Botched Execution of Rattlesnake James.

Major Raymond Lisenba was the last condemned inmate to be hanged at San Quentin State Prison.

 Major Raymond “Rattlesnake James” Lisenba (March 6, 1894 – May 1, 1942) was charged with murdering his fourth wife, Mary Emma James, his third wife, Winona Wallace, and nephew, Cornelius Wright, to collect their life insurance benefits.

  James staged a vehicle accident involving Winona Wallace that fell 150 feet down a raven.  He was able to jump free but his wife was trapped at the wheel.  She unfortunately survived with only a massive head wound behind her ear.  She however didn't survive drowning a week later.  They later found shreds of a bullet in her head during the autopsy.

Cornelius Wright was visiting James while on leave from the military.  James lent him his car and Wright later died after driving off a cliff.  The mechanic who towed the wreck back to James told him that something was wrong with the steering wheel.  

  James final victim was Mary Emma James. She was tied to the kitchen table with her eyes and mouth taped shut.  Her foot was forced inside a box containing two deadly rattle snakes.  When the poisonous venom didn't kill her James drowned her in the bath tube.  Police found her body next to their fish pond in the backyard to make it look like an accident.  She was pregnant at the time.

Clinton Duffy, Warden of San Quentin  between 1940 and 1952.

  Warden Clinton Duffy witnessed the execution and described the mayhem that followed the botched and gruesome execution.

  "The man hit bottom and I observed that he was fighting by pulling on the straps, wheezing, whistling, trying to get air, that blood was oozing through the black cap. I observed also that he urinated, defecated, and droppings fell on the floor, and the stench was terrible".  (This is not abnormal in death by slow hanging as the person slowly strangles)

  "I also saw witnesses pass out and have to be carried from the witness room. Some of them threw up." It took ten minutes for the condemned man to die.

When he was taken down and the cap removed, "big hunks of flesh were torn off" the side of his face where the noose had been, "his eyes were popped," and his tongue was "swollen and hanging from his mouth." His face had turned purple". After this fiasco the state adopted the gas chamber as its primary method for executions.