JACKIE JOHNSTON
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It was only nine o'clock and they weren't going to kill him until after midnight.We were in a makeshift media room inside the walls of the state penitentiary at Walla Walla. We'd had to prove our identities, empty our pockets, walk through a metal detector, and be patted down to wait here for the execution of twice- convicted murderer James Homer Elledge, now known to the Department of Corrections as "the ISCP" (Inmate Subject to Capital Punishment).
A few of us would be culled from the herd of our peers to witness the lethal injection, as DOC procedures require.
Elledge, 58, admitted that he killed Eloise Fitzner, 47, who was, from all reports, a nice, if naive, church lady. With promises of gifts and dinner, he lured her and a friend to Lynnwood's Lighthouse Free Methodist Church, where he worked as a janitor. His rage had simmered for over a year after she'd tried to sabotage his relationship with a woman whom he later married. In the church basement, he tied up and duct-taped the women, strangled and stabbed Fitzner, and stuffed her in a closet. The police say Elledge then sexually assaulted the other woman and released her, and she went directly to the authorities.
"There's something wrong with my nature," he later told authorities.
It wasn't the first time he'd confessed to murder. He'd been serving a life sentence for beating a 63-year-old woman to death in 1974 with a ball peen hammer when a member of the Lynnwood church befriended him. When he was paroled in 1995, church members welcomed him into their fold, found him a room, gave him a job, and included him in parish life. In return for their loving kindness, they got a bloody betrayal and a lawsuit from the surviving victim.
Elledge told the court, "There is a very wicked part of me, and this wicked part of me needs to die." Against his wishes, death-penalty opponents petitioned the Clemency and Pardons Board, arguing that the jury should have been told that in 1987 Elledge saved a prison guard's life during a prison riot, and that he once tipped off prison officials to the escape plans of other inmates. The board voted against clemency, and Governor Gary Locke, a former prosecutor who had the final call, denied it as well.
On this long Walla Walla night, two people could still stop this seemingly inevitable sequence of events: Locke and Elledge himself. There's a live telephone in the death chamber for any "legal impediments" to the execution—like a last-minute gubernatorial clemency. Since Elledge had waived his rights, they were his to reclaim at any time. Neither man had a change of heart.
Executions are relatively rare in Washington; this is the fourth since the penalty was reinstated in 1981. Child-killer Westley Allan Dodd was hanged in 1993, as was triple murderer Charles Campbell in 1994; triple murderer Jeremy Sagastegui was lethally injected in 1998.
PEEKS UNDER THE SHROUD of secrecy draped over the capital punishment process are carefully controlled by the state, personified here by our evening's natty, chatty, and informative master of ceremonies, Department of Corrections information officer Veltry Johnson.
The details of Elledge's last day were few and mundane, but details are what we were there for. It was like the Fox News coverage of Gary Condit—too much time, too little news. Questions from bored newsies went from the tedious to the ridiculous. Q: What is he wearing? A: Orange prison-issue "felony pajamas," T-shirt, sneakers. Q: Brand of sneakers? A: That information is not available. Q: His mood? A: Somber. Q: Is he cooperative? A: Very.
His last meal, that hallowed tradition for the condemned, took on vital significance. We were apprised that Elledge had chosen scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, waffles, sweet roll, OJ, milk. And cold cereal: Was it Wheaties? Special K? Inquiring minds of the free press needed to know. We were scrounging for irony here, but the shroud came down again—Johnson couldn't or wouldn't say.
Then a bombshell. Elledge had declined his last meal—AND the prison lunch offered him that day. Why? "No reason given," said Johnson. What then, did Elledge have for his 6 a.m. breakfast, essentially his last meal? Johnson began the litany of boiled eggs, oatmeal, and hash browns he was to chant throughout the evening. A reporter pushed to find out what Elledge didn't eat by refusing lunch. There was a lot of eye-rolling, and Johnson said he'd check into it.
NO ONE MADE US, the media witnesses, do this. We all applied and were picked by some mysterious process. Eight all together, we represented wire services, two TV stations, the Seattle and Everett dailies, and small-town papers. I covered it not only for Seattle Weekly but also for Agence France-Presse, a French international wire service always hungry for the gory details of American barbarity.
As we waited in a nondescript room once used by the parole board, Veltry Johnson, ever the host, led a wide-ranging conversation about executions past, notorious inmates, and capital cases. There was plenty of the nervous black—sometimes called gallows—humor that reporters, medics, and cops indulge in at times like this. And plenty of waiting. Execution was ordered for August 28 and scheduled for a little after midnight. Legally, Johnson pointed out, it could have been carried out at any time during that 24 hours. We groaned and waited some more. Midnight came and went. So did the deadlines for the morning papers. Reporters looked pained, cell-phoning shrugs through the ether to cursing editors.
