21. Gerard Colby Zilg, DuPont: Behind the Nylon Curtain (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall 1974), p. 304.
22. U.S. Patent 2,120,204, application April 27, 1936, and patented June 7, 1938.
23. See, e.g., American Cyanamid, Zyklon Discoids: Fumigation Manual (New York: American Cyanamid, 1942).
24. “White Is Executed in Nevada by Gas,” NYT, June 3, 1930.
25. Edward E. Hamer, M.D., “The Execution of Robert H. White by Hydrocyanic Acid Gas,” JAMA 95 (August 30, 1930): 661–62.
26. “Nevada’s Gas House,” Outlook 155 (October 1930): 256.
27. See, e.g., P. J. Zisch, “Lethal Gas a Means of Asphyxiating Capital Offenders,” Medico-Legal Journal, January–February 1931, p. 36; Anthony M. Turano, “Capital Punishment by Lethal Gas,” AM 29 (1933): 91–93. See also Stuart Banner, The Death Penalty: An American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 196–205.
28. “Head Severed from Body as Trap Is Sprung,” PEG, February 21, 1930; “Brief Funeral Rites for Eva Dugan Attended Only by Prison Heads,” AR, February 22, 1930; “Lethal Chamber Replaces Rope,” ADS, March 15, 1931; “Lethal Gas, Which Replaces Rope in Arizona, Makes Execution Painless,” TDC, March 18, 1931.
29. House Joint Resolution No. 4, amending Section 22, Article XXII of the state constitution, received by the secretary of state on March 15, 1933. Arizona Constitution, art. 22, sect. 22.
30. Crane McClennen, “Capital Punishment in Arizona,” Arizona Attorney, October 1992, p. 19.
31. Alan Goldberg, Hooded Empire: The Ku Klux Klan in Colorado (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981); Lee Casey, “When the Klan Controlled Colorado,” RMN, June 17–19, 1946.
32. “Cañon City Klan Organized,” The Rocky Mountain Klansman 1 (January 20, 1924).
33. Stephen J. Leonard, Lynching in Colorado, 1859–1919 (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2002), p. 3.
34. “Eddie Ives Ends 40 Years of Crime in Three States on Gallows at Cañon City,” RMN, January 11, 1930; “Belongia Goes to Death Gladly in Gas Chamber,” DP, June 22, 1935; Michael L. Radelet, “Capital Punishment in Colorado, 1859–1972,” UCLR 74(3) (2003): 961–62.
35. Act of March 31, 1933, ch. 61, 1933 Colo. Sess. Laws, 420–22; “Governor Signs Gas Bill,” RMN, April 1, 1933.
36. Diana Andersen, “Warden Roy Best,” Local History Center, Cañon City Public Library, 2002.
37. The state was becoming more sophisticated in determining the precise lethality of the chamber. In May 1930 Nevada’s public health officer, Dr. E. E. Hamer, announced that he planned to utilize a special stethoscope with an extended tube over the heart of the next convict to be executed in the state’s gas chamber, in order to test the actions of the heart and lungs of someone who was undergoing lethal gassing. “Doctors Will Study Man Being Executed,” NYT, June 1, 1930.
38. “2,500 for Death House,” RMN, June 15, 1933; Maurice Leckenby, “State Pen Death Chamber Nearing Completion Here,” RMN, September 24, 1933.
39. Thomas J. Noel and Kevin E. Rucker, Eaton Metal Products: The First 80 Years (Denver, CO: A. B. Hirschfeld Press, n.d.). Timothy J. Travis, president of Eaton, declined to be interviewed for this project and would not allow research into his company’s records about the gas chamber.
40. “Execution Chamber Styles,” RMN, February 27, 1938; Cary Stiff, “Denverite ‘Refined’ Death,” DP, September 15, 1966; Bill Pardue, “Denver Firm Receives Inquiries on Gas Chambers,” RMN, December 6, 1976; Cary Stiff, “The Death House by the Side of the Road,” DP, May 16, 1971; Empire Magazine, May 16, 1971, pp. 17–22.
41. A detailed description of the Eaton design is available in Appendix 1.
42. Walden E. Sweet, “Young Wife’s Plea for Mercy Fails to Save Kelley from Death Chamber,” DP, June 19, 1934.
43. “Boy Is Told He Must Die in Gas Chamber,” NYT, December 30, 1933.
44. Lorena Hickok, One Third of a Nation: Lorena Hickok Reports on the Great Depression, ed. Richard Lowitt and Maurine Beasley (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 285–86, recounted in Radelet, “Capital Punishment in Colorado,” p. 989.
45. Charles T. O’Brien, “Kelley Executed in New Gas Cell,” DP, June 23, 1934.
46. Ibid.; “Death by Gas: 90¢,” Time, July 2, 1934.
47. Hernandez v. State, 43 Ariz. 424 (1934).
48. “Youthful Slayers Executed,” St. John’s Herald, July 12, 1934.
49. “Arizona Has Double Lethal Gas Execution,” New Castle (PA) News, July 6, 1934; AR, July 6, 1934.
50. McClennen, “Capital Punishment in Arizona,” p. 19.
51. “Kisses Executed Man, Is Mysteriously Ill,” NYT, July 12, 1936.
52. McClennen, “Capital Punishment in Arizona,” pp. 17–21.
53. “Burglars Murder Colorado Farmer and Schoolboy and Wound Woman; Fiends Shoot Three Then Pour Kerosene on Them and Light It,” DP, February 28, 1934; “Defense Suddenly Rests in Trial of Pacheco Brothers,” DP, March 30, 1934; Wallis M. Reef, “Two Brothers Die for Brutal Murder,” RMN, June 1, 1935.
54. “Ex-Convict Murders Colorado Rancher and Wounds His Wife,” DP, December 17, 1934; “Murderer Offers Brain to Science,” DP, June 20, 1935; “Belongia Goes to Death Gladly in Gas Chamber,” DP, June 22, 1935.
55. “Posses Encircle Slayers of Sheriff in Colorado,” RMN, July 16, 1935; Jack Carberry, “McDaniels Shows Remorse and Fear on Execution Day,” DP, February 14, 1936; “Otis McDaniels Walks Smiling to Gas Chamber to Die as Double Slayer,” RMN, February 15, 1936.
56. RNO, May 2, 1935. The best source on the history of North Carolina’s lethal gas executions is Katrina Nannette Seitz, “The Transition of Methods of Execution in North Carolina: A Descriptive Social History of Two Time Periods, 1935 & 1983,” Ph.D. diss., Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 2001.
57. RNO, March 27, 1935.
58. RNO, April 4, 1935; Journal of the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of the State of North Carolina, 1935; RNO, May 2, 1935.
59. RNO, May 2, 1935.
60. “Lethal Gas Bill Will Become Law: Almost Made a Bad Slip,” GDG, April 25, 1935; “Death Gas Assailed as Cruel,” NYT, December 8, 1935.
61. “New Execution Method to Be Tried,” Middletown (NY) Times Herald, December 23, 1935.
62. Quoted in David Margolick, “Save Me, Joe Louis!” LAT, November 7, 2005.
63. RNO, January 24, 1936.
64. RNO, January 25, 1935; February 1, 1935; Virginius Dabney, “Use of Death Gas Stirs Carolinians,” NYT, February 2, 1936. See also Trina Seitz, “The Killing Chair: North Carolina’s Experiment in Civility and the Execution of Allen Foster,” NCHQ 81(1) (2004): 1–35.