The General and the Jaguar (36 page)

W
HILE THESE HIGH-LEVEL DISCUSSIONS
were going on, a remarkable undercover operation was unfolding at the state penitentiary. At about midnight on the evening
of May 11, Ben Williams, owner of a detective agency in El Paso, appeared at the gates of the New Mexico penitentiary with
a handcuffed prisoner. The captive gave his name as Antonio Vásquez and was turned over to the captain of the guard. Once
in custody, the man was ordered to take a shower, then given a prison uniform (“with a number on the back”) and locked into
a cell with Juan Sánchez, the sixteen-year-old. The next morning, when the alarm bell rang, the two woke up and began to talk.
When Sánchez asked Antonio what he was in for, the older man said he was a Villa spy. In truth, Antonio was a gumshoe named
Samuel Geck, who worked for the El Paso agency. The firm had numerous clients with business investments in Mexico and Geck’s
assignment was to make friends with the Villistas in order to find out more about the Santa Isabel train massacre and “the
plans of their leaders for possible other depredations on American properties in Mexico.”

Suspecting nothing, Juan Sánchez talked freely about his life with the Villistas. He said he was an orphan, born on a hacienda
in San Luis Potosí, a state in south-central Mexico, and had voluntarily enlisted in Villa’s army. He had accompanied Villa
to Agua Prieta and remained with him through the disastrous Sonoran campaign. He positively linked Villa to the train massacre,
saying that Villa had learned from one of his spies that a number of Americans were on their way by train to Cusihuíriachic
to reopen a mine and that no Carrancista soldiers were guarding them. Villa had then sent several officers and fifty men to
attack the train, “with instructions to kill all the Americans that he found on the train.” The boy ticked off names of other
participants in the train massacre, but the detective later wrote that he couldn’t remember them all because “I had no way
of making notes.”

Sánchez told him that he did not fire any shots while in Columbus and didn’t want to go there, but was forced to go by Pancho
Villa. During the retreat, he couldn’t find his way back to the horses and was picked up by the cavalry soldiers about daylight.

Having gotten what information he could from the teenager, the detective sent word to the prison superintendent that he wished
to see his attorney, a signal that meant he was ready to be moved someplace else. At 11:00 p.m. he was transported to the
hospital room where the other six wounded Villistas were sleeping. In the morning, they awoke and breakfasted together. Afterward
the detective tried to get the prisoners to talk. José Rangel was the first man he spoke to and the story he told differed
significantly from his courtroom testimony. Rangel had testified that he had been pressed into Villa’s army, but now said
that he had joined Villa voluntarily and had accompanied him to Agua Prieta. Some parts of his story, however, remained unchanged.
He insisted that he had had no idea that Villa was going to attack the United States. “If he had, he would have deserted Villa,
but was afraid that he would be caught and killed,” the operative wrote, adding, “Rangel claims to be innocent, but that if
the authorities thought he was guilty of the crime that he was ready to die. Rangel seems to be a leader among the six men,
and is not disposed to talk very much. He spoke about the gringos being cowards.”

Eusevio Rentería stuck to the basic outline of his story. So did José Rodríguez, Juan Castillo, and Taurino García. “Rodríguez
admitted he was in the raid at Columbus, but would not talk about the fight, except that he was wounded in the running fight
with the American soldiers. Juan Castillo only said that if he had to die that he was ready, and would not talk about Villa
or any of the fights. Taurino García did not talk much, claimed he had been with Pancho Villa four or five months, and had
been forced to join the Villa army.”

Despite his mouth injury, Francisco Álvarez was the most voluble. He said he joined the federal army at age fifteen, but soon
deserted with his colonel’s horse and saddle after being ordered to salute a superior. Four years later, he got into a fight
with his cousin over a woman, shot him, and was sent to prison. Upon release, he joined Villa’s troops and participated in
several battles. Álvarez boasted that he was close to Villa during the Columbus raid. “He and Villa and about eighty men were
about the last ones to leave Columbus,” Geck quoted him as saying.

Sensing he was not going to get more information, Geck stated that he wanted to see his attorney. Back in the receiving room,
he exchanged his prison garb for his street clothes. Then, he and his boss, Ben Williams, exited the penitentiary.

B
UEL
W
OOD
had been paid $250 by the court for representing the seven Villistas at trial and had not filed an appeal. But now he had
a new paying client: the de facto Mexican government and the Mexican ambassador, who had retained him to investigate the cases
and make a special plea for the governor to grant executive clemency. His initial public comments, however, suggested that
he was more concerned with currying favor from Judge Medler than keeping his clients from the gallows. “I am fully and firmly
convinced that no man or set of men in the history of the American justice ever received a more impartial and fair trial.
. . . The record of their cases as tried and made, contains no error sufficient to obtain a new trial, and if that record
would be and could be reviewed by a higher tribunal, the only comment of the record made would be a dismissal of the appeal
with thanks to the trial court for his fair and impartial administration of justice. . . .”

While Buel Wood was making his obsequious remarks, Samuel Geck was busily typing up his report. When it was finished, his
boss sent a courtesy copy to J. S. Vaught. The prosecutor was excited by its contents and asked for permission to share it
with the governor: “The report you sent me is very interesting and throws considerable light on the question of their guilt
and also as to whether or not they should be punished in the manner in which they have been ordered punished. Of course I
am interested in seeing that the sentence of the Court be carried out, and want to do everything in my power to have it done.”

It is likely that McDonald did see the report; by June 3, he seemed to have made his mind up about the prisoners’ guilt and
sent another telegram to President Wilson, advising him that his investigation had showed that the seven men had indeed received
fair trials. Wilson thanked the governor for consulting with him, but made one last effort to influence him, enclosing a letter
written by Newton Baker to Joseph Tumulty. In the letter, Baker expressed strong reservations about the pending executions
on both moral and legal grounds:

I still have a feeling that Villa is the responsible criminal and these men were his ignorant dupes, and that therefore the
extreme penalty is too severe. . . . In view of the fact that Villa has not yet been apprehended, and in view of the additional
fact that these men were captured on Mexican soil, brought to the United States without the consent of the Mexican Government
or of the men themselves, and therefore without a resort to the ordinary processes of extradition, which would be the usual
way for the United States to secure custody of Mexican citizens who had offended her laws, it would seem to me better if Governor
McDonald would simply commute their sentences to life imprisonment, so that if in the round-up the Republic of Mexico undertakes
to object to our abducting her citizens without going through the formalities of extradition as provided by treaty between
that Republic and ours, she will at least not be able to say that we carried off her citizens and executed them.

As a postscript, he added, “It may well be that my feeling on this subject is in part affected by my complete aversion to
capital punishment, but I do not think it is.”

The letters and telegrams show clearly that Wilson and his cabinet members had grave concerns about the cases. Yet they did
nothing to assert federal jurisdiction when the prisoners were still in the custody of the U.S. Army, and a few months later,
when another twenty-one Villistas were taken out of Mexico in the same informal way, Wilson once again would allow them to
be tried by local authorities.

As carpenters in Deming were hammering together the scaffold from which the prisoners would be hanged, Governor McDonald on
June 7 issued a second twenty-one-day reprieve. But this time it was for only five of the condemned Villistas. Juan Sánchez,
who had confessed during his trial to being in the vicinity of the Commercial Hotel when Charles DeWitt Miller was killed,
and Francisco Álvarez, who had boasted of fighting at Villa’s side in Columbus, would go to the gallows as scheduled. Leading
the charge to hang them was their former defense attorney, Buel Wood: “We are convinced of the guilt of the two who are to
hang tomorrow and believe they should pay the penalty,” he declared.

A
LARGE CROWD
had gathered at the Deming train station to see the prisoners arriving from Santa Fe, but the sheriff put one over on them
by stopping the train a mile or so out of town and conveying Sánchez and Álvarez to jail by automobile. Rumor had it that
Villa had vowed not to let the men hang and the residents of Deming were taking no chances. Well-armed citizens of the Deming
Vigilantes Committee, which was organized by local merchants in the aftermath of the raid, patrolled the surrounding streets,
and members of New Mexico’s National Guard stood sentry at the entrance to the jail, their guns loaded and bayonets mounted.

In the West, hangings always stirred the poetic imaginations of reporters and they often recorded in great detail the last
hours of a man’s life—what he ate for breakfast, what he wore, and his final words. When invited to speak, some prisoners
spewed out curses while others launched into monologues that sometimes lasted for an hour or more. A priest or minister and
the sheriff usually accompanied them to the gallows. More often than not, the prisoners found themselves drawing closer to
the sheriff in their final moments, for it was he who oversaw the mechanics of the hanging and whom they depended upon to
ferry them as painlessly as possible into the next world.

Hanging a man seemed like a simple procedure but in reality it took a great deal of skill to make sure the death would be
quick and painless. The rope had to be stretched beforehand, the noose coiled properly and positioned in the correct spot
in the hollow of the neck. The force of the fall, which depended in part on the length of the rope and the weight of the condemned
man, had a lot to do with whether the neck would break cleanly. Many prisoners wound up strangling to death, and there were
recorded cases of hanged men suddenly awakening after they had already been cut down and laid in their coffins.

The headline writers struggled to find new ways to describe the moment the trapdoor opened: the condemned men were “launched,”
“ushered,” “dropped,” or “swung” into eternity. One “stepped” confidently into the void, a second was “jerked on the New York
plan,” and a third fell through the trapdoor, “kicking himself to death in the light air.”

At four thirty on the morning of June 9, the Reverend Joseph Carnet and the Reverend Alfonso Romero went to the jail to pray
with the condemned men. Francisco Álvarez smoked cigarettes and made jokes but Juan Sánchez was more serious and spent his
last hours in “semi-silent prayer.” At around six o’clock the witnesses began arriving. Two physicians took up their positions
beneath the gallows with stethoscopes around their necks. The law required that twenty people witness the hangings, but Sheriff
Simpson had sent out invitations to more than fifty, including Milton James, Lieutenant Castleman, and G. E. Parks. Laura
Ritchie had been invited to cut the rope, but when the time came, she found that she just couldn’t bring herself to do it.

In Mexico, the way a man comports himself at the moment of death has such immense importance that an expression has evolved
for it:
hombrearse con la muerte
—to face death like a man or, more figuratively, to push death around. Francisco Álvarez was determined to die with the courage
and dignity so admired by his countrymen and he maintained his composure to the end, asking for one last cigarette as he was
led up the steps of the scaffold. Captain A. W. Brock read the death sentence in Spanish and then asked Álvarez if he would
like to make a final statement. “
Yo no quiero”
—“I don’t want to,” he responded. He cocked his head obligingly as a black cap was drawn down over his face and the noose
tightened. At that moment, his body began to shake and he involuntarily backed away. Gently he was guided back under the rope.
At 6:36 a.m. the trap was sprung. Twelve minutes later, he was pronounced dead.

Now it was Juan Sánchez’s turn. He limped slightly and his small size coupled with his infirmity made several witnesses look
away. At 7:13 a.m. the trapdoor was sprung, and Juan’s body plunged down through the opening. He weighed no more than a hundred
pounds and the clean snap that the hangman had hoped for did not materialize. “He just gurgled so they cut him down. He was
revived and they called the captain immediately,” remembered a young guardsman named George Washington Hudiburgh Jr., who
witnessed the spectacle:

Soon the district attorney and the judge were summoned and an argument ensued whether to hang the poor fellow again or let
him go. The short of it was that they wired the governor and he said to read him the death warrant. It said, “hung until dead.”
So they took the little Mexican back up the gallows and dropped him again but his neck still wouldn’t snap. Now the hangman
was mad and without the usual ceremony he pulled the Mexican up by the rope through the trap and upturned him, and drove him
with great force head first down through the trap. A loud snap told the story and that did the trick. He was dead.