The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  CARL BOWLES

  Carl Bowles’s criminal record took up two thick files in the Hot House record room. The paper trail gave a step-by-step account of Bowles’s development into a cold, calculating killer.

  Born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1940, Bowles was only eight years old when he first got into trouble. At the time, a social worker theorized that he was acting out because his parents’ marriage was disintegrating and he wanted attention. His father, according to prison files, was a drunk, a womanizer, and frequently out of work. Bowles’s mother was beaten by her husband. They fought constantly and Bowles had basically raised himself. He had done a poor job. “I was on my own, you know, hanging around the streets.” At age eleven, he was declared a habitual truant; at twelve, he was declared incorrigible by the juvenile court; and at fifteen, Bowles was sent by a Texas judge to the Gatesville State Training School for Boys. A court psychologist who examined him wrote this when he entered the reformatory:

  The source of this boy’s trouble is his deep feelings of rejection by his parents, plus resentment of his unstable homelife. He is very anxious for love and stability. He seems to have developed a hostile identification with his mother, yet is very dependent on her. There is some sexual disturbance in this boy. Homosexuality is quite possible. It is likely it would be covert.

  If Bowles was looking for love and acceptance, he certainly didn’t find it at Gatesville. Like most Texas reformatories at the time, the program was designed to break a boy’s bad habits with brutal punishment and slave labor. Every boy, regardless of his age, worked ten hours in the fields, usually picking cotton. Troublemakers were put in the “bull pen”—a tiny isolation box. Bowles would later recall that he arrived at Gatesville on a Sunday, the only day when the boys didn’t work, and was told to report to a counselor in the school’s recreation room. When he opened the screen door and looked inside, all fifty or so of the boys stopped what they were doing. An older boy twice his size came up to him.

  “Hey, what size shoes do you wear?” the boy asked.

  “Don’t know,” said Bowles.

  “Let me see one of ’em, will ya?” the boy asked politely.

  Bowles sat down on the floor and removed a shoe. The older boy took off one of his own shoes and put on Bowles’s.

  “How ’bout lettin’ me see the other one?”

  “I took off my other shoe and handed it to him,” Bowles remembered, “and he puts it on and ties it and then walks over to this table and every boy in the place starts laughing at me. That’s when I realized I am the butt of the joke.”

  Bowles grabbed a cue stick from a pool table nearby and attacked. The boy who had taken his shoes started to run, but Bowles reached him first and smacked him in the head so hard that the cue stick snapped in two pieces. Still holding the jagged end, Bowles lunged forward at another boy, but before he could stab his target, Bowles was knocked to the floor by a fist.

  He looked up just in time to see another fist smash into his face. It was the adult counselor. For the next seven days, Bowles worked his regular ten-hour shift cutting cotton and then four more hours as punishment. He worked barefoot—just as he had been when the counselor found him—and he didn’t say a word to anyone. At night, he was locked in the sweltering bull pen, which wasn’t big enough for him to lie down in.

  When his punishment ended, Bowles was assigned a housing unit. “As I am walking up the steps, the guy who took my shoes steps out of the door and puts my shoes down and says, ‘Here are your shoes, man. Thanks for not snitching, you know.’ I sat down and put on my shoes and went in.”

  When a new youngster arrived later that week at the school, he too was confronted by a boy who demanded his shoes. Only this time, it was Carl Bowles who was taking advantage of the new kid. “It was my turn to dish it out,” he recalled. “I had earned that right.”

  For nine months, Bowles worked at Gatesville, and during that time he learned his lessons well. He became one of the worst bullies in the school. “The kid who was the toughest did whatever he wanted, got whatever he wanted. He was respected, admired, even by the adults,” Bowles recalled. “If they had a problem, they came to me to help solve it.”

  Bowles was sent back to his parents, but they couldn’t control him. Within four weeks, he had shot another boy during an argument. Luckily, the boy didn’t die, but a judge sentenced Bowles to four years in the federal youth facility at Englewood, Colorado. Bowles was sixteen when he arrived, and this is how the prison psychologist described him:

  I do not see him as a psychopathic personality, but I fear that he has formed some sort of criminal identification …

  The psychologist recommended a treatment program for Bowles that included counseling and schooling, but Bowles would have none of it. He preferred running with the tougher, older inmates. Because he was good with his fists, he soon won grudging respect from his peers. It was at Englewood that prison officials claimed Bowles started to show signs of sexual aggression toward weaker inmates.

  One year after Bowles arrived in Englewood, another psychologist examined him. He wrote that Bowles exhibited a “great deal of childish frustrated rage” at being in prison. The psychologist also added, with surprise and irritation, that Bowles had developed for unclear reasons “a chip on his shoulder” and had decided that “no one can really be trusted.”

  Bowles served two years at Englewood before he was paroled. Without friends, a job, or any skills, he washed dishes in a cheap hotel for two months before he stole a car and headed to Oregon on a “vacation.” Arrested and taken to jail, Bowles feigned illness and then overpowered the jailer when he came to investigate. Captured a few hours later, he was taken to a different jail where he repeated his ploy, this time beating up the jailer and escaping again. Within days he was arrested and sentenced to eight years in the Oregon State Penitentiary. The prison psychologist who examined him this time warned in Bowles’s file that the nineteen-year-old was about to pass the point where he could be rehabilitated.

  He seems to live for the moment, shows no guilt, regrets, or remorse because he simply does not dwell on the past or concern himself with consequences … He has an exaggerated concern with power and physical toughness … This man verbalizes considerable bitterness and resentment concerning his parents and their faults of infidelity, incompatibility and his father’s inebriety …

  For six years, Bowles remained in the state prison. He wasted no time getting into trouble again as soon as he was paroled in the summer of 1965. He teamed up with a pal from the prison who also was on parole, and together they went on a multi-state crime spree. By the time they were caught a week later, Bowles and his partner had robbed a bank, kidnapped the California state comptroller general, his wife, and their small child, stolen several cars, held six other people as hostages, and murdered an Oregon policeman. Bowles wrote a short confession when he was taken to jail. Because he had dropped out of school at age eleven, the note was filled with grammatical and spelling errors. Amazingly, a copy of it was still in his prison file more than twenty years later.

  I felt poeple just realy didn’t give a dam. Well, if they don’t I don’t so to hell with it all. Ill just do as I please but I know that is not right. I know I’ll go right back to the joint, this time for good, besides what difference does it make anyway who cares. I want to believe in people, do right and live happy but how? Why? I just hung it up again … I still feel there is something mentialy wrong with me because I can’t be like other people on the street. I don’t think I am crazy I know right from wrong, good and bad, but I cannot control myself. I am split up between the two—believe and not believing, caring and not giving a damn.

  This time, the prison psychologist who examined Bowles reported that there was little chance he could be reformed. At age twenty-five, Bowles was declared hopeless.

  He appears to have been thoroughly conditioned by his many years of incarceration.… Treatment, as such, may not ever have any effect on this young man who has bee
n a social problem for years and who now must be classified as a major social problem. The only known solution is long-term confinement. This is a drastic technique, but it is the only known way to preserve community safety.

  Because he had been found guilty of the federal crimes of bank robbery and kidnapping, Bowles was initially sent to the prison at McNeil Island near Tacoma, Washington, but he was later transferred to the Oregon State Penitentiary to begin serving a life prison term for murdering the policeman. Incredibly, on May 17, 1974, nine years after his crime spree, Bowles was issued a four-hour “social pass” to visit a girlfriend in a local motel. A social worker drove Bowles to the motel where he met his date. While the social worker sat in the parking lot waiting, Bowles slipped out a bathroom window in the rear of the building.

  The fact that a convicted cop killer had been issued a social pass made front-page headlines and sparked community outrage. Police organized a massive manhunt, and after several days, two FBI agents thought they spotted him walking down a street in Eugene, Oregon; but because he was wearing a beard, they weren’t certain. One of them approached Bowles on foot while the other stayed behind in his car. “He asked me for identification,” Bowles recalled, “so I reached around like I was getting my billfold, but instead I pulled out my gun and started shooting.” The agent reached for his gun too, but he had a hole in the lining of his jacket, and when he pulled the weapon from its holster, it got caught and fell harmlessly to the sidewalk. The agent jumped for cover. “I fired every shot, and you know what? I missed him. It still cracks me up today when I see these guys in movies shoot each other with one shot across a football field. Hell, we were standing five feet from each other and I missed him.” Bowles grabbed the agent’s gun and ran. A few blocks away from the shooting, he broke into a home owned by Earl C. and Viola Hunter, an elderly couple, whom he took hostage. Forcing them into their car, Bowles managed to elude some one hundred police officers who had flooded the neighborhood. Once he was safely out of Eugene, he pulled into a field and ordered the Hunters outside.

  “I told them that I was going to kill them,” Bowles remembered without a glint of emotion, “but it wasn’t anything personal, you know. I wanted them to know that I didn’t have no hard feelings against them and I hoped they didn’t have no hard feelings toward me. Hell, I didn’t even know them. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and so I killed them.” Bowles shot Viola, age 61, first. “I told her to make her peace with God and then I shot her in the head.” Earl, age 63, was next. “He went to pieces so I shot him in the head and then shot both of them in the heart to make certain they were dead.”

  Two days later, Bowles was captured after a wild chase that ended when he was shot in the stomach while trying to ford a river. He was sentenced to two additional life sentences for the Hunter murders. This time, no prison psychologist bothered to evaluate Bowles, but an anonymous prison official did make this notation in his file:

  This man is ruthless, has no conscience, shows no sign of regret or remorse … He should never be released again in society.

  In prison, Bowles had proved to be as uncontrollable as he was on the streets. Over the years he had violated just about every prison rule. At one point, he was arrested by guards for placing an advertisement in the National Enquirer posing as a psychic with “72 years experience.” For three dollars, he offered to tell the future. He also was caught trying to hide a homemade listening device in the room used by the guards so he could overhear when they planned to search his cell. His record included reprimands for possessing drugs, strong-arming, sexual misconduct, gambling, carrying a knife. But Bowles was best known at the Hot House for successfully bribing a guard in 1981. The incident began innocently enough when a guard stopped outside his cell one afternoon and complimented him on a painting that he was doing. Two days later, the artwork was delivered by mail to the guard’s house. Rather than returning the picture and reporting Bowles, the guard kept it. A week later, Bowles offered the guard $100 in return for bringing $400 in cash inside the prison. The money would be delivered to the guard by a friend of Bowles’s outside the prison. Inmates were not permitted to have any cash at that time and the guard knew he could be fired if caught. But when he hesitated, Bowles reminded him that he was already guilty of accepting a bribe—the painting. The guard was soon working as Bowles’s mule, smuggling in money, marijuana, and pills. Other guards became suspicious when they noticed the two men spending so much time together. When the guard reported to work one morning, he was frisked. He was carrying several .22 caliber bullets in his pockets destined for Bowles. He planned to bring in a pistol the next day. Bowles was sent to Marion as punishment. The guard was allowed to resign.

  “Carl Bowles doesn’t give a damn about anything or anybody but himself,” said Eddie Geouge, the veteran cellhouse manager who had agreed to let Little move in with Bowles. “He’s a real cold-blooded piece of work.”

  Chapter 8

  ROBERT MATTHEWS

  Warden Robert Matthews had only been at work in his new office for a few hours when there was a knock at the door. He waved in Richard Smith, Leavenworth’s associate warden for custody, the de facto second-in-command at the Hot House.

  “We’ve gotten a death threat against you,” said Smith. An inmate informant, who had provided reliable tips in the past, claimed that he had overheard members of the Aryan Brotherhood plotting to kill the “new nigger warden.” According to the snitch, a black guard in the California state prison system had shot and killed an AB member. Matthews was to be murdered in retaliation.

  “We don’t know how real the threat is,” Smith explained. “It probably is just talk, but we can’t be certain.” Both men knew there were plenty of inmates at Leavenworth capable of carrying out such a threat.

  Matthews didn’t react, Smith said later. “If it was intimidating to him, it never did show.”

  Killing a warden was something that inmates simply didn’t do. In the entire history of the bureau, Matthews had never heard of a warden being murdered. The most sensational attack by inmates on a warden had taken place fifty-six years ago and it had happened at the Hot House. On December 11, 1931, seven inmates appeared at the front gate armed with several revolvers which they had smuggled into the prison.

  “Open it or we’ll kill you!” one of the inmates yelled at a guard named Oscar Dempsey, according to newspaper accounts. At the time, the front gate was opened and closed by a single guard stationed outside.

  “Go ahead and shoot!” Dempsey was quoted as saying. “I’m an old man, so it don’t matter. I’m not opening the gate for you!”

  Frustrated, the inmates had grabbed Warden Thomas B. White who happened to be inside the compound. When the guard saw White, he opened the gate and the convicts commandeered a car and fled, still holding White as hostage. The police chased them into a farmhouse a few hours later, and in the gun battle that followed, three convicts were killed. The others eventually surrendered but not before shooting the warden. White recovered and eventually returned to his post, but after that incident the bureau adopted a regulation for all of its prisons that ordered guards never to open a gate for anyone holding a hostage, regardless of who it was.

  Matthews didn’t believe the AB death threat was legitimate. Later, he said that it was probably just inmates bragging among themselves. But he knew that his reaction to the rumor was important. There are no secrets in a prison, and convicts and guards would be watching to see his response.

  “No warden can sit around fretting and saying, ‘Jesus Christ, they might kill me today! I’d better not make any convicts angry!’ ” Matthews explained. “You’ve got to show everyone that you aren’t afraid. If I ever get to the point where I am afraid to walk inside the institution, then I’d better resign.”

  Under previous director Norman Carlson, the bureau had adopted a practice in all its prisons that was called “standing mainline.” Each day during the noon meal, all the prison’s senior off
icials stood in the dining hall while inmates ate. The main reason for doing this was to provide inmates with an opportunity to talk to staff members without being accused of being a snitch. In the old days, convicts always went in pairs to speak to prison officials. This enabled them to vouch for each other when they returned to the cellhouse, thus assuring other inmates that neither had snitched. Now because convicts could walk up to a prison official in the dining hall and talk in full sight of everyone, there was no need for a witness. If other inmates thought someone was snitching, they could walk up beside him and overhear what he was saying to the staff.

  There was also a more subtle but equally important reason for standing mainline. Having the top officials stand in front of the inmates at mealtime was a reminder that despite the fact that the staff was vastly outnumbered and completely unarmed, they were in charge. “Image is a thousand times more important in a prison than on the street,” explained psychologist Dr. Thomas White. “The fact that the top leaders of this institution are standing before them at mealtime sends an important psychological message.”

  Some wardens hated standing mainline; they felt it encouraged sniveling over inconsequential matters. But Matthews, with his ever-present notepad, was a mainline junkie.

  The dining hall began serving lunch shortly after 10 A.M. Matthews hurried there seconds before the first convicts were scheduled to arrive.

  Most officials stood along a wall away from the doors, out of the way of the serving line where each inmate collected a tray, plate, and plastic eating utensils before proceeding down a food line. Matthews positioned himself directly in front of the tray area. It was impossible for a convict to eat lunch without first walking past the new warden. There were no guards near him. No one was protecting him. With his arms folded across his chest, rocking back and forth on his heels, Matthews waited.