5. Rich Owens
Sometimes when volunteering for something it isn’t necessary to step forward. Sometimes, everyone else just steps back; this was the case for Rich Owens and the start of his career as an executioner. Owens was a prison guard in Little Rock, Arkansas and he was thrust into the role of executioner when the man who was supposed to do the job showed up too drunk to even pull the switch.
The convicted man was already in the chair, and Owens believed that no man should have to wait any longer than was necessary, so he walked over and did what needed to be done. Owen’s career as an executioner spanned the years 1918 through 1947 he carried out 65 death sentences. Execution wasn’t exactly out of his wheelhouse however; outside of his duties as an agent of death in the name of justice he killed a shocking 10 people.
In relation to these killings he was tried for murder four times but the prosecution could never make it stick. The first of these homicides occurred when Owens, age 13 at the time, thwarted a thief’s attempt on his father’s horse by catching and killing the unfortunate man. In another incident, as a prison guard, he killed two inmates who attempted to escape. The pair of men used Owens as a shield and encouraged him to walk in front of them with a knife to the small of his back. A tower guard shot one of the prisoners and Owens sprang in to action. He wrestled the knife from his captors and stabbed and beat the two men to death in the prison yard.
4. Jimmy Thompson
Unlike some of the more reserved men who have worn the executioner’s hood, Jimmy Thompson was best described as ‘colorful’ by his peers. Thompson was the state of Mississippi’s executioner throughout the 1940s and his mannerisms befit him as the ex-carnival man that he was. Lagging behind the East Coast in adoption of electrocution, Mississippi relied on traditional gallows and hangmen to carry out their death sentences until the state adopted the electric chair in 1940.
In Mississippi, the executions took place in the country where sentencing was handed down, so in a decidedly modern effort, the state decreed that the executioner would travel around the state in a specially outfitted truck equipped with a ‘mobile death chamber’. This included a generator capable of producing a lethal current, a chair, and restraints.
Thompson’s criminal record was far from clean—he was an ex-convict himself. He administered his executions in jail yards, but the American public can’t give up their morbid curiosity. Crowds would gather around the jails that he visited and a cheer would go up when the lights would flicker. In keeping with his rough lifestyle, Thompson would immediately spend a large portion of his payment on copious amounts of alcohol that night and he often found himself in the drunk tank as a result of his late night escapades.
Did he do it because Thompson was a binge drinker, or did he do it because beneath his rough exterior he couldn’t bear the guilt of having taken the lives of so many people?
3. T. Berry Bruce
After hangings were abolished in Mississippi in 1940, the technological pace of execution equipment picked up speed. In 1955, the state switched to gas chamber executions. It was also around this time that the name of the executioner officially became privileged information. It was about 20 years too late for cautious and worried executioners like Hulbert.
The records may still be sealed today, if it wasn’t for a document leak from the Mississippi Governor’s Office in the 1980s. The leak revealed that since 1957 a former produce salesman had been the man behind the gas so to speak. Berry Bruce was a military veteran who carried out his 12 plus executions in complete secrecy—hiding his actions from even his wife. He had retired in 1964 without anyone outside of the execution chamber knowing that he was a prolific executioner, but the document leak prompted him to come out of retirement. In keeping with the quick pace of technological development, the gassing of convicts was reassessed by the state after the botched execution of a child rapist named Jimmy Lee Gray.
Instead of losing consciousness and passing in peace, Gray spent eight agonizing minutes gasping and convulsing while he asphyxiated in a cocktail of acid vapors and cyanide gas. The episode was so gruesome that the warden dismissed the witnesses before the condemned man was pronounced dead. There were accusations that Gray’s last moments were the product of a heavily intoxicated Bruce’s failed execution attempts.
2. John C. Woods
A man who told Time magazine in 1946 that he was proud to hang nearly a dozen members of the Third Reich came under fire after the high profile executions of ten Nazi officials. Sentenced to death by the famous Nuremberg trials, the duty to carry out their sentences fell on the shoulders of US Army Master Sergeant John Clarence Woods.
While none of his other victims had the same notoriety of top Nazi leaders, Woods hanged nearly 100 men during WWII; both court marshaled servicemen as well as Nazis. He was exposed to some controversy when a witness to his most famous hanging heard moaning and struggling from behind a partition. Woods disappeared behind the curtain and reemerged to accusations that he helped the condemned man on his way. Even more disturbing is the claim that Woods intentionally mishandled the hanging to cause undue suffering on the part of his victims.
1. Jerry Givens
With the unpleasantness of hangings, electrocutions, and toxic fumes behind us, we now use the civilized method of lethal injection to dispose of society’s undesirables. The 1980s leak in Mississippi notwithstanding, the identities of almost all contemporary prison executioners have remained secret. Jerry Givens is an exception as he voluntarily spoke out as a strong opponent of the death penalty.
Givens was an executioner in Virginia and followed the technological tide from electrocution into injection. Calling his role as an executioner ‘the biggest mistake he ever made’, Givens told The Guardian “Life is short… Death is going to come to us. We don’t have to kill one another.”
Unlike some of the more outspoken and bombastic executioners, Givens suffered significant mental anguish over the administration of his duties. He killed 62 convicts for the state of Virginia over his career that spanned 17 years. He suffered flashbacks and significant mental distress in connection to his duties but before he could resign he served four years in prison for money laundering (Givens maintains his innocence).
Psychiatrists diagnosed Givens with a form of PTSD—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—now known as ‘executioner’s stress’, a revelation that the mental health field would never have reached if Givens hadn’t spoken out. While the title reflects the ultimate responsibility of the executioner, the so named executioner’s stress can afflict any member of prison staff that participates in carrying out a death sentence.
