County Keeps Electric Chair Next Door to Drew Peterson Trial Courthouse, No Plans Yet to Use it Again

CHESTER, IL — Right next door to the courthouse where Drew Peterson is standing trial for allegedly plotting to have a prosecutor murdered, the county keeps an electric chair that was used to execute 17 men and one woman.

Those 18 went from the death row at Menard Correctional Center — the same prison where Peterson now lives — to die in that chair between 1931 and 1938.

The last two executions were carried out 10 minutes apart, according to the website Death Row Divas.

First, there was 22-year-old Angelo Giancola. He was followed by Marie Porter, the 38-year-old woman who had hired him to murder her brother.

“She had ordered the murder of her brother for $3,300 in life insurance,” Death Row Divas says. “He was killed on his wedding day, hours before his fiancée would have replaced Porter as beneficiary.”

After Illinois moved on from the electric chair to lethal injection as its method for executing the condemned, Menard’s chair was taken from the prison and shipped to a Springfield warehouse, said Carl Welge, a volunteer at the Randolph County Museum in Chester.

“It was just gathering dust up there and we were able to get it down here,” Welge said.

The museum is housed in a stone building constructed during the Civil War. It was built to be an archive for the county’s vital records, Welge said, and was an annex to the old courthouse.

Menard had one of only three electric chairs in Illinois, according to the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. The other two were at Stateville prison outside Joliet and the Cook County Jail in Chicago.

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