attached wires to his body, and put a black hood over his head and
a device like a catcher’s mask over his face. “They kept talking
about putting the juice to me and electrocuting me and did shock
me,” Hale said.
Burkhart and Ramsey testified that they had received similar
abuse, which was the only reason they had made their
confessions. When Hale was on the stand, he gestured wildly,
dramatizing how the electricity had allegedly jolted his body. One
agent, he claimed, had sniffed the air and cried, “Don’t you smell
that human flesh burning?”
One morning in early June, Hoover was in Washington. He
liked to eat a poached egg on toast for breakfast. A relative once
observed that Hoover was “quite a tyrant about food” and that if
the yolk seeped at all, he would send it back to the kitchen. Yet
this morning it was not the food that disturbed him. He was
stunned to pick up the Washington Post and find, above the fold,
the following headline:
PRISONER CHARGES USE OF ELECTRICITY BY JUSTICE AGENTS...
ATTEMPT TO FORCE HIM TO ADMIT MURDERS TOLD ON STAND....
OFFICERS SNIFFED AT “FLESH BURNING,” HE SAYS.While Hoover had no particular devotion to the niceties of the law,
he did not seem to believe that White was capable of such tactics.
What worried Hoover was scandal or, to use his preferred term,
“embarrassment.” He sent White an urgent telegram demanding
an explanation. Though White did not want to dignify the
“ridiculous” allegations, he promptly responded, insisting that the
charges were a “fabrication from start to finish as there was
absolutely no third degree method used. I never used such tactics
in my life.”