Crimescribe

When 25 witnesses, mostly reporters, gathered in the basement death chamber at Illinois’s Cook County Jail, they couldn’t have known they were gathering there for the last time. Decades down the line Illinois hacks would gather again for the same reason, but in a different place and to see someone killed by a different method.

In 1962 the event itself wasn’t unusual. Illinois had started hanging people courtesy of the Northwest Ordinance passed in 1787. It had replaced the gallows in 1928, starting with a ‘triple hitter’  at Stateville on December 15, 1928.  Dominick Bressette, John Brown and Claude Clarke were  that night electrocuted and, with no problems, the chair’s continued presence was assured.

Three of them, to be exact. One was sited at Stateville and another at Menard, both State prisons. The third, and the busiest, was the Cook County Jail. A rule specified that any county with a population of over a million would retain control of its own executions and Cook (including Chicago and other large population centres) qualified. Anywhere else in Illinois you’d be sent to Stateville or Menard but if you killed in Cook County you died in Cook County.

That wasn’t good news for Warden Jack Johnson who despised the death penalty while still having to carry it out. Like New York had until 1915, Illinois had three electric chairs. Also like New York, its busiest user was its most vehement critic. Like Warden Lewis Lawes at Sing Sing, Johnson had to do the job, but didn’t have to like it. He didn’t, disliking it loudly and often.

Not that it made any difference on that steamy, muggy August night in 1962. James Dukes would die that night and with him went Illinois’s electric chair. Dukes had earned a seat in Old Sparky on June 15, 1956. He’d shot two men who tried to stop him beating up his girlfriend in a church on Chicago’s notorious South Side. They were both seriously wounded, nut survived.

Cornered by two Chicago detectives Dukes murdered Detective John Blyth before his pistol jammed. Dragged out from under a nearby vehicle by Blyth’s partner Detective Daniel Rolewicz, Dukes knew his fate. Illinois had a notoriously hard line with cop killers. As the witnesses gathered in Cook County’s death chamber Rolewicz was one of them. Turning to a reporter he said;

“I’ve been waiting for this night for a long time.”

Dukes, head shaven and already dressed in his execution clothes probably hadn’t declining a last meal, he had to be forced to walk his last mile as well. Clad only in a black hood and black shorts, he was already soaked in sweat and trembling when Warden Johnson’s men came to take him on his final walk.

It may have been around 20 feet between his Death Row cell and the chair itself, but he had to be forced all the same. Whether out of fear or just a desire to be as difficult as possible a United Press international report described the scene:

‘Dukes had to be shoved firmly into the electric chair and held while being strapped in.’

Well, not strapped exactly. Cook County’s chair had few straps but more metal clamps similar to the chair in Hollywood’s version of Stephen King’s ‘The Green Mile.’ That chair was based on the one used in Ohio where inmate Charles Justice had designed metal clamps to replace the old leather straps. Ironically, paroled and released, Justice later came back to Ohio’s state prison on a murder warrant. He died inside his own restraints, perhaps feeling Justice had been ill-served.

Dukes was seated, the straps and clamps were secured after a struggle and the electrodes were applied. Warden Johnson and two anonymous volunteers each pulled one of three switches. None of them knew which was delivering the current. Their first pull delivered a huge jolt. Pulls two and three delivered smaller ones. After a brief pause allowing Dukes’s body to cool enough to be examined the prison doctor stepped forward;

“I pronounce this man dead.”

Only three minutes and forty seconds had elapsed since Dukes had been forced into the room. Now James Dukes was gone. Illinois’s electric chair, unknown to the world, had gone with him. After the current had been shut off an era had ended. No more would witnesses hear the sound of switches clanking and the current humming through a prisoner. No more would an extractor fan remove the smoke and stench of burned meat from a lifeless corpse.

James Dukes had had his day. So had the chair that killed him.

Dukes died without saying any final words, he was too busy struggling to do that, but he wasn’t about to go without a final statement of a kind. When guards went to clear his cell after the execution they found a copy of philosopher Plato’s ‘Dialogues.’ On the pages left open was circled a particular remark:

‘The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways. I to die and you to live. Which is better God only knows.’

It was done. Illinois wouldn’t have another execution for 28 years. On September 12, 1990 it lethally injected murderer Charles Walker. The next was that of notorious serial killer John Wayne Gacy on May 10, 1994. The prison was Stateville (site of Illinois’s first electrocution), the method was lethal injection. Illinois later abolished its death penalty on July 1, 2011, Gacy having been the second of twelve executions in the post-Furman vs Georgia era.

Unlike the more philosophically-inclined Dukes, Gacy’s final comment to the world was reportedly cruder and more defiant. Declining to say anything when strapped onto the stretcher securing him for his lethal injection Gacy said little before entering Stateville’s death chamber. Rather than indulge in any Dukes-like profundity he resorted to profanity instead. Gacy’s last words were reportedly;

“Kiss my ass.”