Death at San Quentin: a reporter's notes

It was just after midnight, the first minutes of a promising new day, but not for killer Stephen Wayne Anderson.

He sat inside a nearby room, strapped to a gurney, facing death by a fatal molasses-thick cocktail of sodium pentathol and other poisons.

In the early hours of January 29th, 2002, a fog had crept in over San Francisco Bay, cloaking the old prison in a moody grayish veil, something for Edgar Allen Poe to relish.

There were a dozen of us, all veteran reporters, huddled over our laptops inside the dimly-lit press room within California’s oldest armed fortress, where since 1852 hundreds of condemned inmates have met their fates.

In the beginning, they were dispatched by hanging and firing squad and later by poisoned syringe and lethal gas within a storied sea-green death chamber.

All within the confines of the notorious San Quentin State Prison.

Built before the Civil War, the ancient fortress remained a symbol of mayhem and bad dreams. By the new millennium it had become crumbling relic, more dungeon than penitentiary, a throwback to a primitive era in California’s colorful corrections history.

It didn’t matter how any of us felt about the death of this drifter who in 1980 shot a San Bernardino County grandmother and then cooked noodles in her kitchen as he watched her die.

We were all professionals, there to do a job, as bleak as it was.

We had no opinions, and if we did, we didn’t express them.

In those days, executions in California were big news, where network reporters did live shots outside the prison, when the families of victims wreaked a revenge often delayed for decades and opposing political camps faced off over the merits of capital punishment.

But those of us in that press room weren’t there to witness the killing ourselves, oh no, colleagues were positioned inside the chamber for that.

We were the support staff, there to add last-minute details such as final meals and protests taking place just outside the prison gates. 

Meanwhile we kept in close touch with editors back in the newsroom — all of them waiting to pull the trigger and dispatch our grim report out to the world.

But there was something wrong on this midnight hour.

Anderson wasn’t dying on schedule.

To keep reporters abreast of events, a prison spokesman stood on a small stage in that grim little press room, cell phone in hand, whispering to someone in the chamber itself.

The moments ticked by. Reporters clamored, starting to complain.

What was the holdup? Any more delays and we’d miss our deadline.

It wouldn’t be convenient.

At a quarter past the hour, we gathered around the spokesmen like an angry mob. It was a farcical scene, reporters on phones with their editors, facing a man connected by cellphone to a place where something terrible was happening.

Everybody wanted to know.

“Is he dead?” someone shouted.

“C’mom, you’ve got to tell us now,” came another voice.

Three minutes later, at 12:18 a.m., the spokesman extended his right arm. And then, with the drama of Julius Caesar inside the Roman Coliseum, he dropped his thumb.

At long last, Stephen Wayne Anderson had met his maker.

I covered two executions inside San Quentin between 2001 and 2002 — a reluctant participant on both occasions.

Back then, reporters at my newspaper could in reality turn down just two assignments.

One was going to war, the other was witnessing a state-sanctioned execution.

I had long ago decided that I did not want to see anyone die, so I declined to put my hand up for either tour of duty. 

I would save my nightmares for other atrocities.

But as a news reporter in my paper’s San Francisco bureau, I covered San Quentin as part of my beat. Even though I would not witness the last throes of a convicted killer, there was still plenty of work to do.

If the killer wreaked his mayhem in Southern California, my paper took more of an interest in the execution. A reporter in Los Angeles would be assigned to reach out to the victim’s family, do a story about their views on both the crime and its punishment.

Then they would travel to San Quentin and be inside the chamber to see it all unfold, talking notes, observing details, like reporters do.

I took my part in the boiler room, making sure the engine didn’t deconstruct.

For my part, I’d done stories about life and overcrowding at San Quentin. I wrote about the little namesake burg just outside the prison gates, about whether it was dangerous, safe or just crazy to live so close to a roiling prison.

I wrote about the prison’s inmate baseball team, where outfielders and relief men were mass murderers, foul balls bounced off guard towers and the team played all home games.

Along with its death row inmates, San Quentin at the time housed 2,000 minimum security prisoners. It also served as a Northern California reception center for another 3,000 inmates who are temporarily processed there before being sent to other prisons. 

The litany of dangerous felons who had spent time there was chilling.

In the early days the lineup included *C.E. “Black Bart” Bolton, the notorious stagecoach robber as well as Robert Lee Cannon and Albert Kessell, cronies of gangster “Machine Gun Kelly,” who was the first to die in the gas chamber in 1938 for killing the warden at Folsom Prison.

There was Caryl Chessman, the Los Angeles’ “Red Light Bandit” who committed robberies and sexual assaults along Mulholland Drive in the 1950s. And George Jackson, one of the San Quentin Six, a Black Panther who died during attempted breakout in 1971 as he overwhelmed and killed three guards after hiding his gun under a hairpiece.

And Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Bobby Kennedy in 1968, cult leader Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker.

In 2001, I covered an internecine war waged in the prison’s Adjustment Center, the home to condemned men singled out for unruly behavior and gang leadership.

Guards who worked the cramped concrete cellblock said it was a chilling place where riot gear, stab-proof vests, biohazard body suits and fear were standard issue.

In retaliation for what they called abuse by guards, inmates fought back with stabbings, kicks and slashings with crude prison-made knives and razors.

One convict sliced an officer’s wrists and hands when he reached into the inmate’s cell to deliver a food tray. Small arrows fired from makeshift slingshots stuck in the arms, necks and faces of guards who were not wearing protective shields.

But by far the worse weapons were the so-called gassings, when prisoners hurled cups filled with feces and urine or even infected blood at the faces of guards.

I  never liked going to San Quentin.

But executions were the worst.

I was also on hand when two-time killer Robert Lee Massie finally met his demons. On the morning of March 28, 2001 it was his turn to die.

But Massie wanted to go. During his 35 years on death row, he had pushed for the chamber, while raging against a system he termed unfair.

Officials gave him a choice between gas and lethal injection. 

He chose the needle.

He could have stopped the proceeding at any moment because he had not exhausted his death penalty appeals, but Massie marshaled on.

His death was described as efficient, cool and clinical.

“It seemed too easy,” said the son of one of Massie’s victims. “Just being put to sleep--he got off too easy.”

I saw none of this, however, and was better off for it.

In the hours leading up to the main event, I was outside with hundreds of protestors, who prayed and pounded Native American drums.

The following year with Stephen Wayne Anderson, it would be the same thing.

On that night when temperatures dipped to near freezing, they ranged from the college-aged to retirees and held signs that read: “Don’t kill for me” and “Not in my name.”

Still, one of the weirdest fascinations many people hold for executions is the menu: what the condemned ate for his last meal.

I don’t know when this particular fetish started, probably back in the 1930s when reporters and cops spoke — and wrote — like Joe Friday. 

Just the facts, ma’am.

But here’s the deal: Hours before their scheduled death, nobody feels much like eating. I once interviewed the prison barber on Georgia’s Death Row and he told me those meals are almost always given away to other prisoners.

Still, editors, they persist.

There was one annoying woman who never met a sordid fact she didn’t like.

That early morning in 2002 when I worked the Stephen Wayne Anderson execution, prison officials released a statement saying that the condemned had consumed two grilled cheese sandwiches, a pint of cottage cheese, radishes, hominy grits, a slice of peach pie and a pint of ice cream.

I filed the information to the desk.

A moment later my phone rang.

“What kind of ice cream?” the editor asked.

“Cold,” I said.

I was tired already yet the woman was relentless.

“You need to find out,” she said.

I approached the prison flak, who made a few calls. There was a question about whether they could release the information to me since no one else had it.

I called the editor back a few moments later.

“Chocolate chip,” I said.

I wanted to add: “Are you happy now. Is the story that much more complete?

I had my doubts.

At that moment, i almost felt like I'd sold my soul.

But in the end, it was all the same to me.

I still liked ice cream, even the chocolate chip kind.

When it was over, I went home to a warm bed in preparation for the new day, a privilege that both Robert Lee Massie and Stephen Wayne Anderson did not share.