Sacco was at his desk writing a letter when Hendry repeated the formula. He slumped down in his chair, then in a thin voice asked the warden if he would see that the letter he was writing was mailed to his father in Italy. Hendry promised to mail it himself. In the last cell Madeiros lay on his back with his shoes off and a blanket over him, as if asleep. At the warden’s announcement he neither moved nor spoke. Father Michael Murphy followed the warden into the room and asked hopefully if the prisoners would receive the rites of the church. Vanzetti and Sacco refused. Madeiros did not reply. Sacco thanked Father Murphy and told him he had enjoyed his talks with him. The priest looked dejected when he left. “Well, I guess they don’t want me now,” he told the newspapermen in the press room. The three were the first condemned men in Charlestown’s history to refuse a clergyman.
Shortly before midnight Executioner Elliott, with Warden Hendry and Deputy Warden Hoggsett and the official witnesses, entered the death chamber from a side door. The witnesses were Surgeon General Frank Williams of the Massachusetts State Guard, Medical Examiner Magrath, Dr. McLaughlin, Sheriff Capen, Dr. William Faxon from the Dedham jail, and Dr. Howard Lothrop, a surgeon at the Boston City Hospital. Warden Hendry would allow only one reporter to be present. Lots were drawn in the press room and the choice fell to William Playfair of the Associated Press.
The witnesses ranged themselves along the wall, stony-faced, their voices held to a whisper. In the center of the room the chair stood with its unfastened straps hanging down, under the glare of the overhead lights. Executioner Elliott took his place behind the screen that hid the switch but not his head. Another screen concealed three litters.
Somewhere in the middle distance a clock struck midnight. At 12:03 two guards brought Madeiros into the bright silent room. Supported by a guard on each side he shuffled as if he were walking in his sleep. They guided him to the chair and he sat down and waited like an automaton while they strapped his arms and legs in place, adjusted the electrodes and the headpiece that covered the upper part of his skull, and finally placed a black mask over his eyes. At a nod from Warden Hendry, Elliott pulled the switch. The masked body stiffened, the mouth grimaced, and in a few seconds the witnesses noticed the odor of burning hair. Three times Elliott switched on the current, then Dr. McLaughlin stepped forward, applied his stethoscope, and pronounced Madeiros dead. Deftly the guards placed the body on one of the litters.
At 12:11 Sacco was brought in. Although the guards flanked him, he walked the seventeen steps from his cell to the chair unaided. As they began to adjust the straps he sat bolt upright, casting about wildly with his eyes. Then in the iron tradition of his belief, like so many of his comrades on the gallows before him, he called out in Italian: “Long live anarchy!” With that he grew calmer, and added more quietly in English: “Farewell my wife and child and all my friends.” Only then did he seem to become aware of the witnesses. “Good evening, gentlemen,” he said. The guards had finished with the straps and the headpiece and the electrodes, and one of them now slipped on the mask. In that last second Sacco found himself beyond wife, children, friends, anarchy, bared to the last basic verity. “Farewell!” he cried out in English as Warden Hendry nodded and the executioner’s hand moved behind the screen, and then in Italian: “Mother!” Elliott increased the current by 300 volts for that sinewy peasant body.
When the guards came to Vanzetti’s cell, he knew that the other two were already dead. With the guards beside him he entered the death chamber, his step firm, his head erect, his gray denim prison trousers flapping slightly from the slits in the sides. Just inside the door he paused near Warden Hendry and said with great precision:
“I wish to say to you that I am innocent. I have never done a crime, some sins, but never any crime. I thank you for everything you have done for me. I am innocent of all crime, not only this one, but of all, of all. I am an innocent man.”
With that he shook hands with Hendry, Deputy Warden Hoggsett, Dr. McLaughlin, and two of the four guards, then took his place in the chair.
There was still something more. As the guard on his right knelt to adjust the contact pad to his bare leg Vanzetti spoke again, his eyes covered. “I now wish to forgive some people for what they are doing to me,” he said gently. Warden Hendry’s eyes were filled with tears as he gave the signal. Afterward he was scarcely able to pronounce the required formula: “Under the law I now pronounce you dead, the sentence of the court having been carried out.”