Depression-era outlaws did not die quietly. It’s like it is against their religion. They died in ditches outside Gibsland, Louisiana like Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow with 130 rounds in their car. Or they died like John Dillinger on Chicago sidewalks coughing blood into the streetlights outside the theater.
Maybe they died like Pretty Boy Floyd, face-down in Ohio cornfields in farmhouse shootouts like Ma Barker and Fred Barker or like Wilbur Underhill died on a hotel mattress with a federal slug in his lungs. They even died in the gallows of Missouri and Indiana when they dropped through the trapdoors with hoods on their heads. Illinois, Ohio, and New York applied the electric chair, and even a few died of tuberculosis in prison hospitals decades after the public had forgotten their names.
The list goes on and on, but only one gets the award for the Depression-era outlaw that had the worst death ever. And I’m sure that’s not an award he was looking to get. I’m Mr. Vee, and welcome back to The Hidden Lens. Today we’re going where most folks have never gone, into the absolute worst death of the entire Public Enemy era.
The death ran across the spectrum. At one end sat John Dillinger, Public Enemy Number One. A single round through the noggin into his brain stem. Lights out before the body hit the ground. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow on the Louisiana road on May 23rd, 1934 sat near the end of that spectrum, too. The ambush was overkill, but their dying was fast.
And on the other end sat something entirely different. Something the official records of this period tried not to describe in full. To understand how this man ended up on the worst end of the spectrum, you have to start with who he ran with. He was one of John Dillinger’s buddies. Not a hanger-on, not a recruit from the second tier of the gang. He was one of the OGs.
The 2 of them had done time together in Indiana before the bank jobs ever started. And when Dillinger walked out of prison in May 1933, the man I’m talking about was already part of the inner circle that would build the most-wanted crew in the country for the next 14 months. In September 1933, Dillinger was picked up in Ohio. This is where we’re going to start. He got locked into the Allen County Jail in Lima. Or Lima.
The crew did not vote on what to do next. The man at the center of this story organized the response himself. This is where it all starts with this guy getting to where he’s going. On October 12th, 1933, he walked through the front door of that jail with 2 armed men. All 3 were dressed in suits and presenting themselves as officers of the law from Indiana State Prison.
The cover story was straightforward. They had come to take Dillinger back across the state line for questioning on an earlier matter. Pretty clear. They needed him to be pulled from that cell and taken with him. Well, Sheriff Sarber sat behind the desk and asked to see their credentials. The man at the front of the group, he didn’t have any. What he did have was a pistol. So, he pulled it and shot him in the side.
Sarber’s wife and a deputy were in the room. They were ordered against the wall when the keys came off of Sarber’s belt. I think it came out of his drawer, maybe. Anyway, Dillinger walked out of his cell. Sarber bled to death on the office floor within the hour. Dillinger walked out a free man.
The crew disappeared into the Indiana countryside and the federal manhunt that followed put every name in that jailbreak on the front page of every newspaper in the Midwest. He stayed loose for about 3 months. The law eventually cornered him in Tucson, Arizona in January 1934, extradited him back to Ohio and put him on trial for the murder of the sheriff. Then the conviction, the sentence was death of course and he was transferred to the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus and locked into L Block. That’s L, sign language.
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The most secure death row sector in the prison with a fixed execution date and a chair waiting on him at the end of the hall. For the next few months, he had reason to believe that he would not see that chair because Dillinger was still loose.
Dillinger broken out of jail plenty of times and walked out of the supposedly escape-proof Crown Point facility in Indiana March 3rd, 1934 using a wooden gun carved in his own cell. If anyone in America was going to come through the walls of the Ohio State Penitentiary with a Thompson machine gun and a getaway car, it was going to be Dillinger. But then on July 22nd, 1934, Dillinger walked out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago and 3 federal agents put 3 rounds into him on the sidewalk. He was dead before the ambulance reached the hospital.
The man on death row in Columbus understood exactly what that meant. The cavalry is not coming, buddy. The only person in the country with the will and the crew to break him out of L Block was lying on a table in the Cook County Morgue. Whatever happened next, he was going to have to do it himself. So what did he do? Same thing Dillinger did.
He started carving prison-issue soap shaped with the plastic spoons and the edge of his thumbnails. Over weeks of patient work. Then he darkened it with shoe polish stolen from the prison laundry. He shaped 2 pistols. He worked with another condemned inmate in the cell block who had agreed to move with him when the moment came. He got the second one.
So the 2 of them watched the guards’ rotation, mapped the corridor, and waited just like you’re waiting to find out more about what’s up. On September 22nd, 1934, you ain’t got to wait much longer. Exactly 2 months and 1 day after Dillinger died on the Chicago sidewalk, they moved. Told you. The man pressed the fake pistol into the ribs of a death-house guard and ordered the cell block opened. Guard had some cojones. The guard didn’t flinch. He shouted instead.
And the catwalks above the corridor. There’s some guards up there. Well, they opened fire with rifles and shotguns. We’re not to the good part yet. But his partner was killed almost instantly, shredded by buckshot before he cleared the door. That’s like 9 pellets, I believe it is, of about .32 caliber, about the size of tip of your finger. That’s what double-aught buck does.
Now, the guards turned the rifles on the man with the soap gun. A round tore through his shoulder and splintered the bone. Another bullet opened his thigh. Then, a big old slug struck him in the lower back and detonated his spinal cord. His legs went out from underneath him, which is what happens when that happens.
He collapsed face-down on the concrete in a spreading pool of his own blood, paralyzed from the chest down. The man on the floor of that corridor was Harry Pierpont. If the guards had let him bleed out where he fell, he would have belonged to the same category as Dillinger on the Biograph sidewalk or Floyd in the Ohio field. Fast, public, finished. The Depression era catalog would have absorbed him as one more shootout casualty and moved on. That’s not what happened. That’s how come I’m telling you the story.
What happened to Harry Pierpont and that’s why his death sits at the top of the worst death list of the entire era because this was just the start of what was about to become the worst death ever of a Depression-era outlaw. The governor’s office issued a preservation order within hours. Pierpont was to be kept alive at all cost.
They ain’t finished killing him, right? Whatever forces were working to kill him from the inside his body would need to be managed just well enough to deny natural death its victory. The execution date stood and the chair would do the work. But that’s not all that happened. But we’re getting there. What the order meant in practice was 25 days of medical containment that the prison doctors themselves could not justify as treatment.
The bullet wounds were not closed surgically. They were just packed with gauze and other things and watched. Slug fragments in the shoulder and the thigh were left there. There ain’t no reason not to, right? The spinal injury was beyond any 1934 medical intervention, but the infections setting in around and in the entry wounds were not, and those were untreated by design.
A man too healed up might survive too long or recover enough strength to try something else. And there was no use wasting perfectly good medical work on someone in his predicament, right? May as well just give the medical team some time off. So he rotted on a cot for 25 days. And with all of this and a looming execution date, we’re still not through with adding on heaping helpings of misery that’s in store for Pierpont. For Pierpont, fate has a way of adding more pain to misery. And it does so here.
Pierpont could not turn over. Nothing below his sternum had any sensation which meant pressure sores opened across his back and legs in the early days of his confinement. His bladder and bowel functions — they’re not working anymore. The waste was on the mattress underneath him continuously and the smell from his bed was logged in the prison nurses’ notes.
Prison records from October 1934 describe a man weeping continuously and begging the medical staff to allow him to die before he got in the chair. I don’t think he read that memo that said don’t let that happen. Well, he watched the calendar from a cot that he couldn’t leave. And the clarity of what the doctors were doing came through in those last weeks.
A man being preserved the way a butcher preserves meat kept just intact enough for the process to be scheduled or the scheduled process to occur. At 12:01 a.m. on October 17th, 1934. We’re not there yet, but things about to happen. But they ain’t going to happen the way you think they are. Well, the cell door opened on that time and that date. Pierpont could not stand. 2 guards walked in.
They slid their arms up underneath his armpits and lifted him off the cot. Yep. They drug his legs behind him as they walked and his bare toes scraped across the concrete corridor floor. The entire length of the trip to the chamber. The chair sat at the center of the room. An oak frame and leather straps with brass electrodes mo
unted to the side. 2 guards lifted Pierpont into the seat. And at 12:09 a.m., the warden gave the signal. And that dude, called the executioner, flipped that switch. 2,000 volts entered Harry Pierpont’s body. His body snapped rigid against the straps with enough force that the chair scraped backwards. Smoke started rising up off the leg electrode. Within seconds, the bullet wounds across his chest opened back up under all that strain.
Blood pushed right through the bandages and ran down the front of his unbuttoned prison shirt. The current ran for a full 2 minutes before the executioner pulled the switch. Then a prison doctor stepped forward with a stethoscope, pressed it to Pierpont’s chest, and shook his head. Nope. Got to do it again.
Even with the second jolt coming, there was even something more fate had in store for Pierpont. The executioner threw the switch again. Another 2,000 volts. Smoke got thicker in the chamber and all kinds of things were going on inside of that dude that nobody wants to have happen to him. By the time the electricity was turned off for the second time, it was 12:14 a.m. This time, when the prison doctor came forward, it was a no-brainer that the deed had been done.
But what they saw next was something straight out of an Edgar Allan Poe story. The execution had taken 5 minutes to get this job done. The normal time for an electrocution in 1934 was under 90 seconds. When the guards stepped forward to remove the leather hood, the journalists in the front row, boy, did they get an eyeful.
That last surge of electricity had locked Pierpont’s facial muscles into a permanent contraction during all of this. His eyes were wide open, looking up towards the ceiling. His mouth was wide open. Whatever was sitting under that hood looked nothing like the dignified executions the state typically advertised to the press. Newspapers the following morning.
According to their reports, Pierpont had died looking as though he was trying to scream to the almighty for mercy. The official press release didn’t mention the 25 days on the hospital cot, nothing about Pierpont being paralyzed or having to be electrocuted twice in one sitting to get the job done. What that release did say though was that justice had been served for the murder of Sheriff Jess Sarber and that the execution had been carried out without incident which is kind of right.
The person that was supposed to stop living did stop living after the second time. And the documented prison report along with the journalists’ filed copy from that night tells another version, set against the full Depression-era catalog of outlaw deaths. The road ambushes, the sidewalk shootings, the farmhouse sieges. What Ohio did to Harry Pierpont over those 25 days and 5 minutes may not be the most famous death in the era, but it was pretty much the worst one.
Now, if this one stuck with you, hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss the next one. And drop a comment below to tell me which other Public Enemy era figures you want me to get into next. I’m Mr. Vee, and I’ll see you in the next episode of The Hidden Lens.
