Interview Last Words author Rob Elder explains why executed Chicago criminals aren't baseball fans

On the scaffold, gurney, or chair, many of America's condemned convicts defiantly plead innocence, tearfully pray, or keep it simple—like murderer Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 told his Utah firing squad, “Let’s do it!” Chicago journalist Rob K. Elder surveys the great variety of capital punishment's parting shots in his new book, Last Words Of The Executed. Elder spent years scouring prison archives, newspaper reports, and 18th-century chapbooks to compile a database of the last words of thousands of executed Americans. As the late Studs Terkel says in his foreword, the quotations Elder included in the book are examples of the “poetry in the speech of people at the most traumatic moments of their lives.” Elder will be out at the Printer’s Row book fair all weekend supporting Last Words, so The A.V. Club spoke with him about the famous last words of some of Illinois’ least favorite sons.

The A.V. Club: Illinois is considered a pretty progressive state as far as capital punishment, with George Ryan ending the death penalty and the Medill Innocence Project getting so many folks off death row, but that wasn’t always the case.

Rob Elder: Illinois was a death-penalty state, and still is, though there’s a moratorium. I think the most interesting locals in the book are the people who were executed for the Haymarket bombing. Perhaps most chilling is that they hung four of them at once, and one guy was cut off in the middle of his final words.

AVC: Why should that matter? If you’re taking everything away from someone as punishment, why should they get last words?

RE: It’s a final chance for someone to repent. It also can perform a legal function, because in some cultures a dying declaration can be entered as evidence. There’s also the consideration that if someone who has not yet confessed confesses before they’re executed, it’s a final chance to prove that the court has been correct and just and fair and true. But that hardly ever happens. Almost no one of the thousands of cases I reviewed finally confesses at the end.

AVC: Any other Illinois big shots?

RE: A gentleman who was executed in Pennsylvania is probably Chicago’s most notorious serial killer. H. H. Holmes, the devil in Erik Larson’s The Devil In The White City, admitted he killed two women, but claimed he didn’t kill the other people. But what’s more interesting than his last words are his final instructions. He killed more than 20 people in a hotel that he built basically to trap people, and he sold their remains to medical schools. In order to defend his own body, he asked that they cement him into a coffin to fend off grave robbers.

AVC: Wasn't Chicago native John Wayne Gacy our most notorious serial killer?

RE: Gacy was famous not just because he sexually molested and strangled his victims, but because around the neighborhood he was known as Pogo the Clown. The press named him “The Killer Clown.” He was also famous because while in prison he made these childlike paintings of the Seven Dwarfs. But any childlike manner is not reflected in his last words. He just said, “Kiss my ass.”

AVC: Some people give shout-outs to their favorite sports team before their executions in your book.

RE: Four of them did.

AVC: But apparently no Sox or Cubs or Bears fans ever speak up. Why do you think that is?

RE: It’s really just football teams. I think two people cheer for the Raiders, one for the Cowboys, and James Filiaggi, convicted of murdering his ex-wife, said, “When the Browns are in the Super Bowl in the next five years, you’ll know I’m up there doing my magic.”

AVC: That guy’s pretty optimistic on two counts: The “up there,” and the Browns. What year was that?

RE: 2007.

AVC: So it could still happen. Any other notable last words with Chicago connections?

RE: There is a guy, Giuseppe Zangara, who was executed in Florida. He tried to assassinate Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and failed, but he wounded four others, including Anton J. Cermak, the Chicago Mayor, who later died from his wounds. Zangara said, “I no 'fraid of 'lectric chair. No cameraman? No movie to take a picture of Zangara? Lousy capitalists—no picture —capitalists, no one here take my picture, all capitalists lousy bunch of crooks. Goodbye, adios to the world. Push the button!” He’s basically railing against capitalism and also mad that no one is there to make a movie of his execution.

AVC: That’s pretty bold. There was also another Chicagoan who tore off the heel of his shoe and said, “I don’t want anyone else to stand in my shoes.”

RE: That was Richard Carpenter, who was convicted of murdering a policeman, but those might not have been his last words. Although they were muffled by the black hood over his head, one reporter heard him say, “Get it over with quick.”