Death Pictures

Biggest news of its day was the world's first legal electrocution, at Auburn, N. Y. in 1890. To that event the New York World devoted whole pages, with details of the apparatus and its effect on the victim, who, through error, was literally fried alive.

Since then, despite the fact that sociologically the death penalty exists only as a horrible warning to others, most newspapers have soft-pedaled electrocutions. Newshawks, many of whom leave a death chamber retching, rarely report such details as the victim's mouth foaming, hair burning, flesh giving off sparks. Exception was the Ruth Snyder execution in 1928, when the tabloid New York Daily News attained a U. S. circulation record of 1,556,000 by front-paging a photograph of the husband-killer in the electric chair. That picture, called by Editor & Publisher "the most sensational ever seen in America's press," was obtained by Photographer Tom Howard, who wore a tiny camera strapped to his ankle, had a remote-control cable release in his pocket, gave the film a six-second exposure from his seat twelve feet from the chair. Newshawk Howard was given a $100 bonus, a trip to Havana for his pains.

Last week newspaper editors had in their hands not one electrocution picture but six, showing progressive stages in the execution of Gerald Thompson, Peoria, Ill. raper and girl-killer in Joliet State Penitentiary, Illinois (TIME, Aug. 12). With one exception, every paper in New York found some reason not to run the pictures. To the Mirror they were "distasteful." The Journal thought they "lacked local interest." The American deemed them "too poor to reproduce." Lone exception was the Daily News, which slipped one into its Sunday rotogravure supplement.

Chicago editors' stomachs were less delicate. Despite the fact that William Randolph Hearst opposes capital punishment, his Herald & Examiner gave the picture a full page, tacked on a homely sermon against crime by Rev. Thomas Anderson, religion editor. Next day the Herex ran all six pictures and the Hearst American slapped one across Page One with a homily by Rev. Preston Bradley, publicity-loving dean of the Chicago clergy.

For the Herald & Examiner, the pictures represented a notable scoop. City Editor John Dienhart had long had a standing order from hard-boiled Managing Editor Victor Watson for an electrocution picture. To the execution of Murderer Thompson he sent tall, personable Cameraman William Vandivert, with a candid camera concealed in the crotch of his trousers. Squatting on the floor in front of some 50 standing and kneeling witnesses behind a wire-mesh glass partition, Vandivert caught the writhing body, the contorted hands, the black-hooded face of Gerald Thompson, won for himself a small bonus, a smaller raise.*

* Vandivert used a Contax camera, Eastman Super X film, made eight 1/5-sec. exposures at F 1.5 from 15 ft.

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