Dead man talking

Aileen Wuornos, the serial killer creepy and evil enough that she spooked the Academy into handing Charlize Theron an Oscar, stayed bizarre until the end. Her last words, before being executed by lethal injection in 2002, ring batty: “I’d just like to say I’m sailing with the Rock and I’ll be back like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, like the movie, big mother ship and all. I’ll be back.”

You’d be surprised how few death-row inmates come across as mentally troubled as Wuornos. We were, as we paged through Robert K. Elder’s latest, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press, $22.50). The book collects the final utterances of the convicted, and reads like an oral history of the moment before a person dies. Elder says it was about seven years ago that he discovered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice publishes the last words of death-row inmates. He stayed up all night reading through them.

“It was fascinating; you get the range of human experience,” says Elder, a regional editor for AOL’s Patch.com. “In doing some research, I was appalled there was no modern study of last words, so it became this thing that I became obsessed with.”

The quotes go all the way back to 1659, when the Puritans were hanging Quakers for sticking around after being banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony. And Elder has divided the book into five sections, by execution method: the Noose, the Firing Squad, the Electric Chair, the Gas Chamber and Lethal Injection. The noose hung around for so long, it makes up the bulk of the book. The earliest executed are mostly religious outcasts, like the Boston Martyrs or the women accused of witchery in Salem. As Studs Terkel says in his foreword, there’s poetry in what people say, particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries, as public hangings brought out crowds and teased out the convicted’s theatrical side. Thomas Gross, a former soldier who confessed to killing his wife in 1788, let loose with this condemnation of society’s stratifications, “Don’t you imagine that men of liberal education are more intriguing, and do more frequently deceive the world than illiterate farmers? And will you not allow that there are as many bad clergymen, in proportion to their number as any other left? As this is my opinion, why should I request their advice or prayers, in preference to others?” Elder includes some brief context after each quote, and notes in Gross’s that he turned irrational and “claimed that he was Jesus Christ.”

The quotes are often poignant or funny (one man before the firing squad requests a bulletproof vest) and often don’t register as much more than interesting historical documents from centuries past. But read in aggregate, all of that pain piles up. Essentially, Elder has amassed a collection of what people say when they know they are going to die, the final product of what could be seen as psychological torture.

“They’re words that can’t be taken back,” he says. “I was interested in why, if these are the most outcast, reviled members of society, why does it remain a cultural value to record what they say?”

It would be easy to see the book as a political act: Reading the final thoughts of the executed illuminates their humanity. For his part, Elder says he was moved by many of the sentiments, but refuses to come down on either side of the debate.

“I really just wanted to study them,” he says. “And what you find is that last words are a reflection of their time. So during Prohibition era you see a lot of people railing against women and wine. So I really wanted to see what they had to say.”

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226202682?ie=UTF8&tag=timeoutnewyor-20... " target="_blank">Last Words of the Executed is out now.

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