Sing Sing’s death chamber was the last place you’d expect a comedy routine, especially if the jokester was a condemned man about to be jolted into the next world.
Yet that’s what greeted 12 astonished witnesses as Frederick Charles Wood, 51, prepared to die in the electric chair on Mar. 21, 1963.
“I got a little speech to make,” Wood said as he faced the group and smiled.
“Gents, this is an educational project,” he deadpanned. “You are about to witness the damaging effect electricity has on Wood. Enjoy yourselves.”
Then he pulled a red handkerchief from his pants pocket, dusted off the seat, and plopped down.
The crimes that sent him to the chair were the murders of John Rescigno, 62, a World War I veteran, and Frederick Sess, 77, on Jun. 30, 1960.
Wood committed the murders a month after he had been released on parole after serving 17 years for killing a man by smashing his skull with a beer bottle.
Still, he was so mild and cooperative behind bars that the parole board decided he was no threat to society.
“I guess you would just have to say we made a mistake on this one,” was how State Parole Chairman Russell G. Oswald summed up the situation.
More surprises followed his arrest.
“I’m at the end of my string,” Wood told police. “I might as well tell you everything. I know I’m going to the electric chair.”
He then revealed a history of horror stretching back to the Jazz Age.
Wood, born into a respectable middle-class Elmira, N.Y., family, started getting into scrapes with the law in 1926 when he was 14. Until 1960, no one knew it was when he committed his first murder.
The victim was a beautiful Italian girl, Cynthia Longo, 16, of Hornell, N.Y. The weapon was a cream puff.
On Dec. 28, 1926, Longo, her sister Esther, 23, and a friend, Marjorie Gay, 9, became violently ill after eating treats left for them by a young man. Ester and Marjorie survived. Doctors said Longo vomited so violently it gave her heart failure.
With the available technology, it was impossible to say whether Longo’s death was caused by food poisoning or murder. No arrests were made.
In his 1960 confession, Wood said he had been seeing Longo. When she turned her attention elsewhere, he taught her a lesson with cream puffs and arsenic.
After that, Wood continued to be in non-stop trouble — holdups, harassing women, drinking, and disorderly conduct. Around 1930, he ended up in an asylum for the criminally insane.
In November 1932, experts there determined he was fine and set him free.
Eight months later, another woman — Pearl Robinson, 33, of Elmira — met a violent death. Someone strangled her with a rope, crushed her skull, stabbed her more than 140 times, and left her body under a bush in a yard. Her face was battered beyond recognition.
No one connected Wood to Robinson’s murder, and the case remained unsolved.
Police finally caught up with Wood after the murder of John Albert Lowman, 42, a carpenter. Wood got angry because he believed Lowman was bothering his girlfriend.
On Oct. 11, 1942, Wood bludgeoned Lowman to death with a beer bottle, stomped on his head, and stabbed him during a drinking party. Wood stashed the body under a sofa in his girlfriend’s rented room.
A jury found him guilty of second-degree murder on Mar. 11, 1943. In sentencing him to 20 to life, Judge Bertram L. Newman said, “For the protection of society, this man should never be released from prison.”
Wood slit his wrists that night, but his suicide attempt failed, and he was sent to prison at Dannemora.
In early June 1960, the parole board decided to let him out, despite vigorous objections from police and law enforcement officials. He was ordered to stay in the Albany area, working in a laundry.
By the end of June, he skipped out and ended up in New York City, panhandling on the Bowery, where Rescigno picked him up. They polished off a bottle of wine before heading to Rescigno’s apartment in Astoria for more liquor. Sometime during the evening, Wood recalled, Rescigno made an indecent proposal.
Outraged, Wood attacked him with a knife, coal shovel, and broken beer bottle. Then he did away with Sess, Rescigno’s elderly roommate, who was sleeping in the other room.
During Wood’s September 1961 trial, he told the court he’d rather die than go back to prison, where he had spent 30 of his 51 years.
The verdict was guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, meaning death in the electric chair.
“Judge, I’ve got schizophrenia. I wonder if you could provide shock treatment,” he quipped at his sentencing. The judge was not amused.
The convicted killer fought against any effort to spare his life. “It grieves me to have to write to a D.A., but in this instance, I have been instructed to do so if I really want to ‘ride the lightning’ Thursday evening sans further delay because of an unwanted stay of execution,” he said in a letter.
He finished his note to the D.A. by insisting that “do-gooders,” like the ACLU, should waste no more time on “this stinking case of mine.”
The ACLU nevertheless brought a last-minute plea to the U.S. Supreme Court. It failed, and Wood got his wish—2,000 volts of electricity that ended his miserable existence.
Since then, his name has sometimes popped up in high-profile cases, such as the executions of Gary Mark Gilmore in 1976 and Timothy McVeigh in 2001, where the condemned man begs the courts to carry out his death wish.