All Criminals EXECUTED in Arizona : Crimes, Last Meals, and Final Words
All Criminals Executed in Arizona: The Last Meal Ledger
When Mara Callahan came home for her father’s funeral, she expected grief, casseroles, and the usual family lies. She did not expect her mother to slap her brother across the mouth in front of thirty mourners, nor did she expect the old brass key to fall out of the dead man’s Bible like evidence from a crime scene.
The key hit the tile floor with a clean, sharp sound.
Everyone in the kitchen stopped breathing.
Her brother Luke stood by the sink with his tie hanging loose, his face red from bourbon and rage. Her mother, June, held one hand to her chest as if the slap had hurt her more than it had hurt him. On the counter sat a ham nobody had touched, three sweating pitchers of sweet tea, and a chocolate sheet cake with the words REST IN PEACE, ELIAS written in blue icing.
Luke laughed once, ugly and broken.
“Tell her,” he said. “Tell your golden child what Daddy really did for a living.”
Mara looked from him to her mother. “He was a prison chaplain.”
“That’s what he let people say.” Luke pointed at the Bible on the floor. “He was there when they killed men. He held their hands. He wrote down what they ate. He wrote down what they said. He came home smelling like bleach and death, and you all called him a man of God.”
The room tilted.
Outside, cicadas screamed in the late Arizona heat. A neighbor’s baby cried from the living room. Somebody whispered Mara’s name, but she couldn’t answer. She stared at the little brass key lying beside her father’s scuffed black Bible.
June bent slowly and picked it up.
“Your father made me promise,” she said.
“Promise what?”
Before June could answer, the doorbell rang.
No one moved.
It rang again.
Mara crossed the kitchen in a daze and opened the front door. A correctional officer stood on the porch, his hat tucked under one arm, sweat darkening his collar. He looked younger than she expected, too young to carry the kind of silence he carried.
“Mrs. Callahan?” he asked.
June stepped behind Mara. “Yes.”
The officer handed her a sealed gray envelope and a small metal lockbox. “This was found in Reverend Callahan’s old locker at Florence. Instructions said it was to be delivered after his death.”
Luke cursed under his breath.
Mara took the envelope because her mother’s hands had begun to shake. Her name was written across the front in her father’s careful block letters.
MARA.
Beneath it, in smaller writing:
When Arizona opens the chamber again, you must finish the ledger.
Her stomach went cold.
June whispered, “I told him to destroy it.”
Luke looked at Mara with eyes that had hated her for years and loved her underneath it. “Now do you understand? He didn’t leave us money. He didn’t leave us peace. He left us the dead.”
Mara opened the envelope.
Inside was a photograph of her father standing outside the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence. He looked young, pale, and terrified. On the back he had written:
April 6, 1992. Donald Eugene Harding. First one in Arizona since 1963. Mara was born six hours later. I heard one man die, then drove home to hear my daughter cry.
The kitchen blurred.
Her mother covered her mouth.
And in that moment, Mara Callahan understood that her father had not been buried that morning.
He had been waiting for her beneath the floorboards of their family history all along.
The lockbox sat on the dining room table until midnight.
Mara’s aunts went home. The neighbors took their casseroles and condolences with them. The house settled into the strange, hollow quiet that follows a funeral, when every clock sounds rude and every room feels accused.
Luke stayed on the back porch, drinking from a bottle hidden inside a paper bag like he was still seventeen and afraid of getting caught. June sat in the living room with all the lights off. Mara remained at the dining table, the brass key beside the metal box, her father’s photograph between her fingers.
She had spent fifteen years away from Arizona, building a life in Chicago as a crime journalist. She had interviewed detectives, widows, exonerees, prosecutors, and mothers whose sons had disappeared into prison systems that swallowed names whole. She had written about justice until justice became a word she no longer trusted.
But she had never written about her father.
Elias Callahan had been a gentle man in public. He preached in small churches when pastors went on vacation. He fixed neighbors’ sprinkler heads. He fed stray cats though he claimed not to like cats. At Thanksgiving, he carved turkey with surgical seriousness and told Mara grace was not a feeling but a discipline.
Yet there had always been locked places inside him.
When Mara was a child, he sometimes came home before dawn and sat in the garage without turning on the light. She remembered opening the door once, maybe seven years old, and seeing him in his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, staring at his palms as if they belonged to somebody else.
“Daddy?” she had whispered.
He had looked up too fast.
“Go back to bed, sweetheart.”
“Are you sad?”
He smiled, but the smile broke before it reached his eyes. “I’m tired.”
Now Mara slid the key into the lockbox.
It opened with a rusty click.
Inside were notebooks. Dozens of them. Black covers, brown covers, spiral-bound pads, yellow legal pages folded into envelopes. Each was labeled by year.
Then a gap.
Another gap.
And one final folder marked:
2025 — AARON GUNCHES.
Mara touched the first notebook.
On the opening page, her father had written:
This is not a book about monsters. It is not a defense of them. It is not an argument against the families who came to watch. This is a record of what the state asked me to witness, what men asked to eat, what they said before silence, and what the living carried home.
Underneath, in a different ink:
If Mara ever reads this, tell her the victims must come first. Always. But tell her the truth also has to include the room.
The room.
That was how he referred to the execution chamber.
Mara opened the 1992 notebook.
Donald Eugene Harding’s name appeared on the first page.
Her father’s handwriting was steadier then. He described Harding as the first man Arizona executed after nearly three decades without carrying out a death sentence. Harding had been convicted after a chain of killings that crossed state lines and left families scattered across Arkansas, California, Texas, and Arizona. In Tucson, he had posed as a security guard and attacked businessmen in a motel. In Phoenix, another victim. Arrested in Flagstaff. Escaped prisoner. A man with violence behind him like a wildfire path.
But Elias did not begin with the crimes.
He began with breakfast.
Fried eggs. Bacon. Buttered toast with honey. Orange juice.
Mara frowned.
Why would her father write down food first?
Then she read the next line.
The last meal is the state’s strangest mercy. It gives a man one final ordinary desire before extraordinary finality.
Harding had chosen the gas chamber. Or perhaps the law had chosen it for him; Elias’s note was unclear. What was clear was the horror of the witnesses, the old machinery, the smell nobody wanted to name. When asked for last words, Harding said nothing.
Nothing.
Mara sat back.
In journalism, silence was never empty. It could mean contempt, terror, confusion, surrender, or one final theft from the people who had waited years to hear remorse.
Elias had written:
A man who has taken so much leaves behind one more absence.
Mara closed the notebook and pressed her fingers to her eyes.
From the porch, Luke said, “You opened it.”
She looked up. He was standing in the doorway, bottle in hand, face wrecked by grief.
“Yes.”
“Congratulations.”
“Luke.”
“No. Don’t Luke me.” He stepped into the dining room. “You know what he did after those executions? He came home and sat at this table. Mom would make eggs sometimes, because he wouldn’t tell her what the condemned man had ordered, but she knew. She always knew. The house smelled like breakfast and secrets.”
Mara said nothing.
Luke pointed at the notebooks. “He chose them over us.”
“He was doing his job.”
“He missed my state championship game because John Brewer wanted to die.”
Mara opened her mouth, then closed it.
Luke laughed bitterly. “You don’t even know that name, do you?”
She looked down at the second notebook.
John George Brewer.
Luke’s voice dropped. “I was twelve. I looked into the stands after I scored and Mom was there alone. Dad was in Florence because some guy murdered his girlfriend and decided execution was what he deserved. Dad said the man needed spiritual counsel. I needed my father.”
That landed harder than Mara expected.
Luke turned away, but not before she saw tears in his eyes.
After he left, Mara opened the 1993 notebook.
Brewer’s case was written in darker ink, as if Elias had pressed harder on the page. Brewer had killed Rita Brier, his pregnant girlfriend, after an argument rooted in obsession and emotional dependence. He confessed. He pleaded guilty. He asked for death. Psychologists debated his mind, his delusions, his dependency, his competence. The courts agreed he could be executed.
His last meal was excessive, almost childlike in its variety: pork chops, bacon, fried shrimp, rice pudding, French bread, applesauce, drinks, coconut cream pie, soup, coffee.
Elias wrote:
He requested death as if death could make him noble. It cannot. No punishment restores Rita. No ritual purifies him. Still, he trembled when the hour came.
No final words were recorded.
Mara turned the page.
James Dean Clark.
A ranch. A young cowboy. Four dead at the Coach’s Guest Lodge. Theft, flight, evidence, conviction. Then, years later, the revelation of childhood trauma, suicide attempts, post-traumatic stress, and an inadequate defense. On death row, Clark had married a psychiatric nurse who visited him.
His last meal: steak, shrimp, baked potato, salad, dessert, bread, strawberry milkshake.
His last words, mouthed to his wife: I love you.
Elias had underlined the sentence that followed:
He asked to touch her. The request was denied.
Mara pictured her father watching through glass as a condemned man’s wife stood close enough to be seen but too far to be touched. She imagined Elias coming home to June, to Luke asleep with his football jersey on, to infant Mara breathing in a crib.
What did a man do with all the last words he was not allowed to answer?
At two in the morning, Mara carried the notebooks to her childhood bedroom.
The posters were gone. The walls had been painted pale yellow. But the window still faced east, toward the desert, toward Florence.
She slept badly, dreaming of eggs, brass keys, and men speaking through glass.
By sunrise, the house had divided itself into territories.
June stayed in the kitchen, making coffee she did not drink. Luke occupied the porch like a guard dog. Mara sat cross-legged on her old bedroom floor with the notebooks arranged in chronological order around her.
The 1995 notebook smelled faintly of dust and old ink.
Jimmy Wayne Jeffers.
Elias’s notes were brief, almost angry. Jeffers had murdered Penelope Cheney after learning she had cooperated with police. He lured her to a motel, attacked her, hid her body, and later buried her near Sedona. His final meal: steak, peas, buttered rolls, strawberry cream pie, a large chocolate milkshake.
When asked for final words, Jeffers responded with obscenities and a crude gesture.
Elias wrote:
Some men seek forgiveness. Some seek control. Some spit at the room because rage is the only possession they have left.
Mara paused.
The next notebook was 1996.
Darren Lee Bolton.
Bolton’s case involved the killing of a very young child, a crime that Elias described only in restrained terms, as though even his private ledger refused to sensationalize it. There had been fingerprint evidence years later. A conviction. A death sentence. Bolton maintained innocence until the end and offered no final words.
Lasagna. Cheesecake. Pepsi.
Elias wrote:
The parents came with a photograph. He looked once, then looked away. The photograph did not.
Mara had to stop reading.
She went downstairs and found June sitting at the kitchen table, her coffee untouched.
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?” Mara asked.
June did not pretend not to understand. “Because your father begged me not to.”
“Luke knew.”
“Luke found one of the notebooks when he was fourteen.”
“And me?”
“You worshiped Elias.” June’s voice cracked. “He wanted one person in this house to look at him without seeing the chamber.”
Mara sat across from her. “Did you hate him for it?”
June stared toward the backyard, where sunlight touched the dried grass. “No. That would have been easier. I loved him. That was the punishment.”
Mara reached for her mother’s hand, but June pulled away gently.
“You need to understand something,” June said. “Your father was not cruel. He did not enjoy it. But every execution took something from him, and he kept giving. To the inmates. To the victims’ families. To the wardens. To the lawyers who called at midnight. To God, if God was listening.” She looked at Mara then. “There was nothing left for us but the man who came home afterward.”
“Why keep the ledger?”
June’s lips tightened. “Because he said the state was too good at cleaning rooms.”
That sentence stayed with Mara all morning.
The 1996 notebook continued with Luis Mata.
Mata’s crime had begun in Phoenix with Deborah Lee Lopez, a young woman looking for her boyfriend in a bar. What followed led to a murder conviction, appeals, allegations of racial bias, questions about intellectual ability, brain damage, and childhood abuse. His brother’s sentence changed to life; Luis remained under death.
His final meal: beef burritos, pork chops, fries, jalapeños.
His last words: Tell everyone I am sorry.
Elias wrote:
He began the Lord’s Prayer. He did not finish. No one does.
Then Randy Greenawalt.
The name opened a darker corridor in the ledger. Greenawalt’s history included earlier killings, prison escape from Florence, Gary Tison, a cooler used to smuggle weapons, and a desert flight that turned into slaughter. Elias wrote of the Lyon family carefully, with their names marked by a cross in the margin. A young couple. A baby. A teenage niece. The page seemed to ache.
Greenawalt’s final meal was simple: cheeseburger, fries, café au lait.
His last words were strangely calm, almost pastoral, saying he had prayed for them and was all right.
Elias wrote:
I watched the family listen to a man bless the room that existed because of what he helped do. I do not know what mercy means in such a place.
Mara found herself reading faster and slower at the same time, drawn forward by dread.
William Lyall Woratzeck appeared next.
The murder of Linda Louise Leslie in Casa Grande. A vulnerable woman. A small dwelling. A brutal attack. Theft of a small amount of money. Fire. Long appeals. Claims of innocence.
His last meal took half a page: rare sirloin steak, fries, onion rings, a dozen fried shrimp, a whole cherry cheesecake, Pepsi, coffee.
His last words insisted Arizona was executing an innocent man and sent love to his wife and family.
Elias wrote:
When a condemned man claims innocence, the room changes temperature. The witnesses stiffen. The officers look at procedure. The chaplain looks at the floor.
Mara closed the notebook.
The front door opened. Luke stepped inside, sober now and pale.
“Mom says you’re going to write about it,” he said.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You always write.”
“That doesn’t mean I know how.”
He leaned against the wall. “Do you know why Dad wanted you?”
“Because I’m a journalist.”
“No.” Luke swallowed. “Because you left before you learned to hate him.”
That was the cruelest true thing he had said.
Mara looked at the notebooks spread across the table.
“I don’t want to hate him,” she said.
Luke’s eyes softened for half a second. “Neither did I.”
In 1998, the ledger changed.
Elias began writing more about the weather.
January cold in Florence. April heat. June glare. The smell of desert dust on witness clothing. The way families arrived holding photographs, rosaries, folded statements, court papers worn soft from years of handling.
José Jesus Ceja came first.
He had been eighteen when he killed Randy and Linda Leon during a burglary connected to marijuana. Elias noted the youth of everyone involved, the boldness of Ceja attending a victim’s funeral, the appeals, the long years on death row, the judge who later tried to spare him. Ceja became a model prisoner, Elias wrote, which did not erase the two graves in Phoenix.
His last meal: two beef and red chili burritos, two Cokes, cherry pie.
Final words: none.
Elias wrote:
Silence can be dignity. It can also be cowardice. I am no longer sure I can tell which is which.
José Roberto Villafuerte followed.
A Honduran national, convicted of murdering Amelia Chavarin in Phoenix. The case carried international controversy because he had not been informed of his consular rights. Honduras protested. The Vatican appealed. Courts proceeded.
Grilled chicken, tortillas, rice, jalapeños, soft drinks.
His final words spoke of love and joining the Lord.
Elias wrote:
Nations argued. Treaties were cited. A woman was still dead. A man still died. The room did not become wiser.
Arthur Martin Ross came next.
A planned killing in Tucson. A fake business identity. A real estate agent named James Ruble lured to an empty office. Afterward, theft, credit cards, impersonation, surveillance footage, fingerprints, arrest. Ross waived appeals and accepted execution.
Croque-monsieur with eggs. Macaroni and cheese. Mint chocolate chip ice cream. Pepsi.
No final words.
Elias wrote:
There are men who fight the sentence and men who walk toward it as if tired of themselves. Neither path leads backward.
Then Douglas Edward Gretzler.
Here Elias’s handwriting stretched over several pages. Gretzler and his accomplice Willie Steelman had left a trail of killings across Arizona and California. Seventeen victims. Robberies, kidnappings, cold decisions, staged scenes. Gretzler had confessed, been sentenced in California, then extradited to Arizona for the murders of Michael and Patricia Sandberg.
His last meal was breakfast food: fried eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, two Cokes.
His last words were remorseful, apologizing not only to the Sandbergs but to the families of all seventeen victims.
Elias wrote:
Remorse at the end is not resurrection. But I saw one mother close her eyes when he said the names. Perhaps she had waited twenty-five years not for apology, but for acknowledgment.
Mara read that sentence three times.
Acknowledgment.
Maybe that was the hidden engine of the ledger. Not sympathy. Not forgiveness. Acknowledgment.
The state had files. Courts had transcripts. Newspapers had headlines. Families had anniversaries. Elias had built a record of the last human fragments before machinery and law converted a living body into a past-tense fact.
In November 2000, Donald J. Miller entered the ledger. He had taken part in the murder of Jennifer Gutierrez after being hired in a dispute over child support. He refused a plea bargain, was convicted, and later volunteered for execution. Elias wrote about Miller’s traumatic childhood, but he did not soften the crime.
His final meal was strange and sprawling: guacamole toast, tacos, strawberry milkshake, cottage cheese and pepper, lemon meringue pie, jalapeños, citrus, strawberry ice cream.
Mara expected final words, but the transcript in the ledger gave her little. Elias’s note instead said:
Some lives are broken before they break others. This explains. It does not excuse.
She underlined it lightly with her finger.
That afternoon, Mara drove to Florence.
She told no one.
The road southeast from Phoenix shimmered under the sun. Strip malls thinned into desert. Saguaros lifted their arms like witnesses who had sworn never to speak. The prison complex appeared low and hard against the land, a place built not to be beautiful, not even to be ugly, but to endure.
Mara parked outside the visitor entrance and sat in the car with the engine off.
Her father had driven this road dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. Sometimes at midnight. Sometimes at dawn. Sometimes knowing a man would die, sometimes knowing a court might call it off, sometimes with June begging him not to go.
Mara tried to imagine him younger, gripping the wheel, whispering prayers he no longer believed could change outcomes.
A memory surfaced.
She was nine. He had taken her to Dairy Queen after school. She had asked why he looked sad.
He had said, “I met a man today who was sorry too late.”
She had not understood.
Now she did.
A guard approached her car. “Ma’am? Can I help you?”
Mara rolled down the window.
“My father used to work here,” she said.
The guard studied her face. “Name?”
“Elias Callahan.”
Something shifted in him. Respect, maybe. Or recognition.
“You’re Reverend Callahan’s daughter?”
“Yes.”
“He sat with my uncle when my uncle was dying of cancer,” the guard said. “Not an execution. Regular infirmary. He came on his day off.”
Mara did not know what to say.
The guard looked toward the prison. “He was a good man.”
Mara thought of Luke. Her mother. The notebooks. The room.
“He was,” she said finally. “And he wasn’t only that.”
The guard nodded as if this did not surprise him. “Most people aren’t.”
The 1999 notebooks were the thickest.
By then, Elias had stopped pretending the ledger was only a record. He wrote like a man arguing with his own soul.
Jess James Gillies appeared first that year. The murder of Suzanne Rossetti had horrified Arizona: abduction, assault, robbery, a cliff outside Phoenix, the victim left beneath stones. Gillies was executed without final words and without a requested last meal.
Elias wrote only one sentence after the official details:
Some crimes make language feel obscene.
Derek Leonard Gerlaugh followed. A young man on crutches named Scott Schwartz had offered a ride. Gerlaugh and others forced him into the desert, robbed him, beat him, and killed him so he could not identify them. The final meal read like a diner order: New York strip steak with Worcestershire sauce, eggs, bacon, buttered toast, mint ice cream, apple juice.
No last words.
Elias wrote:
When they are silent, I hear the victims louder.
Then came Karl and Walter LaGrand.
Mara had heard of the LaGrand brothers in law school articles about the Vienna Convention, though she had not known her father had witnessed both executions. German nationals, convicted after a violent attempted bank robbery in Marana that left bank manager Kenneth Hartsock dead and employee Don Lopez wounded. The brothers had not been informed of their right to consular assistance. International courts, diplomats, legal scholars, and journalists had argued over the case.
Karl chose injection after initially requesting gas. His final meal included roasted chicken, tortillas, tomatoes, jalapeños, rice, Pepsi. His final statement was long, remorseful, apologizing to the Hartsock family, to Lopez, to his own family, to everyone involved.
Elias wrote:
Karl spoke like a man trying to sweep ashes into a pile. Too much had burned.
Walter chose the gas chamber.
Here the pages became unsteady.
Elias described delays, appeals, the grim old method, the witnesses, Don Lopez overcome with emotion, a photograph of Kenneth Hartsock held in the room. Walter’s final meal: six fried eggs, sixteen strips of bacon, fries, pineapple juice, coffee. His last words apologized to the family, thanked those who had forgiven him, and hoped for peace.
Then Elias wrote:
I had thought Harding would be the last gas I would see. I was wrong. I had thought the state would look upon suffering and learn modesty. I was wrong. I had thought I could stand in the room and remain myself. I was wrong.
Mara sat very still.
Luke came into the dining room carrying two mugs of coffee. He set one beside her.
“Read Walter yet?” he asked.
She nodded.
“That was when Dad stopped sleeping,” Luke said. “He’d walk the hall at night. Sometimes he’d stand outside my door. I used to pretend I was asleep.”
“Why?”
“Because I was afraid he’d come in and tell me everything.”
Mara looked at him. “Did you want him to?”
Luke took a long breath. “Yes.”
There it was: the wound beneath all his anger.
Robert Wayne Vickers came next. Bonsai Bob. A prisoner already incarcerated when he murdered his cellmate over Kool-Aid, then later killed another inmate with a homemade firebomb. Violent in prison. Feared by guards and inmates alike. Executed without a final statement. No last meal recorded.
Elias wrote:
The prison made him worse, but it did not make him innocent.
Michael Poland followed. He and his brother Patrick had disguised themselves as highway patrol officers to rob a Purolator armored truck. Guards Russell Dempsey and Cecil Newkirk were taken to Lake Mead and drowned in weighted canvas bags. The money, the evidence, the retrial, the death sentences. Michael’s last meal was breakfast again: eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, cereal, milk, coffee.
His last words were sarcastic, asking whether lunch would be brought afterward because he was hungry.
Elias wrote:
A joke can be a mask. It can also be a final insult.
Ignacio Alberto Ortiz came next. The murder of Manuelita McCormack, the attack on her daughters, the fire set in the home, the later plot to kill surviving witnesses. His last meal: eggs with hot sauce, bacon, sirloin steak, fries, vanilla ice cream, milk, coffee.
His final words invoked Jesus Christ and commended his spirit to God.
Elias wrote:
He did not look at the daughter who survived him.
Mara stopped.
That sentence had the force of a verdict.
She realized then that her father’s ledger was not neutral. It could sound gentle, but it was not soft. It remembered the victims even when the condemned did not. It made no saint of anyone. Not inmates. Not the state. Not Elias himself.
That night, Mara and Luke sat on the back porch for the first time without fighting.
The desert air smelled of dust and cut grass. A dog barked three houses away.
“Do you remember when Dad built us that treehouse?” Mara asked.
Luke smiled despite himself. “The one in the mesquite?”
“It collapsed.”
“You collapsed it.”
“I was eight.”
“You were bossy.”
“You were reckless.”
“I was ten.”
They laughed, and the laughter felt like finding a photograph in rubble.
After a while, Luke said, “I hated him for being kind to them.”
Mara knew who them meant.
“I used to think,” Luke continued, “what about us? What about Mom crying in the laundry room? What about me getting suspended? What about you waiting by the window? Why did strangers get his mercy?”
Mara looked out into the dark yard.
“What do you think now?” she asked.
Luke rubbed his face. “I think he didn’t know how to bring mercy home after carrying it through hell.”
The 2000 notebook opened with Anthony Lee Cheney.
Cheney and his girlfriend had been fugitives after robberies in other states. In Arizona, he encountered officers near Flagstaff, restrained one, then killed reserve officer John Jamison. Elias wrote of the officer’s family, the line of uniforms at the funeral, and the way law enforcement witnesses sat differently in the execution chamber, shoulders squared, grief disciplined.
Cheney’s final meal: fried eggs, bacon, coffee, vanilla ice cream, canned peaches, strawberry jam.
Asked for final words, he simply said no.
Patrick Poland followed in March 2000, eight months after his brother Michael. Same armored truck robbery. Same lake. Same two guards. But Patrick’s final hours differed. He requested no special meal and spent his statement apologizing to the Dempsey and Newkirk families, to his own family, to friends, and to the woman he loved.
Elias wrote:
Two brothers. Same crime. Different exits. But the lake remains the same.
After Donald Miller in November, the ledger went quiet for seven years.
Mara asked June why.
Her mother was folding sheets in the laundry room, though none needed folding. She did not look up.
“Because executions slowed. Appeals. Protocols. Politics. I don’t remember all the reasons.”
“And Dad?”
“He tried to come back to us.”
“Did he?”
June smoothed a pillowcase. “For a while.”
“What happened?”
Her mother laughed without humor. “Life happened. Men kept dying in courtrooms long before they died in Florence. Victims’ families kept calling him. Defense lawyers called. Reporters called. Wardens retired and new wardens wanted to hear how the old ones had done it. Your father had become a keeper of doors.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“I did,” June said.
Mara blinked.
June looked at her. “Not legally. Not publicly. But inside? I left many times.”
Mara thought of all the family dinners where June had passed potatoes in silence, all the Christmas mornings Elias had filmed through a camcorder while looking far away. Families did not always explode. Sometimes they eroded.
In 2007, Robert Charles Comer brought Elias back to the chamber.
Comer had murdered Larry Pritchard, then posed as a narcotics officer and committed further violent crimes against Jane Jones and Richard Smith in the desert. His trial had been controversial; he had fought for his own execution for years. His last meal: fried okra, buttered rolls, salt, banana bread. His last words cheered the Raiders.
Elias wrote:
The room expected confession. It received football.
Mara almost smiled, then felt guilty for it. But Elias had not written it cruelly. He had written it with weary astonishment at the ways human beings avoided the moment even while strapped inside it.
In 2010 came Jeffrey Landrigan. An escaped prisoner from Oklahoma. Murder of Chester Dean Dyer in Phoenix. Bloody fingerprints. A footprint in sugar. Prior convictions. Later claims of inadequate defense, childhood abuse, possible brain damage. His execution was wrapped in controversy over lethal injection drugs.
Steak. Fried okra. Fries. Strawberry ice cream. Dr Pepper.
His last words thanked family and friends and ended with a college football cheer.
Elias wrote:
Men carry childhood teams into death. It is foolish and human. Those two words often touch.
Then 2011.
Eric John King. A Phoenix convenience store robbery. Two dead for seventy-two dollars. Video evidence, witness testimony, later doubts, contested identification, imported drugs used in execution. Final meal: fried catfish, greens, candied yams, cornbread, chocolate cake, tomatoes, grapefruit, cream soda. Last words: none.
Donald Beaty. The killing of Christy Fornoff in Tempe, the search he joined, the funeral he attended, the evidence that later tied him to the crime. Final meal: chimichanga-style steak, guacamole, double cheeseburger, fries, Rocky Road ice cream, Diet Pepsi. Final words apologizing to the Fornoff family, saying he was sorry, speaking to someone named Freddy and to those who had stood by him.
Richard Lynn Bible. The abduction and murder of Jennifer Wilson near Flagstaff. Evidence including hair, blood, and early DNA use in Arizona homicide prosecution. Final meal: cheese eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, peanut butter and jelly, chocolate milk. Last words thanking family and lawyers.
Thomas Paul West. The murder of Donald Bortle during a Tucson burglary. A beating, binding, theft of electronics, later boasting, arrest. Childhood trauma raised in clemency. West refused a special meal and ignored the request for last words, lying still with eyes closed.
Elias’s 2011 notes were spare.
By then he was older. Mara remembered visiting that summer from Chicago and noticing his hands trembled when he lifted a glass. She had blamed age. Maybe it was not age.
At the bottom of the West entry, Elias wrote:
The room is quieter now. Not gentler. Only more practiced.
That sentence frightened her more than the violent details.
Practice was what turned horror into routine.
In 2012, Arizona’s death chamber became busy again.
Mara read the year in a single long afternoon while monsoon clouds built over Phoenix and thunder rolled like furniture being dragged across heaven.
Robert Henry Moormann was first. A prisoner on furlough who killed his adoptive mother, Roberta, at the Blue Mist Motel in Florence. The facts were ghastly, but Elias handled them with restraint. He noted Moormann’s traumatic childhood, intellectual limitations, mental health concerns, destroyed biological evidence, rejected appeals, and the state’s use of a one-drug protocol.
Final meal: double hamburger, beef burritos, Rocky Road ice cream, RC sodas.
Final words: hope that the family could find peace and begin to heal, perhaps forgive him in time.
Elias wrote:
He said heal. I watched a family hear the word from the man who made healing necessary.
Robert Charles Towery followed one week later. The murder of Mark Jones in Scottsdale after weeks of planning, a betrayal of trust, a burglary that became killing. Towery apologized, saying he had turned left in life when he should have turned right. His final words repeated love for family and a phrase meant to sound like a motorcycle for his nephew.
Thomas Arnold Kemp Jr. came next. The racist kidnapping and murder of Hector Soto Juarez in Tucson. Kemp had shown no remorse, rejected clemency, and refused spiritual counsel. His final meal: bacon cheeseburger, fries, root beer, blackberry pie, strawberry ice cream.
His last words: I regret nothing.
Elias wrote:
There are sentences that close doors from the inside.
Samuel Villegas Lopez followed. The murder of Estefana Holmes in Phoenix, a brutal home invasion and assault. A court-appointed lawyer with no capital experience had presented no mitigation. Appeals failed. Final meal: red and green chile beef, rice, avocado, fries, vanilla ice cream, pineapple. Asked for final words, Lopez declined.
Daniel Wayne Cook came in August. The killings of Carlos Cruz-Ramos and Kevin Swaney in Lake Havasu City. Cook had represented himself, no mitigation presented, later evidence of severe childhood abuse and mental health struggles. His final meal was elaborate: eggplant lasagna, garlic mashed potatoes with cheese, roasted Brussels sprouts, asparagus, ice cream, root beer. Afterward Arizona ended special last meals and moved toward standard options.
His final words apologized to the victims’ families, said it was not enough, asked about his lawyers, then drifted into scattered phrases of affection.
Elias wrote:
Sometimes the last words are not a statement. Sometimes they are a mind coming apart under the weight of its last minute.
Richard Dale Stockley closed the year. The abduction and murders of Mandy Meyers and Mary Snyder after a Fourth of July gathering. The bodies found in a mine shaft. A co-defendant’s confession. DNA. Conviction. His last meal before Arizona’s policy changed had been steak, fries, fried okra, salad, cheddar, rolls, fruit, chocolate ice cream.
His final statement: He wished he could die doing something useful; all of it seemed a waste.
Elias wrote:
A waste. Yes. Their lives. His. The decades. The appeals. The parents aging around grief. The guards learning procedure. The chaplains pretending words can carry enough weight. All of it waste, and still the law demands completion.
Mara sat at the dining table until the storm broke.
Rain hit the roof hard, sudden and wild. The desert drank greedily. In the hallway, June paused and looked toward the dining room.
“You found 2012,” she said.
“Yes.”
“That year nearly killed him.”
Mara closed the notebook. “Why?”
June came in and sat down. “Because by then he knew he could not stop. Not because anyone forced him. Because he believed if he wasn’t there, the room would become only needles and straps and witnesses. He thought someone had to remember souls.”
“Did he believe they deserved mercy?”
June’s eyes flashed. “Mercy is not the same as release.”
Mara accepted the correction.
June touched the edge of the notebook. “He believed the victims deserved memory first. He believed the condemned deserved the truth last.”
“What truth?”
“That they could not escape what they had done.”
The storm rattled the windows.
Mara whispered, “Did he ever forgive himself?”
June looked very tired. “For what?”
“For leaving parts of himself there.”
June’s face softened, and for the first time since the funeral, Mara saw not a widow guarding secrets but a woman who had loved a man beyond her strength.
“No,” June said. “I don’t think he did.”
By the time Mara reached 2013, the ledger felt less like a record and more like a confession.
Edward Harold Schad was seventy-one when Arizona executed him. Decades had passed since the murder of Lorimer Leroy Grove, an elderly man traveling in his Cadillac. Schad had been found with the victim’s car and belongings, though appeals argued about physical evidence and time. His final meal was modest: meatball sandwich, fries, corn, apple pie, vanilla milkshake.
His last words: after thirty-four years, he was free to go home.
Elias wrote:
Some men use religion as a door. Some as a curtain. I cannot always tell which.
Robert Glenn Jones came next, executed two weeks after Schad. Jones had been convicted in a Tucson killing spree with Scott Nordstrom: the smoke shop, the firefighters’ union hall, multiple victims, a survivor, testimony from Nordstrom’s brother, six death sentences. Jones declined a special meal and ate the prison menu: meat pies, mashed potatoes with gravy, carrots.
No final words. He maintained innocence.
Elias wrote:
The families came in numbers. Grief multiplied does not become louder. It becomes dense.
Then 2014.
Joseph Rudolph Wood III.
Mara had heard of this one. Everyone in capital punishment reporting had. The execution that lasted nearly two hours. The gasping. The controversy over drug protocols. The horror of witnesses watching time stretch beyond expectation.
But Elias’s entry began years earlier, with Deborah Dietz and her father Eugene. A toxic relationship. Violence. A body shop in Tucson. Wood entering and shooting Eugene, then chasing Deborah and killing her. Arrest after pointing his weapon at police. Conviction. Death sentence. Decades of appeals.
His last words prayed for peace in the hearts of the victims’ family and for God’s forgiveness.
Then the procedure began.
Elias’s handwriting broke apart across the page.
He is breathing.
Still breathing.
The room is counting.
No one says stop.
Deborah’s family watches.
Gene’s family watches.
The officers watch the clock.
I watch his chest.
The room has become a mouth and cannot close.
Mara put her hand over her own mouth.
Luke found her that way.
“Wood?” he asked.
She nodded.
Luke sat beside her. “Dad came home that day and threw up in the driveway.”
Mara shut her eyes.
“I was here,” Luke said. “I’d come by to borrow money. I found him on his knees beside the truck. He looked at me and said, ‘Son, we have confused completion with justice.’ Then he made me promise not to tell Mom.”
“Why?”
“Because she had finally started sleeping.”
Mara stared down at the page.
We have confused completion with justice.
That sentence did not sound like a chaplain. It sounded like a man whose faith had cracked.
“Did he quit after Wood?” she asked.
“Not officially. But inside, yes.”
The next folder was 2022.
Eight years had passed.
Clarence Dixon. Frank Atwood. Murray Hooper.
By then Elias’s notes were thinner, and there were medical forms mixed in. Cardiologist appointments. Prescriptions. A letter from June asking him not to return to Florence. A church bulletin with a sermon title circled: Blessed Are Those Who Mourn.
Clarence Dixon had been convicted decades after the 1978 murder of Deana Bowdoin, an Arizona State University student, when DNA evidence connected him to the crime. He had a history of serious mental illness, had represented himself, and maintained innocence. His final meal was KFC chicken, strawberry ice cream, water. His final words challenged the Arizona Supreme Court and proclaimed innocence, then included a disturbing address toward the victim.
Elias wrote:
Mental illness entered the room with him. So did Deana. Only one was given enough space.
Frank Jarvis Atwood followed. The abduction and murder of Vicki Hoskinson in Tucson, the pink paint from her bicycle, decades of appeals, his conversion to Orthodox Christianity, his wheelchair, the difficulty placing IV lines. His final meal was salami, mustard, peanut butter, jelly, wheat bread, tortilla chips, water with juice. His final words thanked his priest and prayed for mercy.
Elias wrote:
A priest stood where I once stood. I felt relief, then shame at my relief.
Murray Hooper came in November. A New Year’s Eve contract killing in Phoenix. Pat Redmond, Helen Phelps, Marilyn Redmond, a survivor who identified the attackers, organized crime connections, claims of innocence, requests for DNA and fingerprints denied. Hooper was seventy-six. His final meal: KFC fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, barbecue sauce, roll, cheesecake, ice cream, Fanta. His last words urged loved ones not to say goodbye, but “see you later.”
Elias wrote:
The old die differently. The room pretends age is irrelevant. It is not.
Mara found a loose sheet tucked behind Hooper’s entry.
It was addressed to her.
My dear Mara,
If you are reading this, then I failed to tell you in person. I am sorry for that. Fathers often mistake silence for protection. I did.
You will ask whether these men deserved what happened to them. That is not the question I have lived with.
I have lived with this one:
What does a society become when its most solemn act is practiced in secret by ordinary people who must go home afterward and eat breakfast with their children?
I do not ask you to answer as I would. I ask you to answer honestly.
There is one more name coming. Aaron Gunches. If the warrant holds, Arizona will open the room again. I will not be there. You may choose not to be. But if you finish the ledger, do not end with him.
End with us.
End with the families who waited. End with your mother. End with Luke. End with the officers, the nurses, the reporters, the lawyers, the witnesses, the dead, and the living who carried the dead home.
Forgive me if you can.
Dad
Mara read the letter twice.
Then she carried it to Luke and June.
They sat together in the living room while evening light filled the house with gold. No one spoke for a long time.
Finally June said, “He never forgave himself for you two.”
Luke’s jaw tightened. “He should have asked us.”
“Yes,” June said. “He should have.”
Mara looked at her brother. “Do you want me to stop?”
He knew she meant the ledger.
For once, Luke did not answer quickly.
“No,” he said at last. “But don’t make him a hero.”
“I won’t.”
“And don’t make him a villain just because it’s easier.”
Mara nodded.
June wiped her eyes. “And write the victims’ names like they matter.”
“They do.”
“Then write them first whenever you can.”
Mara looked toward the box.
For the first time, the ledger did not feel like a burden her father had left behind.
It felt like a debt.
March 19, 2025, dawned colorless over Florence.
Mara stood outside the prison with a press badge hanging against her chest and her father’s small cross in her pocket. She had not worn it. She did not know whether she believed in it. But she wanted its weight.
Aaron Brian Gunches was scheduled to die that morning.
His case, in the final folder, was the last page Elias had prepared but never completed. In 2002, Gunches had forced Ted Price into a car in Mesa, driven him toward the desert along the Beeline Highway, and shot him. In 2003, after a traffic stop, he shot at a state trooper and fled before being captured after a large manhunt. He pleaded guilty to murder and was sentenced to death. For years he had asked for his own execution, even criticizing delays.
His final meal had been noted by prison staff: a Western double hamburger, spicy gyros, onion rings, baklava.
Mara wrote those words in her notebook without knowing why food still mattered.
Maybe because it was ordinary.
Maybe because Ted Price had once eaten ordinary meals too.
Maybe because families remember kitchens more often than courtrooms.
The prison public information officer led reporters through security. Mara had covered executions in other states, but this was different. Every corridor felt like a sentence her father had already written. Every locked door carried his shadow.
In the witness area, Mara sat beside an older woman with silver hair and a photograph in her lap.
“You family?” the woman asked.
“No,” Mara said. “Press.”
The woman nodded.
Mara hesitated. “My father used to be a chaplain here.”
“What was his name?”
“Elias Callahan.”
The woman’s expression changed. “Reverend Callahan?”
“Yes.”
“He sat with my sister after my nephew’s murder trial,” the woman said softly. “Not this case. Years ago. She said he was the only person who didn’t tell her to move on.”
Mara felt her throat tighten.
The woman looked toward the glass. “People love telling you to move on when they’re tired of your grief.”
Mara whispered, “I’m sorry.”
The woman smiled sadly. “Everybody is.”
When the curtain opened, Mara did what her father had done for decades.
She watched.
She did not look away.
Gunches gave no grand speech in Elias’s folder because Elias had not lived to record it. The official process moved with practiced restraint. Needles. Straps. A warden’s question. A roomful of people holding breath for different reasons.
Death was pronounced at 10:33 a.m.
Mara wrote the time down.
Then she wrote Ted Price’s name above Aaron Gunches’s.
Not beneath.
Above.
When she stepped outside, the Arizona sun had sharpened. Reporters gathered, phones lifted, voices low and urgent as they prepared to send the story into the world. Mara walked past them at first. She needed air that had not been filtered through concrete.
Near the parking lot, she called Luke.
“It’s done,” she said.
He was quiet. “Are you okay?”
The question surprised her.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s probably the honest answer.”
She laughed once, weakly.
“Did you finish Dad’s page?” he asked.
“Almost.”
“What’s missing?”
Mara looked back at the prison. “Us.”
The book took Mara nine months to write.
She did not call it The Executioner’s Chaplain, though her publisher wanted something dramatic. She refused The Death Room and Last Meals of Arizona and Blood Under the Sun. In the end, she chose her father’s plain title:
The Last Meal Ledger.
The first chapter began not with Donald Harding, but with June Callahan dropping a brass key on a kitchen floor.
The second began with the victims.
Mara wrote their names carefully: the businessmen in Tucson, Rita Brier, George Martin Jr., Gerald McFarland, Charles and Mildred Thumm, Penelope Cheney, Deborah Lopez, the Lyon family, Linda Leslie, Randy and Linda Leon, Amelia Chavarin, James Ruble, Michael and Patricia Sandberg, Jennifer Gutierrez, Larry Pritchard, Chester Dyer, the convenience store victims, Christy Fornoff, Jennifer Wilson, Donald Bortle, Lorimer Grove, the Tucson victims of Robert Jones, Deborah and Eugene Dietz, Deana Bowdoin, Vicki Hoskinson, Pat Redmond and Helen Phelps, Suzanne Rossetti, Scott Schwartz, Kenneth Hartsock, Russell Dempsey and Cecil Newkirk, Manuelita McCormack, John Jamison, Roberta Moormann, Mark Jones, Hector Soto Juarez, Estefana Holmes, Carlos Cruz-Ramos and Kevin Swaney, Mandy Meyers and Mary Snyder, Ted Price.
She knew some names would be spelled differently in old records, some details contested, some memories unbearable. She hired fact-checkers. She called families. Some hung up. Some screamed. Some thanked her. Some asked her never to call again.
She honored all of it.
She wrote of Donald Harding’s silence and the gas chamber that reopened Arizona’s execution history after decades.
She wrote of John Brewer’s desire for death and James Clark’s denied final touch.
She wrote of Jimmy Jeffers’s obscene defiance, Darren Bolton’s brief glance at a photograph, Luis Mata’s unfinished prayer, Randy Greenawalt’s strange blessing, William Woratzeck’s claim of innocence.
She wrote of José Ceja’s silence, José Villafuerte’s consular controversy, Arthur Ross’s wordless acceptance, Douglas Gretzler’s remorse for seventeen dead, Donald Miller’s volunteered execution.
She wrote of the long 1999: Gillies with no last words, Gerlaugh silent, Karl LaGrand remorseful, Walter LaGrand dying in the gas chamber, Vickers leaving no statement, Michael Poland joking about hunger, Ignacio Ortiz invoking Christ without looking at the survivors.
She wrote of Anthony Cheney’s simple no, Patrick Poland’s apology, the seven-year pause, Robert Comer’s Raiders cheer, Landrigan’s college chant, Eric King’s refusal to speak, Beaty’s apology, Bible’s thanks, West’s closed eyes.
She wrote of 2012, when executions came like a hard season: Moormann asking forgiveness, Towery talking about wrong turns, Kemp regretting nothing, Lopez declining words, Cook unraveling at the edge, Stockley calling everything a waste.
She wrote of Schad going home, Jones saying nothing, and Joseph Wood breathing for nearly two hours while the room watched the meaning of procedure collapse.
She wrote of Dixon’s defiance, Atwood’s prayer, Hooper’s “see you later,” and Gunches, the final page her father had left blank.
But the hardest chapter was not about any condemned man.
It was about Luke.
She wrote of a boy looking into football stands for a father who was in Florence with a man who wanted to die. She wrote of a mother learning to recognize execution nights by the way her husband set his keys down. She wrote of a daughter who believed gentleness meant innocence because she had never paid the price of that gentleness.
Before publication, Mara gave the manuscript to June and Luke.
June read it in three days and returned it with one note written on the title page:
You told the truth without cleaning the room.
Luke took longer. Two weeks passed. Then three. Mara thought he would never respond.
One Sunday morning, he arrived at her apartment carrying their father’s Bible.
“I read it,” he said.
“And?”
He looked older than he had at the funeral, but lighter somehow, as if anger had been a coat he was finally tired of wearing.
“I’m still mad.”
“I know.”
“But I don’t hate him today.”
Mara nodded because she did not trust herself to speak.
Luke handed her the Bible. “Mom says you should keep it.”
“No. You should.”
He shook his head. “I have the treehouse scar. You get the Bible.”
She laughed through tears.
He turned toward the door, then stopped. “There’s one part you got wrong.”
Mara froze. “What?”
“You wrote that Dad chose the dead over us.”
“I wrote that it felt that way.”
“I know.” Luke swallowed. “But maybe he chose the dead because he didn’t know how to face the living. That’s different.”
Mara thought about it.
Then she opened her laptop and changed the sentence.
The book came out the following spring.
Some people praised it. Some condemned it. Victims’ advocates argued over it. Death penalty opponents quoted it. Prosecutors objected to parts of it. Former corrections officers sent letters written in careful block print, saying they had never told their wives what they saw. A woman whose sister had been murdered wrote that she had hated Mara for three chapters, then cried at chapter four, then hated her again, then finished the book anyway.
Mara kept every letter.
One arrived without a return address.
Inside was a single sheet of paper.
My father was one of the men in your book. I do not forgive him. I do not ask anyone else to. But thank you for remembering that he had children who had to carry his name.
Mara placed it in the lockbox.
Years passed.
June sold the house and moved to a small condo in Tempe with a balcony full of stubborn plants. Luke got sober, then relapsed, then got sober again in the ordinary, heroic, untelevised way people survive themselves. Mara stayed in Arizona longer than she planned. The desert, which she had once considered a place to escape, became the only landscape honest enough for her.
On the anniversary of Elias’s death, the three of them drove to Florence.
Not to the prison.
To a little cemetery outside town where Elias Callahan lay beneath a mesquite tree. His headstone was simple:
ELIAS JAMES CALLAHAN
HUSBAND. FATHER. CHAPLAIN.
HE REMEMBERED.
June brought yellow flowers. Luke brought nothing and apologized for it. Mara brought the brass key.
She knelt and pressed it into the soil at the base of the stone.
June watched her. “Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
The lockbox no longer needed locking. The notebooks had been donated to an archive with restrictions protecting families who did not want their grief turned into spectacle. The book existed. The truth existed. The key had done its work.
Luke stood with his hands in his pockets. “Do you think he’d be proud?”
Mara looked at the grave, then toward the flat horizon where heat trembled above the earth.
“I think he’d be relieved,” she said.
They stood together without speaking.
For years, Mara had thought endings came like verdicts: guilty, not guilty, affirmed, denied, sentence carried out. But real endings were quieter. A family standing at a grave. A daughter returning a key. A brother no longer drunk before noon. A widow letting herself remember love without excusing pain.
The dead stayed dead.
No execution had changed that.
No apology had undone a murder.
No final meal had softened the empty chair at any victim’s table.
But the living could choose what to do with the record.
They could bury it.
They could worship it.
Or they could open it, read every terrible line, name the victims first, refuse easy answers, and still walk out into the sun.
Mara touched her father’s headstone.
Then she stood, took her mother’s hand in one of hers and Luke’s in the other, and together they left the cemetery, not healed exactly, not finished, but no longer locked inside the room Elias had carried home.
Behind them, the brass key disappeared slowly into the Arizona dust.
And for the first time in Mara’s life, the silence felt less like a secret than peace.
