I had been reporting for a couple of years in Baton Rouge when I first heard about it. The guy who processed our film (it was done at an independent company, not at the television station) told me one day, while we were waiting for the thousand feet or so of black and white to come out of the chemical soup that resolved our news images, that a few years back he had processed some black and white film for the sheriff who had an execution filmed. Those were the days he said when the electric chair was portable and it went from parish to parish, taking the lives of the condemned in the privacy of the local lockup.
At first I suspected a stitch-up, waiting for a punchline or the part where they give you a self-satisfied smile, knowing they’d sucked you into believing something that far-fetched. But it never came. No, he even said it would make a good story if anyone ever got a hold of it, and looked wistfully away wishing it could be him, but knowing it couldn’t.
I asked my mentor, news director Carlton Cremeens, if he had ever heard of anything about a film of an actual execution, right there in Baton Rouge. He said yes, he had heard those rumours, but no one had ever been able to prove it. Make a damn good story, he said, but who’s going to run the film on air? he asked rhetorically. Not us, he emphasised, to give the idea finality.
I asked a few of my sheriff department contacts if they’d heard the story as well, but no, they’d never seen it.
Sheriff Bryan Clemmons, East Baton Rouge Parish, was a tough lawman. He was the man who reportedly had commissioned this ultimate snuff film as the chief law officer in charge of the parish jail.
In the course of my reporting I occasionally ran into the man himself and I remember once skirting the issue with him. I was laying the groundwork for further questions at a later time, if he didn‘t just get the point and offer it to me then and there. I didn’t come out and ask directly, but rather, hinted at the general topic. He would not take the bait and changed the subject.
There was once a time when an official invitation came to the television station to witness an execution up at Angola State Prison. It was the custom then to invite reporters, mostly print reporters, to watch a convict die in the electric chair. The reporter then would write the most graphic account of the last minutes of the condemned, to be shared with other reporters who were not so lucky to be there. It was all part of the deterrent process of capital punishment, but no pictures were allowed, that would be cruel and unusual punishment.
I remember both wanting to go and being repulsed by the idea. Wanting to go because it was what reporters did. Not wanting to go because I was not sure if I could watch a person die intentionally without being scarred for life mentally. There may be a part in most of us that is willing to watch something like an execution. We all know such justice was a spectator sport around the world before men became civilised enough to kill people privately. In my day it was akin to an initiation rite into the profession; real reporters could take it and not squirm like the condemned.
Anyway, I was not to have the choice. The plum assignment went to Ron Albritton, the anchorman/reporter just under Carlton, the anchorman/news director. There was envy and relief. As it turned out Ron did go all the way up to Angola as an official witness, a trip of several hours through some of the meanest country imaginable.
(It was said that no man had ever escaped from Angola alive, for, if the Mississippi river on one side of the prison didn’t get them, the mosquitoes or snakes in the dense forest on the other three sides would).
He had to be there well ahead of the execution and waited more hours until the news came that a last minute legal appeal meant a stay of execution. Good news for the condemned, bad news for journalism as Ron came back without a story. Well, without the story he went to get.
When the next official invitation came and I was picked, I declined.
Years later, when I was working for New Orleans television station WVUE-TV, that Louisiana semi-urban legend of the filmed execution cropped up again and I was in a position to ask Sheriff Clemmons straight out this time: Do you have a film of an execution in the parish jail? The answer wasn’t ‘no sir,’ it was: ‘what makes you think that?’ I replied, several sources had told me that they knew of such a film and it’s in your possession. That’s when the ‘no sir’ came. In someone else’s possession? ‘No sir.’ Was a film of an execution at the East Baton Rouge Parish jail ever made? Bryan Clemmons just smiled at me, knowing I had finally asked the right question and never did answer.
I can’t help but think that somewhere, hidden away in some garage or attic, is a rusting old film can with tape around the join between the top and bottom lid, sealing in the horror of legitimised death, and that film is waiting to be found. But then, as Carlton said: Who would show it? These days quite a few places come to mind.
♦
The proclivity of news decision makers toward more and more extreme images within television news programmes probably got its first test in 1987 when the state treasurer of Pennsylvania, Robert Budd Dwyer, called a news conference to talk about being indicted, pulled out a Magnum revolver, put it in his mouth and blew his brains out. When the screaming died down, suddenly someone realised, we’ve got the whole thing on tape.
There was a crowd around the television monitor where the closed circuit afternoon feed came down from the network – images of the day’s news for local affiliates to pick and choose from. But everyone had heard about the shooting, and like I said, most everyone has something inside that makes them willing to see it, no matter how repulsed they might be.
I watched it happen. I was repulsed, but could not take my eyes away from the images. I tried saying once, it was my job to watch, but it didn’t matter if I was a street sweeper, I still would have watched. I didn’t suddenly say: Wait a minute, I just remembered, I have free will. I deliberately watched a man take his own life with the most horrifying special effects imaginable. Except it wasn’t special effects, it was real blood and brains that spattered on the wall behind him, real blood pouring out of his head and onto his clothes.
Those images that were sent around the world were used in different ways on the evening newscasts. Some stations decided to show the whole horror. The station where I worked decided to show video right up until the man put the pistol in his mouth, then fade to black and let the audio track continue…the screams: ”no…no don’t“. BANG. “Oh god”…screams.
A professor type friend of mine, Bob Papper, then at Ohio Wesleyan University and author of Broadcast News & Writing Stylebook, asked me for a video copy for his journalism classes.
I later used the same tape when Bob got me to teach some broadcast journalism classes. I would put the tape in the VCR, give a talk about the subject and then ask who wanted to see it. Most students did, while I stayed behind the image unwilling to see it again. Maybe it was the difference in age, me, already the old fogey, raised on a diet of almost real media, while they were fed slasher films with special effects bizarre enough to satisfy a coroner’s convention. Those students got a chance to see what a real execution would be like.