Crimescribe

Last time we recounted the botched hanging of Arizona killer Earl Gardner, the last man to hang in Arizona. Two days before Gardner danced the hangman’s hornpipe near the Coolidge Dam, Frank Rascon left the death cells at the Arizona State Prison. His final journey took him from what Arizona’s convicts had christened ‘Red Light Row’ across to a flight of thirteen steps, a nod to the traditional thirteen steps of a scaffold and the fictional thirteen turns of the rope on an old-fashioned hangman’s knot.

Those thirteen steps took him through a locked door to an airtight steel box holding chairs with restraints and machinery designed to mix cyanide with dilute acid. Once the lever was pulled there was no turning back. A thin cloud of lethal hydrocyanic gas resembling cigarette smoke would fill the chamber and Rascon would only leave it in a casket.

Once prison physician Doctor H.B. Steward had listened through a specially-designed stethoscope leading outside the chamber he would certify Rascon dead. Rascon’s epitaph would be the wail of the extractor fan supposedly making the chamber safe to enter. It wasn’t safe at all but, gas chambers still being new technology, not all of the teething troubles had been identified. Still less had anything been done about some of them.

Frank Rascon’s death was deliberate and lawful, planned to the last minute and detail. That of his newly-widowed wife Ramona was not, but she nearly died all the same. The reason? Cyanide residue had condensed on Frank’s still-warm corpse. As his casket was taken away a distraught Ramona insisted on it being opened. In tears. the distressed widow kissed her husband several times, ingesting a near-fatal dose of cyanide as she did so.

On her miserable car journey back to Phoenix the poison began to do its work. Its effect was almost as lethal as it was quick and unexpected and only prompt medical attention prevented a single execution becoming a double by mistake. By the time Ramona Rascon received medical aid at her home in Phoenix she was perilously near death.

Arizona’s chamber had been inaugurated on July 6, 1934 when brothers Manuel and Fred Hernandez died side-by-side shortly after five in the morning. The Hernandez brothers were youngster, Manuel being only eighteen and Fred just a year older. Within minutes of the gas and acid being mixed there was an emergency. The newly-installed chamber was leaking, ot at least it smelled like it. The witnesses were hurriedly escorted away from the chamber while the Hernandez brothers steeped in the lethal fumes until all were satisfied that they were in fact dead.

After them came George Shaughnessy on July 13, aged only nineteen. Forty six-year-old Louis Douglas followed Shaughnessy on August 31, but the executioner had to wait until May 15, 1936 before adding Jack Sullivan to his list. Sullivan was also young, aged only twenty-three when he drew his last breath. Still only twenty-six, Frank Rascon was still one of the new chamber’s older victims.

Rascon would die for the murder of Joe Romero, a fellow cowboy shot dead after a brawl near the town of Beardsley on June 11, 1935. Rascon blamed his father for the shooting, but only after being convicted, condemned and his appeals having failed. He hadn’t had to die at all, having fled to Mexico safely outside US jurisdiction. Foolishly, Rascon returned to the US a month later and found himself facing death for the crime he blamed on his fugitive father. It didd him as much good as claiming self-defence had at his trial.

Whether or not Rascon or his father fired the shot will probably never be known, but we do know that the young convict had a more compassionate side. At the time of Rascon’s death two other men, killers Joseph Cochrane and Frank Duarte, were also waiting their turn. Rascon commiserated with them even in his last days, encouraging them to remain cheerful even as his own time ran out. When it did, he died with consequences both unexpected and unintended.

Rascon was escorted the chamber at five on the morning of July 10, 1936, only two days befoe Earl Gardner took his surprisingly willing place in Arizona history. Jack Sullivan had met his end onlytwo months earlier on May 15 and died with cockiness and bravado.

Stripped to his underwear, puffing on a cigar and smiling at cameras on his final walk, Sullivan continued smoking even as the door was sealed and the lever pulled. Only when he took his first whiffs of the gas did he spit the cigar on the chamber floor and inhale strongly to end it as quickly as possible. Rascon was no coward, but he lacked the arrogant Sullivan’s bluster.

When the time came Rascon made one last protestation of innocence. While Catholic priest Father Basil Delgado translated, Rascon offered a last denial as the straps tightened around him:

“I am innocent! My father did the killing!”

Innocent or guilty, Frank Rascon was about to die for the murder of Joe Romero. His last act was hold his breath for almost a minute as the lethal fumes swirled up around him. With a final cough Rascon also spat his cigar on the floor and lost consciousness thereafter. Nine minutes later he was dead.

The fan wailed, sending the deadly gas up a long chimney into the open air. In their cells on nearby Red Light Row, Cochrane and Duarte would have heard the wail, their first sign that Rascon was no more and that they were next in line.Rascon’s corpse was quickly unstrapped and placed in a casket to be collected by his wife Romana, who had remained nearby even while the brim ritual was in progress.

As the casket was carried past the distraught widow insisted on seeing her husband’s body. Showering kisses on her late husband she collapsed in tears, eventually getting into a car for hte long ride back to Phoenix. Nobody knew she had just suffered near-fatal cyanide poisoning. Either enough cyanide had condensed on her late husband’s skin or a last wisp of gas remained in his body, but whichever it was almost killed Ramona Rascon as well.

Stricken with partial paralysis, intense pain and severe vomiting, her body tried to expel the poison while doctors struggled to save her life. Doctor Steward later categorically (and rather unrealistically) denied she had been poisoned as a result of her husband’s recent execution. That was taken with more than a pinch of salt, but to prevent lawsuits against the State and prison and condemned prisoners appealing on ground of cruel and unusual punishment, that had to be the official position.

Prompt and effective treatment saw her safely out of danger, but it took almost a week for her to fully recover. That was never supposed to happen. Officials knew to wash the inside of the chamber thoroughly with a mixture of ammonia and caustic soda to neutralise any remaining cyanide. They also mandated the condemned wear only shorts and shoes to prevent any wisps of gas building up in their clothing.

They did not know they had to wash down a convict’s body after death and Romana Rascon paid the price for their lack of knowledge. This would become standard procedure for gas chamber executions thereatfer in the States that adopted it. Romana Rascon’s near-death experience had not been in vain, as much as her husband had led a wasted life and died an agonising death. She was lucky not to have joined him.

In the chamber’s early days most States made prisoners die wearing as little as possible. After more experience using the chamber, most allowed convicts to die fully-clothed. Anything they wore was cut off, their body washed down and the clothes incinerated for safety reasons. This was probably little consolation, if any, to the woman who lost her husband and almost her life on the very same day.