A Twist Before Dying

By David Seideman

For the families of John Wayne Gacy's victims, his death was long anticipated. Just past midnight last Tuesday, the man who tortured and murdered 33 young men and boys during the 1970s would be executed by lethal injection at the Stateville penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois. Justice would be served, swift and clean, as three chemicals were introduced intravenously into his bloodstream. The first drug would knock him out, the second would suppress his breathing, the last would stop his heart. The procedure would take no more than five minutes. But Gacy would take 18 minutes to die. A clog developed in the delivery tube attached to his arm. Gacy snorted just before death-chamber attendants pulled a curtain around him as they struggled to clear a tube. Finally, the two lethal drugs streamed into him. The monster was dead. But was the killing itself monstrous?

Opponents of capital punishment charged that the mishap again proved that the death penalty constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. "A lot of people think lethal injection is like putting a dog to sleep," says Kica Matos, research director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Capital Punishment Project. "But things still go wrong with all types of executions. It's as gruesome and barbaric as torture." Of 237 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, Matos estimates, 18 have been "botched." Gacy's was among the least painful.

On Sept. 2, 1983, Jimmy Lee Gray, sentenced to die for the rape-slaying of a three-year-old girl, entered the gas chamber in Parchman, Mississippi. But eight minutes after his execution began, witnesses cleared the viewing area, repelled by what they were seeing. Gray, suffocating and purple-faced, died slamming his head against a steel pole. Gas-chamber executions are supposed to end with a quick loss of consciousness.

The NAACP says electrocutions have gone awry eight times since 1976. A weak current caused convicted cop-killer Joseph Tafero to roast to death for six minutes on May 4, 1990. When the switch was flipped, 6-in. flames and smoke spewed out of Tafero's head. The power was stopped, and witnesses saw Tafero inhale deeply several times. It took two more jolts to kill him.

Although lethal injection has become the most popular method in most states because of its pain-free "humaneness," in eight cases before Gacy's it was anything but. The most heartrending: the execution of Rickey Ray Rector, sentenced to die for murdering a policeman. On Jan. 24, 1992, in Conway, Arkansas, loud moans spilled out of the death chamber as technicians kept Rector tied down during a search for "good" veins. Attendants were about to prepare a "cut-down," in which the arm is sliced open to insert an intravenous catheter, when a vein in his right hand was finally discovered -- an hour after the operation began.