The room was smaller than I had imagined. About six from the back wall and centered on the shiny brown cement floor was the chair, a stark, rigid throne of dark polished oak Thick leather straps were looped around high slatted back, the two front legs, and the arm rests.
“Waddell was seated and the first strap fastened-was the chest strap,” Roberts continued in the same indifferent tone. “Then the two arm straps, the belly strap, and the straps for the legs.”
He roughly plucked at each strap as he talked. “It took one minute to strap him in. His face was covered with the leather mask – and I’ll show you that in a minute. The helmet was placed on his head, the leg piece attached to his right leg.”
I got out my camera, a ruler, and photocopies of Waddell’s body diagrams.
“At exactly two minutes past eleven, he received the first current – that’s twenty-flue hundred volts and six and a half amps. Two amps will kill you, by the way.”
The injuries marked on Waddell’s body diagrams correlated nicely with the construction of the chair and its restraints.
“The helmet attaches to this.” Roberts pointed out a pipe running from the ceiling and ending with a copper wing nut directly over the chair.
I began taking photographs of the chair from every angle. – “And the leg piece attaches to this wing nut here.”
The flashbulb going off gave me a strange sensation. I was getting jumpy.
“All this man was, was one big circuit breaker.”
“When did he start to bleed?” I asked.
“The minute he was hit the first time, ma’am. And he didn’t stop until it was completely over, then a curtain was drawn, blocking him from the view of the witnesses. Three members of the death team undid his shirt and the doc listened with his stethoscope and felt the carotid and pronounced him. Waddell was placed on a gurney and taken into the cooling room, which is where we’re headed next.”
“Your theory about the chair allegedly malfunctioning?” I said.
“Pure crap. Waddell was six-foot-four, weighed two hundred and fifty-nine pounds. He was cooking long before he sat in the chair, his blood pressure probably out of sight. After he was pronounced, because of the bleeding, the deputy director came over to take a look at him. His eyeballs hadn’t popped out. His eardrums hadn’t popped out. Waddell had a damn nosebleed, same thing people get when they strain too hard on the toilet.”
I silently agreed with him. Waddell’s nosebleed was due to the Valsalva maneuver, or an abrupt increase in intrathoracic pressure. Nicholas Grueman would not be pleased with the report I planned to send him.
“What tests had you run to make sure the chair was operating properly?” Marino asked.
“Same ones we always do. First, Virginia Power looks at the equipment and checks it out.”
He pointed to a large circuit box enclosed in gray steel doors in the wall behind the chair. “Inside this is twenty two-hundred-watt light bulbs attached to plyboard for running tests. We test this during the week before the execution, three times the day of it, and then once more in front of the witnesses after they’ve assembled.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” Marino said, staring at the glass-enclosed witness booth no more than fifteen feet away. Inside were twelve black plastic chairs arranged in three neat rows.
“Everything worked like a charm,” Roberts said.
“Has it always?” I asked.
“To my knowledge, yes, ma’am.”
“And the switch, where is that?”
He directed my attention to a box on the wall to the right of the witness booth. “A key cuts the power on. But the button’s in the control room. The warden or a designee turns the key and pushes the button. You want to see that?”
“I think I’d better.”
It wasn’t much to look at, just a small cubicle directly behind the back wall of the room housing the chair. Inside was a large G.E. box with various dials to raise and lower the voltage, which went as high as three thousand volts. Rows of small lights affirmed that everything was fine or warned that things were not.