Billy Bailey won't you please

 If you read Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," you remember that the murders he wrote about in his groundbreaking non-fiction-as-fiction book were removed from the rolls of the living at the end of ropes in Kansas. I myself oppose the death penalty, but they are always looking for find new ways to accomplish it, like in Alabama, where they gave a murderer a fatal case of hypoxia by filling his face mask with nitrogen gas. 

It was still legal in Delaware in 1996 to hang a man until he died, and so that was how the state bade farewell to Billy Bailey, who had killed an elderly man and wife in 1979. Delaware built a gallows 15 feet off the ground (larger than the one the January 6 rioters intended for Mike Pence) and then they boiled 30 feet of 3/4" Manila hemp rope. Boiling the rope took away stretchiness and the tendency to coil up. Then, to make sure they got the most efficiency out of the loop meant to snap Bailey's neck, they coated that sliding part with paraffin wax. 

Bailey, center.

There was no doubt in the mind of anyone involved that Bailey did indeed kill the old couple. He never denied it, and since he was caught running from the scene of the crime by a State Police helicopter (upon which he fired and missed) he was in no position to claim noninvolvement. 

Before his execution, "the condemned man ate a hearty meal" (as the old novels and movies always played it). Bailey tucked away a well-done steak, a baked potato with sour cream and butter, buttered rolls, peas, and vanilla ice cream. It's unclear whether anyone present cautioned him about his cholesterol intake.

And, during the final days of his life, this man who committed horrible murders was offered the chance to go by means of lethal injection, which had become the prescribed method for Delawareans since his conviction. But this contemptible, odious scourge, who violated the Sixth Commandment so callously, played it straight and took the rope because, as he said, "The law is the law."