Photographer Recreates The Last Meals Of Infamous Death Row Prisoners

AP/Seth Perlman

What do you eat when you’re about to be electrocuted for killing 30-plus people?

Answer: a hefty meal of steak, eggs and hash browns, followed by jelly for pudding.

Well that’s what notorious serial killer Ted Bundy chose for his last meal, and is one of the famous ‘last meals’ recreated by photographer Henry Hargreaves.

Henry – from New Zealand – has recreated the final meals wolfed down by evil killers. He decided to focus his project on food served to death row prisoners after reading about the efforts to stop the ‘last meal’ tradition in Texas.

He believes food preferences speak volumes about a person’s character and personality in any setting. Death row choices are an extremely powerful example of that theory.

AP/Dave Martin

On his website, he says:

In New Zealand, and in fact nearly anywhere else in the developed world, the death penalty is just not even in the conversation. It is a remnant of an earlier era. This little bit of civility, ‘hey we are going to kill you but what would you like to eat?’ just jumped off the page. I felt it could be a really interesting idea to try to represent visually. Researching this topic strangely personalized these people for me and for a moment was able to identify with them through the common denominator of food.

Personally, I don’t know how you could be a bit peckish knowing you’re about to be killed, but each to their own. These meals just get weirder as you go through them.

They vary from the absolutely extraordinary to the incredibly mundane. Enjoy: