Yellow Mama: Alabama’s Notorious Electric Chair

Few relics of American justice are as infamous—or as unsettling—as Alabama’s Yellow Mama, the bright highway-yellow electric chair that defined capital punishment in the state for seventy-five years.

From its construction by a convict carpenter in 1927 to its retirement in 2002, the chair sent more than 180 men and women to their deaths, some quietly, some in flames and smoke, and some under national scrutiny that forever stained the myth of electrocution as “humane.”

This is the story of Yellow Mama: a tale of law, death, and ritual.

From Gallows to the Chair

Before 1923, executions in Alabama were handled at the county level. Each sheriff bore the responsibility, usually carrying out hangings in secluded gallows. Hangings were often botched—necks didn’t always snap cleanly, and prisoners sometimes strangled slowly while their families wept. Reformers, judges, and state legislators began looking for something more “modern,” more clinical, more humane.

Enter electricity.

The legislature centralized executions under state authority and decreed that electrocution would replace the noose. A special room at Kilby State Prison, outside Montgomery, was designated for the new execution method.

To build the chair, officials turned to an unlikely craftsman: Ed Mason, a British immigrant and inmate serving 60 years for grand larceny. A skilled carpenter, Mason fashioned a sturdy oak chair with thick armrests, wide legs, and heavy straps of leather. It was painted not with varnish but with leftover yellow highway-line paint from the Alabama Highway Department lab next door. The chair’s lurid, almost cheerful color gave rise to its enduring name:

Yellow Mama.

Mason himself was briefly rewarded with a 30-day pass for his work. He absconded, of course, but was recaptured in New York. Even the builder of the chair could not escape judgment.

First Sparks and Early Years

The chair’s inaugural execution came on April 8, 1927, when Horace DeVaughan was electrocuted. Prisoners whispered that the smell of burning flesh lingered in the chamber for days afterward. Over time, Yellow Mama became a permanent fixture in Alabama’s justice system, carrying out 135 executions between 1930 and 1976 alone.

When Kilby closed in 1970, the chair was relocated to Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore. The yellow paint was refreshed, the wiring modernized, and Yellow Mama resumed her grim duties.

Flames, Smoke, and Botched Deaths

Electrocution was sold to the public as instantaneous.

In practice, it could be grotesquely unreliable.

In 1983, John Louis Evans, the first man executed post-Furman v. Georgia, endured a ghastly spectacle. The first jolt caused an electrode to snap from his leg, flames and smoke belched from beneath his hood, and witnesses—including journalists—watched in horror as he remained alive. Only after three separate shocks, totaling 24 minutes, was he finally declared dead.

In 1989, Horace Dunkins, a man with an IQ of 69, was strapped into the chair. Due to miswired jacks, the first jolt stunned but did not kill him. After frantic corrections, he was shocked again, finally dying 19 minutes after the process began.

Such incidents revealed the brutal irony: electrocution was marketed as “scientific justice,” yet it often resembled a medieval spectacle.

The Women of Yellow Mama

Rhonda Belle Martin: A Poisoner’s End

In the 1950s, Rhonda Belle Martin, a Montgomery waitress, shocked the nation with her quiet but relentless killing spree. Arrested in 1956, she confessed to poisoning her mother, two husbands, and three of her children with rat poison. She relished the sympathy cards that arrived during her victims’ illnesses, arranging for them to be buried side by side in a family plot.

Her final arrest came after her fifth husband—also her former stepson—survived her poisonings but was left paralyzed. Investigators unraveled the pattern, and Martin was convicted of the murder of her fourth husband, Claude Carroll Martin, though she admitted to many more.

Because of her heart condition, prison officials kept her execution dates secret until the last moment. On October 11, 1957, after a last meal of hamburger, mashed potatoes, cinnamon rolls, and coffee, she was strapped into Yellow Mama. She wept softly, clutching a Bible, as she recited Psalm 23 with the chaplain.

Her execution was marred by mishap: the first switch was thrown before the electrodes were fully engaged, forcing her to wait in silence until the current cycle reset. At 12:10 a.m., the final surge coursed through her. She was dead within minutes.

Martin had left behind a note begging scientists to study her body to discover why she killed. “There’s definitely something wrong,” she wrote. Instead, her family claimed her remains.

Lynda Lyon Block: The Last Sparks

Forty-five years later, Lynda Lyon Block became the final person to die in Yellow Mama.

A civic activist turned anti-government radical, Block and her partner George Sibley were fugitives when they encountered Sergeant Roger Motley in an Opelika Walmart parking lot in 1993. Motley approached their car after a passerby expressed concern for Block’s young son. A firefight ensued. Witnesses said Block crouched and fired directly into Motley’s chest, fatally wounding him.

She and Sibley argued that Alabama had no authority to try them, insisting the state had never properly rejoined the Union after the Civil War. The courts disagreed. Both were sentenced to death.

On May 10, 2002, Block declined a final meal, spoke no last words, and was strapped into Yellow Mama. At 12:10 a.m., she was pronounced dead—the last person executed in the chair and the last American put to death by electrocution without an alternative method.

Behind the Scenes: Rituals of Death

The execution chamber was not simply a room with a chair.

It was the stage of a carefully choreographed ritual.

Preparing the Chair

Before each execution, Yellow Mama was inspected like a machine awaiting use. Maintenance staff checked the oak frame for cracks, oiled the leather straps to keep them supple, and polished the brass fittings. The most crucial preparation involved the sponges—ordinary sea sponges cut into squares, sewn with black carpet thread, and soaked in saltwater.

The saltwater created conductivity, ensuring the current would pass quickly into the body rather than dance across dry skin. Too much water, however, risked dripping, which could cause short-circuits or spread burns. Each sponge was wrung out with care—damp but not dripping—before being tacked lightly to the electrodes.

One electrode was strapped to the condemned’s shaved scalp beneath a metal helmet lined with sponge. The other was placed on the calf, ensuring the current traveled through the body. Guards and technicians tightened straps across chest, arms, and legs, pulling with the precision of men who knew muscle contractions could snap bones.

The Ritual of Restraint

As midnight approached, the condemned was brought into the chamber, often accompanied by a chaplain. Witnesses—reporters, lawyers, victims’ families—sat behind a glass partition. The condemned was seated, and the guards worked swiftly: straps across the wrists, the ankles, the chest, then the black hood lowered over the face.

Even the smallest details mattered. The straps were tightened not too loose, lest the body buck violently, but not so tight as to cause premature injury. The sponge on the head was adjusted with surgical care.

The Switch

Once the prisoner was secured, the warden read the sentence aloud. Then the executioner—anonymous, often a prison employee—threw the switch. The current, sometimes as high as 2,000 volts, surged through wires into the sponges. Muscles seized, the body jerked against the straps, and the smell of scorched hair and skin filled the room.

Doctors checked the pulse. If a heartbeat remained, the cycle repeated. Witnesses sometimes saw smoke rise from the hood, or heard muffled groans despite the intent of silence.

Aftermath and Clean-Up

When the prisoner was declared dead, guards unstrapped the body. The sponges were carefully removed, rinsed, and sewn again for future use. Straps were treated with Neatsfoot oil to keep them from drying and cracking. Metal fittings were polished, wires resoldered, corrosion cleaned away.

The chair was readied for its next use—its wood silent, but forever infused with the memory of violence.

Retirement of Yellow Mama

By the late 20th century, most states had abandoned electrocution for lethal injection. Alabama clung to the chair longer than most, but Block’s 2002 execution marked the end.

Today, Yellow Mama sits in storage above the execution chamber at Holman. Its yellow paint is dulled, its straps hardened with age. Yet it endures as a relic of a justice system that sought modernity but delivered horror.

Legacy

Yellow Mama was more than furniture. It was a symbol of Alabama’s authority and America’s uneasy embrace of death as punishment.

It reminds us that executions were not just legal proceedings but spectacles—rituals of control, cloaked in the language of science, but haunted by human error, cruelty, and tragedy.

For seventy-five years, the yellow-painted chair ended lives. Today, it survives as a chilling reminder of what it meant to bring electricity to bear against the human body in the name of justice.