Killer’s Son on a Mission : Capital punishment: Ronald Bell, son of the last man executed in the state, says he wants ‘to use my father’s death in a positive way’ and abolish the death penalty.

Ronald Bell’s nightmares have not recurred in years. His period of mourning ended long ago. But he will be haunted always by the gruesome images of his father’s death 23 years ago.

Bell is the son of Aaron Mitchell, the last person executed in California, and he knows more than any son should about his father’s death. An artist was there to sketch it. Reporters detailed the final gasps. What Bell doesn’t know about his father’s death, he can readily conjure.

At age 39, Bell is two years older than his father was when he was walked, moaning, into San Quentin’s gas chamber on April 12, 1967. Bell wasn’t there, but he can imagine what it must have felt like to be strapped to a chair in the small steel chamber, waiting for cyanide pellets to fall into a basin of acid, creating the lethal gas.

What strikes Bell as especially unfair about the death penalty is that a man isn’t given “a fighting chance.” As if envisioning himself inside the chamber, he said: “Let me run for it. Don’t strap me in a chair and give me gas so I defecate all over myself, with a bunch of spectators who I can see watching me die.”

With California preparing to execute convicted killer Robert Alton Harris on April 3, memories of his father’s final days flood back, and Bell is finding himself more determined than ever to pursue what has become his mission.

“I want to get involved in abolishing capital punishment nationwide, to try to use my father’s death in a positive way,” he said.

Bell came to that decision after 12 years as an actor in Los Angeles. He landed parts, mostly small ones, in television episodes, movies and theater productions. He also wrote a play about his father’s final days and performed the part of his father in a production put on by the Inglewood Theater.

But unable to strike it big, he returned to his hometown of Sacramento in 1987, with plans to attend UC Davis. He’s been taking classes on and off since then. Eventually, he said he intends to go to law school, become a lawyer and defend death penalty cases.

Encouraged by San Francisco defense attorney Robert Bryan, chairman of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, Bell is taking a role in the movement to end capital punishment.

Bryan met Bell as the lawyer researched Mitchell’s case two years ago for an event sponsored by Amnesty International. Bryan asked Bell to put his acting to use by playing his father in mock trials in which Bryan and a prosecutor give closing arguments. In two trials so far, jurors picked from the audiences reached verdicts of life in prison, rather than death.

“My father is dead,” Bell said. “It is moot.”

There is, however, a point to the exercise. “I want people to hear Aaron Mitchell’s side of the story. . . . I want them to leave with a question mark: Was this man executed wrongfully? Was he rushed to the gas chamber?”

Mitchell’s path to the gas chamber began on Feb. 15, 1963. A thief in need of money, he had spent the day drinking vodka and sawing off a shotgun. That night, he went to the Stadium Club, not far from his home, and robbed it of $321.

Police arrived as he was leaving. Mitchell disarmed one officer and using him as a shield, stepped outside. Officer Arnold Gamble, revolver drawn, was on the other side of the door. Guns blazed. Gamble died. Mitchell ran 2 1/2 blocks before collapsing. He had been shot seven times.

Much has been written of the families of murder victims, how they never forget their losses. Such is the case with Gamble’s family. His widow told The Times five years ago that the memories are so painful that she would not discuss it.

Arnold Gamble Jr., 14 when his father was killed, told The Times then that opponents of capital punishment don’t understand the pain of the families of murder victims.

“Have they ever known how painful it is? It’s changed all of our lives, and 22 years later, we’re still changed. . . . The victims are the ones who are left. They can never get away from it,” Gamble said.

For his part, Bell called the crime “stupid,” and said his father “was a fool.” But he also believes his father was executed because he was black and that he was the victim of racism.

“In 1967,” Bell said, “racism was rampant.” Referring to his stepmother, he added: “The fact that my father was married to a white lady, a beautiful white lady, with flaming red hair, didn’t help. He drove a white convertible Cadillac. He was just in the wrong time.”

The execution is all the more bitter for Bell because it turned out to be the last in California. Courts in California and across the country, besieged by legal arguments against capital punishment, imposed a moratorium on executions shortly after Mitchell’s death. And in 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all death penalty laws.

States quickly rewrote their capital punishment laws, and the Supreme Court held the new laws to be constitutional, starting in 1976. California reinstituted the death penalty in 1977, but lengthy and frequently successful appeals of the sentences have delayed its use.

Bell vividly recalls his visits to San Quentin and the fatherly advice he got. “ ‘Be a lawyer. Get your dad out of prison. Don’t do like me. Don’t get caught up in this stealing and robbing.’ He wanted me to be the complete opposite of what he was.”

Bell last visited his father on April 11, 1967, the day before the execution. Mitchell sang the spiritual, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” so his mother, Virgie Mitchell, could hear his voice one last time.

“He gave us an appeal, his final appeal, for us to hand-walk to the judge. And we did, me and my grandma,” Bell said.

To the eyes of a 16-year-old, U.S. District Judge Alfonso J. Zirpoli seemed to be sitting on a dais 15 or 20 feet high, like St. Peter deciding whether to open the gates to heaven. Zirpoli listened, went to his chambers and returned, denying the final appeal.

After that final visit with his mother and son, Mitchell returned to Death Row and slashed himself with a razor blade. That night, with his execution looming the next morning, he picked at his wound and smeared blood on his palms. He then stood with his hands out as if he were on a crucifix. In capital punishment lore, the scene is infamous. Later, as he sat in the small octagonal gas chamber, he mouthed, “I am Jesus Christ” to his pastor, one of 50 witnesses who stood outside.

Within the family, there are explanations for these actions.

Said Bell: “His attorney said after the last appeal was turned down, ‘The only way you’re going to save yourself is to try to commit suicide or make them think that you’re going to try to kill yourself. That will delay it and it will give you time to file some more papers.’ ”

“Our background,” Bell continued, “is a religious background. . . . The whole thing about, ‘I am Jesus Christ,’ it’s a saying that a lot of people in our church use. ‘I am Jesus Christ.’ It’s a way of making amends just before you die, hoping that God forgives you for any sin you committed in this life, and to accept you into his graces and into heaven.”

On the day of his father’s execution, Bell went to his high school.

“At about 10:20 that morning, my mom came and got me out of class, and said it was all over with, and she took me out of school and we went to my grandmother’s house.” There, the family had gathered to mourn privately.

For a time afterward, Bell turned to crime. “I wanted to be like him then. But I was going to be successful.”

His mother, Dolores Bell Lewis, was determined to do whatever she could to keep him from ending up like his father, so she moved the family from the neighborhood.

In their new neighborhood in Sacramento, people didn’t know Bell as Aaron Mitchell’s son. He turned to academics, sports and campus politics, becoming head of the black students association at his high school. Then the Army drafted him, despite his contention that he felt no patriotic obligation to a country that had executed his father. Rather than ship out for Vietnam, he went AWOL.

After a stay in a stockade and a discharge, he returned to Sacramento and went to UC Davis, majoring in drama. He said he dropped out because he didn’t believe there were parts of any dignity for blacks and headed for Hollywood. Along the way, he married twice and fathered six daughters.

Today, Bell is calm and articulate when he talks about his father. But the execution left its mark. It is hard evidence of society’s racism, he believes, and it’s part of why he distrusts police.

“I feel fortunate,” he said, “that I have lived 39 years and never been beaten by the police.”

Family members say he bears a striking resemblance to his father. His grandmother, Mitchell’s mother, forever is calling him “A.C.,” Aaron Charles Mitchell’s nickname. Sometimes, when money runs short, Bell said he has thought about the illegal ways of coming up with cash.

But he is intent on proving to anyone who might wonder that the son is not like the father. “Aaron Mitchell stops me,” he said. Besides, if he were to turn to crime, he would be letting down too many people. “I’m the only one in my family who has a chance of graduating from college,” he said.