Next month marks the 35th anniversary of one of Chicago’s last electrocutions: Vincent Ciucci, a grocer in Little Italy, had been convicted of killing his wife and three children after his wife learned of a mistress who was pregnant. In a highly unusual press conference, held as Ciucci was being shaved and dressed for the chair, he confessed to reporters that he had shot his wife, but only in a fit of rage after she had killed their son and two daughters. None of those assembled believed him, and Ciucci went to his death.
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Ciucci’s final moments were detailed in May God Have Mercy on Your Soul, a history of capital punishment in Cook County written in 1993 by Ed Baumann, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News who spoke to him that night. Baumann’s book documented all 171 executions carried out in the county–from the first public hanging in 1840 to the punishment of the Haymarket Square protesters to the county’s first electrocution in 1928 to its last in 1962. Though the book included a pair of essays arguing the merits of capital punishment, it functioned best as a historical sampler of public attitudes and as a revealing look at the knotty ethics involved in covering executions.
Security was also tight on March 22, 1962, the night of Ciucci’s execution. But in an unusual move Cook County sheriff Frank Sain invited seven local reporters into Ciucci’s solitary cell block just after 11 PM, much to the displeasure of warden Jack Johnson. According to Baumann, Johnson despised capital punishment. He knew the men condemned to die, and he wanted the executions carried out to the letter. “He thought the guy’s last moments should be his own and that you shouldn’t have these reporters there talking to him through the bars while they’re shaving his head and putting him in his execution suit and all that stuff,” says Baumann. “But it was a very rare opportunity, and we went anyway.”
Baumann stayed behind after the others had left. Out in the hall he found Ciucci’s covered body waiting on a gurney, and with a reporter’s insatiable curiosity he lifted the sheet. In his book he described what he saw: “There was a deep, red burn, the size of a silver dollar, in the very center of the top of his shaved head where the electrode had sat. That was the only mark on him.”
