Crime and Justice

Two months after I was born, on January 4th, 1949, at 8 pm, Robert Daniels is strapped into the electric chair in Columbus, Ohio. The formerly confirmed atheist Daniels is breathlessly repeating The Lord’s Prayer as the leather mask is pulled down over his face…his last gaze upon this world was into the eyes of Catholic Father Lucier (whom Daniels had claimed by his Christ-like loving forgiveness had won him to Christianity!) as Lucier secretly slipped something into his strapped-down right hand. As 20,000 volts surged through Daniels’ body, he is slammed back in the chair! Witnesses say strange lights danced about his head, sparks flew from his hand as he slipped into death at 8:30 pm!

In 1967, I contacted and traveled to Columbus, Ohio, to meet Clarence Daniels, the brother of “Mad Dog Killer” Robert Daniels who had been, in 1949, eighteen years earlier executed in the electric chair. I had told him over the phone my reason for wanting to meet him was to verify something I had uncovered while researching the Daniels case, my interest inspired by my acquiring the newspapers on front of frame, which had Daniels/West murder spree headline.

Upon our meeting, the first thing I had asked Clarence was the truth of the suggestion his brother’s violent behavior might be attributed to bicycle accident in his childhood. “Bobby was a good boy and a loyal, loving brother, until that car struck his bicycle, causing a near fatal injury to his head! From that day on he had uncharacteristic periodic moments of seemingly uncontrollable violent behavior!” I asked Clarence if he believed what was called his “Mad Dog Nature” was not psychological, but physiologically caused by that childhood head injury! “Everyone who really knew him believed that. What was fatal was Bobby hooking up with slow-witted, violent West, who’d been brutalized by notoriously sadistic Mansfield guard and wanted revenge!”

I was writing this down when Clarence pulled from his pocket something, saying, “When claiming Bobby’s body, Father Lucier told me last thing my brother said to him was what he had done was a bad thing, but was it no worse a sin than their killing him! Then Father Lucier had given me what I’m giving you, Jim, when you share with audience the whole truth of my brother’s story!”

Clarence handed me the crucifix! In my first speech on Daniels’ whole story, I had held up the crucifix and said: “This is the crucifix Daniels clutched the moment he’d passed from this world into the next. I see it simply as one man sharing the unconditional love his Faith had given him with another man at the moment of his death…”