Historic Criminal Trials and Errors

By Don Weber

Don Weber brings his fifty-plus years of experience in writing and the criminal law to the reader. This book is a must-read for true-crime enthusiasts, Ripperologists, and anyone interested in increasing their knowledge of crime and criminal trials. The bestselling author gives the reader the details of forensic science and the criminal law in simple, easily understood language.

The author has tried hundreds of criminal jury cases, both as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. He details the real-life use of DNA science, psychological profiling, bite-mark comparison, gunshot analysis, and many other aspects of forensic evidence. The book also explains most aspects of criminal law and procedure, such as the little understood Felony Murder Rule and the valuable but often overlooked use of the Grand Jury and the prior consistent statement rule.

Along the way, real trials, and historic trials that never happened, are detailed. From the badly botched murder of the Czar and his family to the forensic evidence that saved Wyatt Earp from the gallows, historic crimes are described and autopsied. The fictional trial of Robert Kennedy for the murder of Marilyn Monroe and the trial and execution of Jack the Ripper are based on actual facts taken from the historic evidence.

Readers who want to sharpen their skills concerning crime and evidence and increase their understanding of criminal trials must have this riveting and informative book in their library.

Were Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday saved from the gallows by forensic evidence?

Would Robert Kennedy have taken the witness stand in his trial for the murder of Marilyn Monroe?

The trial and hanging of Aaron Kosminski for the Jack the Ripper murders.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9798889600145

Book preview

cover.jpg

Historic Criminal Trials and Errors

Don Weber

Copyright © 2024 Don Weber

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2024

ISBN 979-8-88960-013-8 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88960-014-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

To Philip Weber and Ed Moorman, two skillful and accomplished defense attorneys who never lost their sense of humor.

Preface

Chapter 1

The Death Penalty

Chapter 2

Criminal Errors and Miscalculations

Chapter 3

The Right to a Fair Trial: Very Clever, Mr. Moorman

Chapter 4

Police Investigations

Chapter 5

Reading Case Files

Chapter 6

Courts and Trials According to Hollywood and the Press

Chapter 7

The Bill of Rights and the Right to Lie

Chapter 8

Alibis and Other Dumb Stories

Chapter 9

Confessions

Chapter 10

Cross-Examination

Chapter 11

The Right to a Jury Trial

Chapter 12

Opening Statement

Chapter 13

Psychiatrists and the Insanity Defense

Chapter 14

Pathologists, Poisons, and the Kennedys

Chapter 15

Gunshot Wounds, Wyatt Earp, and JFK

Chapter 16

Presentation of Trial Evidence

Chapter 17

Criminal Intent, Accountability, and Felony Murder

Chapter 18

Closing Arguments

Chapter 19

Jury Deliberations and Verdicts

Chapter 20

The Jack the Ripper Murders

Chapter 21

Pretrial Proceedings in the Trial of Aaron Kosminski

Chapter 22

The Trial of Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper

Chapter 23

The Crown v. Aaron Kosminski: Closing Argument

Epilogue

Literary Résumé

About the Author

To Philip Weber and Ed Moorman, two skillful and accomplished defense attorneys who never lost their sense of humor.

Preface

All the anecdotes in this book are true, although some names or murder weapons have been changed to protect the guilty. The characters depicted are all real-life human beings, but events or murder details may have been slightly altered. Reality is always more interesting than fiction. The stories related in this book actually happened. After all, truth is stranger than fiction, and one cannot make this stuff up.

The original intent of this book was to give the reader the inside story about real-life investigations and courtroom procedures using real anecdotes from actual police investigations and courtroom dramas. The original intent, giving the reader a simple lesson in trial strategies for beginners, changed into a more in-depth look at the steps in the prosecution and defense of crimes. As the content and purpose of the book changed, the title changed. The title went from A Handbook of Criminal Trials and Procedure for Beginners to the more commercial Criminal Law for Dummies. But the content was always aimed at amateur sleuths who watch murder investigations and court trials on TV but never really realize the real-life foibles of judges, cops, defendants, pathologists, and prosecutors.

The law described in the various chapters has not been changed or altered in any respect. All the legal principles of the criminal law from such topics as jury selection, the death penalty, or closing argument to the right to testify and the exercise of Fifth Amendment Rights and beyond are accurate statements of known legal concepts. Even when Jack the Ripper is put on trial, the pretrial and trial proceedings are constrained by accurate legal rulings and known precedent.

This book is factual and accurate. There was no need to stretch the facts or the law. Not all cop hunches turn out to be correct; not all defendants are wily; many judges have no idea what is going on. In these stories, the reader will discover what really happens in investigations and trials.

Chapter 1

The Death Penalty

In pronouncing the sentence of death, the Court shall set the date of execution, which shall be not less than 60 nor more than 90 days from the date sentence is pronounced.

—Illinois Criminal Code Section 5/119-5(b)

Although Illinois has a somewhat tortured past when it comes to capital punishment, its history of the death penalty is much shorter, and hence less colorful, than that of, say, England.

A History of the Death Penalty in England

England employed quite an assortment of imaginative and often barbaric methods of execution over the centuries. One of the most enduring was beheading, a fate suffered famously by two of King Henry VIII's wives—innocent Anne Boleyn in 1536 and guilty Catherine Howard a few years later in 1541.

Anne Boleyn—falsely convicted of adultery with, among others, the court minstrel Mark Smeaton and her own brother, George, and for plotting against her husband, King Henry—was beheaded at the Tower of London. Her chopping block is still on display in the courtyard, although she actually opted for a French swordsman instead of the traditional block. Unfortunately, the former queen's ladies-in-waiting had not planned much further than the harrowing event itself, and poor Anne's head and body were stuffed into a used arrow box before being buried nearby. According to legend, Anne's head continued her prayers for some time after it was ceremoniously separated from her body.

Anne Boleyn was beheaded on this spot at the Tower of London on May 13, 1536. She was innocent. Her body was placed in a discarded arrow box. The former Queen of England and mother of future Queen Elizabeth I was buried in a common grave in the floor of nearby St. Peter Vincula Chapel. The chapel is seen in the background.

Catherine Howard, Henry's third wife and the reigning queen of England, rehearsed her beheading the night before the grisly event, with accommodating guards bringing the chopping block to her quarters. She preferred a graceful approach to the block so she would not botch her royal role in the proceedings and embarrass the guests. The English are nothing if not proper and polite.

Catherine died unremorsefully, confessing her adultery but pronouncing, I die the queen of England, but I would rather die the wife of Thomas Culpeper.

A marriage to Culpeper, her adulterous lover, would have been problematic however, since he had already been beheaded at Tyburn Hill, the site in London famous as the location of the wooden gallows called the Tyburn Tree, where an estimated 1,100 men and 100 women were hanged over the 650 years it was in use. As was the custom then, Culpeper's head, along with those of several others accused of carnal knowledge of Queen Catherine, was displayed on a pike on London Bridge.

Beheading Culpeper was actually an act of mercy by King Henry. Because of the man's long and close association, Henry commuted Culpeper's sentence from the more ghastly and immeasurably more painful sentence of being hanged, drawn, and quartered. That quaint English custom, dating back to at least the fourteenth century, was the severe punishment reserved for special traitors. The condemned was fastened to a wooden plank and drawn by a horse to the place of execution, again, usually at Tyburn Hill. The traitor was hanged to a point just short of death before he was emasculated and disemboweled and then beheaded before his body was quartered (cut into four pieces). The pieces were then sent to the four ends of the kingdom to be displayed as warnings to other wannabe traitors to consider the matter carefully before acting. (See Mel Gibson's movie Braveheart for a fairly graphic portrayal of that sentence inflicted on Scottish hero William Wallace in 1305.)

King Henry also commuted the more severe sentence for his longtime friend and advisor, Thomas Moore, to beheading. Even kings can be merciful and considerate.

But that was not the practice by King Charles II in 1660. Oliver Cromwell—the Puritan Lord Protector of England, who had been in charge of the government when he ordered the beheading of Charles II's father in 1649—died of natural causes in 1658. When Charles II ascended to the throne, he had Cromwell's body exhumed so it could be hanged in chains before it was beheaded. Cromwell's head was lost for a time before it was found and buried at Tyburn. The English were a vengeful people back then, and traitors' corpses were not allowed to rest in peace.

Boiling in oil was another favorite for the ever-inventive English executioners. This particular method of tortuous death was in style for special murderers like poisoners who did not deserve having their severed heads put on pikes or their quartered remains distributed throughout the realm. Before lowering the condemned into the pot of boiling oil, the hooded executioner would inquire as to which way the hapless figure would prefer to enter the pot—headfirst or feetfirst—it being considered impolite for an executioner to just go about his business without asking.

All these quaint English customs were well-known to the founding fathers in the American colonies. In 1791, ratification of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited cruel and unusual punishment. The amendment's intended prohibition against fates such as boiling in oil or being drawn and quartered has been used to argue that the jolt of electricity initially felt by the condemned in the electric chair or the little sting involved in the intravenous delivery of the first dose of the three drugs used in lethal injection were cruel and unusual. One wonders if a recipient of the boiled-in-oil treatment would not have much preferred a little sting.

While the United States has eschewed all connections to the executions in early England, some of our most popular slang and common phrases are derived from hangings there. An early form of gallows was a simple ladder. The condemned would be led up the ladder with a noose around his neck and fastened to a fixture above the ladder. At an appropriate point on the ladder, the man would be turned off the ladder to be hanged. The next time you hear someone say they are turned off by this or that, it may have a new and more colorful meaning.

Hangings were for centuries celebrated by huge crowds that marked the events with music, entertainment, eating, and a lot of drinking. The day after a hanging, many of the celebrants felt horrible because of the effects of overindulgence in drink. They suffered what came to be known as a hangover.

Similarly, the condition of being on the wagon—that is, not drinking at the present—has its origins in the custom of allowing the condemned to alight from the wagon that was taking him or her to execution at Tyburn Hill. The condemned was encouraged to quaff a few strong brews at each rest stop. By the time the condemned arrived at the site of the execution, they often were already three sheets to the wind. It was thought that drunken hangees were less likely to struggle against the hangman's noose compared to the sober ones. Of course, there were always a few who remained on the wagon, especially the executioner and other officials. The prisoners who remained on the wagon died as sober as the judge who condemned them.

Jack the Ripper—That Would Have Been a Historic Hanging

England would surely have laid claim to the world's most famous hanging if the authorities had the gumption to arrest and convict the world's most famous serial killer, Jack the Ripper. Detectives and writers have debated the identity of the Ripper for 135 years, but many experts and this author are now convinced that the five (or six or eleven, depending on one's interpretation of the evidence) gruesome, slashing murders of women between 1888 and 1891 in the Whitechapel district in the East End of London were the work of Aaron Mordke Kosminski.

Kosminski was a Polish Jew who immigrated to England as a young boy between 1871 and 1873. Police records described him as a barber or hairdresser who seldom worked, ate food from the gutters, claimed to be guided by inner voices, and was known to have a hatred of women. He was eventually declared insane and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in mental institutions, where he died in 1919 at age 54. Although police reports from the Ripper investigation mentioned him as a suspect, he was never arrested or charged.

If Kosminski or anyone else had been convicted as Jack the Ripper, he surely would have been sentenced to hang at Newgate Prison, near where the actual murders occurred in London. English hangings were carried out in many places, but the most prominent ones were Gallows Hill, just outside the Tower of London, and Tyburn Tree, near Marble Arch. However, hangings at Tower Hill Gallows were reserved for the wealthy or influential who had run afoul of the law or, as was more likely, the king or his ministers. Tower Hill Gallows was a short walk from the Tower of London. Tyburn was a short wagon ride from the place of confinement for less well-to-do hangees, but at least the Tyburn condemned got to stop off for a few drinks before arriving at the gallows.

The Marble Arch landmark is located near Hyde Park and is the former location of Tyburn Gallows. Marble Arch is a stop on the popular City of London bus tour. Just catch any double-decker tourist tour bus, and it will take you right by the Tyburn Gallows area.

Hanging had developed into an art form, and much care was taken to conduct a proper hanging by the time Kosminski would have been executed.

The first requirement of an efficient hanging was the knot or rope noose. Over the centuries, the hangman's knot continued to be developed and refined. The knots used from the tenth century to the nineteenth century were simple slipknots. The problem with a simple slipknot was that it did not kill the hangee quickly but rather inflicted a slow death by strangulation. To hasten the execution, the executioner would often allow playful children, concerned family members, or even paid assistants to pull on the person hanging from the rope to hasten the pace of strangulation and death. This quaint custom was the origin of a unique and seemingly harmless description of joking with or fooling a person. If someone is pulling your leg, you may be in worse circumstances than you had realized, although the act may be seen by some as merciful.

By the time of the Ripper murders, the slipknot had evolved into a more sophisticated mechanism with a metal eye spliced into one end of the rope. The rope was then passed through the metal eye to form the noose. This improvement to the slipknot allowed the rope to shorten more easily as the hangee dropped and the tension on the rope increased from the weight of the body. The metal eye created a more efficient ligature and was considered a vast improvement over the old-fashioned slipknot. A noose with a metal-eye knot would most likely have been the one slipped over Kosminski's head as he would have stood on the trapdoor of the gallows at Newgate Prison circa 1892.

Even more efficient and inventive knots for nooses were developed in the United States. The traditional cowboy hangman's noose utilized several loops around the knot, thus increasing the likelihood that the neck would be snapped, causing almost instantaneous death. The extra mass of the noose, as well as its firmness, tended to crush the blood vessels in the neck as the noose tightened around the neck and under the jaw. Slow strangulation would become less likely the more loops that were used. But like almost all mechanical issues, there was a limit to the number of loops since each loop increased the friction on the rope and made it harder for the rope to slide and tighten. One possible countermeasure, used by then-Erie county sheriff Grover Cleveland, who went on to become the twenty-second President of the United States, was to grease the rope with tallow and then to run it through the loop a few times to ensure rapid closure as the drop occurred.

The most efficient number of loops was dependent upon the type of rope, the thickness of the rope, and environmental conditions such as rain or humidity. Of course, it can be argued that the animus toward the hangee and the benevolence of the hangman played a role in these decisions too. There is no historical support for the folklore myth that there must be thirteen loops for a proper hangman's noose. Thirteen loops would not really be any unluckier than the normal four or five used for most hangings.

Placement of the hangman's knot also developed into a subset art form. Placement had been careless and haphazard until it was determined, through trial and error by professional hangmen, that the best and most efficient location was just in front of the left ear beneath the jaw line.

One prodigious hangman was US Army Master Sergeant John Woods, who tallied 347 hangings that included ten Nazi war criminals hanged in 1946 after World War II. Despite being so experienced, Woods used the standard military drop of six feet, an imprecise and outmoded measurement. Some of the hangees were left to strangle, and onlookers observed more than one pulled leg after the trap had opened. One criticism of Woods's technique for hanging the Nazis was that the trapdoor was missing rubber bungs or bumpers, so the door banged against the head of the condemned as the body dangled below the gallows. But since the Nazis were responsible for nearly six million brutal deaths without trial or other civilized niceties, it was difficult to generate any sympathy for them for any complications in their executions.

The drop length was a most important calculation and, over the years, developed into a sophisticated chart. A drop that is too short will result in strangulation over a period of minutes rather than a quick snapping of the neck vertebrae, ideally at the C2 and C3 level, which causes death almost instantly. On the other hand, a drop that is too long can result in decapitation, an unfortunate circumstance to say the least. So over the years, a drop table was created and may have been circulated at hangman's conventions, so the drop, like Goldilocks's porridge, would be just right.

Aaron Kosminski was about 5 feet, 5 or 6 inches and weighed about 200 pounds. The drop table for a murderer of his size in 1889 recommended a drop of 4 feet, 2 inches. The revised table of 1913 set a drop of about five feet. We should assume that the hangman at Newgate Prison when Kosminski would have been hanged had consulted the earlier table and set the shorter drop. That could have resulted in slow death by strangulation for the Ripper. But because of the well-publicized brutality of his murders, particularly that of victim Mary Kelly, it seems unlikely that an agonizing death for Jack the Ripper would have upset many people.

English hangings were often festive events attended by thousands, including women and children. England had a vast number of capital crimes, ranging from murder to visiting a gypsy for more than 30 days. Bakers began giving customers a baker's dozen of thirteen items when it became a capital offense for a baker to short sack a customer with ten or eleven loaves or pastries instead of a full dozen. Picking pockets was also a capital offense, but pickpockets still plied their trade at public hangings. They had many opportunities. Records show 3,365 men and 172 women were hanged in nineteenth-century England.

The last public hanging in Great Britain was in 1868, so the hanging of Jack the Ripper would have been a private affair, by invitation only, on gallows located behind the prison walls at Newgate. The officiant executioner would probably have been one of England's most experienced hangmen at the time, James Billington of Farnworth. He served as a hangman from 1884 to 1901, hanging 141 men and four women. He was a barber before he switched professions to become a hangman. It seemed like a natural progression in his professional life, and he had to work hard and maneuver to get the job.

In November 1892, Billington hanged one Dr. Thomas Neill Cream at Newgate. Just as the trapdoor opened, Dr. Cream uttered a shocking and incomplete declaration, I am Jack the— As tantalizing as that was, no one believed Dr. Cream's dying words was a genuine admission that he was the Ripper. After all, he was merely a poisoner, not a savage killer like Kosminski.

Billington got around. He hanged the condemned all across England for 18 years. He died in 1901 but passed on the family hangman business to his two sons, William and John.

Undoubtedly, the crowd that would have gathered outside Newgate Prison for the Kosminski hanging would have been enormous. It is said that the funeral of the Ripper's first victim, Annie Chapman, drew more than 100,000 onlookers. One must assume that the death vigil for Kosminski, after he would have been convicted in the most highly publicized trial of the nineteenth century, would have drawn unprecedented public interest. Always clamoring for a good public spectacle, the crowds would have been huge, boisterous, and unruly. There would probably have been a great deal of criticism over conducting the hanging out of public view. "How come they get to watch and not us?" the excluded attendees would have likely complained.

Chief Inspector Donald Sutherland Swanson, in overall charge of the Ripper investigation, would have been invited to Kosminski's hanging and probably would have attended. But the head of the investigation, Sir Robert Anderson, probably would have chosen not to attend. He would have been among those (such as the author) who believe it is unseemly if not bloodthirsty for someone involved in the successful investigation or prosecution to also attend the execution of even as evil a person as Aaron Kosminski. It had been Anderson's notes, commented upon and expanded by Inspector Swanson, that finally identified Kosminski once and for all as Jack the Ripper.

Other invitees to Kosminski's hanging would have included his brother, Isaac, who probably would have stood silently as he watched the trapdoor open.

Kosminski likely would have been accompanied to the gallows by a rabbi. He was known to keep Jewish traditions and even once refused to pay a fine on a Saturday because it was the Jewish Sabbath. Murder and mutilation were apparently exceptions to his orthodox observances.

Similar to vicious serial killer Ted Bundy in the United States, Kosminski would likely have had to be dragged up the gallows stairs by guards but would have then regained his composure and stepped meekly onto the trapdoor. Bundy, also a serial killer who attacked and mutilated only women, resisted entrance to the chamber with the electric chair and had to be dragged into the room. After his brief and revealing show of cowardice at the chamber door, however, Bundy regained his composure and submitted to his execution.

Like the lack of grief for Bundy, few of the thirty or forty witnesses who would have attended the hanging of Aaron Kosminski would have wept for him or regretted his death on the gallows.

It is impossible to say how a world-famous trial and hanging would have affected the location of Kosminski's grave. After his little-noticed death in a mental institution, he was buried at East Ham Jewish Cemetery, in East Ham, London Borough of Newham, Greater London, in section G, row 14, grave 12.

Botching a Real Death Sentencing in Illinois

Imposing a death sentence on a killer in Madison County, Illinois, where I had been a prosecutor and attorney for nearly fifty years, was a rare event that usually was approached with the dignified solemnity it deserves. There was a disturbing exception to that in 1982 when one of the Third Judicial Circuit's judges delivered what assuredly was the most tortured death sentence in the jurisdiction's history.

It should not have been much of a surprise. Circuit Judge William Johnson, known derisively to some court insiders as Willy Billy, was as unjudicial as judges come. His career in private practice had been a legal and practical disaster. His few clients often just drifted away, dissatisfied, to find another attorney. Johnson eventually decided to pursue a judgeship by entering politics, the last refuge of a scoundrel. From the beginning, his career as a jurist was, in understatement, checkered. First, he used political connections to get an appointment as a lowly Magistrate Judge. His poor performance earned him a rapid dismissal, but his political contacts helped him step up the ladder with an appointment as associate judge by the sitting Circuit Judges. But they soon fired him again. Willy Billy would turn out to be a prodigious vote-getter when he sought election in the early 1970s as a Circuit Judge in a campaign marked by his hokey tactic of leading a mule around on a rope to emphasize his loyalty to the locally powerful Democratic Party. That certainly drew some attention to him, but it also inspired the expert, clever, and poetic lawyer Edward Moorman to write a song parody to the tune of Yankee Doodle, which included this verse: He got elected to his job campaigning with a mule. Who says a learned judge has to go to school?

Johnson also energized his campaign with loud but totally uninformed support of the death penalty and a fistful of money to buy house licks at local taverns. It is hard to say which was more effective—the mule, support for the death penalty, or the house licks—but the ambitious Johnson was elected Circuit Judge. In recognition of his successful campaign tactic, Johnson hung a large picture of Illinois's electric chair on the wall of his judicial chambers. What became of the mule is unknown.

Before Johnson was thrust unprepared into a death penalty case, he was called upon in 1982 to conduct a trial of a man charged with murder and waived a jury and decided to allow Johnson to be the sole trier of fact and to render a verdict of guilty or not guilty. Although a verdict in a bench trial is normally announced the same day the trial ends, it was a month before Judge Johnson issued a written ruling in this case. He returned a verdict of probable cause, the normal finding at the end of a preliminary hearing, not a verdict after a trial. The judge apparently did not know the difference between a trial and a preliminary hearing. In a prelim, a judge who returns a finding of probable cause is simply ruling there is enough evidence against the defendant to take him to trial on the charges.

Johnson's inappropriate finding unduly complicated the proceedings. The defense attorney, a friend of Johnson's, moved for an acquittal since the judge had not found his client guilty beyond a reasonable doubt at the trial. After several months of wrangling and a trip to the Illinois Fifth District Appellate Court, Johnson's inexplicable ruling was sorted out, and the defendant was convicted and sentenced to prison for murder.

Johnson's death penalty fiasco came later that same year. With some trepidation, I prosecuted a jury trial before Johnson for the murder of pharmacist Eugene Ponder in Alton, Illinois. Defendant Larry Joe Adams had been paroled from a prison sentence for armed robbery only a few months before he robbed Ponder's pharmacy. Adams forced Ponder into the basement of his shop, made him get on his knees, and then shot him in the back of the head five times with a pistol Adams purchased illegally on the street. The jury convicted Adams of murder and, in the subsequent death penalty phase, ruled his crime should be punished by execution. It then became the responsibility of the judge to officially impose the death sentence. All that state law required was for Johnson to set the execution date, an illusory formality since a stay of the execution was automatic to allow for appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court.

The trouble was that Johnson had not the foggiest idea what he was doing. At the sentencing hearing, the unrepentant Adams was chained by his leg to a big counsel table, seated about five feet away from me at the same table. On the bench, Johnson fumbled through the large books of Illinois Revised Statutes, vainly attempting to find the correct provisions, and anxiously moved his reading glasses up and down his forehead as he flipped through the pages.

As the minutes slowly ticked by, I kept one eye on the murderous Adams, who I suspected was amassing saliva to propel in my direction, and the other eye on the judge, who clearly was unable to figure out how to do his duty and impose the death sentence. It truly was a simple matter set out by state law. Death was ordered by the jury. It was not discretionary, and no further thought by the judge was required. He had only to consult a calendar and set the execution for a date sixty to ninety days in the future and then stay the execution to allow for the automatic appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court. Surely the average judge would have studied the sentencing procedure before the hearing began. But Willy Billy was not your average judge. I cautiously approached the bench, politely but firmly pointed out the death penalty provisions in the statutes, and told the judge to get on with it posthaste.

Once I intervened, a dim light seemed to come on in the judge's head, and he appeared ready to proceed. The Hanging Judge, as Johnson liked to be known, began by first profusely apologizing to the murderer and his family (his mother and several shirttail relatives were in attendance). The apology lasted for what seemed like hours. The jurist said repeatedly how sad he was to impose the ultimate penalty, although in this case, it certainly was well deserved.

A sizable gathering had assembled in Johnson's courtroom to witness the rare imposition of a death sentence. The audience consisted of curiosity seekers from the general public, courtroom hangers-on, and prosecutors and defense attorneys who had never witnessed such an event and likely never would again.

Johnson's reluctance—or inability—to do his duty was shocking to everyone, especially coming from a judge who had a picture of the electric chair on his wall. I was saddened by the judge's lack of judicial temperament and apparent indifference to the fact that Ponder's distraught widow and most of the victim's immediate family were by now sobbing heavily in the courtroom. The widow was so upset at the senseless murder of her husband that she became a recluse after the trial and never again ventured outside her small home in Alton.

Johnson finally mustered all the courage he could find and, while intentionally looking away from Adams, solemnly pronounced the mandatory sentence of death, I am now required by statute to sentence you to death. I hereby set your execution date for December 24.

Christmas Eve? Did Willy Billy just sentence Adams to be executed on Christmas Eve?

Visions of the first Christmas execution in Illinois's electric chair flashed through my mind. The last meal, probably a traditional holiday turkey dinner, could be followed by an exchange of gifts between the condemned man and his family and possibly even the guards. Other death-row inmates would be singing Christmas carols that would echo through the hall as Adams slogged down the green mile toward his execution. And the guards, eager to get home to their families, would be urging Adams to hurry up so as not to delay their Christmas celebrations.

Those bizarre images faded quickly as I became aware of muffled snickering giving way to outright laughter coming from the back of the courtroom where some of my fellow prosecutors had gathered to witness this most solemn event in the law. They were astounded by Johnson's inept dithering and could not restrain their amusement. Other spectators were beginning to recognize the full irony of the date of execution, December 24. Adams, becoming aware that he now had a firm date to ride the lightning in the electric chair, was no longer salivating.

But Johnson continued to struggle with the necessary logistics of imposing the sentence. He had not yet issued a stay of the execution to allow for the appeal to the Supreme Court. He still seemed confused, if not stupefied. Once more, I felt compelled to intervene and approached the bench to gently tell the judge to stay the execution and then remand Adams to the custody of the Illinois Department of Corrections to be held until his execution. To his great relief, the nervous and confused jurist took my direction and managed to complete the sentencing.

Months later, Johnson told me how irritated and dismayed he was that some spectators in the courtroom snickered and laughed at such a solemn moment as a man was being sentenced to die. I decided not to disclose that the laughter was because Johnson's inept bumbling and stumbling through the somber hearing made a mockery of the event. The whole sentencing proceeding turned out to be a lot of wasted effort. The Illinois Supreme Court later upheld Adam's conviction but ordered a new sentencing, at which Adams was given a life sentence that he continues to serve today.

Johnson had a stroke a few years after the Adams trial and was confined to a wheelchair at home. No one in the courts seemed to have noticed, and he remained a Circuit Judge for another two years before the other judges and Democratic politicians in the county finally prevailed on him to retire. He died in 2010 at age 79.

The Illinois Death Penalty

Illinois applied the death penalty by hanging until 1928, the year Southern Illinois crime boss Charlie Birger was hanged for murder. His gang had fought for control of the coal fields with the Shelton gang, and Birger's side lost. It is said that Al Capone and his downstate lieutenant, Frank Buster Wortman, were connected to the Birger gang but always admired and feared the Shelton gang, their main opponents for control of crime in the south end of the state.

When Birger was arrested for murder, he expected to be released soon because he had such deep and corrupt influence in so many counties. But even the best-laid plans of mice and murderers often go astray, however. Birger was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Franklin County, a jurisdiction he did not control.

Birger was dropped from the gallows by a local hangman in Benton on April 19, 1928. He took his death sentence stoically, protesting that he would be hanged even though the actual triggerman on the job had drawn only a prison sentence. Charlie chose a black hood for the occasion since he didn't want to be mistaken for a Klansman. As Aaron Kosminski probably would have been if he had been hanged in England almost forty years earlier, Birger was accompanied to the gallows by a rabbi.

Homespun poet Ox Gwaltney immortalized Birger's life and death with the lines:

And when they finally caught him, he was sentenced to be hung.

But they hadn't broke his spirit the day the trap was sprung.

Gwaltney may have been correct about Birger's unbroken spirit, but his neck was not so fortunate.

Birger missed the distinction of being the last man hanged in Illinois by a matter of months. That dubious honor went to Charles Shader on October 10, 1928. Not much else was recorded about Shader's life and crimes.

Illinois's method of execution was changed to the electric chair after Shader was hanged. Called the Midnight Bride by some, the chair was used in Illinois until the mid-1950s. The last man to ride the lightning was a cop killer in 1956.

Illinois had a love-hate relationship with the death penalty for decades. In 1972, the US Supreme Court struck down the death penalty nationally as being arbitrarily enforced in a ruling in the famous case of Furman v. Georgia. The Illinois legislature reinstated the death penalty in 1974 with specific guidelines for applying the death penalty in compliance with the US Supreme Court's ruling in Furman. The next year, however, the Illinois Supreme Court voided the new death penalty law by a slim 4–3 majority. The legislature, not to be deterred, adopted a new death penalty law in 1977 and reinstated the use of the electric chair—for murder only—this time.

At one point, four Illinois Supreme Court judges voted to support the death penalty in a 4–3 majority. But then one pro-death penalty judge retired and was replaced with an anti-death penalty judge, creating a 4–3 majority against the death penalty. Surprisingly, the next time the issue came before the Supreme Court, a 6–1 majority approved the death penalty. Two of the anti-death penalty judges voted with the majority writing that a change in personnel on the court should not change the outcome of this case.

Illinois's method of execution was changed to lethal injection in 1983. Before Larry Joe Adams's death sentence was reversed, he was actually given the option to choose electrocution or lethal injection because he was convicted under the old law but was scheduled to be executed under the new one.

While investigating the murder of Karla Brown in 1982 (the subject of my book Silent Witness with noted true-crime author and former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Charles Bosworth Jr.), I was offered a tour of Illinois's death row. The state's condemned prisoners were housed in Menard Correctional Center in Chester in Southern Illinois, but executions were conducted at the death row at Statesville in Joliet in Northern Illinois. The six-hour ride to the death house must have been a bizarre and disturbing experience for the condemned.

Death row at Menard was in a separate building high on a hill overlooking prison for the general population. While the prison is still active as a maximum-security facility, death row was demolished after a squeamish Illinois legislature repealed the death penalty in 2011.

Death row had been an almost immaculate row of cells. Prisoners were allowed to cook their own meals, and each cell had extra space for recreation and amusement. These privileges, I was told, were also used as disciplinary measures to control the often rebellious and difficult prisoners. After all, if one was already on death row awaiting execution, there wasn't much to lose other than your kitchen or TV privileges for assaulting a guard or engaging in other misbehavior.

I walked past the cell of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, but he was asleep and did not awaken to greet me. Gacy, the verbose and articulate murderer of 33 teenage boys whom he also sexually assaulted (some after they were dead), was executed by lethal injection in 1994.

Close by Gacy's cell, I noticed a coiled fire hose that could be used as an extra means of discipline of inmates who got too rowdy. No guard would have to enter the cell if the hose were utilized.

Shortly before Illinois Governor George Ryan was convicted of official misconduct and sent to prison himself, he commuted the death sentences of all 167 death-row inmates in January 2003. Ryan was not the first, nor would he be the last, governor to go to prison. Illinois had a history of electing criminals to office. Illinois elected crooks on a nonpartisan basis. The number of former governors sent to prison was a dead heat at three Republicans and three