At midnight, a prison chef served Victor Harry Feguer his last meal just as the young killer had requested it: a single olive, with the pit. Feguer murmured something about hoping that an olive tree, "the tree of peace," would someday sprout from his grave.
He wasn't keen on the death penalty, the Michigan native told two priests early on that cool morning of March 15, 1963 -- 50 years ago today. But he did dress respectfully for the occasion, donning a crisp blue suit, white shirt and dark-blue tie. At the appointed time he walked from his holding cell, glanced at the 27 witnesses and climbed 16 steps up a scaffold. A federal marshal fastened straps around Feguer's arms and legs, and then -- much as a tailor sizes shirt collars -- fitted a noose snug against his neck. An anxious Feguer quickened the pace of his gum-chewing. Deep breaths inflated his chest as the marshal shrouded his face with a black hood.
At 5:30 a.m., Feguer dropped awkwardly through the trap door of an Iowa gallows. He died nine minutes later, after his body stopped swaying, for a Dubuque kidnapping that violated federal law. Feguer had murdered his victim -- a frightened young doctor whose wife was pregnant with their fourth child -- in Jo Daviess County, Ill. Even in his final hours, Feguer didn't admit to the crime,
despite overwhelming evidence against him. He obsessed instead about his own execution, and debated whether to make a speech against the death penalty from the gallows. He told the priests: "I sure hope I'm the last one to go. ... Will you make sure the press gets that?"
For 37 years after the business end of a rope snapped Feguer's thin neck, he got his wish: The federal government didn't execute another prisoner until June 11, 2001. That prisoner was Timothy McVeigh, sentenced to die for the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Feguer was the last to be executed in the state of Iowa.
Generally speaking, federal death cases aren't as controversial as state cases, such as those that have been overturned in Illinois and elsewhere. Federal defendants have better-paid and often better-skilled lawyers than defendants in state courts. What's more, federal prosecutors have better investigative resources at their disposal and are more likely to offer tape recordings or other comparatively unambiguous evidence.
Feguer's case typified how the federal death penalty often played out in the 20th century: Although the case was sensational, the execution itself was so mundane that it got almost no notice in newspapers across the U.S.
The tale started on July 7, 1960. Feguer, the 25-year-old product of a broken home and Michigan correctional institutions, traveled alone by bus from Milwaukee to Dubuque. Two days earlier, he had passed a bad check to buy a .38-caliber handgun.
Claiming he was a vacationing accountant and artist, he rented a room in a red-brick apartment house on Bluff Street. Four days later, he called the home of Dr. Edward Bartels, the first general practitioner in the telephone book's alphabetical listing of physicians. Feguer told Bartels, 34, that he was visiting Dubuque and that his wife (in truth, he had none) was suffering from post-operative pain. Feguer reportedly later told the FBI that he hoped the doctor would show up carrying morphine or
Bartels left a note for his wife, then drove down the bluff on his mission of mercy. Feguer lured Bartels into his bedroom, pulled a gun and forced the doctor back to his car. He made Bartels drive east, across the Julien Dubuque Bridge to a wooded spot between East Dubuque and Galena, Ill. There Feguer shot Bartels in the head and left him face-up in the woods.
As Dubuque police and the Iowa Highway Patrol frantically searched for Bartels, Feguer drove the doctor's gray 1959 Rambler first to Gary, Ind., and then to the Michigan cities of Holland and Grand Rapids.
Frederick White, an Iowa attorney who served on Feguer's defense team, later told a reporter about Feguer's peculiar behaviors after the killing, such as target-shooting along Lake Michigan dunes and wearing the dead doctor's stethoscope.
Feguer picked up a drifter and drove to Birmingham, Ala., where he tried to sell Bartels' auto. A suspicious used-car dealer tipped the local FBI office. Seven agents converged and, when they found a handgun on one of the Rambler's seats, detained Feguer.
Within hours, the FBI figured out that it really was holding a suspect in a Dubuque kidnapping. Bartels' body was discovered the next morning in Illinois, apparently after Feguer told the FBI where to find it.
In 1961, a federal jury in Waterloo deliberated seven hours and
18 minutes before convicting Feguer and recommending death. The jury didn't buy the only plausible defense argument, which attorney White later summed up this way: "We tried to prove he was crazy."
Because the United States at the time had no federal execution chamber, Feguer was sentenced to die at the Iowa State Penitentiary in Fort Madison.
After exhausting their appeals, Feguer's attorneys tried what they acknowledged was a "Hail Mary" maneuver. They drove to Des Moines to meet with Gov. Harold Hughes, a capital punishment foe who in 1965 would sign the law abolishing Iowa's death penalty. With the lawyers present, Hughes called the White House. There an aide fetched President John F. Kennedy from the swimming pool. Kennedy told Hughes, a fellow Democrat, that he had reviewed Feguer's case but could find no reason to commute the sentence.
Kennedy offered to move the
execution to Illinois if that would ease Hughes's conscience.
The governor's response: "If you're going to let the man die, I don't see any reason to move the execution and go through the pain and the
agony of that sort of public display."
On the morning of his execution, a stoic Feguer muttered his own pointless prayer to the president. "Well, John F. Kennedy," he said, "if you're going to make any sudden moves, you'd better make them now."
Twenty-five minutes before he dropped from the gallows, Feguer sat waiting for the telephone call that never came. He bent too far back in his swivel chair, nearly tipping it over. "If I'm not careful," he said, "I'll break my neck prematurely."
Then he anxiously made his way to the hangman.
