Original subtitles

Tom ward (narrates): A decaying facility in america,

first designed to tame the wild west.

There are a lot of strange contraptions in here.

I've seen prisons, I've seen torture chambers,

and this reminds me a little bit of both.

A stately home in Scotland once embroiled in an audacious plot.

Just kind of walking around

you are always in danger of stepping on a rotted plank or something

and plunging to your death.

A subterranean maze in liverpool

with mysterious origins.

It really feels like a labyrinth

you know like one of those dreams that you just keep running down,

there is another corridor and another corridor

and you never get to the end of it.

And a resort on the shores of the dead sea

collapsing into the abyss.

When it opened up it just caved in, we have got many more,

they are all over the place.

Decaying relics.

Ruins of lost worlds.

Sites haunted by the past.

Their secrets waiting to be revealed.

Near loch lomond is the setting

for one of the strangest stories of world war ii.

What makes this castle so bewitching

is how it is almost merged with nature over the years.

It's been basically encroached upon by the surrounding woods.

Just to get to it, you've got to climb

over a barbed wire fence

and fight your way through thorny bushes.

Trespassers have been beguiled by the castle ruin

but it's a place of hidden dangers.

This is a grand place and it's been consumed

by this jungle of a forest,

it's a bit like a fairy tale in there,

it's all rather beautiful.

But don't let that beauty fool you,

this is place is derelict and seriously dangerous.

There is falling stone from walls in all directions

and that's just the danger that is above you.

Below you can see these holes in the floor

and in some parts its caved in completely.

Elsewhere layers of dirt obscure lethal cassems

a side effect of being opened to the elements.

Most places you stand in the building,

you can see the sky,

there are three or four floors above you,

but they are just gone.

And one of the most striking features

is as you walk in there

is this massive beam presumably from the roof,

that has just toppled down into the interior,

into the keep of this castle

and it's just kind of stuck in the ground.

An historic castle on the edge of collapse,

still standing to tell its story.

Today access to the castle ruin is strictly forbidden.

But 80 years ago it was a safe haven for hundreds of people.

During the second world war

this was used as a military hospital

but the building is much older than that.

John carruthers preserves

the history of the loch lomond region.

With special permission this is the first time

he has been allowed inside the grounds.

One fireplace, two fire places,

looks like a spiral stair a door come in up there.

It must have been a grand place in its day.

Such a shambles now.

It has these beautiful almost gothic stone walls

and spiral staircases...

And scattered on the floor

are these victorian looking metal brackets

that were once used for holding up the ceiling.

Just looking at the cast iron beams

which have not yet broken

obviously supported the upper floors.

Imagine getting these heavy beams into this place.

Quite immense.

Then we find the old entrance room,

it's a huge space

with a beautiful grand fireplace,

this wasn't only built as a place for sick people.

This is Buchanan castle.

It's a name that reverberates in local folk lore

because Buchanan is the name of one of Scotland's proud clans.

The clans were very important,

north of the central belt they really ruled the roost.

Clans themselves were more like tribes

and to be a member of a clan like the Buchanan clan

you could be buchannan by blood

or you could be Buchanan by alliance and affiliation.

The clan chiefs were defector kings of their lands.

And they built these castles to rule from.

Here we have basements or cellars I'm not sure.

Massive, massive under building.

Maybe that's where they kept their wine.

The buchannan's have a very active history in Scotland

dating back to the 1400s

when they make a very risky move to ally the French

against the English,

which you know was fraught with peril

because the English were closer to hand,

they had bigger armies

they were always agitating on the frontier

so this could have meant disaster for the Buchanan clan.

But it wasn't the English who left this place in ruin.

Well, buchannan's had been the dominant family,

ruled the roost round here for oh what 700 years?

And in the early 1600s, they fell upon hard times.

But in addition to that the 22nd laird

failed to produce a male heir,

and the combination of these effects

was that the estate was put on the market.

The Buchanan dynasty was over,

and their family home would share its fate.

A neighbouring clan purchased the land

and built the castle that barely stands to this day.

It must have been a wonderful place in its day,

I'm sure the grace and the good use of...

Buchanan castle from time to time,

weekend parties and all the rest of it.

The new castle became a house of leisure

but when the second world war broke out,

it was repurposed as a military hospital.

And on one evening in 1941,

a doctor serving there received an unusual patient.

On may 12th, doctor j Gibson Graham was stationed

at Buchanan castle

now called the drymen military hospital.

A pilot was brought to him going by the name of Alfred horne

who had injured himself

when bailing out of his aircraft over a wheat field.

The doctor noted in his memoir

that his patient was a sallow man of good physique

and he spoke good English.

He had a commanding presence,

and clearly regarded himself is an important person

and expected to be treated likewise.

But something about this German pilot didn't add up.

In the course of his early time

in the military hospital in the ward,

there were suspicions amongst his fellow patients,

that he wasn't just a simple...

There was more to this than met the eye.

After his injuries were seen to

horne was taken for questioning

there he revealed his true identity...

His name was Rudolph Walter Richard hess,

once second in command of the third reich.

Hess joined the Nazi party very early on

and formed a close friendship with a young Adolf Hitler.

Some people have called him Hitlers most loyal follower.

But after the Nazis came to power,

hess' influence on the fuhrer had diminished.

He was a very weak man and he was being pushed out

by more aggressive Nazis like gehring

like himmler like boorman

and so it's been speculated that he flew to Scotland

basically to try to win favour with Hitler.

Hess' plan was to meet someone who had influence

over the British prime minster and broker a peace deal.

He was looking for the Duke of Hamilton.

He's met the Duke of Hamilton in receptions in the past,

but as it turns out the Duke of Hamilton

has no interest in helping Rudolph hess,

when informed of this plan

he doesn't want to get his hands dirty,

refuses to be helpful.

This was a huge blow to hess,

he had come all this way, risked his life,

disobeyed his fuhrer only to be given

the cold shoulder by the Duke.

With or without the help of the Duke

word reached Churchill that hess was in britain

but his offer for peace was ignored.

Churchill says

I don't want to hear from Rudolph hess

that would look bad,

I have committed to fighting these people

on the beaches on the landing grounds

never surrendering,

why do I want to negotiate with this sort of fallen Nazi.

Hess' plan had failed.

At the end of the day the doctor thought

that hess was not a military prisoner

he was a man with medical problems,

he certainly had a distorted image of reality

thinking that he could bring britain

to the negotiating table with himself

just on his own without any back up.

When the mission is revealed to Hitler

he is aghast, ashamed, baffled,

and tries to cover it up as long as possible

but the British advertise the news

and so predictably

doctor Joseph girbals the head of Nazi

propaganda comes out

and totally disowns hess, says he's crazy,

says we have no idea how this happened.

With his mission of failure and his career in ruin,

the disgraced Rudolf hess could only confide in one friend.

Hess told the doctor a fair bit about his life,

his private life, his upbringing etcetera,

I think that the doctor began to become

sympathetic perhaps, not quite the right word,

but at least understanding of hess

and a reasonably close relationship was actually formed.

So, on may 17th, hess and doctor Gibson Graham

left Buchanan house

and started a new journey to the tower of London.

Rudolf hess spent the rest of his life in prison,

after the war drymen military hospital

was decommissioned and the castle fell into disrepair.

It was abandoned after the war,

well the war office had it till 1948

and then it was in limbo

and 1954 they took the roof off to avoid paying property tax.

Now, all that's left of Buchanan castle

is an empty shell waiting to collapse.

Set back from the shores of the dead sea,

decaying structures create a chilling scene.

This place looks like the set of disaster movie.

The roads and Bridges are falling down,

you see the carcasses of buildings, dead trees, empty swimming pools.

There's empty abandoned shops,

roads with holes in them that look like craters

from ids or bombs,

everything is just falling apart here.

There are security fences warning signs,

whole areas of the town which are off limits.

Has this site

in the famously troubled occupied west bank

been caught up in conflict?

It becomes apparent the craters extend well beyond the roadside.

There are huge craters in the ground,

some of them even in the middle of the beach.

Your first instinct is to think these must be manmade,

they are so regular.

But the warning signs and fences

clearly indicate that the danger isn't over.

To go beyond those fences would be like entering a mine field,

you just don't know what you will be stepping onto.

This whole area is in the grip of some powerful forces

but what are they?

Despite the obvious dangers

and eerie quiet these empty remains were built for crowds of people.

You can clearly see the logistics of this place

were set up for tourism.

There's restaurants, pools, bars,

everything you would want at a nice seaside resort.

We have no electricity today so the fences are closed,

and we will have to go around the reception area

to go into the beach and pool area,

so why don't you follow me and we will go in.

Dr Arthur trotsky is part owner of the mineral beach resort

in the occupied west bank.

This is what's left of the office.

This used to be a beautiful modern air conditioned office.

Ok, let's take a look over here you will see the restaurant.

This was an amphitheatre,

and we used to have musical performances on the stage,

they would actually have the whole theatre filled up

and chairs and way up there,

it was quite beautiful in the evenings,

dead sea, stars, the wind, breeze, beautiful.

But the empty and disintegrating structures

aren't the only thing that is wrong here

they appear to be set back hundreds of metres from the beach.

Ok this was the water line,

right under this bridge here this was the lifeguard tower,

and these umbrellas right on the beach

that's how high the water was.

The water line has dropped so much

that some resort owners physically moved infrastructure

to try and stay close to the water.

These drop in water levels kicked off a chain reaction.

Nobody saw coming.

December 29th, 2014.

Arthur was relaxing at mineral beach

when the peace was suddenly shattered.

I was sitting in the cafe, I head this loud crash,

so I ran out here and I saw this huge sink hole.

Faced with the drop in water level for many years

now this new phenomenon was threatening the resort.

You see this in the middle of the parking lot

and we've got many more over there

the massage rooms went down into sink holes,

the beach had sink holes, they are all over the place.

The receding water line and sink holes are connected

but the root cause of both phenomena is neither simple nor obvious.

The fast drop in water level alone

isn't why these places are abandoned,

but it is part of the story.

South of mineral beach in Israel,

this entire area is out of bounds to all but a few experts.

From here on you must follow me exactly

to walk on my footprints, ok.

Because there are a lot of hazards here.

And that's why you must follow me ok?

Around 400 new sink holes appear along the shores

of the dead sea each year.

It's happened to me

to find myself in the bottom of a sink hole

covered by a pile of avalanche above me.

Eli raz is a geologist

and has spent decades

studying the causes of these collapses.

In the variation for the sink holes appearance

the drop in the level of the dead sea,

which was a made man problem,

now beneath there is a subterranean salt layer.

The problem here lies with this layer of salt

and it's a bi-product

of the dead sea's remarkable geology.

This is a rift valley similar to death valley in the us

or the great rift valley in Africa.

It's a place where tectonic plates are pulling apart

and the earth is dropping away, in some cases even below sea level.

This is the lowest place you can stand on earth

and yet under water it goes down another thousand feet.

Gravity then does the rest.

All the water that flows in here

carries with it some minerals and salts

that its picked up as its tricked through the rocks and deserts.

But then the sun beats down on the water,

the water starts to evaporate, the minerals and salts stay behind.

That's the reason the ocean is salty,

things flow into it but they can't flow out,

but this dead sea is ten times as salty as the oceans.

But the sink holes are a relatively new phenomenon

so why is this high salt content and dropping water level

only recently become so dangerous?

As long as the dead sea water was high enough

they penetrated to the area and protected the salt layer.

The problem for the dead sea

is it that it depends on a source of water

and that main source of water is the river Jordan.

All along the way water is being taken out for,

for drinking water, for farming,

farms in Jordan, farms in Israel and the occupied west bank.

The Jordan river is blocked now there are dams on the Jordan river

and other tributaries

and water continuously evaporating

but there is no water coming anymore.

So, now instead of having the water in some kind of balance,

we have more water evaporating every year

than is coming in and the difference is dramatic.

The dead sea is sinking at a rate of almost a metre a year.

As the sea water disappears ground water takes its place,

this has a devastating impact

on the layer of salt under the ground.

When the dead sea level is high

that stops fresh ground water getting to this layer of salt,

but when the levels of the dead sea receded

this fresh water could now get to the salt

and cause it to dissolve

as it dissolved it left huge hollows in the ground

and it was only a matter of time

before the ground above would collapse.

The first sink hole

that I saw appear in 1981.

But since then the rate of sink holes appearance

accelerated very much

there is no other place upon the earth

where this formation of sink holes is so rapid.

They have almost cost Eli his life.

But the real cost has come to the tourist industry.

The most remarkable damage is the damage to tourism.

The dead sea brought here a lot of tourists

and now they are prevented, they cannot access the seashore.

Ironically it is the very salt that causes sink holes to open up

that will also save the dead sea from drying up entirely.

What's interesting here

is the dead sea won't ever disappear completely

because as the level gets lower the salt concentration gets higher

and so the water becomes less likely to evaporate.

But the damage has already been done to people's homes and livelihoods.

Hidden in the city of liverpool is a true engineering mystery.

This is one of the iconic cities of the world, liverpool.

A completely urbanised built up area,

it would be really surprised at what you can find

under your seat.

Just off the centre of liverpool is this facade

that is still standing that is missing

the rest of its building.

This facade is the gateway to an underground maze

where things don't seem to add up.

These are very complex convoluted passages,

it really feels like a labyrinth you know like one of those dreams

that you just keep running down,

there is another corridor and another corridor

and you never get to the end of it.

When you look up and you see these ornate structures,

there's brickwork that has been finely designed,

there's arches,

there is something quite grandiose about these,

even though it seems dark and dingy at first look.

The dirt and rubble lays in contrast

to the elaborate architecture,

but artefacts uncovered here

begin to reveal the tunnels surprising past.

There is a whole collection of trinkets

that have been found down here that date back over a hundred years.

Bits of China, bottles,

all these signs of a life that was once lived.

A subterranean network undisturbed for over a century,

a time capsule on a grand scale.

This is one of the best kept secrets

in britain really,

I actually studied in this town and knew nothing about it

in the late '90s,

it's a secret that was kept for over a hundred years.

By the 1800s,

international trade had put liverpool on the map.

But not everyone here was prospering.

Liverpool is rapidly expanding

and is one of england's largest port cities.

It's very bourgeois, business is booming,

and the population is expanding.

Edgehill was one of the poorest of these areas

but it had at least one resident

that was doing well for himself

and his name was Joseph Williamson.

Joseph Williamson came to liverpool

when he was 11 to make his fortune.

Joseph Williamson had worked his way up the business ladder,

largely to the tobacco trade

and by 1803 he was a very wealthy man.

He saw the poverty and suffering of edgehill

and he decided to do something about it.

Tom stapleton is part of a group

who have been unravelling the history of these tunnels

for over 20 years.

Williamson appears to have

perhaps become a philanthropist by default,

he was always happy to give a man a day's pay

after they had done a day's work

but he would not give handouts,

he was not in the business of hand outs to charity.

So, one of the early theories

about how these tunnels came to be

was that he wanted to give people the chance to work

for that money not a freebie.

And so he paid people hands on labour

to come and make these tunnels.

Stories of Williamson's philanthropy

are legendary.

But some think this was a cover to hide the real purpose

of his underground chambers.

During Williamson's time,

liverpool was a hot bed of Christian sectarianism

and even extremism.

While religious unrest swept liverpool's streets,

Williamson himself a protestant continued digging.

What's strange about these excavations though

is that they are not in some remote location,

the tunnels all lead directly to Williamson's house.

We are now in what we are calling

a sunken back yard at the back of Williamson's house

and through this bay window here we are looking

into a very large kitchen area in the basement

of what was his three storey Georgian house above here.

He lived alone with his wife

so why would you need to have such a...

A big kitchen area just beneath your house

what was the need for that?

It's quite an enormous space really for a kitchen

and it contains this wonderful array of four cooking ranges

which really was I suppose I have to say a complete mystery

and a surprise to us when we uncovered it.

It became a bit of a local legend

that Williamson had

some type of end of days cult going

that he and his followers were seeking

to prepare themselves for armageddon

and the story ran

that all this underground construction

was that so they would have a refuge.

Williamson's secrecy invited speculation.

But rumours of the occult were never proven...

And Joseph Williamson took the secret of his tunnels

to the grave.

Williamson was busy beavering away

with these tunnels until his wife died

and then he started to do less and less and then himself

he died in 1840

and that's when the tunnelling stopped.

And so it was from that point onwards

that the tunnels sort of disappeared into folklore.

For a hundred and fifty years

the tunnels lay forgotten under the streets of liverpool.

But in 1999,

workers on a building site discovered a hole in the ground.

Under this car park,

that area under these two parking bays

14 and 15,

is roughly where this big hole in the ground was.

It was just big enough to drop a ladder through

and a fairly slim man to squeeze his way

through the hole and realise

that he was into something important.

So, when they actually found the tunnels

it was like stumbling across Atlantis.

It opened up a whole underground world

and that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I remember when I arrived here

before any excavation started

I could say there was a pile of rubble

from there to there you could sort of clamber

over the top of it for a few yards here

and then beyond that to the far end

it was literally up to there,

you could look along it

and maybe see the end but you couldn't,

you couldn't get over it.

The team of amateur archaeologists

began removing hundreds of tons of dirt by hand.

After chipping away they finally found the tunnel floor

but that was just the first level they found another,

this was a multi-levelled tunnelling system.

At that time it was absolutely impossible

for anybody to judge just how deep this cellar system

might end up being and it was years and years later

before we finally emptied it out

and realised the full depth of what we had discovered.

As the team dug deeper

the true origin story of these tunnels was becoming clear.

As we lowered the soil level bit by bit

in this chamber it became apparent

for the very first time to us what he was doing,

he was going to vault over here in his brick arches.

And had put two layers of working cellars above

and then four storey buildings on top of that.

They discovered stone buttresses strong enough

to stop the roof from caving in.

But that didn't explain

why the tunnels were dug in the first place.

However the team still hadn't reached the bottom,

its only when they went a bit deeper

that the purpose was finally revealed.

We discovered this floor here

which consists of three large blocks

of stone over there,

the one we are standing on and the one behind.

They are not real rock formations

they have clearly been carved out of the rock.

Beneath edgehill is a material prized

for its utility, sandstone.

It appears that Williamson was extracting the stone

to extend his own stakes,

not only for himself but for the whole community.

We don't know how much of this went on

but we do know for sure that he donated all of the stone

that was needed to build one of the local churches,

that's st Jude's church which was just a few hundred yards

down the road.

The secret of the Williamson's tunnels

appeared to be solved

but some mysteries about this place might never be explained.

One thing that really intrigues me

is this appeared to be a process

that was going on in full swing,

they were obviously working on three blocks of stone

or four blocks of stone all at once and then suddenly stopped

and I find that a very intriguing question,

we would love to know answers.

I'm afraid we never will.

Nearly two centuries after Joseph Williamson's death

the legend of his tunnels still captures the imagination

of liverpudlians

and the search for the truth continues.

We believe that there are other spaces

which are a lot bigger,

there is a great tunnel which we know of

and we hope it still exists and are having great trouble

trying to find it and we haven't been able to find

a way into it yet, but we are determined to find it.

On the southern plains of Wyoming usa

lies a sinister building designed to tame the untameable.

We are really out in the middle of nowhere,

it's a beautiful country the wild west.

But here in the midst of all this natural beauty

we also see an outpost of barbed wire and guard towers.

We are looking at a building that sticks

out of the prairie like a sore thumb.

The walls of this place are built of stone slabs

that were quarried from the local bedrock.

Very strong almost impenetrable.

You can imagine cattle and cowboys

roaming around on these plains,

but this building tells us a whole other story.

How dark that story is,

starts to become clear once you walk inside.

There is a chamber that looks like

some kind of human sized pressure cooker,

and there are all these other strange sorts of contraptions.

One room is particularly creepy,

there is not much left in it,

there's kind of an ominous hook hanging from the ceiling

and a square on the floor

and then a window looking out across the beautiful countryside.

As a soldier in the invasion of Iraq,

I saw a lot of prisons and torture chambers

and this place reminds me a little bit of both,

I would hate to be inside this cell.

So, who was locked up here

and what horror did these walls bear witness to?

In the middle of the 19th century,

the northern frontier of america was a land of opportunity.

But it wasn't for the faint hearted.

When the frontier was open

and the only people that would go out there

were the people who were foolhardy,

brave or trying to escape from something.

The criminals were going out there because there was no law.

It was these people that gave the wild west its name.

They are used to taking the law into their own hands

with quick draws,

lynching's and cash rewards for killings,

but there is change on the horizon.

As the 20th century approached the territories government

hoped to join the union

and the population was growing weary of Wyoming's wild side.

The problem was that you still had your criminal element

and these people didn't want to live

amongst a bunch of lawless criminals.

This is a turning point in history,

we are at a crossroads,

the west was known for being wild for a reason,

but it needed to be tamed.

For their plan to work, something dramatic had to be done,

and this site was at the heart of it all.

The Wyoming state penitentiary.

Tina hill is an expert on the history of the building.

Now, we are in cell block a, it is our original cell block,

all of our cells could be locked and unlocked by the bar

called the Johnson bar,

when the bar is up all the cells are locked,

pull the bar down, all the cells are unlocked.

These cells are 5 by 7.

We would have two to a cell,

we did not have hot water it was very cold in a block.

We are the only state penitentiary in Wyoming so we had everyone,

this is a minimum, medium, Max security penitentiary,

we had people here for forgery,

we had people here for first degree murder.

And mixed in amongst these ranks were some colourful characters.

One of our most infamous inmates was bill Carlo,

he was a train robber,

he robbed the indo pacific railroad four different times,

he wound up escaping from here, got put in a shirt crate,

they put the crate on the train, which is right down the street,

he popped out of the crate, robbed the train and escaped.

Trying to civilise Wyoming's wild element

was never going to be easy, escape attempts were common.

We had a mass escape in 1912,

at the time our penitentiary was surrounded by a wooden stockade,

20 inmates escaped through a hole that they had broken through

on the stockade,

people were out on the streets shooting at anyone

they didn't recognise

because they just assumed they are escaped inmates.

Most of the inmates were soon captured,

but a few managed to flee the town after a violent encounter.

One resident was shot and killed by the inmates,

four inmates escaped, two of them came back deceased,

the other two they never found again.

A stone wall was soon built to replace the old wooden stockade,

but for some it was clear that simply locking up

violent criminals wasn't enough.

So, the prison needed something else

to deal with these cowboys,

and why not turn something from the past into the future.

Torture and execution were about to become

this prisons calling card.

In 1916 the prison expanded they added a death house

where they could house the worst prisoners,

those with death sentences and they could carry out executions.

It was a time in us history when executions were on the rise.

While execution was an accepted punishment,

the method of killing was open to interpretation.

One of the stranger ways of executing somebody

in the American west was the Julian gallows,

it was basically a sort of mouse trap

self-execution platform.

Designed so that the condemned inmate

would start their own execution process,

only a few features of the elaborate system remain.

They would slip a noose around their neck

and step onto a trap door knowing

that they would fall through that door,

and hopefully snap their neck.

By stepping on the platform a chain reaction was started

in the room below.

Using water, weights and pulleys

ultimately would end in the collapse of the support structure

beneath the trap door.

His weight would start a bucket of water underneath

to start draining out,

it would take about a minute to a minute and a half

for the bucket of water to empty out,

the trap door would spring open,

the man would fall through and down he would go.

The Julian gallows that they installed in the prison

was poorly designed,

there wasn't much distance for the prisoners to drop,

more than once prisoners experienced the hell

of not having their neck broken

and slowly strangling at the end of the noose.

In total nine men were killed using this device,

but soon deemed too inhumane,

a unique contraption nearby

shows how the business of execution was being modernised.

Just at the foundations of the prison are being laid down,

eugenics are starting to catch on,

this is the idea that we should select

who is genetically superior and inferior

and eliminate the undesirables to improve the human race.

Unfortunately that dangerous idea coincided

with the development of chemical warfare

in the first world war...

All of this set the context

for the development of the gas chamber.

It was an attempt to be more scientific,

more clinical if anything it was worse than hanging.

Installed in the 1930s,

this gas chamber was meant to provide a more humane system.

The inmates were brought in, strapped down by their chest,

arms and legs underneath the chair was a pen...

A sulphuric acid mixed with water,

when it was time the warden was pull this lever

and a cheesecloth sack of cyanide towels

would drop down into the acid,

hydro cyanic acid gas would then be formed.

In about 30 seconds the man was unconscious,

two and a half to three minutes he was dead.

Use of the gas chamber continued until 1965.

And all those encountering

that fate spent their final days here.

Right now we are in the bull pen for death row,

this is where you would be waiting for your execution.

You are in your cell, 24 hours a day,

if you were behaving,

they would allow you to come out here

to the bull pen to exercise for an hour,

inmates were up here

between three months and a year and a half

waiting for their execution.

Imagine living in that psychological burden

of knowing your death is on the horizon

the exact date

and there is nothing you can do about it.

In 1981 the frontier prison was deemed outdated

and its doors were closed for the final time.

Throughout its life thousands had been incarcerated here

and an unlucky few had paid the ultimate price.

While the prison story ended years ago,

the death penalty here still remains.

As long as Wyoming has been able to decide

whether or not we were going to have capital punishment,

the state of Wyoming has always had capital punishment.

Wyoming is now in the minority.

Death sentences are decided on state by state

and most of the United States have abolished them.

As a result they have fallen 85% over the last 25 years.

We still have so far to go.

Liberty and justice for all its an aspiration it's an ideal,

what's so frightening for me

is that what horrifies us today,

was seen as perfectly acceptable even progressive in the past,

but what progress have we made?

Wouldn't we give anyone

the legal right to take the life of another?

Captioned by ai-media ai-media. TV