Reviews -- The Unforgiven: Utah's Excecuted Men



	The Unforgiven Utah's Excecuted Men

Associated Press, Mike Carter
Chauncey W. Millard sold his life cheaply—swapping his body to a surgeon for a pound of sweets. He sucked the candy while the firing squad took his life outside the Provo Courthouse the winter of 1868.

Then there was Thomas Ferguson, who in 1859 was sentenced to hang for killing his boss.

He climbed into the back of a wagon, sat on his coffin and rode to the east gate of Salt Lake City, near where the Governor's Mansion stands today.

As he mounted the scaffold, Ferguson was asked if he had any last words. He did—plenty of them. Some accounts have him talking for four hours. Most put the diatribe at somewhere around an hour before he was hanged.

They are among 47 men whom Weber State University author and sociologist L. Kay Gillespie calls The Unforgiven. Reviled and condemned, they walked Utah's last mile, most to a pauper's grave, dead at society's hand.

Some stood defiant before their executioners as the noose was tightened or the target pinned on their chest. Others were able only to ask for what they knew they could not have—absolution.

All, according to Gillespie's history of Utah's executed men, were "humans with tragedy in their lives."

"What I came away with was the sense that they were people," said Gillespie, whose book, The Unforgiven: Utah's Executed Men, will be published next month by Signature Books.

"I think of the similarities of their lives and ours," he said.

The book contains vignettes of the lives and deaths of each of the condemned. Some are compelling, others absurd. All are tragic, he said.

"What I learned is that everybody is a loser in the process," said Gillespie, a former member of the state Board of Pardons.

Gillespie said he does not oppose capital punishment, but believes society avoids responsibility for it. It's facile, he said, to dehumanize those condemned to death.

It's also unfair.

"They aren't cruel beasts," he said. "We can't separate them from us."

Nor does he have an abiding faith that the justice system is infallible.

"As a sociologist and criminologist, I believe society can mete out its own punishment " he said. "But I'm cynical enough about the justice system to not trust it to take lives."

The first official executions in Utah involved a pair of Ute Indians, Long Hair and Antelope, hanged over the Jordan River for killing and scalping two young brothers near Cedar Valley in 1854.

The last was child killer Arthur Gary Bishop, who went willingly to his death by lethal injection in 1988. There are currently 12 inmates under sentence of death in Utah.

In between, the deaths of 45 other men have been sanctioned by the state. In all, according to Gillespie, 39 were shot, six hanged, and two died by lethal injection. They were responsible for 58 murders.

They were a mixed bag of ruffians, criminals and rascals. The youngest at 18 were Millard, the condemned man with the sweet tooth, and Harry Thorne, who died by firing squad for the 1910 shooting of a grocer.

The young Thorne showed a lot of interest in the two executions preceding his. He would ask: "Well, did he die like a man?"

The oldest was John D. Lee, who at the age of 64 was sat on the edge of his coffin and shot in 1877 for his participation in the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre some 20 years earlier. Lee died at the site of the crime.

The racial makeup of Utah's condemned does not appear to be out of proportion with the Utah population. Forty-one were white, two hispanic, two black and two Indians. All but one victim was white.

Gillespie said the role religion may have played is not so clear. Of the 47, 25 were non-Mormon, eight Mormon and 14 unknown.

Most of the non-Mormons had recently moved to Utah, and the statistics "could indicate the presence of some degree of xenophobia. . . as well as religious discrimination," he said.

Gillespie's research involved hundreds of hours pouring through old newspapers and diaries, interviews with relatives and historical accounts.

"If we're going to use (capital punishment) then I wanted to show what happened," he said. "I wanted to document who we use it on."

The book contains brief sketches of the crimes, the method of execution and a photograph of the condemned, often taken moments before the sentence was carried out.

The most compelling words, though, come from the condemned themselves.

Lee told his executioners: "Center on my heart, boys. Don't mangle my body."

Enoch Davis, who killed his wife in 1894, told his son: "She died like a lady and I buried her like a gentleman." While waiting for the firing squad, he embarrassed witnesses by asking if there were any prostitutes available.

"Enoch Davis died like a dog," The Salt Lake Tribune reported.

In 1866, hostler Robert Sutton faced a firing squad for killing a cavalry trooper in Tooele. Defiant to the end, he told the sheriff: "To hell with your little Jesus," and asked for a drink of whiskey.

More poignant perhaps was Henry Hett, condemned for killing a police officer in 1923. After a lengthy written apology and warning to other inmates about a life of crime, Hett sat in the execution chair repeating over and over: "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Through his research, Gillespie said he believes three Utahns may have been wrongly executed.

He questions the guilt of labor leader Joe Hill, executed in 1915 for a robbery-homicide the year before.

Another possibly innocent man was Pedro Cano, a Mexican national executed in 1925 for the murder two years earlier of a Park City woman. Cano claimed his testimony was skewed by an interpreter friendly with his girlfriend, who he maintained did the killing.

Lastly, Gillespie questions the guilt of Don Jesse Neal, executed in 1955 for killing a police officer. He said the state's key witness, Wilma Tulley, likely pulled the trigger.

Gillespie notes that while pioneer justice was often harsh, there were some notable cases of leniency.

One of the first commutations in the Utah Territory was granted to U.S. cavalry trooper Warren Drake—though the circumstances surrounding his death sentence were unusual.

Drake was caught by his fellows having sexual intercourse with his horse in a camp near Echo Junction in 1857. A court-martial sentenced man and mare to the firing squad.

Instead, the trooper's sentence was commuted, he was excommunicated from the Mormon Church and banished from the territory.

The horse was shot.

Utah Historical Quarterly, Ken Driggs
Death-penalty historian Watt Espy has confirmed over 18,000 executions throughout the history of the United States and its territories. Virginia has executed over 2,000, New York over 1,300, Georgia over 1,100, and Pennsylvania and North Carolina both over 1,000. My own state of Florida has executed 225 men in our electric chair since it was first used in 1924. Since 1847 Utah has executed only 47 men, yet this still more than a dozen other states.

This book is a very brief history of those "unforgiven," as the author aptly calls them, with a minimum of background on the subject. The author is chair of the Department of Sociology at Weber State University, but, more important for this work, he was appointed to the Utah State Board of Pardons in 1983 and subsequently worked for the Department of Corrections. Those roles gave him an intimate contact with the death penalty and those men condemned to die for their crimes in Utah. The most engrossing passages of the book draw from those experiences, and the reader will wish he had drawn from them more often. While he professes to be a supporter of the death penalty, he observes in his very tempting prologue that "There is no humane way to execute, but we pretend there is."

The author never suggests his book will plumb the souls of these men or his soul as he examines them. It is more journalism than scholarship or introspection. After some introductory history on nineteenth-century Mormon belief in blood atonement he briefly discusses demographics, the fate of unexecuted accomplices, and the manner of execution. (Utah is one of the few states requiring the condemned to elect his manner of execution from statutory choices, currently lethal injection and firing squad but in the past including hanging and the never-used beheading.) The author then moves through a two- or three-page discussion of each of the 47 who died—names, dates, brief descriptions of crimes, trials and executions. Most have an accompanying photograph.

His discussion of more recent events includes the most thought-provoking portion of the book, the sentencing and 1988 execution of Gary Bishop. He was that rare death-row inmate, a repentant man who wished to die, a "volunteer" in the vernacular of the death-row defense lawyer. Bishop's Mormon beliefs played an important role in his case. The book winds down with a discussion of Utah commutations and pardons, past and present. The author also recounts his own experimental stay of a few hours in an unoccupied death-row cell surrounded by and talking with the condemned.

This book is interesting and quickly read. The author makes a point not to promise a great deal, but when you finish you still wish you knew more about these "unforgiven," how it was they arrived at this state in life, and Gillespie's thoughtful reaction to them.

Ogden Standard Examiner, Charles F. Trentelman
As you walk down the quiet tree-lined street in one of Ogden's more genteel neighborhoods, stop and ponder one particularly lovely brick and gable house.

A district judge was murdered while looking out its second floor bedroom window.

He heard someone shoot at the house with a shotgun and looked out to see who it was. It was the last thing he ever saw.

It's right up there on 27th Street. The house stands to this day, although a tree now obscures the clear shot of the judge's window the killer had back in 1943.

Or, if you like, you can take a stroll downtown to the site of a former grocery store on the corner of 24th Street and Grant Avenue. Imagine yourself back to the 1941 night when a police officer, trying to break up a burglary attempt, fell in a hail of bullets.

You can still see the window behind the building, in the alley, where other officers tossed a tear gas grenade to flush out the killer.

A bit macabre? Well, yes. That's the point.

L. Kay Gillespie, a Weber State professor of criminology and social work, knows all these places and more. They're all places where men who were executed by the state did their particular crime. Add them up, over the years, it makes a grisly collection of shootings, beatings, stabbing and the like.

And it was all right around here. Gillespie's thinking of doing a tour.

Maybe a Halloween type of thing. Get a busload of people and drive them around. He sees himself with a microphone up front, telling about the baby sitter who was picked up at 34th and Washington and never seen alive again, describing the man who told his wife he could kill someone and get off by faking insanity (he didn't).

Gillespie knows all about this stuff, and it isn't just morbid interest. A former member of the state board of Pardons, he's extensively interviewed men on death row, been an official witness at two executions, and recently published a book on Utah's executed criminals, The Unforgiven.

He admits it almost wasn't called that.

He was tempted to call it "47 Men and a Horse," because of an incident in early territiorial days when Mormon militia soldiers out to oppose U.S. Army troops executed a horse because a trooper had made immoral advances toward it.

Both man and horse had been condemned to death (by a unanimous vote of the soldiers in the unit), but the trooper was given a reprieve at the last minute.

The horse wasn't. Orders were followed and the horse was shot.

You can see that spot if you like: Out near Echo Junction, in a field on the right at the end of a long row of trees just before you hit the interchange.

The tour of Ogden isn't very difficult. Ogden was a small town in the 1930s and 40s when most of the crimes meriting execution took place up here.

The notable exception is the 1974 Hi-Fi Shop murders. The location for that one is somewhere under the front section of the Ogden City mall, the record and stereo equipment shop having moved twice since those grisly crimes.

The tour stops would be simple: Start at the corner of 24th Street and Grant Avenue.

On the southeast corner is what used to be a Safeway grocery store. On the night of Feb. 11. 1941, Walter A. Avery, reportedly high on drugs, walked into the store to rob the place.

It went bad. Alerted by a store employee, Ogden Police Officer Hoyt L. Gates went to the store and knocked on the front door.

A store employee opened the door, told Gates to pull his gun and jumped aside. Before Gates could get his gun out and aimed, Avery shot him. Gates returned fire, but didn't hit anyone.

"He told me to drop my gun. I told him to drop his. We both did a hell of a lot of shooting," Avery said later.

Police flushed Avery out of the back of the store with tear gas and he was tried and ordered executed.

The judge who ordered his execution, District Judge Lewis V. Trueman, was himself the victim of a murder only two years later.

Along with murder cases, Trueman handled the usual divorce cases. One was that of Austin Cox Jr. Cox didn't like the outcome, and on the night of July 24, 1943, went hunting for his wife.

He'd heard she was staying at a house at 2240 Lincoln Ave. (now the site of a home improvement center) and went there. She wasn't there but six other people were and he shot them, killing four and wounding the rest.

Then he drove to 1543 27th St., Trueman's home, and fired a shot at a kitchen window. Trueman and his wife, in a second story bedroom, turned on a light and went to a window to see what was going on, and Cox shot him.

Cox was executed a year later.

From the Trueman home it'sjust a short drive to 2572 Van Buren where a small clapboard house still stands.

It is still identical, in fact, to its picture in the paper on July 1, 1936, when the story ran about three people being bludgeoned to death there.

George Mortensen, 37, did the deed. A Salt Lake City cosmetics salesman, Mortensen went to the house June 30 after his wife of three months had left him.

His wife was in the home with her parents and grandmother, and he beat them with a pick handle. His wife's parents died on the spot, his wife's grandmother died in the hospital, but his wife survived.

Mortensen was captured in Los Angeles, where he told police, "I don't konw what happened in Ogden. I must have gone crazy or something."

He was sentenced to life in prison, but his records have disappeared and not even Gillespie could find out what happened to him.

A final Ogden stop would be the last place Shirley Gretzinger was seen alive.

The story is short: Gretzinger, 17, had gone to the corner of 34th Street and Washington Boulevard to be picked up for a baby-sitting job the evening of July 20, 1949.

"There were witnesses who saw her walking south down Washington past the city-county building." Gillespie said, "and that's the last anyone saw of her."

Her body was found the next morning in Riverdale. Ray Dempsey Gardner, an itinerant cherry picker, was eventually arrested. He was executed in 1951, his last words being, "I'm ready to go. No one will miss me. My life has been worthless."

He was right. Not even his relatives wanted his body.

While it didn't happen in Ogden, no tour of Northern Utah's old-time murder sites is complete without at least a mention of Delbert Green, who solved his marital problems by murdering his wife and her parents at their east Layton farmhouse on the night of Jan. 5, 1930.

The farmhouse was on Mountain School Route Road, U.S. 89 now. Green, who lived in Ogden at 2054 Washington Blvd. (now the site of Deseret Industries), came home to find a note from his wife saying she'd left him and gone to her parents' house.

Green went to the house and shot all three.

His infant daughter, who his wife had taken with her, was found under her dead mother's body.

Green was executed by the state July 10, 1936.

If it's Wild West action you seek, you can drive out to Echo (near where the horse was executed) and visit the grave of Thomas Stagg, a law officer killed in one of those staples of television westerns—the posse chase of desperate criminals.

In this case the "desperate criminals" were Patrick Coughlin and Fred George, who stole a package of berries from a vendor in Park City, stole a horse to make their getaway and ran to a cabin in Echo.

The cabin was surrounded by law officers and shootout ensued. Coughlin and George escaped and two law officers were killed. Stagg was shot by other officers in a crossfire, but N.E. Dawes was killed by the two escapees.

The fugitives fled through Ogden, to Salt Lake City and out to Tooele. They were finally captured near Grantsville.

Coughlin was sentenced to die. Somewhat colorful in his language, Gillespie said, Coughlin was asked what he wanted for a last meal and answered, "I'd like a little Dawes or Stagg on toast."