On the afternoon of April 18, 1985, James Dyral Briley sat for two hours with his family at the Virginia State Penitentiary in Richmond. When they had gone he asked for fried shrimp, a soft drink and ice cream. United Press International put the order in its dispatch that night, close to the account of a failed last-minute appeal and the count of 500 people cheering outside the walls. In those years, what a condemned prisoner ate on the last day was treated as public information: noted by the prison, handed to reporters by a spokesman and repeated in the next morning’s paper alongside the time of death.
It is no longer a safe assumption. Texas posted each executed prisoner’s final meal on its prison website until 2003, then took the list down. In 2011 it stopped cooking special meals at all. Other states kept the custom but fenced it with rules of their own, and the Associated Press reported that year that some states did not acknowledge final meals, while others disclosed them only when the prisoner agreed.
The record left by eight people convicted of multiple killings, executed in four states between 1984 and 2019, shows how the custom worked when it was still routine news, and where the reporting of it narrowed. It also shows how ordinary the meals usually were.
There has never been one national practice. When Texas ended its custom in September 2011, the Associated Press surveyed the field and described a patchwork. Florida capped the final meal at $40 and had the food bought locally. Texas had never set a dollar limit, but it required that the meal be prepared in the prison kitchen. Some states imposed time limits or other conditions. The same report said it was unclear whether any other state had followed Texas in abolishing the choice.
That patchwork matters for anyone reading old newspaper accounts. A last meal reported from Florida in 2002 was ordered under a price ceiling. A last meal reported from Texas in 1997 came out of an institutional kitchen. A meal reported from Virginia in 1984 might have been something the prisoner never asked for. The bare menu in a wire story rarely carried those conditions with it.
Linwood Earl Briley, the eldest of three Richmond brothers, was sentenced to death for the September 1979 robbery and killing of John Harvey Gallaher, a Richmond radio disc jockey and bass player known as Johnny G. A separate judgment entered on January 12, 1980, convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder, with other charges, arising from the deaths of Harvey Wilkerson, Judy Diane Barton and her five-year-old son on October 19, 1979. Prosecutors and police linked the brothers' group to at least 11 killings that year. On May 31, 1984, Linwood and his brother James led six condemned men out of the Mecklenburg Correctional Center at Boydton. They were recaptured in Philadelphia 19 days later.
He was executed in Richmond on the night of Friday, October 12, 1984, and pronounced dead at 11:05 p.m. No reporters were in the room. Eight citizens witnessed the execution, among them his lawyer, Deborah Wyatt. Yet the press still learned what he had eaten, and the detail it reported was a small reversal. Briley had planned to skip his final meal, UPI wrote, but prison officials gave him a steak and a baked potato.
He spent his last hours with his mother, who would not answer reporters' questions, with his 10-year-old son and with Wyatt. His brothers Anthony and James telephoned. He told the director of the Department of Corrections, Robert Landon, that he was innocent, and Wyatt said afterward that he had maintained his innocence to the end. He declined to have a clergyman walk with him, although a chaplain was present. Outside the prison about 500 demonstrators gathered, split roughly evenly between supporters and opponents of the death penalty. Someone set off firecrackers at the hour of the execution, and one man waved a Confederate flag. Governor Charles Robb’s aides said he saw no grounds to intervene. The Supreme Court of the United States had refused four times to hear Briley’s appeals, twice that week.
The meal in that account belongs to the prison, not the prisoner. A man who meant to refuse food was served a plate anyway, and the state saw fit to report it.
James Dyral Briley, the middle brother, was condemned for the October 19, 1979, killings in Richmond of Judy Diane Barton, who was 23 and pregnant, and her son Harvey Wayne Barton, 5. A Richmond jury convicted him of two counts of capital murder, with other charges, and of the first-degree murder of the boy’s father, Harvey W. Wilkerson, as a principal in the second degree; the trial testimony was that an accomplice killed Wilkerson at his urging. The Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the death sentences on November 26, 1980, and the federal courts rejected his habeas petition in 1984.
His final weeks carried more incident than most. On March 28, 1985, he married a freelance writer in a jailhouse ceremony performed by the Rev. Marjorie Bailey, a Baptist minister. On the morning of his execution, inmates at the penitentiary rose in a disturbance that guards put down within 15 minutes; UPI reported that it did not interrupt the preparations. His lawyer, Gerald Zerkin, carried a final appeal to U.S. District Judge Dortch Warriner, resting it on an affidavit from another inmate. "She simply is not credible," the judge said. Zerkin ended his efforts that evening and called further appeal hopeless. Governor Robb again declined to intervene, and the Supreme Court of Virginia refused to halt the execution.
After the family visit he ordered the shrimp, the soft drink and the ice cream. He spent the rest of the evening on the telephone with relatives and listening to recorded music, including songs by Al Green. He thanked Bailey before he was led out. Prison officials said he made no formal final statement; instead he looked at the nine official witnesses, smiled and asked whether they were happy. He was pronounced dead at 11:07 p.m., six months after his brother. Once more, no news reporter witnessed the execution. Outside, about 500 supporters of the death penalty cheered and applauded, and police made about 10 arrests, most for drunk and disorderly conduct.
Two brothers, six months apart, in the same building: one refused his meal and was served a steak, the other chose shrimp. Both menus reached the public through the same wire service on the same night as the executions.
Carroll Edward Cole was convicted by Texas juries of three murders in Dallas and given a life term. In Nevada he pleaded guilty to the murder of Kathlyn J. Blum and to the first degree murder of Marie Cushman in Las Vegas in 1979. Acting as his own lawyer at sentencing, he objected when others tried to put mitigating evidence before the three-judge panel and asked to be sentenced to death. Judgment was entered on October 12, 1984. He filed no appeal. The Supreme Court of Nevada held his waiver valid and affirmed the conviction and sentence on October 22, 1985. He had told the Nevada court he had killed at least 13 people.
He spent his last full day, December 5, 1985, at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City. According to Warden Harol Whitley, he joined the Roman Catholic Church that day; the Rev. Dave Casaleggio performed the baptism. He watched television, played Monopoly with his guards and talked with Catholic and Protestant chaplains while several guards kept him under suicide watch. "He has a good attitude and is not displaying any anger," Whitley said.
UPI gave the menu in full: jumbo shrimp, french fries, a tossed salad with French dressing, and clam chowder. Cole was executed early on December 6, the first execution of its kind in Nevada. He had refused every offer to appeal, and he went to the end of the process having asked for it from the start.
What stands out in the Carson City account is the care with which the prison described an ordinary day. A warden named the priest. His account took in the Monopoly game. The food was listed down to the salad dressing.
Florida’s schedule shaped its menus. Theodore Robert Bundy had been sentenced to death twice in the state: in July 1979, after a jury convicted him of the first-degree murders of Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, in Tallahassee, and in February 1980 for the murder, with other charges, of Kimberly Leach, 12. In his last days he confessed to investigators from several states, and the count of killings he admitted came to about thirty.
On January 23, 1989, he gave a final interview to the radio host James Dobson, who said Bundy wept several times while they talked. He had also seen his lawyers and a psychiatrist they brought in to examine him. He spent his last night at Florida State Prison, near Starke, with a Methodist minister, much of it in prayer.
Because the execution was set for the early morning, the meal on offer was breakfast. UPI reported that Bundy refused a final breakfast of steak and eggs. "He didn’t want any breakfast," said Bob Macmaster, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Corrections. He was led into the death chamber shortly before 7 a.m. and pronounced dead at 7:16. He was 42.
A prisoner’s refusal was as reportable as his order. The state’s spokesman offered it, the wire carried it, and the uneaten plate became part of the official story of the day.
Aileen Carol Wuornos was convicted of six first degree murders of men in central and north Florida between late 1989 and late 1990: one at a Volusia County trial in January 1992, five on pleas of guilty or no contest in Marion, Citrus, Pasco and Dixie counties. Each judgment carried a death sentence, and the Florida Supreme Court affirmed them between 1994 and 1996. She later dismissed her lawyers, told a judge she wanted to drop her appeals and was held competent to do so; the Florida Supreme Court approved that ruling on April 1, 2002. Governor Jeb Bush signed her death warrant on September 5.
On the night of October 8 a visitor spent three hours with her at Florida State Prison. According to Knight Ridder’s account, she prayed during that visit for the families of the men she had killed; the meeting was upbeat, without tears, and ended at midnight. Staff woke her at 5:30 the next morning. She asked for a towel and a washcloth to freshen up, said the prison spokesman, Sterling Ivy. "She is very calm this morning," he told reporters.
UPI’s account of the morning recorded that Wuornos declined the traditional last meal. She could have ordered anything for under $20, the agency noted. Instead she was given a cup of coffee. Thirty-two witnesses watched the execution, and she was pronounced dead at 9:47 a.m. She was 46.
The $20 figure shows Florida’s price ceiling in operation thirteen years after Bundy’s refused breakfast, and nine years before the Associated Press recorded the state’s cap at $40. A last meal in Florida was a purchase made within a budget, and in 2002 the prison was still prepared to tell the public that the budget had gone unspent.
Texas convicted Michael Lee Lockhart first. A jury in Bexar County convicted him in October 1988 of the capital murder of Officer Paul Douglas Hulsey Jr. of the Beaumont Police Department, killed on March 22, 1988, while trying to arrest him. Indiana later sentenced him to death for the murder, with other charges, of a 16-year-old girl in Griffith in October 1987, and Florida did the same, after a guilty plea, for the murder, with other charges, of a 14-year-old girl in Land O' Lakes in January 1988. Texas executed him on December 9, 1997, at 37, while both other death sentences still stood. He was Texas Department of Criminal Justice prisoner number 917 on the department’s list of executed offenders.
In those years Texas went further than Virginia, Nevada or Florida in publicizing the final meal. Until 2003 its prison system posted each executed prisoner’s last meal on the death row pages of its website, a running public register. Governing magazine later located an archived copy of the page that listed requests from 1982 to September 2003. Lockhart’s execution fell inside that span. Then, after 313 meals had been posted, the department stopped. The Associated Press reported that the listings were withdrawn because of complaints that they were offensive.
The department did not stop publishing everything. It kept its list of executed offenders, with numbers and dates, and the pages that set out what each prisoner said in the chamber. The menu was the item the state chose to drop.
The custom itself lasted eight more years in Texas, and it ended over one man’s order. Lawrence Russell Brewer, condemned for the 1998 murder of James Byrd Jr., a single-victim case and not a serial one, was executed on Wednesday, September 21, 2011. For his final meal he had asked for two chicken-fried steaks, a triple-meat bacon cheeseburger and fried okra, among other dishes. Prison officials said he did not eat any of it. The department told the Austin Chronicle that Brewer received some of what he requested, though not in the quantity requested.
State Sen. John Whitmire, chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, wrote to Brad Livingston, executive director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, calling the privilege "extremely inappropriate." He told the Associated Press that the practice was ridiculous, threatened to seek a statute if it did not stop immediately, and put his objection in one sentence: "Mr. Byrd didn’t get to choose his last meal." Livingston agreed that the senator’s concerns were valid. "Effective immediately, no such accommodations will be made," he wrote.
From that Thursday on, a condemned prisoner in Texas was to receive the same meal served to other offenders on the unit. In practice, the reform did not change the economics of the custom much: Texas had never set a price limit, and its meals had always come from the prison kitchen. What changed was that there was no longer anything special to report. Texas had first removed the public list, and then removed the thing the list described.
Florida did neither. In 2019, the first year of Governor Ron DeSantis’s term, the state carried out two executions of men convicted of multiple killings, and in both cases prison officials told reporters what had been eaten.
Robert Joe Long, known as Bobby Joe Long, had pleaded guilty on September 23, 1985, to eight counts of first-degree murder in Hillsborough County for killings of women around Tampa in 1984. Under the plea agreement he faced death in only one case, the murder of Michelle Simms; that sentence was imposed in 1986, vacated in 1988 and imposed again on July 21, 1989. A separate Pasco County conviction was reversed three times, and in 1997 the Florida Supreme Court ordered a judgment of acquittal in that case.
On May 23, 2019, prison officials said no one had visited him before his execution. They also said his last meal was a roast beef sandwich, french fries, bacon and a soda. At 6 p.m. the execution was delayed while the Supreme Court of the United States considered his final appeals, and at 6:30 the justices denied them. He gave no last words and was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m., at 65. A woman he had kidnapped and released in 1984, whose account had helped detectives identify him, watched from the witness room. "The peace that came over me is a remarkable feeling," she said afterward.
Three months later it was Gary Ray Bowles. He had confessed to killing six men in Florida, Maryland and Georgia between March and November 1994 and was convicted of three of the Florida murders: Walter Hinton in Jacksonville, on a guilty plea that brought a death sentence, and Albert Morris in Nassau County and John Hardy Roberts in Daytona Beach, each with a life term. In 2019 his lawyers argued that he was intellectually disabled; the courts held the claim untimely, because he had not raised it until 2017.
On August 22, 2019, Bowles had a final meal of three hamburgers, French fries and bacon, the News Service of Florida reported. In a handwritten statement he said he was "so very sorry to all of the family and friends of Mr. Hinton," apologized to his mother and thanked his lawyers, the warden and the staff, writing that he had been "treated with respect" on death watch. He was pronounced dead at 10:58 p.m. He was the second prisoner executed since DeSantis took office in January. The first had been Long.
Set side by side, the two Florida menus are almost interchangeable: fried potatoes, bacon, meat on bread. They are the meals of men who had been in prison for a quarter of a century or more, ordered under rules that, as of 2011, called for food bought locally within a $40 cap, and announced by the state in the same matter-of-fact way it announced the time of death.
The meals of these eight were plain. Shrimp appears twice, in Richmond in 1985 and Carson City the same year. Steak appears twice, once served to a man who had not wanted it and once refused at a breakfast table in Starke. Wuornos, offered anything under $20, took coffee. Long and Bowles, more than thirty years after the Brileys, ordered sandwiches, burgers and bacon. The most lavish order of all belonged to a man executed for a single murder, and he did not eat it.
What changed over those decades was less the food than the willingness of the state to speak about it. In 1984 Virginia kept reporters out of the chamber but told them about the steak. In 1989 a Florida spokesman volunteered that Bundy had wanted no breakfast. By 2003 Texas had decided that a public list of meals gave offense, and by 2011 it had decided the meal itself did. The Associated Press, surveying the states that year, could say only that some disclosed the meal with the prisoner’s consent and some did not acknowledge it at all.
The old wire stories describe a custom and a policy at the same time. Each menu in a wire story was there because a prison decided to release it. When James Briley’s fried shrimp went out over the UPI wire in April 1985, the state of Virginia was telling the public something about the last hours of a man it was about to put to death. Texas no longer tells. Florida, as of its 2019 executions, still did.
• September 14 to October 19, 1979: killings in Richmond, Virginia, for which Linwood and James Briley were later condemned.
• 1979: Marie Cushman is killed in Las Vegas; Carroll Edward Cole later pleads guilty to her first degree murder.
• July 1979 and February 1980: Ted Bundy sentenced to death in Florida.
• May 31, 1984: Linwood and James Briley lead six condemned men out of Mecklenburg Correctional Center; recaptured in Philadelphia June 19.
• October 12, 1984: Linwood Briley executed in Richmond; prison officials serve him a steak and a baked potato after he planned to skip the meal.
• October 12, 1984: Cole’s Nevada death sentence entered.
• April 18, 1985: James Briley executed in Richmond after ordering fried shrimp, a soft drink and ice cream.
• October 22, 1985: Supreme Court of Nevada affirms Cole’s sentence.
• December 6, 1985: Cole executed in Carson City; his final meal was jumbo shrimp, french fries, salad and clam chowder.
• March 22, 1988: Officer Paul Hulsey Jr. killed in Beaumont, Texas; Michael Lee Lockhart convicted of his capital murder in October 1988.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy executed at Florida State Prison after refusing a breakfast of steak and eggs.
• December 9, 1997: Lockhart executed in Texas.
• October 9, 2002: Aileen Wuornos declines a last meal priced under $20 and is given a cup of coffee; executed at Florida State Prison.
• September 2003: last entry in the Texas prison system’s online list of final meals; the list is withdrawn after 313 meals.
• September 21, 2011: Lawrence Russell Brewer executed in Texas.
• September 22, 2011: Texas ends special final meals; condemned prisoners will receive the same meal as other offenders on the unit.
• September 2011: the Associated Press reports Florida’s final-meal cap at $40, with food bought locally.
• May 23, 2019: Bobby Joe Long executed in Florida after a last meal of a roast beef sandwich, french fries, bacon and a soda.
• August 22, 2019: Gary Ray Bowles executed in Florida after a final meal of three hamburgers, French fries and bacon.