The Reluctant Executioner

Robert G. Elliott was not a murderous person by nature, but he proved, no doubt to his own surprise, to be rather good at killing people. A well-groomed, silver-haired man with a pipe and a thoughtful, learned air, he might in other circumstances have been a college professor. He certainly had the brains for it.

Instead in 1926, at the age of 53, he became America's top executioner.

Elliott grew up in a prosperous family on a large farm in upstate New York. He studied mathematics and physics at Brockport Normal School (now the State University of New York at Brockport), but his passion was electricity and he decided as a young man to become an electrical engineer. This was at a time in the late nineteenth century when electrical transmission was an exciting new technology. Elliott was employed setting up municipal lighting plants across New York and New England when he was sidetracked into the challenge of electrocuting criminals. This, too, was a new thing, but it wasn't going well.

Electrocution seemed, on the face of it, a quick, humane way of putting people to death, but in practice it proved to be neither neat nor straightforward. If the voltage was too low or not applied long enough, the victim was often dazed but not killed, and merely reduced to a gasping wreck. If a more ferocious jolt was given, the results tended to be unpleasantly dramatic. Blood vessels sometimes burst and, in one gruesome instance, a victim's eyeball exploded. At least once, the subject was slowly roasted alive. The smell of cooking flesh was “unbearable,” recalled one of those present. Electrocution, it became clear, was a science that required careful, professional management if it was to be done efficiently and relatively humanely.

This is where Robert Elliott came in.

Called in as a consultant for an execution in New York State, and having read about the suffering and failures so far, Elliott realized that the trick of a successful execution was to adjust the application of electricity continuously and judiciously throughout the process, rather as an anesthesiologist controls the flow of gas to a surgical patient, so that the subject was rendered first unconscious and then lifeless in a progressive and comparatively peaceful manner.

He performed his first two executions in January 1926, and proved so adept at it that soon states all over the East were commissioning him. It wasn't that Elliott found any satisfaction in killing people—quite the reverse—but that he had an ability, more or less unique, to dispatch them gently. In 1927, he was executing people at the rate of about three a month, at $150 a time, and was in all but name the official executioner for New York and New England.

Because of the lack of specialized equipment, Elliott had to make his own. Each victim was fitted with a piece of headgear that Elliott adapted from leather football helmets bought at his local sporting goods store. It is a macabre image, but an accurate one, to think of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti going to their deaths dressed in the style of Red Grange.

(from One Summer, America 1927 by Bill Bryson)