It was disturbingly easy to watch as the state put Aileen Wuornos to death

STARKE -- Even for the witnesses, there was no escape.

At 9:28 a.m., a guard shut the door we had just walked through and locked it from the inside. All of Florida State Prison was on lockdown Wednesday morning, the exercise yards and work fields eerily empty beneath a low gray sky. All of the roughly 1,200 inmates housed here -- except one -- were in their cells.

Now the room where we'd watch Aileen Wuornos die was sealed, too.

The guard pointed me to a seat in the last of four rows. There were 29 people in the room, including six relatives of Wuornos' victims, 12 journalists, a state prosecutor and various Department of Corrections officials.

We sat ramrod straight, staring at the brown curtain that separated the large viewing window from the execution chamber. Two speakers were mounted on opposite ends of the wall above the window. All was silent, except for the hum of a Friedrich air conditioner set on low cool in the rear corner.

We were a captive audience, brought together to witness the aptly bizarre end of a twisted life. We had different viewpoints, different roles, different feelings, but for 20 excruciatingly long minutes, we sat together as a killer was killed. There wasn't an inattentive eye in the house.

But after the ritualized pageant was over, after she stiffened and turned blue and two men with stethoscopes leaned over her body and officially pronounced her dead at 9:47 a.m., I didn't feel nearly as disturbed as I would have thought. And that was disturbing in itself.

At 9:29 a.m., the curtain opened. Wuornos was strapped onto a gurney, with a needle leading to two intravenous tubes poked into the fleshy bend of her right arm. Her mouth and lips were moving, but we could not hear. The microphone dangling above her was off, our wall speakers mute.

Her eyes were open, darting to the side from her restrained head to quickly survey the witness room.

"She seemed a little surprised to see so many people," Terri Griffith, who sat in the front row, said later. Her father, Charles Humphreys, was one of seven men Wuornos confessed to murdering. "I know she appreciated the attention."

Wuornos was tucked beneath a white sheet, which was folded with military precision under her feet and around her neck and shoulders. She looked like a made bed. The only visible parts of her body: her head and her right arm.

Final statement

The digital clock on the wall above her changed to 9:30.

The microphone was turned on.

"Do you have a final statement?" she was asked.

"Yes," she said. "I'd just like to say I'm sailing with the Rock, and I'll be back. Like Independence Day with Jesus, June 6, just like the movie, big mother ship and all. I'll be back."

She spoke in a barely audible voice, with speech that seemed slurred even though officials said she did not request or receive a sedative in her final hours. I could hardly make out a word, the low volume and air conditioner causing those of us in the back corner to exchange horrified glances and whisper, "What'd she say? I couldn't hear."

Later, on the van ride back to the media area, those closer to the speakers helped to reconstruct her words.

As to what they meant, nobody could figure that out.

"She was off her rocker," Griffith said.

"She's totally off the wall," said Wanda Pouncey of Boynton Beach, whose father, Troy Burress, was killed by Wuornos.

That conclusion was echoed by British filmmaker Nick Broomfield, who made a documentary about Wuornos and is working on another. He had the final interview with her on Tuesday. After complaining about the "sonic waves" that were controlling her mind, she flipped him off and stormed out of the session prematurely.

"She's obsessed and crazed, has totally lost her mind," Broomfield said. "She trusts nobody and is stark raving mad. She's multiple people. Every time I met her, she was a different person."

It's a point that Fort Lauderdale attorney Raag Singhal made, to no avail, in a letter to the Florida Supreme Court last month. Singhal represented Wuornos earlier this year, but they weren't on speaking terms at the end. She was found competent to be executed after a psychiatric evaluation last week.

I traveled with Singhal to Starke, then found myself boarding the van to the witness room when two journalists didn't claim their spots. As second alternate in the media lottery, I thought I'd be covering this execution from outside.

But at 9:30 a.m., when it came time for the matter of the State of Florida vs. Wuornos to reach its conclusion after 12 years, I got to see it for myself. The woman who once said she'd kill again because she had "hate crawling through her system," now had a chemical cocktail coursing through her veins. The executioner, who could not be seen behind a two-way mirror, first released two syringes of sodium pentothol, which rendered her unconscious. Then came two syringes of pancuronium bromide, which paralyzed the muscles, and two syringes of potassium chloride, which stopped the heart.

The next 17 minutes were agonizingly slow, and she didn't move a muscle, although her heart fluttered a bit on the monitors until she completely flat-lined. Then the doctors in white coats came out. The curtain was drawn, the door was unlocked and we filed back outside to the vans that would take us back to the rest of our lives.

I made it home in time for dinner.

Simple ritual

No matter how you feel about the death penalty, watching another human being get put to death is not supposed to be easy. But this was all so smooth, so clinical, so antiseptic, that it was disturbingly easy.

Too easy for everyone.

Victims' relatives thought it was too easy for Wuornos, whose chest heaved once and whose eyes shut before reopening ever so slightly, in tiny slits, after the lethal mix of chemicals pumped through her veins. With vengeance and bloodlust, some relatives said they wanted to see her suffer more, preferably in the electric chair with flames and smoke shooting.

It was too easy for Gov. Jeb Bush, who carried out two executions on consecutive Wednesdays a month before an election. Rigoberto Sanchez-Velasco came last week, Wuornos this week. It was an especially distasteful coincidence considering there hadn't been an execution since January 2001 and there are now major constitutional issues concerning the death penalty in Florida that should be sorted out by courts.

And it's too easy to say Wuornos was evil incarnate, unrepentant and a willing participant in her own death. She was all those things, but she was also obviously mentally ill. After hearing her final statement and hearing about her bizarre behavior, I don't know how any civilized society can take satisfaction in proclaiming her mentally fit before putting her down like a rabid dog.

Outside, somebody later remarked that anyone who kills more than one person is probably inherently insane.

Florida has killed 53 people since the death penalty resumed in 1976, administered in a way that often seems arbitrary and unfair.

What does that make us?

Michael Mayo can be reached at mmayo@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4508.