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Wearing a dapper black suit and an almost triumphant expression, Robert James glanced down at the crowd gathered at the foot of the gallows. It was May 1, 1942, and the red-haired barber from Alabama was about to become the 215th man hanged in California.
His journey to the scaffold wasn’t just strange — it was pure noir, ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. There was a dead blond beautician. A philandering husband. A double indemnity life insurance policy. And then there were the murder weapons: diamondback rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning.
The courtroom circus that passed for a trial attracted reporters and Hollywood celebrities, each clamoring to peer at the lineup of eccentric witnesses, the array of gruesome crime scene photos, and the pair of live rattlers the state presented as angry, hissing evidence.
June 1936 newspaper article that shows the rattlesnakes Lightning and Lethal.
(Los Angeles Times)
Pandemonium broke out when Lethal wriggled free, slithering around the courtroom until two snake handlers recaptured the errant serpent with a trash can and a wire noose.
“If you made a movie out of this, nobody would believe it,” Michael Fratantoni, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s staff historian, told The Times.
But the case stands out for another reason: It was the state’s last hanging execution. And according to Fratantoni, it did not go particularly well, leaving the warden horrified.
By that point the state had already decided to replace the noose with the ostensibly more humane gas chamber, so James’ execution ushered out one era of capital punishment with a harbinger of what has plagued the practice since: It’s surprisingly hard to find a palatable way to kill people.
According to University of Richmond law professor Corinna Lain, the guillotine, the rope, the electric chair and the needle all have been heralded — at one time or another — as a new and improved means of death.
Circa 1935 or 1936: Robert S. James, in suit, tie and hat, seated in back seat of car, smiling and waving, with another man seated next to him,
(Los Angeles Times)
“If you trace the evolution of execution methods over time,” Lain said, “what you see is a series of promises by the state that each and every method is humane.”
But whether any of them actually has been is a subject of ongoing debate. When a federal judge initially stopped California from executing people in 2006, it was over concerns that the state’s lethal injection protocol could be cruel and unusual punishment. (The state never resumed executions, and in 2019 Gov. Gavin Newsom announced an official moratorium that will remain in place at least as long as he’s in office.)
Nearly two decades later, officials in other states have begun shifting from needles to other methods they argue might be more humane. Last year, Alabama became the first state to kill someone by using a mask to pump nitrogen gas into their lungs.
According to the Associated Press, the state’s attorney general touted it as the “most painless and humane method of execution known to man” — though media reports say some witnesses saw the condemned writhing and gasping on the gurney as he died.
Nonetheless, Louisiana soon followed suit, and several other states now have nitrogen hypoxia on the books as an approved method.
South Carolina, meanwhile, brought back the firing squad earlier this year, similarly claiming it would be the quickest and most humane method. Already in at least one case, an autopsy showed the condemned may have suffered for an extended time after the bullets missed his heart.
The case that brought James to the San Quentin death chamber started in the summer of 1935, when 27-year-old Mary Busch James turned up dead one Monday evening — apparently drowned in the shallow fishpond behind her La Crescenta home. At first, investigators thought it was an accident.
July 1936 newspaper article on Robert James.
(Los Angeles Times)
But James was young, newlywed and pregnant, and her sudden passing mysterious enough to spur news coverage from the start. The initial story in The Times vaguely reported “it was believed” she’d been gazing into the water when she suffered a “fainting spell” and fell forward, bashing her head on the concrete water basin on the way down.
Adding credence to that theory was the half-finished note in Mary’s handwriting, complaining to her sister in Las Vegas that she felt ill after something bit her leg while she was watering flowers.
When a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy showed up to question her husband, he was a mess. Sobbing convulsively, James told authorities he’d last seen his wife alive before he left for work at his barbershop in downtown L.A. By the time he came home that evening with two friends, she was dead in the fishpond.
The detective bought it, later admitting in a true-crime magazine tell-all that he’d even felt sorry for the couple once James explained they’d tied the knot only three months earlier.
For several months, the case faded from the headlines. Then, James tried to collect on his wife’s life insurance policies — which totaled more than $21,000 (about $495,000 today). An insurance investigator began poking around and soon realized that James had been married at least four times before, that his third wife had also drowned and that he’d taken up with another woman within days of his wife’s death.
And besides that, Robert James wasn’t even his real name.
Murder suspect Robert S. James sitting on the witness stand with a plan of his house behind him, Los Angeles, 1936.
(Los Angeles Times)
Born to an Alabama sharecropper, James — or Major Raymond Lisemba as he was then known — left the cotton fields when his sister’s husband paid to send him to barber school. There are some discrepancies about his marital record, but The Times initially reported that his first marriage ended abruptly in 1921 when his wife accused him of having sadistic sexual proclivities and filed for divorce.
Undeterred, he moved to Kansas and married again. But according to The Times, Wife No. 2 left him when the father of another woman ran him out of town, apparently suspecting James was responsible for his unwed daughter’s pregnancy.
Robert S. James, in suit and tie, carrying hat and coat, smiling, walking in hallway, with doors and drinking fountain in background. Robert S. James’ real name was Major Raymond Lisenba. He was known as Robert S. James during his marriage to Mary Emma Busch James and at the time of her death in 1935, and, after her murder by rattlesnake bite and drowning, as “Rattlesnake James.”
(Los Angeles Times)
The future ladykiller fled to North Dakota and changed his name. His mother died, leaving behind a life insurance windfall. Apparently inspired by the possibility of more easy money, he moved to Los Angeles and in 1931 married a young, blond woman named Winona Wallace, whom he soon persuaded to buy a $14,000 life insurance policy.
After she suddenly died during their honeymoon that September, it was deemed an accident, and James cashed in on the insurance money.
Later, though, investigators theorized he’d actually bashed in Wallace’s head with a hammer then pushed her car down a cliff. When she lived — with no memory of the incident — he’d allegedly drowned her in the bathtub, claiming the head wound from the wreck must have caused her to faint.
His fourth marriage was annulled when James discovered he couldn’t take out a life insurance policy on the woman because she refused to see doctors. Even before the paperwork was settled, James hired Mary Busch, the strawberry blond manicurist who would become Wife No. 5.
After the insurance investigator’s tip jump-started the dormant probe into her death, the Sheriff’s Department investigator tracked down the widower’s next fling, who — according to a prosecutor’s account in the true crime magazine Startling Detective — claimed he’d tried bribing her with $1,000 to bolster his false alibi.
Authorities decided to bug James’ house. But instead of hearing a murder confession, they just overheard a lot of sex, most often between James and his own niece, a 21-year-old who’d also worked in his barbershop.
After three weeks of eavesdropping on cooing and coitus, authorities burst into the couple’s love nest in April and arrested them both on “morals” charges.
James confessed to Mary’s murder while cooling his heels in the county jail — but he claimed the killing was never his idea. Instead, he said, the plan came from his accomplice, an ex-sailor and hot dog stand operator named Charles Hope. Hope, however, had already cooperated with investigators, taking them on a cross-county tour of all the spots where they’d gathered supplies for their crime.
By his account, the plot began with James persuading Mary to have an illegal abortion. That gave him an excuse to get her good and drunk — for anesthesia — and tape her eyes and mouth shut, ostensibly to keep secret the alleged doctor’s identity.
But instead of a doctor, Hope came in with a box of snakes. James shoved Mary’s leg in, hoping the cooped-up rattlers would strike. Only one bit her, and only on the toe — not close enough to a major vein to kill her quickly. Her leg swelled and she writhed in agony, so James drowned her in the bathtub and tossed her body in the fishpond.
After a five-week trial in the summer of 1936, the jury found James guilty. Upon hearing the verdict, James simply batted his eyes and said: “I guess I can take it. I’ve taken everything else.”
Despite his courtroom bluster, James went on to fight his death sentence. At first, he claimed his confession had been beaten out of him. Then, he said the live snakes had frightened the jury, biasing them against him. His appeals made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though in 1942, the justices upheld his guilt in a 7-2 decision.
Until about the 1600s, maximizing pain had been an acknowledged part of executions. But then, according to Lain — who studies execution methods and recently published “Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection” — Europeans began shifting from outright torture to less-prolonged methods, such as beheading.
When Joseph-Ignace Guillotin debuted his eponymous decapitation device, it was intended to offer a more efficient and humane alternative to the ax.
But physicians questioned if it really did, because witnesses reported seeing decapitated heads grimace, mouth words or, in one case, actually bite someone, Lain said. Soon, beheading fell out of favor, and hanging took its place. In theory, with the right length of rope, the condemned’s neck would break, making for an instantaneous death.
October 1940 newspaper article on Robert James.
(Los Angeles Times)
That turned out not to be entirely true, either — though it was the method California settled on starting in 1803, when San Diego killer Jose Gabriel climbed the blue gallows steps to his death.
The state continued to rely on that method for well over a century. Then in 1937, a few years after a prisoner’s head popped off and rolled to the corner of the room during a particularly gory botched hanging in Arizona, California lawmakers decided to replace the noose with the gas chamber.
Yet James had specifically been sentenced to hang, as that was the state’s official method at the time of his 1936 trial. So when he finally lost his last appeal, Fratantoni said, San Quentin officials had to build a new scaffold to execute him.
Afterward, Fratantoni said, he writhed on the rope for 13 minutes before he died — not a particularly long time as far as executions go, but certainly not an instantaneous neck-breaking demise. Maybe the construction was too hasty, Fratantoni suggested, or the steps not quite high enough.
But he “was calm to the end,” The Times wrote, adding: “It has not been determined whether the wife James killed was his fifth, sixth or seventh.”
