Snakes as weapons: Case marked state's last hanging

Wearing a dapper black suit and an almost triumphant expression, Robert James glanced down at the crowd gathered at the foot of the gallows.

- Keri Blakinger

It was May 1, 1942, and the red-haired barber from Alabama was about to become the 215th man hanged in California.

His journey to the scaffold wasn’t just strange — it was pure noir, ripped from the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel. There was a dead blond beautician. A philandering husband. A double indemnity life insurance policy. And then there were the murder weapons: diamondback rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning.

The courtroom circus that passed for a trial attracted reporters and Hollywood celebrities, each clamoring to peer at the lineup of eccentric witnesses, the array of gruesome crime scene photos, and the pair of live rattlers the state presented as angry, hissing evidence.

Pandemonium broke out when Lethal wriggled free, slithering around the courtroom until two snake handlers recaptured the errant serpent with a trash can and a wire noose.

"If you made a movie out of this, nobody would believe it," Michael Fratantoni, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's staff historian, told The Times.

Los Angeles Times ROBERT JAMES sits in the back of a car in the mid-1930s. He tried to kill one wife with snakes.

But the case stands out for another reason: It was the state's last hanging execution. And according to Fratantoni, it did not go particularly well, leaving the warden horrified.

By that point the state had already decided to replace the noose with the ostensibly more humane gas chamber, so James’ execution ushered out one era of capital punishment with a harbinger of what has plagued the practice since: It’s surprisingly hard to find a palatable way to kill people.