Execution Day - 2:30 p.m.
Barbara's body was left strapped to the death chair for an hour and a half as an exhaust fan high above the gas chamber sucked the deadly fumes out. Her dead body drooled and regurgitated onto the front of her suit, and her bowels and bladder emptied inside her clothes. When it was finally safe enough to enter, she was sprayed with liquid ammonia to neutralize any fumes that might have collected in her clothing, hair, or bodily orifices. Afterward, the body was removed and the place of her execution was fumigated.
The gas chamber was then ready for Perkins and Santo.
They had spent the previous night in adjoining isolation cells just off death row. Warden Teets had ordered a television set put in front of the two cells, quite a treat for them because that was a time in penology before prisoners could have personal TVS in their cells. During the long night, they watched part of a western movie together, but mostly they reminisced about their long criminal partnership. None of the death watch officers heard either one of them mention Barbara Graham a single time.
The curious reticence of the two men to discuss Barbara had been ongoing since their mutual trial ended. At no time during their tenure on death row had either been known to speak of her in any context. Reverend Byron Eshelman, a Congregational minister who was the Protestant chaplain at San Quentin, had been friendly with both men since their arrival on death row, and in the scores of conversations he had with them, individually and together, her name was never uttered even to him. They neither implicated her in the crime, nor absolved her of it. If her name did come up in a group discussion, both men fell strangely silent. Reverend Eshelman sensed their resentment of her -- for leading police to their hideout, and for blowing the trial with her rigged alibi attempt -- but it was a resentment never voiced.
While on the Row, Perkins and Santo were generally liked by other condemned men. Perkins was kind of a good old boy, a hick who played dumb a lot, while Santo, comparably a man of the world, would beguile his peers with true stories of his days with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish-American War.
Both denied the Monohan murder, and some fellow inmates professed to believe them to be innocent -- usually in return for Perkins and Santo believing them to be innocent of their crimes. Mutual disbelief in guilt is a common necessity among the condemned, and its importance increases with the heinousness of the crime -- such as killing a helpless old lady.
To their dubious credit, Perkins and Santo died well. About three hours after Barbara's execution, they strolled together unassisted to the chamber, stared down several witnesses, sat in the companion death chairs, and chatted calmly while being strapped in. As the big door was being closed, Santo yelled out to the death crew, "Don't you fellows do nothing I wouldn't do!"
As they rested their heads back to die, Perkins, at 47, looked to be the older of the two because he had left his dentures in the holding cell. Santo, 54, was well groomed and as swarthy as ever. After the cyanide dropped, Perkins died in six minutes, Santo in seven.
Ed Cassidy, a Burbank detective who was one of the witnesses, commented, "They died too easy. They had it a lot easier than Mabel Monohan."
Just about the time they drew their last breaths, Barbara's body was being put into a hearse from the Frank Keaton Mortuary in nearby San Rafael.
A controversy was already brewing over the last-minute delays in the execution that had transformed Barbara from a comparably calm and self-controlled person ready to go to her death with dignity at 10:00 a.m. as scheduled, into a quivering, near-hysterical, tortured woman who had to be blindfolded and half-carried into the chamber and hour and thirty-four minutes later.
Opponents of the death penalty howled that it was "cruel and unusual punishment." Perhaps it was, but the blame lay not with the authorities but with Al Matthews, a Los Angeles attorney who handled Barbara's appeals and fought very hard to save her life. An emergency appeal he filed in the federal court caused the first delay when the clerk of that court notified the California governor's office to stop the execution process while the appeal was considered. When the appeal was denied a few minutes later and the execution ordered to proceed, Matthews quickly filed a second appeal he had prepared in advance, which resulted in the second delay.
U. S. Judge William Denman strongly rebuked the lawyer, saying that he was "making a carnival out of the entire process." California attorney general Edmund Brown, who later became governor, called it a "disgraceful episode." The Los Angeles Times termed it "a blot on the name of justice."
Yet the fact remains that Matthews was trying to save his client's life.
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