Murderer Gerry Daniels is facing electrocution at midnight.  The chaplain, warden and an officer are there to prep him — expose the contact points for the juice, say a little prayer, offer him a last request. Unlike most such scenes, it is not just a last meal, but a last request that is granted.  The warden wisely adds “within reason” to head off any “3 more requests” tomfoolery.  Or hookers.

After protesting his innocence of this murder, Daniels requests a typewriter and some paper, pushing his luck with two requests.  He begins typing a letter to the editor of The Star Times News (24-hour old news printed on dead trees, for you youngsters).

He asks that when they print the story of his execution, they also print this letter.  He starts off opining that District Attorney Bernard Butler, who sent him to the chair, “is a fool” who has convicted the wrong man in his case, and blamed others for crimes that Daniels did commit.

In flashbacks as Daniels types, we see that he is quite a lady’s man.  He picks up a married woman drinking alone in a bar, and they go back to her place.  Just as they start swapping spit, her husband returns early from a business trip and belts her.  The husband then attacks Daniels, who shoots him.  Daniels then shoots the woman, and stages them to make it look like a murder-suicide.  In the letter, he admits shooting them both and mocks Butler for being so easily fooled.

At the bar, a waitress tells him that she saw him with the murdered woman the night she was killed. For $200, she will keep quiet.  So, he kills her too.  Again, he berates Butler for charging the waitress’s husband with her murder.  Her husband, he types, “was executed for a crime he did not commit, just as I will be executed for a crime I did not commit.”

Next he hooks up with a doctor’s wife.  His bookie tracks him down at her house.  She offers to pay his debt in order to never see him again.  When he goes to deliver the cash, the bookie is already dead.  Daniels is standing right there, however, so he is charged with the murder.  The doctor’s wife claims to have never met him.

In the letter he admits to killing three people, but says he is innocent of the crime which got him convicted. So the fool Bernard Butler is sending an innocent man to the chair.

He mails the letter, then gets a visit from the idiot Bernard Butler.  The doctor’s wife changed her mind and provided his alibi — he is a free man He screams to get the incriminating letter back, but it is too late.

Yeah, that Butler — what a maroon!

Post-Post:

• AHP Deathwatch:  A couple of Daniels’ babes are hanging on.
• Another reason I watch the AHP intros, but not TFTC’s: