October 25, 1932

October 25, 1932, was the date set for the execution of Eduard Delacroix, the Cajun prisoner who had raped and murdered a young girl and then set a fire that killed six more people. The date had been advanced from the expected October 27, a rare occurrence that compressed the already tense preparations. The day itself was the last of a strange October heat wave, with thunder rumbling in the west and dark clouds stacking up as the night came down. A tornado struck Trapingus County around ten that night, killing four people and tearing the roof off the livery stable in Tefton, while vicious thunderstorms and gale-force winds battered Cold Mountain. It seemed to Paul Edgecombe as if the very heavens protested what was about to happen.

The Execution and Its Catastrophic Failure

The witnesses began arriving around eleven, most talking in low tones about the impending weather and speculating about a power outage postponing the electrocution, unaware that Old Sparky ran off a generator. At eleven-thirty, Edgecombe, Brutus Howell, and Dean Stanton approached Delacroix's cell. Delacroix, sitting on his bunk with Mr. Jingles in his lap, handed the mouse to Edgecombe, saying, "Don't let nothing happen to Mr. Jingles." John Coffey took the mouse for safekeeping, and Delacroix stepped out for his last walk, tears and sweat running down his cheeks as thunder rolled overhead. In Edgecombe's office, Brother Schuster prayed with Delacroix in Cajun French, and Delacroix added a Hail Mary in his native tongue, ending with "Ainsi soit-il." As they proceeded to the storage room, Delacroix stopped cold at the sight of Percy Wetmore standing on the platform, the sponge-bucket by his foot. Edgecombe and Howell urged him on, and Delacroix sat in the chair, saying, "It only gonna hurt for a minute." The execution began normally, with the hum of the generator and Delacroix's body surging forward, but then things went catastrophically wrong. The humming wavered, joined by a crackling sound, and blue tendrils of smoke curled from beneath the cap. Delacroix began to jitter and twist, his legs pistoning, and the mask burst into flame on his face. The smell of cooking hair, sponge, and flesh filled the room. Delacroix's eyes were blown out of their sockets, his face blackened, and he screamed and rocked for what felt like two minutes before finally slumping dead. The witnesses panicked, the doctor fainted, and Curtis Anderson had to calm the crowd. Edgecombe later discovered that Percy had deliberately used a dry sponge, which failed to conduct the electricity properly, causing Delacroix to be slowly burned alive instead of killed instantly.

Consequences and Aftermath

The botched execution had immediate and far-reaching consequences. In the tunnel afterward, Brutus Howell nearly attacked Percy, but Edgecombe stopped him, arguing that Delacroix was dead and nothing could change that. Percy, dazed and claiming he "didn't know the sponge was supposed to be wet," was forced to renew his promise to transfer to Briar Ridge. The witnesses were traumatized, but most would later tell their friends it was poetic justice, and the story was kept out of the newspapers as too gruesome. For Edgecombe, the event was the ugliest, foulest thing he had ever seen, and it pushed him over the line into action. The next day, he gathered Howell, Dean Stanton, and Harry Terwilliger at his house and proposed the risky plan to take John Coffey to heal Melinda Moores, the warden's dying wife. The execution of Delacroix, a "bad death" that violated every standard of decency, became the moral catalyst for the night journey that would save Melinda's life and ultimately reveal the truth about John Coffey's innocence. It also sealed Percy's fate, as the guilt and horror of what he had done, combined with John Coffey's later transfer of Melinda's tumor into him, drove Percy permanently insane, leaving him catatonic for the rest of his life.