A man is led to a gallows, a black hood placed over his head.
Next is the thick rope noose, as he is asked if he has any last words.
The condemned remains silent, and the executioner moves to his station.
Yet there is no trap door for the condemned to fall through, in fact he is about to be
less ‘hanged’ for his crimes, and more ‘jerked’ for them.
Welcome to the world of the Upright Jerker.
Some of you history buffs probably know that the FBI’s first ever “Public Enemy Number
1” was the outlaw named John Dillinger.
What most of you won’t know is that the man that was actually called public enemy
number one first was one Gerald Chapman, a sophisticated smooth criminal that was nicknamed,
“The Count of Gramercy Park.”
This Brooklyn-born man started his criminal career in his early teens, and later became
a smartly-dressed, well-read, startlingly eloquent man who belonged to an early Prohibition-era
gang.
He robbed banks, made illegal alcohol, and was eventually accused of murder.
Chapman pleaded for justice, saying he was innocent of the crime, but the court didn’t
see it that way.
The cops wanted him dead, for various reasons that we will soon discuss.
What’s of more importance today is how he went, which could be said to be the USA’s
most brutal kind of capital punishment – and one few people have heard of.
Since Chapman was arguably the most infamous criminal whose life ended at the hands of
the upright jerker, we’ll first tell you a little more about the man and why the authorities
so dearly wanted him dead.
Born to Irish immigrant parents in New York in 1887, Chapman lived a rough and tumble
kind of life.
He was first arrested at 14 and then sent to prison, and would spend the majority of
his young life behind bars.
It was on the inside where he read voraciously and educated himself, and when he got out
he dressed like a man of high esteem and perfected a rather posh British accent.
In his twenties he had bootlegging operations all over the U.S. and became quite a successful
criminal.
But it wasn’t until his mid-30s that he really hit the big time after robbing a U.S.
mail truck of money, bonds and jewelry.
The haul was worth around 2.4 million bucks – around 34 million in today’s money.
After that he lived like an aristocrat in New York’s very wealthy Gramercy Park neighborhood,
hence his sobriquet, “The Count of Gramercy Park.”
He was also called “The Gentleman Bandit.”
He was eventually arrested, and then made the headlines not only for conning people
into thinking he was an aristocrat, but also because he escaped from the police station.
He was captured again and given 25 years, but he subsequently escaped from prison.
While on the run he was injured during his re-capture, but then he escaped from the prison
hospital.
Chapman was a man that was hard to pin down, that’s for sure.
While on the run he went on a crime spree, and during one particular robbery a police
officer was killed.
It was then that the media ran the story about the country’s, “Public Enemy Number One”.
Chapman had become a huge embarrassment to the federal authorities, who now not only
wanted to pin him down, but also string him up.
When he was arrested again, law enforcement were hoping for one thing: a swift execution.
On April 6, 1926, Chapman was taken to the gallows in Connecticut’s Wethersfield Prison.
He’d fought a hard legal battle, saying he wanted justice, not mercy.
Instead, he was taken to be executed on what was called The Upright Jerker.
Reports at the time stated that Chapman “swore profusely as doom neared.”
Ok, so what was it exactly?
Well, we’ve seen one patent and what it looked like was a contraption that would perform
a reverse hanging.
Instead of putting a person’s head in a noose and then letting them fall through a
trapdoor, the upright jerker would use pulleys and a large weight to lift the noose, and
the neck in it, upwards.
The man wasn’t fastened down.
He would be left hanging a few feet off the ground, but it was hoped that the sudden jolt
would break the man’s neck.
Hmm, you might ask, why would the U.S. decide to use such a contraption.
Why not stick with good old hanging?
The reason was that hanging didn’t always work.
Sometimes the drop would be too much and the prisoner would be decapitated, and sometimes
the drop was too little and the prisoner would take too long to die.
While public hangings always drew large crowds, decapitations and drawn out deaths were not
to the people’s liking.
They wanted a good, clean, swift death.
But was the upright jerker any better than regular hanging?
The answer, it seems, is no.
In fact, it took nine minutes for Chapman to die, which was far from humane.
The “automatic gallows”, as it was sometimes called, didn’t exactly take off around the
world, and for good reason.
But it was tried and tested in some states, notably New York.
Long before Chapman was placed on the upright jerker a man named Lewis Wilber went the same
way in Morrisville, New York.
It was agreed that the weight to be used would be 238 pounds (107kg), which as you can imagine
was some force pulling his head up.
It worked of course, and Wilbur died, but was the death as painless as upright jerker
enthusiasts had said it would be?
Well, when the weight was released poor old Wilbur was sent flying four feet in the air,
only to come back down again and hang two feet off the ground.
It wasn’t really a good look for the authorities.
The condemned was never meant to take off like a rocket.
When a man named James Stephens was hanged, he too was raised into the air, and reports
said he was left contorting and gurgling until he died from asphyxiation.
That’s not what hanging was supposed to be like.
It was supposed to break the neck and put the condemned out of his misery very quickly.
The same thing happened to a man named Benjamin Hunter.
His neck didn’t break and he spent a good few minutes in agonizing pain.
A bystander remarked, “A chill ran through the witnesses present.
It was awful.”
This all happened towards the end of the 19th century, a time when scientists in Britain
were trying to perfect hanging using measured drops, so that the person’s neck would break
when the man fell through the trapdoor and the rope tightened.
But those Brits kept getting it wrong, too, and men’s heads would roll or they would
be left dangling like a dog on a leash, wriggling around and panting until finally dead.
The upright jerker was supposed to be an improvement - a modern American take on killing science.
The thing is, it just didn’t work, and in the latter half of the 19th century some critics
in the U.S. were calling the method “hideous” and “brutal.”
Those critics asked what was the point of the upright jerker, since it very seldom broke
a man’s neck.
At least with your regular hanging the odds were stacked against the condemned person
enduring several minutes’ of painful strangling.
When Thomas Welsh met with the machine in Newark, it’s said the sheriff hung his head
in shame as the man struggled on the rope, with bystanders turning the other way.
It was called a slow, painful death.
Coming to the end of 19th century a man named Charles Sterling got the same treatment in
Ohio, with one newspaper later saying that the execution was a “scene of horror…sickening
in the extreme.”
But for decades to come all over the U.S. men convulsed, contorted, writhed and thrashed
around on the contraption, and even though the press wrote about the sheer horror of
the backwards hanging, it was still the method of choice in some states.
The reason, as we said, was because all over the world countries were struggling to hang
folks with dignity – if there is such a thing.
Then there was the hydraulic upright jerker, which was supposed to be an improvement.
In 1892, a man named Mr. T. Thatcher Graves was supposed to go this way in Colorado.
It was a kind of complicated device.
Again, there was a weight on the other end of a noose, but with this hydraulic version
the condemned man actually killed himself.
This took the weight of guilt off the authorities.
The man basically stood on a platform, his body weight putting various gears into motion,
and releasing a plug on a water jug in another room.
The water would rush into a barrel that was connected to the rope that the condemned man
had around his neck.
When it was full and heavy the rope was pulled upwards with the man’s head in it.
It sounds rather like one of those complicated mouse trap videos that appear on YouTube now
and again.
Did it work?
Of course it didn’t, well, in the way it was supposed to.
The water contraption looked very modern and scientific, but the “twitch-up” method,
or being “jerked to Jesus” as it was sometimes described, was almost always a botch job.
Mr. Graves, should have gotten the hydraulic version of the upright jerker, but he hanged
himself in his jail cell rather than be the first person to test the complicated killing
machine.
Allowing the prisoner to basically kill himself was all the rage at the end of the 19th century.
More devices were built so that when the man stood on a platform a weight would be released
– except it looks like the authorities gave up on using water.
Believe it or not, in 1905 in Nebraska, a man named Francis Barker invented a hanging
machine for himself.
His device consisted of a trap-door, though, not the upright method.
Still, he created a device that allowed the condemned – in this case him – to push
a button that would release the door.
At the time the magazine “Popular Mechanics” wrote that law enforcement would welcome such
a product.
So, what happened to the upright jerker?
Well, the electric chair took over in the end.
More and more states in the early 20th century started adopting the electric chair as a killing
instrument.
Electricity was the in thing, and hanging to some people seemed so old hat.
The chair was touted as being painless, fast, and humane, which it certainly was not.
We can’t tell you who was the last person to be executed on the upright jerker, although
its use ended sometime in the 1930s.
In 1933, there is a report that says in the state of Colorado the last man took his “flight
to eternity.”
Now go watch this video, “What The Last 24 Hours of Death Row Prisoner Look Like in
2019”.
Or have a look at this, “Teenage Death Row Prisoner Who Survived His Own Execution.”