The Last Supper: Ricky Lee Sanderson
Sue Ellen Holliman went missing from her home on March 14, 1985. A month later her body was found by a farmer, interred in a shallow grave, half naked, stabbed three times in the chest.
At the time when Ricky Lee Sanderson confessed to Holliman’s murder he was already serving a life sentence plus 110 years for rape and murder. (Sanderson’s confession ended up freeing another man, Elwood Jones, who had previously been coerced by aggressive police officers into signing a false confession for Holliman’s murder.)
On death row Sanderson found God and became devoutly religious; he initially opted to forgo his last meal as a kind of protest against abortion. “Those babies never got a first meal, that’s why I didn’t take the last, in their memory.” Sanderson did not pursue any appeals of his conviction; he believed that years of legal battles would put Holliman’s family through undue suffering. Sanderson chose to die in the gas chamber, as opposed to by lethal injection, because he believed that he would suffer more during his execution. This choice was also, apparently, made out of deference to Holliman’s father, Hugh, who was expected to witness the execution.
Notwithstanding his protest against abortion, Sanderson ordered a honey bun from the prison commissary not long before being put to death.
Symbolism and Creative Process
Ricky Lee Sanderson’s last supper is an homage to an undated dessert still life by Georg Flegel. Flegel’s composition depicts a conflict between good and evil, personified by a parrot and mouse, respectively. In his painting the “heavenly” bird guards over a bowl of sweets and confectionary that might represent all that is good in the human spirit, while the foregrounded mouse sneaks into the scene, nibbling at the sweets and opening a walnut. (Walnuts were usually considered symbols of Christ — the hard wooden shell represents the cross while the flesh of the nut references Jesus’ divinity.) The biblical themes in Flegel’s work are reinforced by the grapes and goblet of white wine on the right hand side of the image.
In my own composition the wine is replaced with gore — a reference to the last supper of Jesus and to the thematic connection between wine and blood in Christianity. A single dead rose has been placed at the bottom the wine goblet, in memory of Sue Ellen Holliman. Finally, the baby mice leaning against the honey bun are a reference Sanderson’s final act of protest against abortion.
Flegel’s composition was based around the idea of a conflict between good (the parrot) and evil (the rat). In my own work I kept only the rat; it seems this is all that’s needed to represent the life and death of Ricky Lee Sanderson. Reporting from the night of Sanderson’s execution described a crowd of death penalty supporters gathered outside the prison walls to cheer and, finally, breaking into song at the moment of Sanderson’s death. “Nah-nah-nah-nah, nah-nah-nah-nah, hey-hey-hey, goodbye.” Asked about the rowdy crowd of supporters Diane Kelly, Holliman’s best friend, expressed disgust. “I don’t see how people can get joy out of this,” she said. “There’s nothing happy about it.”
An Alternate Version
As a part of my creative process I generally produce a lot of different variations for each Last Supper that I shoot. Generally these alternate version are not shared in public; however, here I thought it might be interesting to give the viewer a sense of how the sausage is made.
The above version of Sanderson’s last retains nearly all the same visual motifs and metaphorical meaning, but arranges these elements in a slightly different way. Here I had in mind the idea that the mouse has already spoiled the dessert, whereas in the previous version the mouse is merely leaning towards the bun — the corruption of evil is more of a threat and less of a done deed in that interpretation. The colour scheme is also somewhat more muted and desaturated in this version, which I think makes it a little less visually engaging.