The Murder of the Century: The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized a City & Sparked the Tabloid Wars (35 page)

Thorn’s neighbors weren’t quite sure how to answer, though.

“Good luck!” Braun finally blurted.

Turning his attention to the rest of his new cell, Thorn also noticed what was missing.

“
I want my books,” he pleaded to a guard through the bars. It was the first time that morning that he’d actually sounded upset, and his relief was palpable when the guards moved the pile to his new cell.

“They are my friends,” Thorn said as he hefted his books. He’d developed a fierce love of reading while on Death Row and even had managed to
snare a coveted title from the prison library:
“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows.”

Well, if Sherlock Holmes wasn’t quite a comfort on this day, at least he was entertaining. Thorn paused occasionally to chat across the cell walls with the other prisoners. One was reciting Heine poems, another chimed in with a dirty story, and a third started talking politics—namely, anarchy and socialism.

“I don’t believe in it,” Thorn shook his head. “Let a man keep what he earns.”

“And what a man doesn’t earn, let him steal,” cracked Braun from his cell, before turning more serious. “
Have you seen your mouse yet, Thorn?”

“No,” Thorn called back. He’d caught one earlier in the summer and tamed it with portions of his prison ration. When the pet went missing earlier that week, it had nearly brought him to tears. “Smart little fellow, too—he’d eat out of my hand and all that.”

But now Thorn was alone again in his cell.

“Rats desert a sinking ship,” he added dryly to Braun and said a salutary set of prayers—for while religion had come slowly to him, he was covering his bets now. At six there arrived a final meal of roast beef, turnips, rye bread, and pudding—the foods of Thorn’s youth in Prussia—and as the night finally fell outside, Thorn turned talkative with the priest dispatched to his cell as spiritual counsel. One of the keepers brewed a pot of coffee at the guard station, and cups were passed between the keepers, the priest, and Thorn. The prisoner didn’t want to talk about his case; instead, he mused upon his
childhood in his hometown of Posen. Those were happy days. Why dwell on the present?

I still remember
, he said as midnight closed in.
I remember the sound of my father’s hammer as he worked on shoes
.

“You must get some sleep, Martin,” the priest said gently.

Thorn clasped his hand, then hung his clothes for the morning and settled into his cot. Soon he was so soundly asleep that the guards were startled when he suddenly sat up bolt upright at 4:30 a.m.

Fritz?
he called out.
Adrian?

The other inmates were still asleep.

“What are you doing, Thorn?” a keeper asked.

“Thinking about Posen,” the prisoner mumbled—and then collapsed back into his slumbers.

THE NEXT MORNING
, the curtains were drawn across the other inmates’ cells. Warden Sage was bustling around his office, making preparations and welcoming his guests: the visiting physicians, electricians, and newspaper artists clutching thick pads of paper. All wore black for the occasion, and they mingled with nervous solemnity. More than two thousand applications had poured into the warden’s office in the last week, but state law dictated that
only twenty-eight observers were allowed at the death chamber. These men were the elite of the New York press and medical establishment. The old-timers could spot the yellow-press men by the sheer flash of their presence:
They’ve sent Smith and Jones
.

Hearst had deployed Langdon Smith, one of the
Evening Journal
’s top correspondents, and a man once
famed as the country’s fastest telegrapher. Standing by him was rival
Haydon Jones, the
World
’s own speed artist. Barely out of art school, he’d been
scooped up by Pulitzer’s crew from the
Mail and Express
when it became clear that he was the best quick draw in town.

Follow me
, the warden motioned the crowd. Smith and Jones tagged behind them, observing the location. The artist readied
his favorite Blaisdell pencil and rakishly square Steinbach pad for the
World
litho crew, while Smith took notes for the
Journal
even as they
crossed Sing Sing’s grounds:
“The procession, black-clad and quiet, followed the Warden across the prison yard, where the dumb convicts were working: through the engine-room, where three noiseless dynamos were running, and on to the death chamber. An empty, high-ceilinged room, with broad glazed glass windows, a room without the softening effect of curtains or pictures, a room bare and spartan-like and well-fitted for the rigors of death.”

To the
World
’s man, the
room was reminiscent of a small chapel—its only ornamentation a subtle Grecian meander painted around the walls, like a funeral urn, its totality bathed in the glare of sunlight. A few colored panes had been placed in the high skylights, giving the walls a ghostly green tint. As they sat down on the room’s perimeter of hard pine benches, the crowd was already beginning to perspire under the rays of an August morning.

“
Gentlemen”—the warden stood before them as the revving dynamos became faintly audible—“you will oblige me if you will not leave your places until after the physicians have declared the execution complete.”

Before them, at the center of the far end of the room, stood the instrument of that execution: a heavy, plain-hewn oak chair with leather straps dangling idly from its sides. Above it spread black cables—“
the tentacles of an electrical octopus,” one awed reporter wrote—that snaked down and around the front legs, before creeping up to the screw cap at the back of the empty chair. Nearby, the state’s electrician pointed to a board with a stark arrangement of three rows of six naked lightbulbs.

“
By these lamps,” the electrician explained, “we will test the current and see that we have the necessary power.”

He tapped five bells to the dynamo room, then threw the switch. The lights rose in a row, each in succession, their filaments turning from a cherry-red glow to a blinding white radiance; the empty chair was coursing with electricity, the room ablaze with incandescent light.
1,750 volts at ten amperes
, he read from his gauge. When the power was cut, it took nearly thirty seconds for the angry glow of the test lights to finally die away.

The electric chair was ready.

Warden
Sage opened the iron cell-block door and stepped out of
the room with a guard. Reporters could hear the squeal of an iron door in the adjoining hallway and the low mutter of voices.

“
The hour has come,” the warden said.

“All right,” they heard Thorn answer. “I want to thank you for your kindness.”

The men appeared in the doorway: the warden, the guards, Father Hanselman, and the prisoner, who greeted his old newspaper acquaintances with a quick half smile. Thorn’s gratitude to the warden showed on his sleeve, for Warden Sage had allowed a concession to the man’s vanity: Thorn was wearing his best frock jacket and a white cambric tie. He sat down in the chair without any prompting, as if he were taking breakfast on an ordinary Monday morning.

“Dear God, this will be the birthday of a new life,” intoned Father Hanselman. “
Christ have mercy.”

“Christ have mercy,” Thorn dutifully repeated as his feet were lashed to the chair legs.

His eyes followed the guards as they placed sponges soaked in salt water against his calves and then against the base of his neck, the better to increase conductivity; over these they firmly buckled the cable fittings and the headpiece. A long black rubber sash was stretched across his face and around the back of the chair to hold his head in place; only his mouth was visible through a slit. Scarcely two minutes since he’d been led out of his cell, Thorn was now immobile and blindfolded.

“Christ, Mary, Mother of God,” the priest chanted as he slid a small wooden crucifix into Thorn’s right hand. “Christ have mercy.”

The warden silently nodded to the electrician.

“Chri—” The prisoner’s lips moved.

He never finished the word. Thorn’s body was thrown into the straps by a massive shock. For ten seconds, then another twenty, then thirty more, his limbs convulsed and his neck swelled as the powerful current coursed into him, the amperage needle nearly twisting out of its gauge. A thin curl of smoke rose from his right calf, and when the electrician pushed the lever back up, Thorn’s body slumped. White foam dripped from the slit of the faceless rubber mask.

The prison’s physician stepped forward, stripped open Thorn’s
shirt, and lay the cold medallion of his stethoscope against the condemned man’s chest. The only sound in the room was a pencil making quick slashing and cross-hatching across a sketch pad—for of all the newspaper artists there, only Haydon Jones had the presence of mind to catch Thorn in the moment before the lever was pulled. The others sat stunned and breathing in air that, a
Herald
writer noted, smelled “
like an overheated flatiron on a handkerchief.”

The doctor turned to the witnesses.

“The man is dead,” he said.

SMITH AND JONES
hustled to get their stories and pictures out, and the other reporters followed hard on their heels. While the
Evening Telegram
announced
MARTIN THORN GOES CALMLY TO HIS DEATH
, and the
New York Sun
chimed in with
THORN MET DEATH CALMLY
,
Herald
readers were treated to a different execution altogether:
MARTIN THORN DIES IN ABJECT TERROR
. The
World
, always solicitous of its female readership, declared
WOMAN MEDIUM COMMUNES WITH THORN JUST AS HIS SPIRIT WINGS ITS FLIGHT
.

“It was all for thy sake, Augusta,” they reported him calling out from the astral plane, “but I have forgiven and I died happy.”

One man, though, was not so sure of that. As the reporters quickly exited the stifling death chamber, a different sort of witness pressed past them to the front of the room. Dr. Joseph Alan O’Neill was a surgeon with the New York School of Clinical Medicine, and he looked keenly at the lifeless body still slumped in the chair. It smelled of singed flesh, for one of the saltwater
sponges had dried out, causing a burn hole nearly an inch deep under the electrode on Thorn’s right calf. The body was still warm from the departed electrical current.

O’Neill opened his medical bag, revealing syringes and a ready supply of restoratives:
nitroglycerin, strychnine, and brandy.

Shall I administer them?
Dr. O’Neill asked the warden.

No
, the prison official shot back.
You may not
. The law, the warden
insisted, did not allow for resuscitation measures, but if Dr.
O’Neill insisted on ascertaining that the patient was indeed dead, there was no language in the statute against that.

Then I will
, Dr. O’Neill replied, and produced a stethoscope from his bag.

It was a tense moment. O’Neill was raising a delicate matter that few of the doctors still lingering in the room wished to acknowledge: that nobody was quite sure whether the electric chair actually worked. It had been introduced with great fanfare by the State of New York just eight years earlier, promising a new era of humane and instantaneous execution. But on the chair’s first use, condemned prisoner William
Kemmler had been left still breathing, with brown froth pouring from his mouth; some said he’d also caught fire. The nine-minute ordeal left witnesses so shaken that one deputy sheriff emerged in tears. Thorn, only the twenty-seventh man to go to Sing Sing’s chair, faced a procedure that had hardly been perfected yet.

O’Neill bent over and rested the stethoscope on Thorn’s skin. There was a motion underneath—a faint thrill in the carotid artery. That, he suspected, might just be blood draining from the head down to the trunk. But there were other disturbing signs. With swift and practiced movements, the doctor examined the cremasteric reflex, which retracted or loosened the testes; it was still working. O’Neill then lit his ophthalmoscope and pulled back Thorn’s left eyelid; the pupil contracted beneath the blaze of light.

“If required, I should be very reluctant to sign his death certificate,” the surgeon announced.

It was an admission many physicians made in utmost privacy after these executions—but not in front of the public. The prison doctor pointedly ignored O’Neill and directed two attendants to carry the body to an autopsy room. Thorn’s skull and chest were quickly opened to reveal little of note.

Aghast, Dr. O’Neill fired off a dispatch titled “Who’s the Executioner?” to the
Atlantic Medical Weekly
. “
The law requires post-mortem mutilation,” he noted. “It is, in fact, part of the penalty; for, as it reveals no cause of death and teaches nothing of interest to science, it is evident that
its purpose is to complete the killing.
”