old.
At 21, Elliott went to Avon, N.Y., to help start the operation of the towns lighting plant. There, he met his future wife, Addie Hocmer, and when she moved away, Elliott took a job as assistant electrician at the Clinton Prison in Dannemora, N.Y., to be closer to her. When the chief electrician left six months later, he assumed the position of chief of the powerhouse. Soon, Robert Elliott and Addie Hocmer were married.
In effect, Elliotts career as an executioner began at Dannemora. Because the prison power plant provided the current for the electric chair, it was Elliott who was responsible for the machinery for executions, and, although not the primary person who threw the switch, his role was to provide the energy for the executioner.
Sooner or later, it was inevitable that Elliott would assume a greater role than merely the operator of the power plant. In Elliotts memoir, one can almost sense the steady progress from technician to executioner.
At the turn of the century, prisons were rather open institutions, allowing the public to inspect them on tours, including the death chamber. Elliott was occasionally asked by the warden of Dannemora to conduct tours, and, inevitably, the electric chair became the highlight of each tour. Many visitors asked to sit in the electric chair, and once Elliott himself was asked to sit in it, at the request of the wife of a prominent state official. The officials wife even requested that he be strapped in it, so that the full effect could be viewed. Elliott reports that he experienced some of the sensations that he expected the condemned to feel, although after that experience, he never again felt the same degree of fear when he sat in the chair again.
In June 1901, Elliott participated in his first electrocution, although from a distance. In his role as plant engineer, he was the man who started the engine and threw the switch that sent the current to the execution chamber. The executioner was none other than Edwin Davis, Kemmlers executioner.
The two men, Davis and Elliott, rehearsed the execution in the morning, testing the current with a 15-pound piece of beef. Later that morning, the condemned man, George Middleton, received four shocks. The first was for two minutes, the second a minute, and the third and fourth about a half minute each. Elliotts career was beginning.
Throughout his life, following the wishes of his parents, Elliott was a devout Methodist — a superintendent of the Sunday school, a member of the church board, and later treasurer of the church. While it was well known that Elliott was the man who furnished the current for the electric chair, his fellow congregants, many of them employees of the prison, were not dismayed by the Sunday school superintendents special prison duties.
In various accounts of the executions of famous felons, Elliott is often described as grim-faced, or stern-faced, and often reported to be wearing a gray suit with a brightly colored tie. He is also described as lanky and business-like. Some authors say nothing about him, as if he were a colorless extension of the machinery of execution. It is clear that these several authors have never spoken to anyone who knew Elliott, and have relied on comments made by witnesses to the executions who, like the authors, generally ignored his existence.
What kind of a man would be a professional executioner? Would he have to be a man without feelings, incapable of pity, inured to death, a calloused personality? Most would assume that the executioner might be something of a sociopath, or, at the very least, an outcast from society, friendless, scorned.
Elliott quotes Diebler, once the principal headsman of France:
To kill in the name of ones country is a glorious feat, one rewarded by medals. But to kill in the name of the law, that is a gruesome, horrible function, rewarded with scorn, contempt, and loathing.
Nevertheless, Robert Elliott had no concerns about how he was considered by society. He thought of himself as an average man who led a common, relatively bland existence. Throughout his memoir, he insists that if society is to have capital punishment, someone must carry out such sentences.
Hannah Arndt, in describing the Nazi mass murderer Adolf Eichmann, used the phrase the banality of evil. With respect to Elliott, it is not an inappropriate description. Banality, of course, means commonplace. That is not to say that Elliott was in any way evil, but, paraphrasing Arndt, a more accurate rewriting of her description for Elliott would be the banality of middle-class respectability. As he describes in his autobiography, Elliott comes off as a very ordinary small-town resident.
When not acting as the states agent of death or doing electrical contracting jobs, I spend a great deal of time in my flower garden. I am particularly proud of my roses and gladioli, which have been the envy of the neighborhood.
Besides tending his garden, Elliott wrote that he enjoyed shooting movies of his grandchildren at play, walking in the woods, and fishing with his son and sons-in-law. In the evenings, he listened to the radio, read biographies, and read the newspaper comics to his children and grandchildren. All in all, he was a comfortable man, an admirer of Calvin Coolidge and Will Rogers, a pipe-smoking candidate for a Norman Rockwell magazine cover.
Like many middle class suburbanites of the 1920s and 1930s, he enjoyed driving, often taking his car to his trips to prisons to carry out the executions. His wife often accompanied him, particularly when the executions were in Pennsylvania, so that she could enjoy the Nittany Mountains and a little inn in a neighboring village while her husband went on to the prison to throw his switch. On one occasion, they were in an auto accident, and, though shaken and bruised, Elliott went on to the prison, performed the execution, and off they drove to western New York for a weeks vacation.
The puzzling question about Robert Elliott is how he felt about what he did. He does not seem to be a reflective man, but he does spend a chapter in his autobiography justifying his profession. He concludes that although he throws the switch, it is society that decides whether death is an appropriate punishment. His conscience is clear.
I have always been a God-fearing, religious person. I have endeavored to lead an honest, moral life, and in my dealings with others have tried to follow the Golden Rule. I have striven to be a good husband and a good father. Wherever I may have failed, it has not been for lack of sincere effort. As to the service I perform for the state, I have already discussed why in my mind there is no shadow of consciousness that I have done wrong.
As if to augment this personal philosophy, Elliott states that he is opposed to capital punishment. He did not believe that it was a deterrent. He was affected by what he called the widespread orgy of sensationalism — almost sadism that capital punishment brought out in people, citing the crowds that waited outside the prisons for the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, and Hauptmann. Many in those throngs were morbid individuals, to whom death is a commonplace jest and human life is cheap.
A theme in Elliotts memoir is his concern that he might have electrocuted an innocent man. While he doesnt explicitly say so, this appears to be a worry that might alter his status as a mere instrument of the state, and, in some way, implicate him. However, he assumes a position of it cant be helped, and goes on with his otherwise uneventful life.
Although Robert G. Elliott, executioner, may be long forgotten , five whom he executed — convicted in three cases — remain in the public consciousness, even after almost 80 years. They are, in order of execution, Nicola Sacco, Bartolomeo Vanzetti (1927), Ruth Snyder, Henry Judd Gray (1928), and Bruno Richard Hauptmann (1936). Few cases in the 20th Century aroused such interest and passions.
The details of these cases have been described in Crimelibrary articles. Denise Noe (The Murder of Albert Snyder) recounted the Snyder-Judd case in fascinating detail. The celebrated cases of Sacco and Vanzetti (The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti) and Hauptmann and the Lindbergh baby kidnapping (Theft of the Eaglet) were reported by Russell Aiuto.
The significance of the three cases, as one would expect, induce Elliott to devote an entire chapter to them in his autobiography. Clearly, although they constitute less than 1 percent of the condemned that he executed, they hold a special case in his career. There are three reasons for the notoriety of these cases. In one instance, Sacco and Vanzetti, it was the sense that a gross injustice had been done, and that politics and the hysteria of the Red Scare was the driving force for their conviction and execution. In the second case, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, it was one of the most publicized cases of sex and passion, a forerunner of many similar cases that were to follow in 20th Century history of crime, but one of the first to engage the tabloid, as well as the respectable press. The fact that a surreptitious photograph of Ruth Snyder, taken at the moment of her death, was published the day after her execution further sensationalized the execution. Finally, the third case, the execution of the kidnapper and murderer of the child of Americas hero, Charles Lindbergh, produced a national fascination unlike any other in the annals of murder up to that time.
As Elliott states in his memoir, The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was the first in which I was to put to death condemned men in what the public calls a big case. Convicted in 1921 of murdering a payroll master and his guard, the two Italian immigrants were sentenced to die on August 3, 1927, after six long years of appeals. During this period, Sacco and Vanzetti, avowed anarchists (actually, more fervent socialists than anarchists) were supported by intellectuals, people of prominence, and those who were certain that the two men were found guilty because of their political beliefs. It was, indeed, a case of worldwide importance.
As befitting the importance of these cases, Elliott found himself caught in the midst of highly charged situations. His accounting, for example, of the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti is as dramatic as anything written about electrocution.
His description of the two weeks leading up to the deaths of the two Italians begins with his arrival at the Massachusetts State Prison at Charlestown on August 10, 1927. The executions were scheduled for midnight. He described the atmosphere:
As darkness fell, the air seemed charged with electricity. Everybody in the prison, from the warden down, was uneasy, tense. Outside, there were great crowds and noisy demonstrations. Scores of policemen, many of them mounted, attempted to control the throng and the traffic jam of hundreds of automobiles. Never before had a penal institution been so armed and garrisoned.
An hour before the scheduled executions, Elliott received word that they had been postponed. The governor had granted a reprieve in order to allow the Supreme Court to consider an appeal.
On August 22, I reported at the prison in midafternoon, and went through the same procedure as before. Again excitement ran high. As the hands of the clock neared midnight, many nerves were almost at the breaking point. The death march began three minutes after twelve.
This was one of the 30 occasions when Elliott put to death three condemned men in a single night. The first to go to the chair was Celestine Madeiros, a young man who killed a bank cashier and had said that he — not Sacco and Vanzetti — was connected with the payroll robbery and killings for which the Italian anarchists were convicted. At 12:09, Madeiros was pronounced dead. He had gone silently to the chair in a semi-stupor.
Now, the tension heightened. Sacco was led in, unaccompanied by a clergyman, having earlier refused spiritual consolation from the prison chaplain. Without support, he made his way to the chair.
While he was being strapped into the chair, he made the first of his statements: Long live anarchy! he said in Italian. The last procedure, the placing of the mask over his face, was next. Unfortunately, it could not be found. While the guards frantically searched for it, Sacco kept talking. Farewell, my wife and child and all my friends, he said, and then, Good evening, gentlemen, and finally, Farewell, mother.
Finally, the mask was discovered. It had been caught in Madeiros clothing. The mask was placed on Sacco, and Elliott threw the switch.
The last of the trio to be dispatched that night by Elliott was Vanzetti. His exit from the world was, in many ways, the most dramatic. Throughout the long ordeal of six years of appeals and publicity, Bartolomeo Vanzetti emerged as the most dignified and eloquent of Death Row residents. Befitting his reputation, Vanzetti faced his fate with the calmest demeanor of all. While Madeiros was torpid and Sacco pale and tense, Vanzetti was composed and dignified. He shook hands with the guards who took him from his cell on Death Row to the execution chamber. He also shook Warden Hendrys hand, and said, I want to thank you for everything you have done for me, Warden. Elliott observed that the warden was deeply moved. He turned to the witnesses, and said, I wish to tell you I am innocent, and never committed any crime, but sometimes some sin. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only of this, but all. I am an innocent man.
Finally, with the mask in place, he said, I wish to forgive some people for what they are now doing to me.
The Sacco-Vanzetti case was over. However, the writings of the two men, the belief in their innocence, and the inspiration they engendered in artists and thinkers of every persuasion persist to this day.
One can sense that Elliott recognized, even at that moment, that he was a part of history. He left the prison, recognized by a few among the thousands in the crowd. He took a taxi to his hotel, spent the night, and returned home the next day. Less than a year later, Elliotts house was bombed. Although he does not propose it, it seems likely that the bombing was an aftermath of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
There are several reasons for Elliott to single out the 1928 Snyder-Gray case as memorable in his career. As already mentioned, it was a sensational, lurid case. It was also the first woman that he was required to execute. In fact, Ruth Snyder was the first woman to die in Sing Sings electric chair since 1899. The Snyder-Gray case was sensational enough that it inspired James M. Cain to write his memorable novel Double Indemnity. An attractive blonde, goading her spineless lover into assisting her in murdering her dull, rich husband, was the juiciest of tabloid stories. After the conviction and sentencing of the pair, the newspapers covered their days in the Death House, relishing every detail.
As for Elliott, stories were published that he was horrified by the thought of electrocuting a woman, and that he intended to appeal to the governor to commute their death sentence to life imprisonment. Elliott, the dedicated servant of the state, was neither horrified nor sympathetic to the condemned. Unlike the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which Elliott had surprisingly received no death threats, he received a large number of letters threatening him with retaliation if he executed Ruth Snyder. Evidently, Grays fate did not arouse such passions. The sensational nature of the case, and the fact that the two lovers were to be executed together, brought forth over 1,500 applications to Warden Lawes of Sing Sing for permission to witness the electrocutions. The Death Room at Sing Sing could hold only 20 witnesses.
At a minute after 11 p.m. on January 12, 1928, Ruth Snyder was led into the death chamber. When she saw the electric chair, she broke down, and had to be assisted by prison matrons into the chair. Jesus, have mercy on me, for I have sinned, she sobbed. She prayed, and as the mask went over her face, she said, Jesus, have mercy. Elliott threw the switch, and two minutes later, she was pronounced dead.
Judd Gray was next, and went quietly to his death.
In addition to the lurid elements of the case, what has persisted in the memory of those who recall it is the photograph that appeared in a New York tabloid the next day. At the very moment that the current ran through Ruth Snyder, a photographer, with a camera strapped to his leg, photographed her. It is a dramatic, horrifying photograph, and has become famous over the years. Its impact was so great that for all future executions at Sing Sing, witnesses were searched before being allowed into the Death Chamber.
Shortly after the executions, a newspaper reported that Elliott was haunted by what he had done, that the specter of Ruth Snyder bedeviled him. It was reported that Elliott required sedation to sleep, and that he was paralyzed with guilt. That, of course, was pure invention. Elliott does report that he was affected by the necessity of electrocuting a woman, but he was not the type of man to lose sleep over having done his job.
No one expected, at the moment of their execution, either the idealistic Sacco or the philosophical Vanzetti to confess to the crime for which they were convicted. And, there was no doubt as to the guilt of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, although Snyder mumbled protestations of innocence as she was being strapped in the chair.
But Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a different story. The expectation was that he would confess at the last moment, and thus be spared execution. It didnt happen. On the contrary, right up to minutes before he was led from his cell to the place of execution, he had expected a reprieve. The result was, as Elliott describes him, a bewildered, almost insensible figure. If he had had anything to say, any accomplice to implicate, he was too shocked and confused to say it.
As in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping and murder case was a prolonged affair, beginning with the kidnapping on March 1, 1932, and ending with the execution of Hauptmann on April 3, 1936. More than two years after the abduction and murder of the child, Hauptmann was finally caught, passing one of the ransom bills. He was convicted in a sensational, publicity-fraught trial six months later, and finally met his fate more than a year after that.
Because of numerous appeals and investigations by the governor of New Jersey, Elliott was scheduled to act as executioner three times, over four months. Little wonder that Hauptmann felt that he would eventually be spared. So stirred by this case and the delays of the execution, the newspapers, radio, and newsreels couldnt get enough about Hauptmann. Elliott was offered $10,000 somehow to signal to one newspaper that Hauptmann was dead, so that the paper could scoop its competitors by five or six minutes. Elliott, always a man of rectitude, naturally declined.
Even more so than the other two famous cases, Elliott was deluged with threats and was hounded by reporters. He resorted to various subterfuges to evade reporters in his trips to the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton, having his daughter drive his car while he caught a taxi parked at the back door, changing his license plates, evading the crowd of newsreel cameramen, radio announcers, and reporters gathered at the prison gate. A large crowd had gathered outside the prison, with state and local police keeping order. This was a crowd of the curious, rather than the immense crowd of supporters and protestors that had been outside the Massachusetts State Prison when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed.
Just as the trial itself had drawn crowds and media attention, the execution of Hauptmann was a circus. For the first time in his career, Elliott was searched before being permitted to enter the execution room. The New Jersey authorities did not want a repeat of the famous death photograph of Ruth Snyder.
Elliotts description of the last moments of Hauptmann is vivid, and conjures up a scene that is gripping.
His head, which had been shaved, titled slightly to one side. His face was yellow; his features were drawn. He glanced neither to the right nor to the left. He walked past the chair, and would have collided with a physician had not a guard stopped him. The guard turned him around, and maneuvered him to the chair. He gripped its broad arms with his hands, staring straight ahead as he was strapped in. His lips did not move, and he gave no indication that he wished to speak. I placed the head electrode on him, and helped to adjust the mask. At precisely 8:44 oclock, I was given the signal. The current streaked through the condemned man.
So ended the story of the man convicted of the Crime of the Century.
Elliott reported in his memoir that he had received numerous letters over the course of his career, some of them threatening. For the most part, he ignored these, since the vast majority of them were clearly crank letters. He had been quite adept throughout his years as an executioner in maintaining anonymity.
However, on May 18, 1928, at 1:10 a.m., his house was bombed.
The front of the house was destroyed, but the occupants, fast asleep in the upper level, were unharmed. All of the windows had been blown out by the force of the blast. A few neighboring houses had their windows damaged, and were struck by flying pieces from the Elliott house. The explosion had been felt over a block away. Neighbors assisted the startled Elliott family out of the house.
Who had done this was a mystery. How they did it was discovered by the police, who found that the bomb was made of dynamite and steel particles, with a timer. Witnesses reported a red car leaving the area immediately after the blast, but the car was never found.
Could the bombers of Elliotts house have been anarchists sympathetic to Sacco and Vanzetti? Bombing was not an unknown technique of some of the Italian anarchists of the 1920s. Elliott appears to doubt this, since he thought that an act of revenge nine months after he had executed Sacco and Vanzetti seemed quite a long time before vengeance was extracted. It is clear that Elliott did not understand the Italian idea of vendetta, where grudges can linger for a century or more.
The house was repaired within two months, the costs of restoration provided by the New York legislature. Police guards were posted outside Elliotts house for the next five years, and, after that, every May 1 and every time Elliott was about to carry out an execution.
Throughout the latter part of Elliotts career, newspapers were fond of reporting that his profession depressed him, sometimes writing that he was prostrate with guilt, under a physicians care, or inclined toward suicide. This prediction, that Elliott would commit suicide, was, in the minds of the press, confirmed when Elliotts predecessor, Hulbert, shot himself in February 1929. Immediately, the newspapers concluded that Hulberts profession was the cause, that he was a man haunted by the faces of those he had killed in the electric chair. One magazine reported that Elliott had hanged himself, and had to retract that report when Elliott protested to the editor. In all likelihood, Hulbert, ill, recently widowed, and enduring approaching blindness, fell victim to depression.
It was difficult for newspapers and the public to accept the existence of an executioner who seemed unaffected by his profession. They seemed to insist that Elliott had to be a tortured soul. Elliott reported a typical story, which said that Elliotts wife and two of his children had been murdered, and that he became an executioner to avenge their deaths.
No one was ready to accept the picture of the grandfatherly Elliott tending his roses and gladioli in his neat suburban garden.
Can we generalize from the story of Robert Elliott about the characteristics of a successful executioner? Without additional first-person accounts of their careers, the sample size of these practitioners is simply too small.
We do know enough to suggest several traits. If we consider the anonymity of the hooded ax man of Medieval Europe, the masked operator of the gallows or the guillotine of 100 years ago, we can arrive at the conclusion that it is desirable for the executioner to be unknown and faceless. Elliott, up until the writing of his memoir, certainly lived up to this expectation. He was about as colorless and unpretentious a man as one could find. If it had not been for his involvement in the three high profile cases described earlier, he probably would not have been known at all, and his house would not have been bombed.
There are several reasons for this. First, to dispatch the condemned to their Maker, one must assume the role of an impersonal arm of the state. An executioner with a personality would suggest that capital punishment is an act of vengeance (which it often is) on the part of government, and this would make the idea of execution distasteful to many citizens who reluctantly support it. Second, while Elliott appeared to be indifferent to threats, anonymity provides some protection for the individual carrying out the executions from the deranged, the angry, and irrationally passionate people who are found in every society. In effect, the executioner must be invisible and without personality.
If Elliott is to serve as an example, then it appears that the executioner should be a person who is, for want of a better word, workmanlike. A home-loving, middle-class craftsman, as was Elliott, can go about his duties of executing the condemned efficiently, without guilt or regret, just doing his job.
Finally, it seems that Elliott represents the need for a third general characteristic. The executioner must balance a strong moral sense, perhaps with basic Christian values, with a suspension of any ideology. In essence, Elliott assured himself that someone had to do what society demanded, and whether he personally opposed capital punishment (which he says he did) or supported it, such positions were irrelevant.
Whether the profession of executioner really exists today is doubtful, at least not in the sense of Robert Elliott, who worked at it for more than 30 years. True, the people who depress the series of plungers that result in execution by lethal injection meet our criterion of anonymity, but they seem to be mere technicians rather than professionals. And, of course, with the exception of Texas and Virginia, there arent that many executions carried out in the United States today, compared with the 1920s and 1930s.
Finally, can we make a distinction between professional executioners, hired by the state to carry out sentences imposed by judges and juries, and the Nazis at Auschwitz and Buchenwald? Is there any essential difference between Robert Elliott and Adolph Eichmann? This is an observation often made with executioners, that they are simply state-sanctioned murderers. However, it is an invidious comparison. There are several differences. First, while not always true, for the most part Elliotts clients were guilty of crimes that were defined by law as capital crimes. The victims of the Nazis had committed no crimes. Thus, while both executioners and Nazis are instruments of their respective states, the latter carried out their duties not by law, but by edicts pronounced against people who had committed no crimes. Second, sensibilities of the Western World demand that execution for crimes be undertaken soberly and humanely. Certainly, being herded into a shower room naked, gassed, and thrown into a furnace does not meet this standard. Third, there is the subtle difference in the source of authority for carrying out the killings. The professional executioner, such as Elliott, is engaged for the act, receives a legally constituted order, and, in the presence of confirming witnesses, carries out the execution. The victims of the Holocaust were killed on command.
The executioners of Elliotts time were continually described by newspapers and magazines as tortured by remorse for what they did, but if we can believe Elliott, that seems unlikely. Both of his predecessors, Davis and Hulbert, were, like Elliott, old-shoe types, and even Hulberts suicide doesnt indicate that he shot himself because of his profession. As much as tabloid journalism would have liked executioners to wring their hands in guilt, those who practiced the craft for any length of time seemed not to worry much about what they were doing.
Books:
Ehrmann, Herbert B. 1969. The Case That Will Not Die. Little, Brown
Elliott, Robert G. (with Albert R. Beatty). 1940. Agent of Death: The Memoirs of an Executioner. E.P. Dutton
Fisher, Jim. 1994. The Lindbergh Case. Rutgers University Press
Jones, Ann. 1996. Women Who Kill. Little, Brown
Kennedy, Ludovic H. 1985. The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann. Viking
Margolin, Leslie. 1999. Murderess! Pinnacle Books
Russell, Francis. 1971. Tragedy in Dedham: The Story of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case.
McGraw-Hill
Articles on crimelibrary.org:
Aiuto, Russell. The Theft of the Eaglet
Aiuto, Russell. The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti
Gado, Marc. The Last Step: Women in the Electric Chair
Gado, Marc. Stone Upon Stone: Sing Sing Prison
MacLeod, Marlee. The Electric Chair
Noe, Denise. The Murder of Albert Snyder