RICHMOND, Va. — Accompanying 28 men to their deaths is not something that ever leaves you.
A “haunting effect” is how the Rev. Russ Ford describes it.
For 13 years in the 1980s and 1990s, Ford was head chaplain on Virginia’s death row, ministering to those who had been sentenced to die for their crimes. His area was, as he put it, “the art of dying. Assisting them on their spiritual journey. That’s what I was commissioned to do. My job was to befriend the condemned and walk with them through that.”
Ford, 71 and long retired, has co-written a new book about his experiences on the job, “Crossing the River Styx: The Memoir of a Death Row Chaplain.” The book recounts the relationships he had with prisoners as they faced death — first in the electric chair and later by lethal injection — and features a behind-the-scenes view of the lead-ups to these macabre spectacles: the sights, the sounds, the smells. Then there was the time he almost became an unintended victim in the death chamber.
The book also serves as a history of an era when Virginia was racing its way to becoming a national leader in executions. Virginia, which in 2021 became the first Southern state to abolish the death penalty, still stands third among states in executions since the reinstatement of the capital punishment in the United States in 1976.
The book also permits Ford to detail the less-than-humane conditions he encountered — while making a point of not sugar-coating the heinous crimes of which the condemned had been convicted — as he walked the prison halls, as well as his vehement opposition to the death penalty.
“Ignorance, hate and indifference cause us to see others as less than human,” he writes. “We treat inmates like animals and monsters because this is what we think they are. And we justify our inhumane treatment by telling ourselves that it is ‘just part of the punishment.’ In doing so, however, we become the monsters.”
Writing the book has been an adventure in itself for Ford, a longtime Chesterfield County resident. He started gathering material in 1994 and worked with another writer on an outline, which turned into a partial manuscript a few years later. Before he could finish it, though, he suffered a traumatic brain injury, which forced him to retire. He spent four years in rehab, and though he had largely lost hope his book would ever see the light of day, he did not want to give up completely.
“I always felt it was a story I needed to tell,” he said.
About six years ago, Todd C. Peppers, an attorney and professor of public affairs at Roanoke College who also teaches at Washington and Lee University, got in touch with Ford regarding a book Peppers was writing on the late Marie Deans, an anti-death penalty activist and a friend of Ford’s. Ford gave Peppers his unpublished manuscript to use as a resource. Peppers finished the book on Deans — “A Courageous Fool: Marie Deans and Her Struggle Against the Death Penalty” — and then asked Ford if he would like to finish his.
“I said, ‘Sure!’” Ford recalled, “and we started working on it.”
Peppers’ son, Charles, also assisted with the book.
Ford got back into writing: “I didn’t feel like it was me writing, I really felt the muse inside … (and) it flowed.” Things fell into place.
“It was cathartic for me to get it out,” he said, noting the experience as death row chaplain left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. “I didn’t realize how much of it remained in me. There’s a haunting effect to that. I’d been carrying that with me.”
They found a publisher in University of Virginia Press, and when he finally held the finished book in his hands — almost three decades after he started the project — he said it felt like a “mission accomplished.”
In an odd coincidence or even, perhaps, a bit of foreshadowing, Ford’s family had roots in Oregon Hill, within sight of the old state penitentiary on Spring Street. He grew up in Chesterfield — he would graduate from Manchester High, where he played basketball — but he recalled visiting relatives and taking note of the grim, hulking complex where, at night, “you could see the lights into the big cell houses and the guards’ towers and all of that. It was a real eerie kind of place to think about, and my mom said it wasn’t fit for human nor beast.”
And he came to learn she was right.
Tough and relentless as the work was, Ford said his service as a prison chaplain was “a calling.” He learned so much about becoming a spiritual guide in such a brutal setting, he said, by working with his predecessor, Marjorie “Marge” Lee Bailey. She was the first woman in America to serve as chaplain in a male maximum security prison, according to the Religious Herald, but to Ford she was more than that.
Ford calls her “my mentor” and “one of the most beautiful people I would ever know.”
It was Bailey who had warned Ford that chaplains “have to guard against spending all their energy and emotion fighting the system, leaving them little time to deal with other needs,” though she recognized the tension between not fighting the system versus “becoming an accomplice in the evil it perpetrated,” Ford writes. “As my work as a prison chaplain drew me into the dark corners of death row, and I witnessed the dehumanizing treatment of the condemned men, I struggled to heed Marge’s quiet words.”
Ford said of all the executions he attended, none haunts him to this day as much as the first one — Morris Odell Mason’s on June 25, 1985 — because Mason was a paranoid schizophrenic with the mental capacity of a 1st-grader.
Ford is quick to point out Mason was convicted of brutal murders for which he was clearly responsible. It is that Mason was “a lost child who did not comprehend his death” that most troubles Ford.
Less than an hour before Mason’s scheduled execution, after his head had been shaved and his pants leg cut off so that an electrode could be attached, Ford asked how he was holding up.
“Okay, I’m a big boy,” Mason told him. “I’m brave.”
“I hated what Morris had done,” Ford wrote, remembering his thoughts at the time, “and I hated what Virginia’s justice machine was preparing to do.”
Though he would attend 27 more executions, standing only a few feet from the condemned inside the death chamber, Ford said he would turn away and not actually watch another after Mason’s.
Ford very nearly did not make it out of the death chamber on July 19, 1990. He was there with Ricky Boggs, who was to be executed for the murder of an elderly neighbor. Boggs was secured into the oak electric chair and the skullcap was attached to his head, followed by electric cables to the cap and his ankle.
After a black mask was placed over Boggs’ face, everything stopped as prison officials waited to hear from the governor’s office whether the execution would be allowed to continue. To Ford, the delay seemed like added torture, and he asked for and received permission from prison officials to speak with Boggs.
Ford put his hand on Boggs’ hand, which was strapped to the chair, and placed his other hand behind Boggs’ neck. Ford spoke quietly to Boggs, trying to reassure him, telling him just no matter what happened to “go with the flow.”
About that time, someone yelled, “Russ!” which was followed by a shout of “No!” to the warden.
Ford lifted his hands from Boggs to see about the commotion — just before the switch to the electric chair was activated. Ford heard “a crack and a hum and saw Ricky’s hands go rigid” as the first voltage surged through Boggs’ body.
“My legs nearly gave way as I stumbled away from the chair,” Ford wrote.
As he recounted the incident the other day, Ford said, “That one made a preacher cuss.”
