The Executioner's Song

Pittsburgh County oak used to make this chair has turned dark, maybe because of age, maybe by the past it bears.

Eighty-two lives ended in "Old Sparky," the state's electric chair, 61 at the hands of the man said to have "little devils jumping out" of his unblinking blue-gray eyes.

"Oh, the spirits of that chair," said John East, a volunteer who runs the McAlester State Penitentiary museum where the now-retired chair sits.

Richard Earnest Owen didn't make a living with death, but he made a name. A former coal mining pit boss, Owen was paid $100 (that would be equivalent to $1,207 in today's money) for each man he executed. On days he put more than one to an end, he was paid $50 for each extra execution.

From 1918-1947, Owen received $5,750 for executions, about $69,000 in 2006 dollars. But he didn't do it for the money, he would say. After executions, Owen would go right back to work as "gang boss" of inmate work crews in an era when "hard labor" was part of prison life.

While history fades with time, legend grows. Which effect plays on Owens's story might never be clear, since those who knew the state's most prolific executioner have themselves faded.

"Most of these old retired prison guards are dead and gone," said James Tannehill, whose family runs a private museum in McAlester that housed the electric chair until it was moved to the prison museum.

Even the man's name is unclear. Some prison history buffs and many news stories spell it "Owen," but others, including his obituary printed after his death at age 67 in 1948, spell it "Owens."

By all accounts, though, one thing is clear: The guy was one tough knot.

Born in Joplin, Mo., Owen was tried for murder four times and acquitted. He shot six men to death. His first was a thief he picked off his father's horse when Owen was 13, one was a disgruntled mine worker Owen fired, one was shot while Owen pursued a murder suspect and the rest were escaping inmates. Owen fatally knifed two other men.

Owen, once an aspiring boxer, beat an inmate to death with a shovel, telling the warden he finished the man off by jumping up and down on his head. That happened after two inmates tied Owens's hands with barbed wire, stuck a knife in his back and tried to use him to escape.

Owen warned them right off he was no shield, that he'd tell guards to shoot regardless. He kicked and struggled until one inmate was shot by a guard, then Owen dealt with the second man himself, turning on his attacker until he had nearly severed the inmate's head.

"He was a little bitty fella," Tannehill said "Evidently, he would fight a circular saw. He was back when ships were wood and men were steel."

Writers who visited Owen found two joyless bulldogs in Owens's yard an unavoidable metaphor for the man.

Owen was a natural to become the young state's first resident official executioner.

The job fell to Owen after a man hired from Arkansas for the first few executions showed up too drunk to throw the switch. Assisting, Owen didn't flinch and "walked over and slapped it to him like I was doing it all
my life," he told a reporter.

That was decades before America's highest court ruled standards for imposing the death penalty unconstitutional, before so much of the public had grown conflicted over execution. Oklahoma's last electrocution in the chair occurred in 1966. The state's next execution, by the lethal injection method Oklahoma was first to adopt, wasn't until 1990.

"We're talking about a different time," said East, former case manager supervisor who coordinated injection executions before retiring in 1999. "It's a whole new era."

Back in Owens's day, executioner was a job, one Owen seemed born to. "It is a pleasure to kill some of these dirty so- and-sos," Owen once said of strapping men in for the kill, then standing feet away in plain view and throwing the switch. "I never give them a thought afterward."

However, the executioner befriended some of the condemned, including one man who requested Owen pray with him in the hours before Owen was to execute him. Owen complied, but said he had no sympathy for the man. He did for the inmate's wife, though, and signed over his $100 execution check to her so she could buy a train ticket and move to the Panhandle.

"Nobody I ever electrocuted ever held it against me," he said, "at least not before hands."

Owen, also called on to electrocute three men in New Mexico, two in Arkansas and two in Texas, didn't care for the one hanging he had to perform in McAlester in 1936.

Some blamed the way Owen tied the noose or the way he placed it around Arthur Gooch, the only man to ever be executed under the federal Lindberg kidnapping law. Gooch was the only person sentenced to death and executed by the federal government for kidnapping, while a victims remained unharmed. Gooch participated in kidnapping two policemen in Texas and released them in Oklahoma.

Although electric chair was an only method of executions in Oklahoma at this time, Gooch was executed by hanging. Like Gooch, another federal inmate James Alderman, executed in Florida on 1929, was also hanged, despite Florida State law authorized electrocution as a sole method.

The sentence was carried out by Oklahoma's state electrician Richard Earnest Owens. According to the witnesses, Gooch's hanging was preformed by a botched way and his death lasted 15 minutes. Many blamed Owen for this failure, because this was the only hanging he ever preformed.

Arthur Gooch, identified in a June 20, 1936, Tulsa World story as a kidnapper, bandit, larcenist and pervert, was executed under a 1934 law that made it a capital offense to take a kidnap victim across a state line.

He had been convicted in U.S. District Court of kidnapping two Paris, Texas, police officers and forcing them to take him into Pushmataha County, where they were released. He and five other prisoners had escaped from the Okmulgee County Jail a few days earlier.

One escapee was killed by police at the time Gooch was captured.

A crowd of 350 came to the penitentiary to watch the execution of Gooch, 36, a federal prisoner, on a gallows that was constructed in the prison yard after prisoners had gone to bed. It was dismantled before they arose the next morning.

It took 15 minutes for Gooch to die, a delay that authorities said was the fault of the executioner, Rich Owen, who had electrocuted 59 persons since 1912 but had never hanged anyone.

The noose around Gooch's neck slipped, causing him to choke to death rather than die of a broken neck.

Something of a carnival atmosphere had developed at the prison.

As the witnesses began arriving in the yard for the 5:30 a.m. hanging, they were told that newspaper reporters would be allowed to stand near the gallows, but that lay witnesses would have to remain 100 feet behind.

At least 100 lay witnesses pulled out paper and pencils and claimed to be reporters. They were allowed to remain near the gallows, the World reported.

After the execution, witnesses rushed to the wooden gallows and cut off pieces for souvenirs. Some were able to cut off pieces of the rope.

"Hangings take too long and are too messy," Owen said.

Owen studied his preferred method, boasting "all of them have been perfect." He said that just by looking at a man he could figure how much power was needed to execute him. He was proud of varying voltage to "let him cool down a little," while bringing death quickly, dependably and without having to "burn a man half so bad" in the process.

"The blood has to have time to cook in the heart," he explained. These days, executioner is more concept than character, some say.

Three people meet at an undisclosed location. Wearing black hoods so not even the driver knows them, they are shuttled to the prison to administer lethal drugs from behind one-way glass.

"Few people ever see them come or leave," a McAlester prison spokeswoman said.

The ritual has occurred often in recent years in Oklahoma, which led the nation in executions in 2001 with 18. Oklahoma's 14 executions so far this year place the state second behind Texas' 20, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Oklahoma's total of 69 is third behind Texas and Maryland in number of executions since 1976.

Through them all, executioner secrecy has been maintained. Only a few officials know who Oklahoma's executioners are, and, unlike those of the past, today's executioners are not allowed to talk to the media or
divulge their identity. It's all "to protect the dignity of the process," Mann said. "We don't want sensationalism."

Owen didn't seem to either, they say, even though public attention was inevitable for a man with his expertise. He didn't ask for the duty, he said, and "it's just another job to me. Somebody has to do it."

Even from the bed where he was dying from liver cancer, Owen told a reporter he was ready to stand at the switch one last time and send the next condemned man on his way "if I can stand up long enough to pull it."

To the end, Owen said he never feared what he brought to so many. "I just figured every man has a time to go."

Gooch’s last words were: "It's kind of funny--dying. I think I know what it will be like. I'll be standing there, and all of a sudden everything will be black, then there'll be a light again. There's got to be a light again--there's got to be".

One acquaintance of Owens remarked after his death "I reckon by now Owens knows whether he ever killed an innocent man or not."

(source: The Oklahoman & The Tulsa World)

© - Dennis Muncrief - March 2008