Mystery Hangman Sets Off a Washington Controversy

A retired Topeka, Kan., hangman who sprang the trap on 64 men claims his job never caused him to lose even one night’s sleep.

But what would disturb his dreams, he said, is if people knew his name: “We got too many idiots out here in this world. I don’t want a bunch of midnight callers.”

Washington officials recently hired a man to perform the first hanging in this country in 24 years, and state authorities agree with the traditional notion that an executioner is entitled to his repose. State correction officials say that the hangman is a U.S. citizen and will be paid as much as $1,500 to perform the hanging, but that his identity should remain anonymous so that he can perform his duties without fear of “harassment and retaliation,” Washington Assistant Atty. Gen. Aaron Owada said.

A hangman was hired because triple murderer Charles R. Campbell faces execution by hanging June 27 at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. An appeal has been filed, though, and court arguments will be heard later this month. But should the execution be cleared by the courts, state officials wanted to have a hangman on call.

The hiring of the mystery hangman, however, has triggered controversy among state officials and anti-death-penalty crusaders in Washington who are using the issue to focus attention on what they feel is the barbarism inherent in all forms of execution, especially hanging, which they see as a holdover from the days of the Wild West.

‘A Thing of the Past’

“Execution by rope is a thing of the past,” conceded the anonymous Topeka hangman, who added that he was not interviewed for the Washington state job.

Hanging, once the most common method of execution in the United States, is now legal in only three states--Washington, Montana and New Hampshire. For now, a condemned person in Washington may choose between lethal injection or hanging; if he refuses to choose--as Campbell has--hanging is the official method.

But a bill to abolish hanging in favor of lethal injection has passed the Washington state Senate--although it has been tabled, perhaps until the next legislative session. Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union last month filed a Freedom of Information request asking that the hangman’s identity and qualifications be revealed.

Kathleen Taylor, executive director of the ACLU of Washington, said Washingtonians have an obligation to learn how the hangman intends to do his job. “We are attempting to obtain as much information as possible (about the hangman) to make the community face the grave and gruesome aspects of state execution,” she said.

The state Department of Corrections responded by filing suit in Thurston County Superior Court to block the ACLU from examining records pertaining to the hangman. Veltry Johnson, spokesman for Washington state’s Department of Corrections, said disclosure of the executioner’s identity might scare off any future applicants for the job and would make it difficult for the department to “do business.”

Cruel and Unusual?

Some death penalty opponents feel there is something especially horrible about a hanging. Martin Gardner, a professor of law at the University of Nebraska, who disapproves of capital punishment, said hanging is “more brutal” than other forms of execution because it damages a person’s “bodily integrity.”

If he had to support a method, he’d chose lethal injection because it’s least likely to result in mutilation. “What I really don’t like is the electric chair, the firing squad, hanging,” he said. “We even put dogs to sleep in ways that don’t tear their bodies apart.”

Hanging replaced earlier and more brutal means of execution such as burning at the stake and drawing and quartering. But early this century hanging was phased out in most states when the electric chair and gas chamber became widely available, said Henry Schwarzschild, director of the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project in New York City.

He said the trend toward “scientific and technical” means of execution is intended to make the death penalty more palatable to the public. When lethal injection was introduced in Oklahoma in 1977, he said, “it was merchandised as being less painful, less abhorrent than earlier methods. It was designed to make these things (capital punishment) more acceptable.”

Total Efficiency Impossible

Still, Schwarzschild pointed out the gross inefficiencies of existing means of execution, and like other opponents of the death penalty, he can cite case after case of malfunctioning electrodes, snapped restraints, botched injections and inept firing squads.

“There is no form of execution that can’t be bungled,” said Watt Espy, who single-handedly operates the Capital Punishment Research Project in Headland, Ala.

But hanging seems to claim the greatest share of execution horror stories. Espy, for instance, said he knows of incidents where ropes broke, forcing condemned men to climb the gallows a second time, “crying and screaming.”

If the condemned person is heavy and the executioner miscalculates the “drop,” decapitation can result, Espy said. This has occurred in the past at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla, according to corrections department spokesman Johnson.

To avoid a repeat mishap, prison authorities sought “a technically proficient individual” to serve as hangman, said Richard Bauer, spokesman for the Washington state penitentiary where the Campbell hanging would be carried out. A hanging is “a math problem,” he said, involving “momentum, weight and distance. We don’t want a decapitation or a strangulation.”

Wanted: Hangman

Bauer said that Washington prison officials looked for hangmen in other states and also outside the country before settling on the one they hired.

But according to the retired Topeka hangman, he may be the only person in the country fit for the job in that he can claim prior experience. He knows of only one other experienced hangman: the man who taught him his trade at a war crimes prison near Tokyo after World War II. The last he heard, his aging mentor was living near Augusta, Ga.

“If he’s dead, I’m the only one,” the 74-year-old hangman said. Most of his executions were performed on war criminals in Japan. He said he participated in the Dec. 23, 1948, hanging of Tojo Hideki, former premier of Japan. It was while he was in the military that the hangman learned how to calculate “the drop” needed to kill a man according to his size, weight and age.

On-the-Job Training

It was from his teacher in the military, too, that he learned how to prepare a Manila hemp rope for a hanging. The rope has to be boiled, he said, then a 210-pound weight hung on it for 12 to 14 hours “to take the stretch out of it, so when the accused comes to the end of the rope he doesn’t bounce like a rubber band.”

At the time of the execution, traditionally conducted just past midnight, two escorts lead the condemned man up the 13 steps to the scaffold, he said. In his experience, the man who is about to die does not show much emotion. “They just walk up there like a normal person would a flight of stairs.”

Atop the scaffold, the hangman asks the condemned man to place his feet in the black footprints--made from a man’s size 12 shoe--painted on the platform.

“As quick as he gets himself positioned, I immediately slip that hood over his head,” the hangman explained. “I bend down and buckle his two ankle straps.”

While the hangman, who is not masked, is leaning down, his assistant loops the noose over the condemned man’s neck. The hangman straightens up and flips a lever. The trap door springs open and the man drops. From the time the condemned man mounts the scaffold, the whole thing takes only about six seconds, he said.

The retired hangman, who has seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, said he doesn’t mind discussing the arcane art of hanging with anyone.

“It’s nothing that bothers me,” he said. “I just see it as another job that has to be done.”