…to the official page for Last Words of the Executed, a book by Robert K. Elder, with a foreword by Studs Terkel.

Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, has praised the project and called it, “A dangerous book…” This is a nonpolitical work, simply asking, “If these are the most reviled, outcast members of society—why does it remain a cultural value to record what they say?”

This is the history of capital punishment in America, told from the gallows, the chair, and the gurney.

Check out book tour details here.

Each day, we are posting excerpts from the book, plus outtakes, by date of execution.

“So long.”

— James Joseph Roedl, convicted of robbery and murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed July 13, 1945

Roedl killed Abigail Williams with a hammer after she picked up him and an accomplice while they were hitchhiking. According to authorities, one of them sang the pop tune “Love Letters in the Sand” to signal the murder. Just before his execution, Roedl served cherry pie and coffee to the press, laughing and joking. According to the prison chaplain, however, Roedl “broke into sobs” when he was strapped to the “old wooden chair” used in previous executions.

“I’m sorry for what I done. I’m sorry for killing your mama. I’m not asking you to forgive me. Not a day goes by that I’m not trying to forgive myself. Don’t let your anger and hate for me destroy your lives.”

After apologizing to his parents for the “embarrassment and shame” brought on the family:
“As Gary Gilmore said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

— Rocky Barton, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Ohio.
Executed July 12, 2006

After a domestic dispute, Barton shot his wife, then turned the gun on himself. Barton said he deserved execution and gave up his appeals shortly before his death. He was the first to receive a new technique of lethal injection in Ohio, with two veins instead of one used to administer the drug.

“My God! Have mercy on me.”

— Delbert Green, convicted of murder, firing squad, Utah.
Executed July 10, 1936

Green had been convicted of murdering his wife because, he said, she was unfaithful. The same evening, he also killed his stepfather and mother-in-law. After he was convicted and sentenced to death, he tried to plead insanity on the grounds that his whole family had a history of mental illness—his father and aunt had been sent to asylums, and his grandfather committed suicide. In the days before his execution, Green’s mother and fellow inmates wrote letters attempting to sway the governor to commute his sentence.

Green’s daughter, who was seven at the time of his execution, defended her father almost forty years later in an interview with the Ogden Standard Examiner, saying that he would have done anything for her mother, who was unfaithful.