In 1935 legendary author Raymond Chandler wrote a short story called ‘Nevada Gas,’ one of many featuring private eye Philip Marlowe. He was inspired by the State of Nevada adopting the gas chamber in 1921. At the time of Chandler’s short story only Nevada and Colorado had adopted the method, but more states would follow. Its first victim was Chinese gangster Gee Jon.
Jon, a member of California’s Hip Sing Tong, had been convicted in 1921 with fellow-gangster Hughie Sing for the murder of Tom Kwong Kee. Kee, with ties to the rival Bing Kong and Four Brothers Tongs, died as part of a territorial dispute. The Hip Sings and their allies the Suey Sings fought the Bing Kongs and Four Brothers in one of the bloodiest gang wars of the 20th century.
Jon had been sent from California to do the killing. Sing, from nearby Carson City, had been recruited to assist him. A fairly new member with a mere two, Hughie Sing was Gee Jon’s apprentice. Where Jon went, Sing followed. When Jon went on Tong business, Sing helped. Aged only nineteen, Sing was to be the ‘fingerman’ who pointed identified Jon’s impending victim.
The Tong Wars are often overshadowed by the Beer Wars of Prohibition and the Castellamarese War between rival factions of La Cosa Nostra, but were equally brutal affairs in their own right. The Hip Sings traded mainly in drugs and bootleg alcohol and their allies the Suey Sings were not prepared to give ground to their rivals. The Bing Kongs and Four Brothers were equally prepared to take what they could not peacefully share. San Francisco was their primary battleground, but Tom Kwong Kee was in Mina, Nevada when Jon and Sing came to kill him.
Mina is a small place with a population of little over one hundred people. Finding Kee would not have been difficult in such a small place, but finding him without themselves being easily remembered and identified certainly was. Nor did it help that Deputy Sheriff W.J. Hammill had already been warned that Tong killers were on their way to murder Kee. Hammill’s warning had included that they were pretending to look for work in the area, which proved damning when Hammill personally saw two Chinese men in Mina asking about working in a local cafe. He later identified them in court as Hughie Sing and Gee Jon.
When alerted that Kee had been found dead in his own doorway, shot twice through the heart at close range on the night of August 27, 1921, Hammill’s first thought was of the two Chinese strangers he had seen the week before. Knowing they had come from Reno, Hammill alerted Reno Chief of Police John Kirkley who picked up Jon and Sing the same day. Believing that a quick confession would secure his release, Sing spilled everything.
Sing, of course, was woefully wrong. Far from securing his safety, all he had done was leave Gee Jon at the dubious mercy of the executioner. For Sing himself there would be no mercy whatsoever from the Hip Sings or any other Tong, for that matter. If Tong hatchet men ever got hold of him Hughie Sing would be very dead, probably very painfully. Gee Jon’s death would be less painful, more formal and give him his own small place in history. He probably didn’t appreciate the distinction.
Sing and Jon were not safe, far from it. Nevada was not known for using its death penalty very often, certainly not compared to States like New York which was averaging nearly twenty executions per year, but it did have capital punishment and ws not afraid to use it. Unfortunately for Gee Jon, he was condemned shortly after Nevada had abandoned its gallows and firing squad for a new and so far untested method, cyanide gas. Nevada’s Humane Execution Act had been passed on March 28, 1921, only eleven months before Jon and Sing were condemned to death by the District Court of Mineral County. Gas was the new thing and only one question remained; Who would be first to suffer it? Sentenced to die by Judge J. Emmett Walsh on December 3, 1921, it looked very much like being Hughie Sing and Gee Jon.
Nevada had not executed anyone since Andriza Mircovic, who died by shooting at the Nevada State Prison on May 14, 1913. Mircovic was the only Nevada prisoner to die by shooting, delivered by a custom-built machine when a full firing squad couldn’t be assembled due to a lack of volunteers. We’ll get to Mircovic another time, but by 1921 cyanide was the latest idea if not a breath of fresh air.
Like William Kemmler debutig the electric chair at New York’s Au chamber hburn Prison on August 6, 1890, this was uncharted territory. For starters, a workable gas chamber had yet to be invented. Nor had the courts decided whether the method, untested as it was, would even be constitutional. Before Gee Jon could enter the gas chamber and then history itself both issues would have to be resolved and resolved they were, but not in Jon’s favour.
Hughie Sing was in luck. Given he was only nineteen at the time of the murder and that Jon had fired the fatal shots, the Nevada pardon board commuted his sentence to life imprisonment on January 27, 1924. Gee Jon, however, was not so fortunate. He would die as scheduled on the morning of February 8, 1924. In the intervening period Warden Dickerson (who had been in charge when Andriz Mircovic was shot) had been hard at work producing a functional ,if very crude, gas chamber by converting Nevada State Prison’s barber shop.
The intial idea had been to pipe cyanide gas into a prisoner’s cell while they slept so they woul die without even knowing it. Given what we now today about the pain and suffering of cyanide poisoning this seems unrealistic and unworkable. The idea was duly abandoned and the barber shop converted into an airtight room with observation windows and enough restraint chairs to kill three prisoners at once.
Instead of the more modern method of mixing sodium cyanide with dilute sulphuric acid to generate hydrogen cyanide gas, canisters would be connected to a fumigation machine on the chamber floor and five guards would each turn a valve on a canister dispensing either air or cyanide without knowing which.
Unlike with a firing squad where the recoil (or lack of it) instantly tells the shooter whether they fired a live or blank round, none of the five guards would know whether they had personally delivered the lethal gas. That did not stop five prisoners from refusing to work on the conversion (ending up in solitary as a result) or other prisoners and staff from avoiding the building whenever possible. Neither the State or Supreme Court had any reservations, the US Supreme Court had refused even to hear Jon’s appeal and the Nevada courts were clear. In their opinion there was nothing inherently wrong with the new method.
With Hughie Sing’s death sentence commuted Gee Jon and Thomas Russell were slated fo two of the three chairs, a regular barbershop duet. The night before, however, Governor Scrugham intervened. Thomas would be spared. Like Hughie Sing before him Russell’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Three had become one. Gee Jon would die alone.
As befitting so grim an occasion February 8, 1924 dawned cold and grey. Car after car of reporters, photographers and official witnesses came through the prison gate. One was US Army officer Major Delos Turner, a man whose eccentricity belied a distinctly sinister side. Turner had an interest in chemical weapons and had already caused a stir by wantig to try and revibe Gee Jon after the execution. Waarden Dickerson refused categorically to indulge Turner’s bizarre request.
As for the reluctant star of the show, Gee Jon himself had not eaten or slept properly in over a week. He had needed much persuasion to accept a last meal of ham, eggs, toast and coffee and was openly nervous as he arrived at the newly-converted barbershop. Strapped securely into one of the three wooden chairs, he sobbed as the door was closed and the chamber sealed. At 9:40am the five guards opened the vales and the world’s first execution by lethal gas was on.
Trial and error would tell prison officials that the chamber needed to be at a temperature of around 75 degrees Fahrenheit for cyanide gas to fully vaporise. With a broken heater the chamber was at around 49 degrees, leaving a pool of liquid cyanide on the chamber floor. Jon’s head rose and fell, his breathing became progressively more laboured and six minutes after the valves were opened the gas seemed to have done its work. Compared to the ghastly horrors of William Kemmler’s death at Auburn in 1890, it seemed as though lethal gas might indeed be the way forward. The Miami Herald of February 9, 1924 describes it thus:
‘With an audible hissing sound the acid within the tank escaped into the chamber as gas. Gee Jon shut his eyes. As though an unseen hand had tapped his forehead, Gee Jon sank back. His head rolled to the right. His body quivered once withinthe straps. For 10 seconds his chest, silhoueted against the stone wall, heaved less and less perceptibly. There was not an altered muscle on Gee Jon’s face and Gee Jon was, to all intents and purposes, dead. Observers agreed there was not the slightest index of pain. Critics of the method speculated about Gee Jon’s last thoughts. For six minutes the body quivered, then was still. Two hours and forty minutes later, Gee Jon was pronounced legally dead.’
Whether Gee Jon was in pain or not only Jon himself would ever know. Certainly other gassed prisoners have signalled that they were suffering, often severely so, during their last moments. One thing, though, was certain. While the concept would need refining and the equipment drastically needed improving, the gas chamber was here to stay.
In time it would be adopted by Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Wyoming, California, Missouri, Oregon, New Mexico, Mississippi and Maryland and botched executions would become as common as with the electric chair it was supposed to supplant. Not until the early-1990’s did the gas chamber gasp its last. By then, of course, hundreds of prisoners had done the same.
Except the idea of lethal gas has not gone away. In recent years Arizona has dusted off its old gas chamber and is prepared to resume the use of the old cyanide method. Other States such as Alabama have adopted a new form of killing with gas, nitrogen hypoxia. Initial reports show that, like the electric chair, gas chamber and lethal injection before it, America’s latest new idea intended to kill quickly, cleanly and humanely has been anything but a success.
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