ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Wednesday, January 17, 1996            TAG: 9601170072
SECTION: NATL/INTL                PAGE: A-4  EDITION: METRO 
DATELINE: DOVER, DEL.
SOURCE: Associated Press 

DELAWARE DUSTING OFF ITS GALLOWS

Nine years ago, a defiant Billy Bailey said, ``I just hope they buy a strong enough rope.''

But the condemned man soon lost his nerve and began fighting to save himself from the hangman's noose for the 1979 shotgun slayings of an elderly couple.

Barring any legal delays, he will be hanged on Jan. 25 on the outdoor gallows at the state prison near Smyrna.

Bailey would be the third person hanged in the United States since 1965, when Kansas hanged four men. The last two hangings were in Washington state in 1993 and 1994.

Delaware has not hanged anyone in 50 years, so four corrections officials went to Washington last week to see how it's done.

``Our procedure is pretty much going to operate like theirs,'' said Gail Stallings, Corrections Department spokeswoman. ``Both procedures follow the old military procedures of execution by hanging.''

Bailey, 49, was sentenced to hang after being convicted in 1980. The state changed its method execution to injection in 1986 and allowed anyone sentenced to die before then to choose between the two methods.

Bailey selected hanging, saying he is just complying with his original sentence.

``Asking a man to choose how to die is more barbaric than hanging,'' he said in a recent interview with The (Wilmington) News Journal.

Edmund D. Lyons, Bailey's attorney, said his client is resigned to the prospect of execution for killing 73-year-old Clara Lambertson and her 80-year-old husband, Gilbert.

In 1979, Bailey escaped from a Wilmington work-release center, robbed a liquor store and then killed the Lambertsons at their farm house near Cheswold, about 35 miles south of Wilmington.

Bailey has said he was drinking and taking pills all day and doesn't remember the slayings.

Lyons has filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court.

LENGTH: Short :   49 lines
ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO:  AP. The gallows awaits. Barring legal delays, Delaware 
          will carry out its first hanging in 50 years on Jan. 25 using this 
          outdoor gallows. The condemned man, a double murderer, could have 
          chosen lethal injection (ran on A-1). color.