Washington’s electric chair in the 1930s, looking basically the same as it does now. Photograph Courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty., somebody smashed Daisy Welling over the head with a brick as she walked across the grounds of the Capitol, on her way home from her job as a telephone operator at the nearby Hotel Driscoll. Her skull was fractured, and the attacker pulled her into the bushes, raped and robbed her, then ran off.
On the morning of May 29, 1928, three guards led Jackson down a long corridor on the fourth floor of the District jail. Their destination was a straight-backed wooden seat, illuminated by a beam of sunlight shining in through the jail bars: Washington’s new electric chair. Jackson was about to be the first person killed by it.
At a glance, it resembles an old-fashioned shoeshine chair. But then you notice the belt restraints, the blindfold, the electrode-fitted headpiece that provided the jolt—all still right there, as if the thing could be plugged in and fired up tomorrow. “It’s a piece of the city’s history—and, of course, America’s history,” said DC archivist Bill Branch, who had agreed to show it to me.
The process—presumably as determined by Hadley on his trip—would at some point be written in red ink on a three-by-five card, as the Post later reported. “Pull the wooden handle—labeled main switch—spin the control wheel to the right, and keep your eye on the voltage meter. For the first 6 seconds, give 2,000 volts, followed by 50 seconds of 500 volts. Then, 3 seconds of 1,000 volts, 50 seconds of 500 volts, and, finally, 6 seconds of 2,000 volts.
In 1946, three men were executed in the chair within hours of one another on the same day. Julius Fisher had been a janitor at the National Cathedral; he confessed to murdering the cathedral’s assistant librarian after she complained to his supervisor that he hadn’t swept properly under her desk. Fisher split her skull with a stick of firewood and strangled her, then stashed the body in the library’s subbasement.