PART IV
Execution Day - 10:00 a.m.
When Warden Harley Teets, Father Daniel McAlister, and the execution team came for her, Barbara had changed from the red silk pajamas into a champagne wool suit with matching covered buttons, brown high-heel shoes, small, gold, drop earrings, and a crucifix around her neck. A wheelchair had been parked near the holding cell, in case the woman became hysterical or too weak to walk on her own. But it was not needed. Barbara was more than ready; she'd had all she wanted of life.
"It's time," Father McAlister said quietly.
"Thank God," Barbara replied. She took the priest's hand. "I feel good, Father. I don't feel any hatred. I feel only pity for everyone who will have to live with what they've done to me."
Just as she stepped out of the holding cell, the telephone rang for Warden Teets. He conversed tersely with someone for a moment, then hung up and said, "Governor Knight has instructed me to delay the proceedings."
"My God, why'" Father McAlister asked.
"I'm not sure," said Teets. "Some kind of legal technicality, they said"
Hearing that, Barbara collapsed and had to be helped back to the cot in the holding cell.
Five minutes passed. Ten. Twenty.
Finally, at 10:25, the telephone rang again. This time Teets did little more than listen. After hanging up, he said, "The governor has said to go ahead with the execution."
It took several minutes for the priest, the doctor, and a matron to get the distraught woman back up and on her feet steadily enough again to once more start the short walk to the gas chamber. This time they made it to the chamber entrance, but just as Barbara was about to step through the chamber door, just as she glimpsed a sea of thirty-seven faces peering through the chamber's plate-glass windows to witness her die, the telephone rang a third time and her escorts quickly drew her back.
Harley Teets looked pale and ill when he hung up the phone this time. "Governor Knight has ordered another delay," he said miserably.
"I can't take this," Barbara said, choking on her words. "Why didn't they let me go at ten' I was ready to go at ten!"
Instead of taking Barbara all the way back to the holding cell, the death crew helped her into a small preparation office adjoining the gas chamber room. There she was helped to sit down on a secretarial chair; she nearly fell off when it suddenly swiveled and rolled. Shivering as if she had just been pulled out of icy water, yet beginning to sweat profusely, she was helped to keep her balance by Father McAlister and one of the matrons.
More minutes passed, with maddening slowness. Five. Ten. Twenty.
"Why do they torture me like this'" Barbara half screamed, half sobbed.
Everyone in the crowded little room probably wondered the same thing. By now, all of them were perspiring heavily. A matron produced a handkerchief and gently patted Barbara's forehead and cheeks. Finally, at 11:18, an hour and eighteen minutes after Barbara had initially started for the gas chamber, the telephone rang a fourth time.
"We're ordered to proceed again," Warden Teets said bleakly after taking the call.
Barbara was helped to her feet again. This time she had only a few last steps to go in order to enter the chamber. Suddenly she remembered the sea of faces she had seen through the witness windows. "I don't want to look at those faces!" she said in sudden, desperate panic.
"Is there anything we can use as a blindfold'" someone asked.
"I have a sleep mask," a matron said. She hurried back to the holding cell area where her purse was.
Father McAlister put his arm around Barbara and she leaned her head on his shoulder. Her lips began to move as if in prayer, but no one could hear her words except the priest. Presently, the matron returned with the sleep mask and it was put over Barbara's eyes. The death crew then started her for the chamber again.
It was 11:34 when Barbara was finally guided into the twin-chaired execution chamber and helped to sit in the chair on the right. In the blue-green light, the lower part of her face below the mask looked as white as ivory. Her natural chestnut hair, grown back from being bleached blond, looked soft and shiny. Four brown-uniformed officers quickly strapped her ankles, forearms, and chest to the chair. As they completed their assigned jobs, they left the chamber. The last one to leave patted Barbara on the shoulder and said, "Count to ten after you hear the cyanide tablets drop, and then take a deep breath. It's easier that way."
Turning toward the sound of his voice, Barbara grunted derisively. "How the hell would you know'" she said without rancor.
The big airtight door was swung shut and pressure locked. Witnesses saw Barbara swallow nervously. Several times she wet her lips. At some point, she moved her lips, perhaps praying. It was a full minute before she heard the plunger-like sound of a cheesecloth bag, containing two golf- ball-size cyanide pellets, being lowered into a concrete vat of sulphuric acid directly beneath her chair. The sound, though very faint, startled her and she tensed momentarily. Through a rubber tube attached to a stethoscope diaphragm taped to her chest, then extending through an air-tight portal to the exterior of the chamber, a doctor listened as her heartbeat increased to a frenzied rate. The death fumes were invisible, but their slight bitter almond odor reached Barbara's olfactory nerves and her nostrils flared once, briefly. Then she drew in a deep, deliberate, tortuous breath. Almost at once, he head nodded, lips twitching, then slumped forward, chin on chest. As the doctor listened, he heart slowed until it finally chugged and gushed to a final halt.
Barbara Graham was dead at 11:42 a.m.
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