STRAPPED tight to a gurney with a lethal injection penetrating his vein, crowds cheered as Corey Johnson took his last breath on death row.
Stood metres from the serial killer, Bill Breeden had spent decades visiting inmates behind the barbed wire of Terre Haute Penitentiary in Indiana.
But on January 14, 2021, he attended an execution for the first time and had to watch the slow, grisly death of a man who took 15 minutes to stop breathing.
The execution was so shocking it left Breeden waking up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat with agonising bouts of PTSD.
Bill, 77, told The Sun: “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. He heaved heavily a couple of times and said his hands and mouth were on fire.
“After that, he said nothing. Then they came in and pronounced him dead. He took around 15 minutes to die.”
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Corey’s family were sat in a soundproof room behind Bill as the execution took place.
He said: “The glass wasn’t really soundproof, as I found out. As soon as the execution started, when the guy said, ‘let the execution begin’, Corey’s brother, who he hadn’t seen in 29 years, stood up and started screaming, ‘I love you, bro! I love you, bro! I love you, bro!’
“He never stopped until Corey was pronounced dead.”
Bill had been working with Johnson, 52, as a Unitarian Universalist minister.
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The inmate had been in solitary confinement for almost 30 years after he was convicted of killing seven people in Virginia in 1992 as part of the drug trade.
He hadn’t had a single visitor throughout his time behind bars.
Bill said he showed remorse, but he was unable to read out his final words – which was an apology.
After the go-ahead was given to end his life, families of the victims then cheered “like it was a football match”.
Bill said: “In those last words, the first thing he said was ‘don’t worry about me. I’m okay, but remember these names’.
“He listed the name of every one of his victims. He said, ‘I want to apologise to their families. I know you’re hurting so bad’.
“The families of his victims were in a room right outside of death row, watching through glass, and they could hear what was going on.
“I told the first marshal that I met ‘I want to bless his body after he’s executed, I want to say a prayer for him and I want to read his last words for him because he can’t read’.
“That person said ‘that sounds fine’.
“But when I got into death row, there was a piece of tape on the floor. I could only be within 5ft of him. I could not touch him, but I could talk with him.
“I stood there for probably 45 minutes or more, waiting for the final court decisions to go through. Maybe longer than that. It seemed like an eternity.
“When it came time for the execution to take place, a guy stuck his head in the door of this room and said, ‘there are no impediments’, that’s when they say, ‘go ahead and kill him’.
“I thought that was a strange way to put it, ‘no impediments’ to a murder.”
Bill started to read Corey’s last words for him – but he was interrupted by an official who called out “let the execution begin”.
“The victims’ families all stood up and started cheering like it was a big football game going on or something,” Bill said.
“I said, ‘I want to read his last words’ and they wouldn’t let me do it. He said, ‘he has to read them’.
“I replied, ‘he can’t read’. Besides that, he can only move his little fingers on his hand. He couldn’t move his head. He couldn’t, it’s an impossible situation.
“They wouldn’t let me read those words and I really do believe that, had he allowed me to do that, the families would not have reacted that way because his apology was very sincere.
“Finally, we argued about it for a few minutes. I asked Corey if he would like to try to read it if I held the paper for him.
“And he said ‘no, let’s just go ahead and finish this’.
“So the people didn’t hear it.”
Johnson’s death came in the last few days of Donald Trump’s first presidency in 2021 and marked the 12th execution of his tenure.
His administration had restarted federal executions following a 17-year hiatus.
Bill added: “It was just crazy because they brought in hundreds of people for the execution. It was the first time they’d had one in years after they started the executions in the Trump regime.
“They brought in busloads of people to carry out things, and Covid went through the federal prison and had many people die from Covid because of those executions.
“When I got into the death chamber I was wearing a mask.
“Everybody except the executioner, the skinhead, was wearing a mask because he refused to.
“At the end, when he was finally pronounced dead, I was allowed to touch his body for the first time. I did a blessing for his body.”
To this day, Breeden struggles with PTSD and claustrophobia after he began to wake up in a cold sweat following Johnson’s death.
He continued: “It’s not in our DNA to stand by and watch murder and not try to stop it. That’s just a totally unnatural, crazy kind of thing.
“In any other circumstance, if I was seeing a person being murdered, I would do everything in my power to stop it.
“And yet I knew if I did anything out of order, they would remove me. So I stood frozen.
“I don’t think we’re made to do that. That’s not part of the human psyche when you are forced to just stand and watch murder take place, which is actually on the death certificate – it’s called homicide.”
During his visits to death row, Bill also got to know Phillip Stroud, who was on death row for three murders but had his death sentence overturned. He is now serving life instead.
He also regularly visits Chad Fulks, who has been on death row for more than 20 years and has attempted to take his own life six times during that period.
He and Brandon Basham killed student Samantha Burns, 19, after kidnapping her from a parking lot in 2002.
They also carjacked, kidnapped, raped and killed forty-four-year-old grandmother Alice Donovan 10 days later.
But despite his monstrous crimes, Bill says Fulks feels “like a son to me” after initially talking him out of killing himself before his later attempts.
He said: “I got a letter from him and he was actually planning on taking his own life because the isolation was getting to him.
“He said that he wasn’t afraid of dying but he was afraid of going to hell.
“I’m a Unitarian Universalist minister. I grew up in a very fundamentalist religion. I was preaching in tent revivals when I was 16 to 18-years-old.
“Now I’m pretty much an agnostic. So I wrote back to him and said, ‘look, I think I can get you over your fear of hell, but it may take me a little while. So hang on until I can get into death row’.
“I’ve been seeing Chad now monthly for about 18 or 19 years, I think.”
He continued: “It was very difficult to get up the energy to go because it was so depressing.
“But now I look forward to it every month. He’s in much better shape now. He’d never finished a book in his life and now he reads constantly. He’s a very thoughtful person.”
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He added: “He’s like a son to me now.”
If you are affected by any of the issues raised in this article, please call the Samaritans for free on 116123.