John Albert Taylor (born c. 1960) was executed by firing squad in Utah on January 26, 1996 at 12:03 a.m. Mountain Time for the 1988 rape and strangulation of 11-year-old Charla King.

He is currently the last person to have been executed in the United States by firing squad, but as of 2005, the method remains a legal (but not necessarily preferred) method of execution in three of the United States (Idaho, Oklahoma and Utah).

Over 150 TV crews from around the world came to record the event, with nine media witnesses being allowed to record the actual event. One of them, Paul Murphy (from KTVX Channel 4, Salt Lake City) said:

"[we] saw this very large man strapped to a chair. His eyes were darting back and forth". He was strapped to the chair by his hands and feet and lifted his chin for Warden Hank Galetka to secure a strap around his neck and place the black hood over his head. At 12:03 a.m., on the count of three, the five riflemen standing 23 feet away fired at a white cloth target pinned over Taylor's heart. Blood darkened the chest area of his navy blue clothing, and four minutes later, a doctor pronounced him dead. Very little blood spilled into the pan under the chair's mesh seat. As the volley hit him Taylor's hands squeezed up, went down, and came up and squeezed again. His chest was covered with blood."

"The image I have when I close my eyes is of his chest heaving upward after he was shot," said Kevin Dale Stanfield, another witness.

Taylor ordered pizzas "with everything" for his last meal and is said to have chosen the firing squad because it would be awkward for state officials. Of the option of lethal injection, Taylor said he did not want to flop around on the gurney "like a dying fish." The chair to which Taylor was strapped was surrounded by sandbags to absorb his blood.

Firing Squad Executes Killer

The New York Times

January 27, 1996

John Albert Taylor politely lifted his chin for a prison warden to secure a strap around his neck before a firing squad carried out the killer's death sentence early today.

Taylor's Death Was Quick . . . But Some Weren't So Lucky

Executioner's Song--a Utah Reprise

By Harold Schindler - The Salt Lake Tribune

January 28, 1996

Editor's Note: Tribune reporter Harold Schindler has witnessed five of Utah's 49 executions, including John Albert Taylor's death by firing squad Friday.

If ever John Albert Taylor felt consuming terror, it would have been in the agonizing 45 seconds before a Utah State Prison firing squad snuffed out his life early Friday morning.

That was the elapsed time from the moment Warden Hank Galetka pulled a hood over the convicted child-killer's head and stepped from the execution chamber to the instant that four .30-caliber slugs slammed into Taylor's chest.

As quickly as the breath exploded from his lungs, it was over. Taylor was dead before the doctor could make the official pronouncement--before witnesses could bring themselves to breathe again.

Not all of Utah's 49 executions have been so methodical, or so fatally efficient. In fact, firing squads have bungled two executions--one in 1879, the other in 1951.

And while the condemned have been given options of hanging and--in recent years--lethal injection, 40 have died from gunfire. There have been bizarre twists and controversies through the years, including one claim of beheading. Among the quirks:
-Several condemned men donated their bodies to science, and one 18-year-old sold his for a bag of candy.

-An inmate allowed an electrocardiograph to monitor his heartbeat during his death by firing squad. He was the first to will his eyes to a specialist in California; his body went to the University of Utah.

-A prisoner cheated the firing squad by taking a drug overdose the night before he was to be shot.

When Taylor ordered pizzas "with everything" for his last meal, it struck a chord for some veteran law officers: "Who else ordered pizza?" Barton Kay Kirkham.

In June 1958, he became the last prisoner hanged in Utah. Kirkham spent his last hours playing the piano, chatting with reporters and sheriff's deputies and eating    "pizza and ice cream" in the prison auditorium.

The melody Kirkham noodled on the keyboard was simple, but he could not manage it. "I'll just have to practice more," said the young man executed for the murders of David Avon Frame and Ruth Webster, who were killed during a grocery-store holdup in Salt Lake City in 1956.

Offered the option of the gallows or firing squad, Kirkham asked, "What costs most?" He chose the noose because of the publicity it would generate and because he wanted to make his death difficult for the state.

"I heard the shooters get to keep the guns, and they're not getting anything free from me," Kirkham said.

Taylor also wanted to rub Utah's nose in it. He chose the firing squad because it would be awkward for state officials. Taylor shunned lethal injection, saying he did not want to flop around on the gurney "like a dying fish." Friday's execution, in a mechanical sense, was a model of lethal decorum.

The death chair, painted a deep midnight blue to neutralize the color of blood into an indistinguishable glistening hue, was made of steel and mesh. Velcro strips secured the condemned's ankles, wrists, arms and body.

It was a far cry from the piece of ordinary office furniture used when the notorious Gary Mark Gilmore faced a firing squad in 1977.

All the straps and harnesses used on Taylor were to keep him from moving around. They were unnecessary, for Taylor proved entirely cooperative.

But on May 16, 1879, a lack of restraining straps resulted in the most bizarre, grotesque and horribly botched Utah execution on record. It was so disgraceful that one newspaper, the Ogden Junction, sarcastically reminded the state that "the French guillotine never fails."

It all came about when Wallace Wilkerson, who killed a man in an argument about a card game in Provo, was to face the firing squad in a corner of the jail yard. As the hour neared, Wilkerson strode from his cell dressed in black broadcloth and wearing a white felt hat. In his left hand he carried a cigar, which remained with him to the last.

Witnesses noticed "he exhibited unmistakable effects of liquor." The condemned man insisted on not being tied to the chair and he refused a blindfold. "I give you my word," he said, "I intend to die like a man, looking my executioners right in the eye."

The sheriff protested, explaining that the sharpshooters would be concealed in a shed 20 feet distant. Wilkerson pleaded, and the sheriff relented. He placed a white, 3-inch patch over the condemned man's heart, stepped back and signaled the shooters.

Wilkerson heard the muted command, "Ready, aim . . . " and drew up his shoulders as if to brace himself for the fatal moment. The guns fired; four heavy slugs tore into the condemned man. With the impact, Wilkerson leaped out of the chair and jumped forward "five or six feet." He crashed to the dirt and turned his head downward to his chest.

"Oh, my God! My God! They have missed," he screamed.

A doctor and several witnesses rushed forward. As Wilkerson writhed on the ground in full view of some 20 spectators, it became apparent the bullets had not struck his heart.

By straightening in his chair, he had raised the target and the shooters were misdirected. Three slugs touched the target, but were well above the vital spot; the fourth bullet struck six inches from the others and shattered Wilkerson's left arm.

It was 27 minutes before he could be pronounced dead.

In September 1951, Eliseo J. Mares became the second condemned man to suffer the consequences of a botched execution.

Mares was the first prisoner to be put to death in the new prison at the Point of the Mountain. The old penitentiary in Sugar House had been the execution site since 1900; before then the sentences were carried out in counties where the crime took place.

When Mares was shot, newspaper stories carried the barest of details. Not until 25 years later, in a reminiscence by one of the witnesses, Salt Lake Tribune reporter Clark Lobb, was it disclosed that Mares "died silently and horribly." Two of the four bullets fired from 15 feet away struck Mares in the hip and abdomen. It was several minutes before the prisoner was declared dead.

Much has been made of firing squads being a throwback to early Utah, when Brigham Young was governor and speaking forcibly about murderers--that their souls could be saved only by having their own blood shed.

And it is a fact that a territorial law approved in March 1852 provided that the condemned should suffer death by being shot, hanged or beheaded. There is no official case of beheading on record, but an emigrant of 1850 claimed that another emigrant was "taken into the bush" and beheaded by a sheriff's posse.

As for firing squads, Idaho, Nevada and Oklahoma used them for a while.

Until 1911, Nevada depended on the gallows to mete out the death penalty, but its Legislature broke with the past and amended the penal code to include firing squads. First to make use of the option was Andriza Mircovich in May 1913. The state responded by ordering a "shooting machine" from an Eastern foundry.

It consisted of three rifles mounted on a steel frame. Phillip I. Earl of the Nevada Historical Society described the weapons as "pre-aimed, loaded [with two live rounds and a blank] and equipped with Maxim silencers. They were to be fired by a coiled spring mechanism set off by simultaneously cutting three strings, only one of which would fire the two loaded rifles.

The machine, facetiously dubbed the "shooting gallery," was used to execute Mircovich, but it never was used again. The contraption went into storage until World War I, when it was donated to a scrap-metal drive.

Nevada adopted lethal gas in 1921, but a bill introduced in 1922 called for the return of the firing squads, citing gas as too barbaric. The measure failed. Lethal gas last was used in 1979, and abolished in 1980 in favor of lethal injection.

Utah at times has been innovative in meting out justice. In the spring of 1850 occurred what may be considered the first "formal"--if not official--execution in Utah history. The account of Patsowits, a Ute Indian, was located in the Bancroft Library papers of historian Dale L. Morgan by former University of Utah history Professor Brigham D. Madsen.

The diaries and journals say Patsowits shot an emigrant in Sanpete Valley and was  "taken into custody" by settlers. Chaplain John Kay and Sheriff James Ferguson administered last religious rites to the Ute before he died. Lt. John W. Gunnison, serving in the Stansbury survey expedition at the time, noted Patsowits was "caught and killed by the bowstring," implying that the Ute was garroted, or strangled.

In 1858, Thomas H. Ferguson stood on the gallows in Great Salt Lake City and devoted his last words to a criticism of the territorial court, which first had sentenced him to die on a Sunday (which was remedied), but then had deprived him of his right to choice.

"I was tried by the statutes of Utah Territory, which give a man the privilege of being shot, beheaded or hung. But was it given to me? No, it was not!" Having spoken his piece in a half-hour soliloquy, Ferguson was launched into eternity.

Chauncy W. Millard, an 18-year-old New York street urchin who turned killer, was executed in January 1869 in the Provo City Jail yard. Before he died, he sold his soon-to-be-corpse to a Provo surgeon for a pound of candy. Some 400 people witnessed his death.

Enoch Davis, condemned for killing his wife, asked if there were any "prostitutes available" on the morning of his 1894 execution. His request was denied and he faced a squad of six riflemen. None shot blanks.

The Tribune reported that Davis "died like a dog . . . the most despicable, mangy canine whelp that ever met an ignominious fate could not have whined itself out of existence in a more deplorable, decency-sickening state than was Enoch Davis' last hour." Frank Romeo, executed Feb. 20, 1913, collapsed and had to be "all but dragged" to the firing squad.

John Deering in October 1938 refused appeals and demanded the firing squad. He allowed a cardiograph to record his heartbeat. His heart stopped 15.6 seconds after the bullets struck. His heart rate went from 72 beats to 180 at the moment he was strapped in the chair. He willed his eyes to a California specialist and his body to the U. of U.

Career criminal Mack Merrill Rivenburg faced a firing squad for killing another inmate at the Utah State Prison in 1958. Rivenburg and two other inmates used a knife to nearly sever the head of their victim.

Utah was revolted by the crime, but Rivenburg cheated the executioner. On Sept. 13, 1962, hours before he was to be executed for the murder of LeRoy Joesph Verner, Rivenburg committed suicide by taking a smuggled drug overdose.

Lessons from case detailed

By Ben Winslow - Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

Jun 9, 2006

MIDWAY -- Ten years after John Albert Taylor was executed for the murder of 11-year-old Charla Nicole King, detectives who investigated the case are sharing the lessons they learned.

Urging police agencies to put aside egos and turf battles and focus on the child victims, Weber County Chief Deputy Sheriff Chris Zimmerman and Lt. Doug Coleman recounted investigating King's horrific murder and what led them to her killer.

"This was a boogie man-type homicide," Zimmerman said Wednesday.

The two police officers spoke at the 2006 Children's Justice Symposium, hosted by the Utah Attorney General's Office. More than 500 police officers, child protective services workers, victim advocates and prosecutors gathered at the Zermatt Resort to discuss issues related to child victims.

"It's critical they have ongoing training so we can better serve children," said Tracey Tabet, an administrator for the Children's Justice Centers in Utah. "They're learning from their peers about what worked -- what didn't -- in an investigation."

In 1989, King was found dead in her mother's Washington Terrace apartment. She had been raped and then strangled with a phone cord.

Police investigating the murder got a pair of breaks that led them to Taylor, an ex-con who had been in the Ogden area just four days. His fingerprints were on the telephone, and his sister came forward to tell police about his criminal history of assaults and rapes. Taylor, who had lived in Florida where he served time for attacking a woman, was living with his sister at the same apartment complex as the victim.

Investigators questioned Taylor, who never confessed but was caught in a series of lies. He was ultimately convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die.

His method of execution became an international sensation: Taylor died by firing squad. Even today, Coleman bristles at the focus being taken off of Taylor's victim. "Nobody heard about this until the (expletive) execution, then it's a big deal," he said. "This is the kind of case that will happen in their city. They're not going to have a 30-year serial killer. But they will have a Charla Nicole. It will happen in their cities."

Using crime-scene photos, interviews with King's mother and interrogations with Taylor, the officers recounted successes and failures in the case. They urged multi-jurisdictional cooperation to solve crimes.

"Ninety percent of rural Utah doesn't have crime-scene investigation units. They're trying to do it themselves. It doesn't work," Zimmerman said.

A homicide task force and a crime-scene investigations unit came out of the King murder, with experts from different departments pitching in to help out on any death investigation. The victim advocate program also came out of the case, Zimmerman said.

"It's a team approach," he said, acknowledging that police egos still get in the way. "There are still detectives that don't want to ask for help. There are still chiefs and sheriffs that think they can handle it on their own."

People who work directly with children and victims were urged to build a rapport with families. Tabet said Utah's 15 Children's Justice Centers can help as they are set up to provide a comforting environment for a child. Professionals at the centers can help law enforcement and social workers facilitate interviews with child victims.

"Before a Children's Justice Center, a child could be taken back to a police station, to a hospital, to a CPS worker's office, back to a police station for another interview. They may end up being interviewed six, seven, eight times," she said. "Imagine how much room there is for the story to change and compounding the trauma to a child."

In 2004, the Children's Justice Centers handled about 5,000 cases involving child victims. Tabet said the cases have increased in part because of population growth as well as more education and increased reporting of crimes involving children.

John Albert Taylor