Page Out of the Old West and a Poetic, Hanging Judge

Hanging is not the most amiable of subjects, but as a form of punishment that helped to forge the West, it fascinates many of us.

Evidently it was seen as too brutal by some souls, so it has been replaced in California by the gas chamber and in other states by electrocution and lethal injection.

Beheading by ax or sword was never (or rarely) practiced in America, though it was used in England to dispatch numerous queens and noblemen, as well as minor felons.

Perhaps the most notorious of hangings in California was that of William Edward Hickman, a bright young psychopath who in 1927 kidnaped a 12-year-old schoolgirl, Marion Parker, for ransom. In a series of bizarre notes he instructed her banker father to pay him $1,500 (in 75 $20 bills) for her safe return. The exchange was to take place on a residential street, without the presence of police. The police intruded. Hickman spotted them and backed out. A second exchange was arranged. This time the cops stayed away. Hickman drove up with a bundled-up figure in the back seat. Perry Parker saw his daughter’s face. He turned over the money. Hickman drove on, stopped briefly and dumped out a bundle. It was Marion Parker’s body. Her eyes were sewn open. Her arms and legs had been cut off.

This crime set off what was called the biggest manhunt in the West. Hickman was arrested on a highway in Washington state and brought back to Los Angeles for trial for murder. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. A jury of eight men and four women found him guilty, and Hickman was hanged at San Quentin Prison before a festive gallery of 400.

Hanging was peculiarly suited to the Old West, because all that was needed to accomplish it was a horse, a rope and a tree, all of which were plentiful. The condemned man was seated on a horse, the horse was walked to an oak tree, a rope was knotted around the man’s neck and tied to an overhanging limb, then a principal whacked the horse on his hind quarters, the horse bolted, and the man was left with his feet dangling in midair.

What provokes these morbid reflections is a document sent me by a reader, Miriam V. Anderson of Inglewood. It purports to be the text of a death sentence handed down by a judge of the U.S. District Court in the New Mexico Territory in 1881. A note introduces the text as a verbatim transcript of the sentence and says that is was read in Taos in an adobe stable serving as a court. The judge is not named.

The sentence:

“Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, in a few short weeks it will be spring. The snows of winter will flee away, the ice will vanish, and the air will become soft and balmy. In short, Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, the annual miracle of the years will awaken and come to pass, but you won’t be there.

“The rivulet will run its soaring course to the sea, the timid desert flowers will put forth their tender shoots, the glorious valleys of this imperial domain will blossom as the rose. Still, you won’t be here to see.

“From every treetop some wild woods songster will carol his mating song; butterflies will sport in the sunshine, the busy bee will hum happy as it pursues its accustomed vacation; the gentle breeze will tease the tassels of the wild grasses, and all nature will be glad, but you. You won’t be here to enjoy it because I command the sheriff or some other officers of the country to lead you out to some remote spot, swing you by the neck from a knotting bough of some sturdy oak, and let you hang until you are dead.

“And then, Jose Manuel Miguel Xavier Gonzales, I further command that such officer or officers retire quickly from your dangling corpse, so that vultures may descend from the heavens upon your filthy body until nothing shall remain but bare, bleached bones of a cold-blooded, bloodthirsty, throat-cutting, murdering son of a bitch.”

That may be apocryphal, like much of our Western lore, but I have no doubt that some of our hanging judges were capable of such poetic flights when inspired by a hanging, and that their purpose was to deepen the murderer’s anguish and remorse by making him contemplate the beauty of the life he was about to leave.

We do not know what reveries occupy the mind of a condemned man on Death Row. Perhaps a man capable of kidnaping and murdering a child was never aware of life’s small blessings; perhaps the psychopath is never gentled by the humming of a happy bee or the sporting of butterflies in the sunshine.

I have an idea that our cold-blooded murdering SOBs are oblivious to life’s pretty amenities. No need to feel sorry for them. In the words of W. S. Gilbert, “they never will be missed.”