Appetite for Destruction
Before entering the death chamber in Huntsville Prison, Texas, Jeffrey Barney sat down to a child's meal of Frosty Flakes sloshed down with full-cream milk. A homely and innocent meal for the man who raped and strangled his victim, a female prison aide, who'd helped him win parole from his car theft sentence.
To learn the details of a final meal on death row is to forge a strange intimacy with a killer. The items on the chosen menu trigger an uneasy sense of recognition. It appears that many of us have shopped at the same supermarket, our eyes scanning for the same brands as we wander down aisle 11 searching for that box of cereal.
Photographer Celia Shapiro captures this uncomfortable familiarity in Last Suppers, her wordless re-creation of condemned prisoners' final meals. Her pictures are deep-fried poetry reading out loud the last mouthfuls of America's most notorious and not so notorious killers. Like a flash of personality from the coagulated veins of death row, it is here on Shapiro's aluminum trays, where monsters truly come alive.
It was the execution of Karla Fay Tucker, the first woman put to death in Texas since 1863 - that invigorated Shapiro to join the capital punishment debate and complete her half-formed idea of Last Suppers. Tucker had been 23-years-old and under the influence of copious drugs and a frenzied sense of revenge when she hacked two people to death with a pickaxe. She was 38 when executed and said to have become very much a reformed woman, contrary to the state requirement that the condemned must be deemed irreparable and a permanent high risk to society.
Another requirement is that the condemned be lucid and sane at the time of their death. Something Ricky Ray Rector, actively drooling in the death chamber, was not. The mentally impaired inmate set aside half of his last meal - a pecan pie - saying that he was saving the rest "for later".
Shapiro claims she still grapples with the death penalty, a process she believes she's partly responsible for as a United States taxpayer. She was drawn to prisons back in the 60s when she was studying fine arts and used to duck over to Mexico to party on weekends. One of her friends was caught coming back into southern California with a single joint in her possession and was made an example of. She was sent to a maximum-security prison for a year.
"She was never the same," Shapiro says. "They broke her." And in a way, Shapiro was never the same either. She became highly attuned and drawn to the trembles of violence beneath America's clean veneer. Twice she has had a gun held to her head, once by a Texas State Highway trooper on the side of the road, the second, she was mugged on the New York subway.
It took Shapiro three years to finish Last Suppers. "The photographs are facts I re-created," she says, adding that she made the meals that couldn't be purchased but couldn't bring herself to eat them. "I tried to sneak the leftover ingredients into my husband's food, but he was always onto me," Shapiro giggles. "Finally our house-sitters went through it all - thank God." Prisons refused to sell her used trays and cutlery from the prison canteens, so she called the companies who supplied them and ordered an assortment of trays, cups, forks, knives and spoons. These are still stored in her pantry.
"People are obviously homesick on death row," says Shapiro. Mexicans want Mexican food, African Americans want fried chicken, while killers pine for sweets they ate as kids. Nigel Slater, the British author of Toast - a book on food nostalgia, says that thoughts of the commercial food we ate as children can often open up more detailed memories than a photo album ever could.
The "last supper" is not about physical sustenance but serving up an aluminum tray laden with memories - a true example of comfort food. On execution day, the smell of buttered beans slowly frying in a pan could take a man back to a time of peace. The particulars can be jarring. Not trusting the prison chef would know how to cook it correctly, one mother came to cook her son's last meal in the prison kitchen. One inmate dared to express wry humour when he asked for "wild game, or whatever is on the menu".
Shapiro discovered that the accepted idea that inmates are fed whatever they want for their last meal is not necessarily the case. "They are given whatever they want within the restrictions imposed by each facility," she says. "Often these restrictions might include a $US20 tab and must come from a restaurant within a five-mile radius of the place of execution, which could also explain the prominence of fast food."
Certainly perusing the last meals of prisoners on America's death row, one might be forgiven for thinking it is the last supper that kills a condemned man or woman rather than the lethal injection. Some wolf down a dozen hot dogs, cheese doodles and lemon meringue pies. A former KFC manager turned serial killer ordered a bucket of KFC chicken, while another inmate asked simply for a pint of pineapple sherbet. And while the appetites of the condemned may appear voracious, Shapiro says many of the prisoners are simply taking the piss. They are well aware they may only get one of the 20 hot dogs they order.
But as Mike Randleman, founder of deadmaneating.com, points out, "Most killers are from the lower classes and eat like 95 per cent of the country: burgers, fries and fried chicken." A play on the words "dead man walking", deadmaneating.com (DME) is a website often accused of being in "poor taste" (excuse yet another lame pun). For five years, Randleman, a tubby LA actor with bouffant hair who plays bit parts in shows like The Drew Carey Show and ER, has been uploading the details of the condemned's last meals.
"The thing that gets the goat of some people is the logo of the hanging stick figure with the melting ice-cream cone," Randleman says. "I can understand that, but it is the best thing I have ever drawn and it will stay."
Initially he just uploaded details of prisoners' last meals onto his own website alongside his essays, but found the suppers were generating enough interest to deserve their own website. "It seems there are a lot of people out there with the same morbid fascination as me," he muses. Apart from producing the yearly DME Death Row Dining Guides, Randleman also sells Dead Man Eating (DIVE) trucker hats, mugs and G-strings online. He is "hoping" to get a chance to witness an execution, especially now the idea of publishing a book is in the pipeline.
Another book that's now available in shops is by Brian Price, a former inmate of the Walls Unit, the infamous unit of Texas' Huntsville prison where executions take place. Price cooked last supper requests in the prison kitchen for 11 years while he was on the inside, after accepting a plea bargain to serve 15 years when he was sentenced in 1989 for sexual assault on an ex-wife. He prepared Karla Tucker's last meal, plus numerous cheeseburgers and T-bone steaks. His cookbook, Meals to Die For, includes recipes for Post-mortem Potato Soup and Old Sparky's Genuine Convict Chilli -which has three degrees of spiciness, 5000, 10,000 or 20,000 volts depending on the number of jalapeno peppers.
Texas has held the most executions in America since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, lethally injecting 359 of the country's 1016 inmates on death row. The last meal is served at the Walls Unit. Sometimes the inmates can play checkers or cards with the guards after the meal before being taken into the holding cell, here the inmate waits to be called on to stand up and make their way to the death chamber.
The chamber is like a miniature glass dome set on a stage of what could be mistaken for an amateur arts theatre. Tiered seats for witnesses are divided so the victim's family and the inmates can sit separately. The inmate is strapped down to a stretcher. Usually they are calm and say a few words. For many, this moment is of no surprise. The longest time spent on America's death row is 23 years, while one inmate was only nine minutes from execution when the Supreme Court stepped in and agreed to hear his case.
Often, the last words are still, "I didn't do it."
The lethal injection takes seven minutes to take effect comprising of three compounds to sedate, collapse the lungs and diaphragm, and finally stop the heart. The last breath is audible within the glass dome. The inmate's family can rush to the funeral home to touch the body while it is still warm.
On the Texas corrective services website, the system unashamedly posts up mug shots and details of its death-row inmates. Photos of mostly impoverished black or Hispanic young men, stare out of their files, glaring at the state. Just 50 per cent of murder victims in America are white.
In a kind of forced marriage, the names of victims are forever tied to the name of their killer. The detailed facts of their gruesome union reside in tortured type on these official documents. A woman sentenced to death after luring a disabled man out to a paddock, where she and three men, tortured him for four hours before killing him. A 72-year-old woman is strangled and stabbed with a sharpened screwdriver by Larry White, the man who George W. Bush famously refused the traditional last cigarette on "health grounds".
Demarco McCullum was executed for abducting (with three of his friends) and shooting a 29-year-old homosexual man. The star high school footballer told his mates they had to kill the man because he knew their names. He reportedly shouted the name of each member of the group, including his own, and shot the gay man point-blank in a field. He requested a cheeseburger, French fries, apple pie, three Cokes and five mint sticks. Robert Anthony Madden, convicted of murdering two men, requested that his last meal be given to a homeless person instead of him. His request was denied.
DME's Randleman gets into the swing of things when I ask him what his last meal would be. With gusto he recites: "Three chilli cheese dogs with mustard and onions from Lafayette Coney Dogs in Detroit; a BBQ pork steak from Strawberries in Holcomb, Missouri; one pepperoni roll from Morgantown, West Virginia; an order of BBO bologna from the BBQ Shop in Memphis; fried okra; a big bowl of macaroni and cheese; strawberry shortcake; a box of Teuscher's champagne truffles and a six-pack of Pepsi ONE."
As for Celia Shapiro, her answer is more considered. "Several people have asked me what I would like as my last meal. My mind will only go as far as to say, I hope I don't know which meal will be my last."
Many people on death row do not finish or eat their last meal. The tray is pushed away long before it is over.
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