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Sunday, February 16, 2014

How My Uncle’s Borderline Personality Put Him in the Electric Chair

by James C Johnson

Two of my ancestors died on the same day.  Bertha Benton Rasico (31) and her son Walter Rasico (1) died on “13 Sep 1913, in Terre Haute, Ward 4, Vigo, Indiana.”  That’s the kind of information you find in a genealogical family tree: names, dates, and relationships, usually with no explanation at all.

I assumed Bertha and Walter died in a tragic fire or accident. 

Then I looked at Aunt Bertha’s husband.  Five months after the deaths of his wife and son, Harry Rasico died in the electric chair at Michigan City, Indiana.

Now I noticed something else.  Most family trees didn’t mention how or where Uncle Harry died.  Many trees deleted him entirely.  Only one tree accurately described what happened to his family.

I can understand why.  Nobody wants to remember an ancestor who murdered his pregnant wife and infant son.  It’s better to pretend he never existed.

But that’s not fair to the victims or the survivors, so I decided to find out more. 

A Google search only showed that my uncle was the first man to die in Indiana’s new electric chair.  To get the full story, I read dozens of newspaper stories written a century ago.  The stories had lurid headlines, no by-lines, and long convoluted sentences: Harry Rasico was an uxorcide and child slayer whose crime was the most brutal in the annals of criminology.

The stories described an angry suicidal madman, with emotions that could switch from love to hate in seconds.  Harry Rasico was a classic borderline.  The only difference between his botched murder-suicide and similar tragedies today is the body count.    

In 1913 Harry and Bertha Rasico and their five children lived in Vincennes, Indiana.  In September, Bertha, with their infant son, went to visit her brother, Luther Benton, in Terra Haute, about 60 miles away.  When she didn’t return after a few days, my uncle became angry. 

“Tomorrow your papa and mama will be in the front room in a box,” he told his son, Paul.  After his father left for Terra Haute, Paul rushed to the telegraph office to warn his mother that her husband was stalking her.

“Papa up there watching you tonight.  Don’t go any place tonight.”    

Bertha didn’t try to hide.  She was seven months pregnant and staying at her brother’s house.  Where could she go?  She didn’t have any money.  Her husband was a chicken picker at a poultry farm.  They barely earned enough to get by.

When Harry arrived at the Benton home Saturday evening, his wife was getting ready to go out with Hersie Benton, her sister-in-law, and Mrs. Lucille Messick.  Bertha told her husband she would return with him to Vincennes on Sunday. 

Harry asked his wife if it wouldn’t be nicer if they went downtown together, but she said she wanted to go out with her friends.

After the women left, Harry went to a saloon, where he was robbed of all his money and beaten up.  After being robbed, he pawned his coat, bought a cheap revolver, and returned to the Benton home to wait for his wife.  He spoke with his brother-in-law in the kitchen and then played with Walter in the bedroom. 

The women went downtown and Bertha bought presents for her children at the five and dime.  The family would be celebrating Walter’s second birthday on Monday. 

After shopping, the women went to see a moving picture.  Perhaps they saw “Where the Trail Divides,” a silent Western that had just opened in Indiana.  In the film, Winifred Kingston’s character falls in love with a man who is a tyrannical brute.

Bertha returned to her brother’s home after 10 o’clock.  She and her husband went into the bedroom and talked for more than an hour.  Just before midnight, she saw the gun.  Bertha screamed and tried to flee, but Harry shot her in the leg.  At the front door, she fell to her knees with arms upstretched and begged for her life.  My uncle twisted her head sideways, placed the gun against her skull, and fired a single bullet into her brain.

The sound of gunfire brought Officer Mahoney to the front door.  Harry held him at bay with his smoking gun and fled into the bedroom.  Little Walter was asleep.  My uncle put the gun against his son’s head and fired a single shot, killing him instantly.  Then he put the gun to his own head and pulled the trigger.  The gun misfired twice.  Officer Mahaney burst into the room and took Harry into custody.

Cheap handguns were easy to buy in 1913 and mental health care was virtually nonexistent for people like Harry.  Then as now, suicidal men with borderline personality disorder sometimes kill others before they kill themselves.  For my Uncle Harry, murder-suicide was the only remedy he could imagine.

At the police station, Harry laughed and talked about his crime.  He showed no signs of remorse.

“My only regret is that I did not succeed in killing myself,” he told the officers.  “I tried, but the cartridges I saved for myself wouldn’t go off, darn ‘em.

“I won’t pay a nickel for a lawyer.  I’ll plead guilty and go to the electric chair.”

He said he had sent his wife money to come home, and had ordered her not to associate with Mrs. Messick.  “It was her fault,” he said, “but I won’t preach.” 

“I have had nine children, only four living now,” he said with swaggering bravado.  “I had been thinking of doing it for some months.”

On Monday, Walter’s birthday, deputies took Harry to the Vigo County Courthouse, where he was arraigned and charged in thirty minutes.  He refused an attorney and waived trial by jury. Instead of lighting two candles on his son’s birthday cake, my uncle pleaded guilty to two counts of first degree murder.

Sheriff Shea had him under heavy guard at the courthouse.  Harry had said he might try to escape, in the hope that guards would shoot him.  He still wanted to die, but was having second thoughts about dying in the electric chair.

Harry blamed my Aunt for everything.  “If she had done what I asked her Saturday night she would be alive,” my uncle told the judge.  He had no proof of his wife’s unfaithfulness, but she had done things which made him suspect her.  He refused to talk about it.  “My wife and boy are dead, and it is no use for me to recall things that happened long ago.”

Mrs. Lawrence O'Donnell, the matron of the Vigo County Jail, told reporters my uncle showed no signs of being a raving maniac.  He passed the time playing cards.

Before passing sentence, the Judge convened an insanity panel.  I have no doubt that my uncle was afflicted with a severe Cluster B Personality Disorder, but in 1913 such disorders didn’t even have names.  Nowadays he would have easily been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Organization, and probably Antisocial Personality disorder as well.  But in 1913 no such diagnosis was possible.  The insanity panel concluded that Harry knew right from wrong and understood that his actions were punishable by death.  He was sane.

“This crime merits the extreme penalty, death,” the Judge said. 

“You ought to give it to me,” my uncle replied.

Judge Charles M. Fortuna sentenced Harry Rasico to die on January 16.  After sentencing, my uncle asked Deputy Feller to take him to a saloon for a drink.  The deputy refused. 

“Well, I’ll enjoy one more Christmas,” Harry boasted.  “After January 16 I will meet her again, for I’m not such a bad fellow after all.” 

Harry was taken back to his cell, where he eagerly resumed his game of solitaire. 

My uncle’s four surviving children were brought to the jail to visit their father.  He turned his back and refused to speak with them.  They never visited again.

Two weeks after sentencing, my uncle was transferred to the death house at the State Prison.  He burst into tears when guards tried to confiscate photographs of his wife and son.  Harry put the pictures on his cell wall.

Governor Samuel M. Ralston postponed Harry’s execution until February because the Prison didn’t have an electric chair.  The New York Times reported that the Indiana Legislature had failed to appropriate the money.  It took a month to design and build the chair, with wood came from the old hangman’s scaffold.

Eight minutes after midnight on February 20, 1914, guards clamped my uncle into the new chair and killed him with 2,500 volts of electricity. 

We remember Harry Rasico because he’s in the history books.  Let’s not forget Bertha Benton Rasico, her son Walter Rasico, and her unnamed unborn baby boy, who died on September 13, 1913, because my uncle was mentally ill and had a gun.

Bertha's four surviving children went to live with Uncle Luther Benton in Tere Haute: Paul Rasico (born abt 1895-    ), Blanche Rasico (abt 1900-    ),Frances G Rasico (1904-1992), and Marie Rasico (abt 1906-    ).  Paul Rasico may have died in 1919 from wounds received in fighting on the French front during the first world war.

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