ROBERT McGLADDERY killed Pearl Gamble after a dance in Newry, Co Down, over 30 years ago. Newry people turned out to cheer and jeer as the police searched for the body, just as many years later Angelinos would crowd the California freeways to gawk at a White Bronco.
McGladdery was the last person to be executed in Ireland, North or South. A hangman from England did the job. Since then, despite the barbarities of the Troubles, society on both sides of the Border has turned its back on capital punishment. The practice has been consigned to history as uncivilised and counter productive in all western democracies except the United States.
On Thursday they hanged a man in Smyrna, Delaware. Billy Bailey, a chubby man with glasses, had blasted a couple to oblivion with a shotgun. On the scaffold he closed his eyes, sniffed the cold wind and said nothing before the hood was placed over his head. A prison officer pulled a lever, the trap door opened, Bailey dropped. His body twisted in the wind before he was pronounced dead 11 minutes later. It was the first hanging in the state in 50 years.
Bailey could have chosen a lethal injection. In the US, not only is capital punishment growing in popularity, the methods are growing more varied. Death Row inmates have the rig lit to choose.
At 12.03 a.m. local time yesterday, John Taylor was executed by firing squad in a warehouse at Utah state prison. Five volunteer marksmen shot him using the same type of .30 deer rifles that killed murderer Gaty Gilmore in this prison in 1977. Gilmore was the first person to be put to death after a 10 year moratorium in the US and the last to be killed by firing squad.
The marksmen were paid Taylor, as he sat strapped like a trussed deer in a metal chair. One rifle had a blank, so none would know if he had fired a lethal shot.
Taylor, a remorseless paedophile who raped and strangled 11 year old Carla Ring, had his first cigarette in six years as he was led to the death cell on Wednesday. (I had my first in five years after witnessing an execution by electric chair in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1994.)
He cried and sang hymns with a Catholic priest and bad some pizza and coke, before the bullets tore into the white circle fixed to his jumper. "It went like clock work," prison warden officer Hank Galetka said.
Taylor had a choice between firing squad and lethal injection but chose bullets because "I didn't want to lay on the table and flip around like a fish out of water". Death by lethal injection is usually the execution of choice for both states and killers. Dana Ray Edmonds was the first to die this way in Virginia a year ago,
Many states are abandoning the electric chair in favour of injection which makes the death penalty more palatable to the public. But there really is no serious debate about the morality of capital punishment.
Sociologists identify several factors which pushed the US off in a different cultural direction from other democracies when it resumed executions in 1977. A horrifying rise in crime in the last two decades (now in reverse) has hardened attitudes.
The ready availability of guns make people feel the need for tough deterrents. In a 1971 poll asking people what should be the purpose of prisons, 76 per cent said "rehabilitation", but in 1994 only 25 per cent said "rehabilitation", while 61 per cent wanted "punishment". And what they want is punishment to fit the crime.
Where the public once saw the death penalty as a deterrent to crime, now many also want a life for a life, according to Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington. "What is spurring this is the perception that crime is out of control.
In Utah, firing squads are a reminder of the Mormon belief in blood atonement. Officials in the western state wish for a more modern image, and a move is afoot to ban firing squads. But it is the method, not the practice, that is being questioned. Utah does not like embarrassing publicity.
Dozens of reporters from all over the world turned up for the firing squad execution. "Most executions don't attract this kind of attention. We've become inured to them," said Mr Joe Baker of Amnesty International USA.
The law and order ethic has grown stronger since Republicans took over Congress and many states in 1994. New York has joined the 37 other states which execute its citizens. Texas, Virginia and Louisiana have executed 128 prisoners since 1977. The rate is growing as appeals are dismissed more quickly. There are almost 3,000 people on Death Row.
Nothing is likely to change as many Democrats support capital punishment, including President Clinton. He has signed a new law increasing the number of federal crimes punishable by death from two to 60. People don't like it, but they will not be shaken from their conviction that an eye for an eye is a necessary evil.