GREENSVILLE, Va. — The prison transport van rolled through the gates of Greensville Correctional Center just after dawn, carrying a man who had spent years trying to arrive at this exact moment. Robert Charles Gleason Jr.
, 42, looked out from inside the vehicle with something rare for a man facing execution: satisfaction. He had finally gotten what he wanted.
Gleason’s journey to Virginia’s death chamber was anything but ordinary. A proud Yankee from Lowell, Massachusetts, he had built a career as an award-winning tattoo artist, studying at art school in North Carolina before opening shops along the East Coast. Friends described him as fiercely loyal, a man capable of genuine warmth.
But behind that exterior lurked a dark and calculating desperation that would ultimately define his final years.
The turning point came in 2007, when Gleason was convicted of murdering Michael Jamerson, a killing tied to a methamphetamine ring. He received a life sentence. But prison did not humble him.
It radicalized him. Faced with the prospect of decades rotting inside a cell, Gleason made a decision that stunned even veteran corrections officers: he would force the state to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 him.
In May 2009, at Wallens Ridge State Prison, Gleason’s cellmate, 63-year-old Harvey Watson Jr. , was found dead. The scene was grisly.
Watson had been hog-tied, beaten, and strangled. Gleason remained locked in the cell with the body for more than 15 hours, offering no explanation, showing no remorse. It was a message.
And he was not finished.
Just one year later, at Red Onion State Prison, Virginia’s Supermax facility hidden deep in the mountains, Gleason struck again. His victim was 26-year-old Aaron Cooper, strangled with a hand-braided rope pulled through the wire fencing of neighboring recreation cages. The killing took nearly an hour.
Gleason’s warning to the state was chillingly simple: the only way to stop me is to put me on death row.
Eventually, they did. On September 6, 2011, a jury sentenced Robert Gleason to death. He welcomed the verdict with the calm of a man who had achieved a lifelong goal.
According to Gleason, the murders were part of a twisted promise to his family. He said he wanted to ensure he would never 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again. “I wasn’t there as a father,” he told those close to him.
“I’m hoping I can do one last good thing.”
But his lawyers had other plans. To Gleason’s fury, his own defense team began fighting to stop the execution. Not because they denied the horrific murders, but because they believed Gleason was using the state to commit suicide by proxy.
They painted him as paranoid, depressed, and psychologically unstable. They argued that years of isolation had broken him. Gleason dismissed the legal maneuvering as a cynical ploy.
From death row, speaking in his thick Boston accent, Gleason told the Associated Press exactly how he felt. “Why prolong it? The end result’s going to be the same.
The death part don’t bother me. It’s called karma.” His words were deliberate, defiant, and clear.
He understood precisely what awaited him. And he did not care.
Late in the evening, Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell reaffirmed what had already become painfully obvious. He would not intervene. In an official statement, McDonnell pointed to the fact that Gleason had shown no remorse, refused to appeal, rejected legal assistance, and repeatedly insisted that the execution should proceed.
Courts had found him mentally competent. Gleason never formally asked for clemency.
Still, McDonnell said he reviewed the case anyway. In the end, he found no compelling reason to intercede. The governor’s decision cleared one of the final hurdles standing between Gleason and the electric chair.
But his attorneys refused to go quietly, despite having been fired by their own client.
Former defense counsel made one last desperate attempt to stop the execution. Emergency filings were submitted to the U. S.
Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, requesting a stay of execution and a new competency evaluation. Attorney John Sheldon argued that years on death row, much of it spent in near-total isolation, had psychologically broken Gleason. He claimed this was no longer a rational decision.
Sheldon also warned about the broader implications. He argued that the death penalty itself had become an incentive for inmates like Gleason to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 behind bars to escape permanent isolation. If prisoners know they can trade a life sentence in solitary confinement for execution, Sheldon reasoned, some will do exactly that.
The message, he said, was dangerous.
The ruling came down from the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. Request denied. No new competency hearing.
No stay. The court found no reason to overturn earlier evaluations. According to the judges, Gleason had consistently demonstrated that he understood exactly what he was doing.
What his lawyers described as psychological collapse, the court saw as a conscious choice.
Gleason himself never claimed innocence. In fact, he argued something entirely different. He insisted he was different from the other men on death row because he had never killed innocent people.
His prison victims, he said, were criminals too. One was a convicted killer. The other was a carjacker with gang ties.
He saw no moral equivalence.
“I ain’t saying I’m a better person for killing criminals,” Gleason said. “But I’ve never killed innocent people. I killed people that’s in the same lifestyle as me and they know these things can happen.”
It was a twisted code of ethics, but one he clung to until the very end. His former attorneys still were not giving up.
As the afternoon progressed, defense counsel made one final frantic attempt to stop the execution, submitting an emergency stay application to the Supreme Court of the United States. Inside Greensville Correctional Center, Robert Gleason spent his final hours completely alone. No visitors.
No family. Prison officials confirmed that nobody came to see him, not even his sons.
It was not because the relationships were broken. Those close to Gleason described a man devoted to the people he loved. A man who once dressed up as a purple dinosaur for his young son’s birthday party, then comforted the boy when the costume scared him.
A man who organized a motorcycle fundraiser for a child with cancer. There was real goodness in him, one friend would later say.
But Gleason chose not to let his family see him like this. He made a deliberate decision to spare them the agony of a final goodbye. Instead, he requested that his final meal remain secret, a decision kept hidden from the public.
He wanted his last hours shrouded in mystery, controlled entirely on his own terms.
Outside the prison gates, the case had divided the community. Protesters gathered near Greensville Correctional Center, holding candles and signs, calling for mercy. Among them was Steven Northam, director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
To abolitionists, Gleason’s case proved something deeply troubling about capital punishment itself.
They argued that the death penalty had become the very incentive that drove Gleason to murder again. Without execution on the table, they said, Gleason would have remained in solitary confinement with no reason to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁. The state, in their view, had effectively enabled his crimes by offering death as a reward for violence.
Supporters of capital punishment saw the exact opposite. To them, Gleason was the ultimate justification for the death penalty’s existence. Here was a man who openly promised to keep killing, who demonstrated that some inmates can never be safely contained.
Execution, they argued, was the only absolute guarantee of public safety.
At 8:30 p. m. , the Supreme Court of the United States rejected the final emergency petition.
No explanation. No intervention. With that single decision, every legal path was exhausted.
Nothing remained to stop what came next. The execution team moved into position, and Gleason was escorted into the death chamber.
He smiled. He winked at his spiritual adviser, the only person there for him. Under Virginia law, his family was not allowed to witness the execution.
On the other side of the glass sat the families of his victims. Among them was Kim Strickland, mother of Aaron Cooper, the young man Gleason had strangled through the prison fence.
Strickland had opposed the death penalty her entire life. That changed when Gleason mailed her Bible verses preaching an eye for an eye. Now she stood on the other side of the debate, convinced that he deserved to die.
“May God have mercy on his soul,” she said. “I’ve been praying that his family can heal from this ordeal.”
Inside the chamber, Gleason appeared calm, completely resigned, almost comfortable. The wooden electric chair waiting for him had not been used since 2010. Dust was removed.
Straps were prepared. Gleason had personally chosen electrocution over lethal injection. He believed the injection was more painful and refused to die lying down on a gurney.
“I can’t do that,” he had said. “I’d rather be sitting up.” It was a final act of control, a last assertion of will over his own death.
The execution team began the final preparations. They placed the calf clamp, the head electrode, and the leather mask. Gleason remained perfectly still throughout.
Then, one final remark. “Well, I hope Percy ain’t going to forget to wet the sponge.” It was a dark joke, a reference to the electric chair itself.
The sponge placed beneath the electrode was meant to conduct the current and prevent the head from burning. A macabre detail, but Gleason found humor in it.
Then came a nod to his Irish roots. “Put me on the highway to Jackson and call my Irish buddies.” Pog Mahone, translated from Irish Gaelic, means “Kiss my arse.”
It was his final act of defiance. Then, softly, he added: “God bless.”
With that, Robert Gleason gave a final thumbs up to his spiritual adviser. The execution began. The current surged through his body, approximately 1,800 volts at 7 and a half amps.
Witnesses watched his muscles tighten, his body tense, his skin turn pink beneath the leather straps. The first electrical cycle lasted 90 seconds.
Then another cycle began. Three full minutes of electricity coursed through his body. When the current finally stopped, the chamber fell silent.
A prison physician stepped forward, pressing a stethoscope against Gleason’s chest. There was no heartbeat. At 9:08 p.
m. , Robert Charles Gleason Jr. was officially pronounced dead.
With his death, he was permanently etched into history. Robert Gleason became the final man to die in Virginia’s electric chair, marking the end of 113 years of electrocution in the Commonwealth. It was the first execution in the United States in 2013, and a case that raised profound questions about the death penalty, mental health, and the limits of human desperation.
What remains is a chilling legacy. A man who murdered twice behind bars, not out of random violence, but with calculated purpose. A man who used the state’s ultimate punishment as a tool to escape his own life.
And a justice system that, despite the desperate pleas of his attorneys, concluded that his choice was rational, informed, and legally permissible.
Robert Gleason got exactly what he wanted. In death, he found the escape that prison could never offer him. And in doing so, he left behind a haunting question for those who witnessed his final hours: was this justice, or was this a man who simply outlasted the system’s ability to contain him?
The answer, like Gleason himself, is gone. Buried in the silence of Greensville Correctional Center, where the electric chair now sits empty forever.
