He was no inmate, although. Ford had dedicated no crime. That day, the Baptist minister was current to counsel killer Ricky Boggs, strapped into Virginia’s electrical chair on the (now closed) Mecklenburg Correctional Heart.

In 1984, Boggs robbed and murdered his widowed neighbor, Treeby Michie Shaw, after ingesting tea along with her for an hour. He spent the proceeds on medication. Six years later, Boggs was within the demise chamber, with Ford at his aspect.

Ford bent over Boggs to whisper in his ear and provides him a comforting pat. The moment Ford lifted his hand from the condemned prisoner, the executioner flipped the chair’s swap.

As 2,500 volts convulsed the inmate’s physique, Ford heard a loud crack and a hum and felt the present soar to him. The shock despatched him careening backward, as he watched sparks fly from Boggs’ proper leg.

“That have was sufficient to make a preacher cuss,” Ford instructed me.

That’s the opening scene of a brand new e-book, “Crossing the River Styx: The Memoirs of a Loss of life Row Chaplain.” The College of Virginia Press on Wednesday issued the e-book about Ford’s profession ministering in prisons.

Amazon.com’s promoting the hardcover model for just below $30; the Kindle version is $16.17. Wednesday afternoon, the 230-page quantity ranked 25,045 amongst memoirs on Amazon.com.

Ford, 71, wrote it with co-authors Todd C. Peppers, a Roanoke School professor, who supplied structural recommendation and modifying, and Peppers’ son, Charles Peppers, 22, who carried out key analysis to flesh out many particulars, in between school and graduate college.

Todd Peppers, 55, is a “recovering lawyer” who’s additionally a visiting professor at Washington and Lee College’s legislation college. He’s revealed 5 earlier books, together with two targeted on Virginia’s demise penalty.

“Crossing the River Styx” by no means would’ve made it to a writer with out the help of each Peppers, Ford stated.

A lot of the manuscript had been sitting in a drawer for years, Ford instructed me, as he coped with put up traumatic stress dysfunction from observing 28 Virginia executions. Later, he suffered a traumatic mind damage in a martial arts class. That landed him in rehab for 4 years. (Ford had a life exterior jail, too, with a spouse and three youngsters they raised.)

“It felt incomplete, one thing in my life that had not been completed,” Ford replied after I requested why he wrote the e-book. “There have been tales that wanted to be instructed. I needed to cap [his prison efforts] with a report on what I skilled.”

After Todd Peppers discovered about that unpublished manuscript, he learn it and helped information Ford to getting the e-book in form for publication.

“I’d blow on the embers,” Peppers instructed me. “Working with Russ, I’d say, ‘OK, right here’s a man I need you to speak about. Give us as a lot as you possibly can proper now.’

“Typically, getting him to write down was tough for him,” Peppers stated. “It was too painful.”

In Greek mythology, the River Styx was a large marsh that fashioned the boundary line between Earth and its underworld. In Ford’s e-book, that line is jail partitions that separate lawbreakers from well mannered society. Ford spent years crossing the boundary for his job.

He wound up as death-penalty chaplain as a result of he linked higher with condemned inmates than different jail chaplains, “and [the other chaplains] have been sincere about that,” Ford stated. Usually, he spent years attending to know the condemned males, forging relationships and creating understanding of their crimes.

The e-book introduces them to readers. Many, Ford stated, have been schizophrenic or suffered from different psychological diseases. Some had been born with fetal-alcohol syndrome.

Some comparable to Ricky Boggs, spent years making an attempt to achieve a full understanding of the heinous crimes they dedicated. One other, Ford instructed me, really kissed the electrical chair’s seat after he walked into the demise chamber.

As a profession, “it was non secular and stuffed with grace. We really felt grace within the demise chamber,” Ford stated. “There’s a way of holiness, of being at one with your self and different individuals, that epiphany we expertise in disaster.”

Ford termed it “peace past human understanding.” Some, however not all, condemned prisoners obtained there, he stated.

One who got here near demise however survived was Earl Washington Jr., a convicted assassin with an IQ under 70. Within the early Nineteen Eighties, Washington was coerced into confessing to the rape and homicide of a mom of three from Culpeper, which he had nothing to do with.

Gov. Douglas Wilder commuted Washington’s sentence to life in jail after questions arose about his sentence. Later, in 2000, Gov. Jim Gilmore granted Washington a full pardon and launch after DNA proof proved one other man dedicated that crime.

“Crossing the River Styx” additionally introduces readers to Virginia’s death-penalty neighborhood. That’s composed of death-row guards and their bosses, demise penalty chaplains who got here earlier than Ford, attorneys who symbolize the inmates and anti-capital punishments activists Ford encountered on his journey.

Warning: That is no warm-and-fuzzy narrative. Most of the particulars concern hellish life in dilapidated settings which can be so inhumane, the typical kennel compares favorably. Nevertheless it’s so well-written and gripping chances are you’ll discover it laborious to place down.

At one level Ford describes watching boiling blood erupt from the face of a assassin and pool on the ground beneath the electrical chair as its present kills the man. At one other, Ford discovers the supply of physique odor emanating from a disabled prisoner (who wasn’t going through execution). The scent got here from maggots feasting on the person’s limbs, Ford writes.

Different particulars recount the heinous crimes that landed the prisoners on demise row, and their tragic victims. Todd Peppers stated they deliberately didn’t sugarcoat any of that background. Charles Peppers unearthed lots of these specifics.

Different info could go away the reader uncomfortable, too.

Right here’s one: Because the Colonial period, greater than 15,000 males, ladies and kids have been executed in what’s now the USA — through gallows, fuel chamber, electrocution, firing squad and deadly injection.

One other: Virginia has executed extra individuals than every other state, counting its Colonial period. Again then, hog thieves and tax evaders have been topic to execution. (That nugget alone ought to provide you with an thought concerning the arbitrariness of capital punishment.)

By the early 1900s, Virginia nonetheless executed rapists and tried rapists. By the late twentieth century, capital punishment was reserved for individuals convicted of essentially the most heinous murders.

A deceptively easy query underlies a lot of the amount. Todd Peppers framed it this manner: “Why does the state kill individuals, to show them killing is mistaken?”

Virginia not executes jail inmates. The commonwealth’s closing state-sponsored execution occurred in 2017, with the deadly injection of William Morva, who shot and killed a sheriff’s deputy and a hospital safety officer in Blacksburg in 2006.

In 2021, led by Sen. Invoice Stanley, R-Moneta, the state abolished capital punishment. No matter criticism you would possibly wish to heap on Stanley, he deserves accolades for that.

Ford and the Peppers deserve accolades, too, for “Crossing the River Styx.”

It’s haunting. Learn it and also you’ll see for your self.