The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  The jury found Silverstein guilty and on March 3, 1980, he was sentenced to life in prison and transferred to the penitentiary at Marion.

  “I was innocent,” Silverstein later recalled. “I was being framed by these rats who had just flushed my life down the toilet. I knew I was going to Marion with a life sentence, and I had a real attitude problem because I was pissed. I figured I didn’t have much to lose.”

  Five months later, Edward Hevle and Charles McEvoy both pleaded guilty to reduced charges. Once they were no longer under any legal jeopardy, they signed affidavits that cleared Silverstein of the Atwell killing. The murderer, they claimed, was none other than the prosecution’s main witness, James Schell. Federal prosecutors were furious, and accused the two men of lying in revenge for Schell’s testimony against their friend. But Schell himself signed a detailed confession that cleared Silverstein.

  Phillips appealed Silverstein’s conviction and, after studying the case, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit said it was appalled by the quagmire of conflicting testimony and recanted statements. “We do not view this as a case in which the evidence overwhelmingly points to the guilt of the defendant,” the judges wrote. Schell’s testimony was hearsay and should never have been admitted as evidence. Super Cop’s testimony also should have been disregarded because it was “difficult to believe” and “ambiguous at best.” The judges ordered federal prosecutors to either dismiss the murder charge against Silverstein or conduct a new trial.

  Phillips was elated. He genuinely believed his client was innocent. But the appellate court’s ruling had come too late for Silverstein. By the time the court ruled in his favor, Thomas Silverstein had already been convicted of two other murders at Marion. Phillips was told that his client had been given a new nickname in prison. Everyone called him “Terrible Tom.”

  Chapter 15

  THE CUBANS

  Stories about guards beating Cuban prisoners began to surface about one month after the Cubans arrived at Leavenworth. Lieutenant Torres Germany, who was responsible for investigating alleged staff brutality in the prison, decided to snoop around. The guards in C and D cellhouses quickly closed both their ranks and their lips. “We were pissed, really pissed,” a guard recalled. “All of us had been pulling double shifts, working our butts off, and now Germany was looking over our shoulders.” Another guard added, “You got to understand Cubans were throwing piss and shit on us. They were fucking animals. There wasn’t any staff brutality. Sometimes a Cuban would give us a shot, a legitimate shot at him—for example, he would resist or he’d take a swing at an officer—and when that happened, you’re damn right that Cuban got smacked around, but it was good for them and good for us. You got to understand these fucking Cubans only understand violence. Nobody was beating the shit out of them, but a guy might pull a Cuban’s cuffs up between his shoulder blades when he was being taken somewhere just to give him a message: ‘Hey, you fuck with us, we’ll fuck with you!’

  “Someone like Germany didn’t understand that,” the other guard continued, “but Germany wasn’t in there every day. Lieutenant Shoats knew what was going on. He knew that what we were doing wasn’t staff brutality. It was staff survival.”

  The relationship between Germany and Shoats turned icy as Germany continued to probe. Most days they avoided each other. By the end of February 1988, Germany was able to document some minor incidents. He knew that guards in one cellhouse had written “Hang the Cubans” on a wall. Someone had made hangman’s nooses from string and left them dangling in front of several cells. The nooses were supposed to scare the Cubans by reminding them that guards could hang a prisoner in his cell and later claim he had committed suicide. But other than those two incidents, Germany hadn’t really learned a thing.

  On March 6, 1988, Germany and Shoats both happened to be working the day shift, and by chance met at the coffeepot in the lieutenant’s office. Since it was a slow Sunday afternoon, they sat down together.

  “Phil, I know you believe in the Holy Bible. Do you believe there is a heaven?” Germany asked at one point.

  Shoats laughed. “I’m going to be one pissed-off motherfucker if there’s not.”

  The next time that Germany thought about Shoats was when he heard that Shoats had been murdered.

  Elke Shoats was cooking hamburgers at Homer’s, a local Leavenworth drive-in, when a prison guard called and asked her to come home immediately. It was just before 7 P.M. on March 7, a Monday, and as she hurried home, she figured something had happened to one of her two sons, who were ages fifteen and fourteen. Guards were clustered outside the brick house that the Shoatses rented from the bureau only a few hundred feet from the prison walls and refused to let her go inside. She was taken to a neighbor’s.

  “Are my sons okay?” she immediately asked when Warden Matthews came to get her.

  Matthews nodded. Both boys were fine, he said, but her husband was dead.

  Shoats’s body had been found lying on the family room floor. He had been shot twice with a .12 gauge shotgun, once in the head.

  Lieutenant Shoats was buried four days later at Belden Funeral Chapel in Leavenworth. Warden Matthews helped plan the funeral. The pallbearers included Torres Germany, Steven Myhand, Stephen Hobart, Edward Pierce, William Kindig, Monty Watkins, Billy Thomas, and William Blount, all Hot House lieutenants. A prison chaplain gave the eulogy. Everyone agreed afterward that the funeral had been a fitting tribute to a man whose life had revolved around the bureau. It wasn’t until later that night at Benny’s that guards began asking the one question on everyone’s mind: What had Shoats done that would cause his own teenage sons to kill him?

  Michael Harris, an assistant federal public defender, was filing papers at the courthouse in Topeka on March 8, 1988, when he was asked to represent two juveniles who had been arrested for shooting their father. “A twelve-gauge shotgun is a rather drastic way to deal with a problem,” Harris said later, “but after talking to the boys, I realized this was a violent home, a very violent home.”

  Harris had represented victims of domestic violence before. This is how he later reconstructed the shooting. Shoats started arguing with his fifteen-year-old son and during a moment of rage slugged the boy in the chin, knocking him unconscious. Then Shoats turned toward his fourteen-year-old and reportedly snapped, “You’re next!” The boy grabbed a double-barreled shotgun and fired both chambers at his father.

  Harris immediately sent an investigator to Leaven-worth to conduct interviews and take photographs of the murder scene, but the day after the shooting, the investigator called with disturbing news. “When he got to the Shoats house,” Harris said, “the family’s belongings had been moved out, the place had been scrubbed clean—even the bloodstains in the carpet had been cut out and the carpet repaired—all within forty-eight hours of the death. My suspicion was that the bureau didn’t want Shoats’s past to come out, and for a very good reason.”

  There was more at stake than embarrassment, Harris believed. “Every prison case that I’ve ever done usually comes down to who you believe: the guard or the inmate. When there is a fight, the guard says the inmate started it and the inmate says the guard started it. Those cases are always resolved in favor of the guards. In every one of those cases we try to get access to the guard’s personnel file to see if he has gotten into trouble before, and the government always resists this to the maximum. The bureau doesn’t want defense lawyers mucking around inside a guard’s personnel file, and I think everyone knew that in a homicide case we were going to get inside Shoats’s file. The bureau didn’t want to set a precedent and it sure didn’t want us peeking into Shoats’s file.”

  Within a week, Harris had obtained copies of his juvenile clients’ medical and school records. “They were replete with suspicions expressed by school personnel through the years,” Harris said. “There were reports of the kids showing up at school with unexplained bruises, black eyes, and other injuries, yet no one did anything
about it because Shoats always lived on a bureau reservation. No one wanted to interfere.”

  Harris got a call from the U.S. attorney’s office a short time later. The complaint against the boys was dropped without explanation. “Someone had figured out what was going on in the Shoats house and they didn’t want the case coming to light,” said Harris. “It’s only my suspicion, but I believe the bureau just made a decision early on that this case was more of a problem than it was worth.” Both boys were released to their mother.

  After her husband’s funeral, Elke Shoats moved away from Leavenworth. “I was worried about my fourteen-year-old, how he’d take it. But he said he had a dream about his daddy and his daddy told him that it wasn’t his fault and that he shouldn’t feel bad about shooting him,” said Mrs. Shoats, pausing long enough to wipe her eyes. “He said his daddy told him that he is very happy where he is now, very happy, and that helped.”

  When Elke and Phillip Shoats first met at a party in Wiesbaden, West Germany, back in August 1972, she was a single German mother raising three small children, two boys and a girl. He was a brash, street-smart U.S. serviceman stationed at the local base. “Phillip really could talk,” she said. “He had me laughing and feeling good. He could have been a lawyer—the kind of lawyer you hired if you stole something—because he could have gone to court and gotten you off.” Five months after they met, Phillip and Elke married. On their wedding night, Shoats said he didn’t believe a husband and wife should keep secrets from each other, but there was an incident in his past that he had never told anyone, and even though he loved her, he couldn’t yet bring himself to reveal it.

  “Why not, Phil?” she asked.

  “I just can’t tell anyone, baby,” he replied. “Maybe on our tenth anniversary, I’ll tell you.”

  Elke Shoats quickly forgot about the secret, she said. “Phil was super sweet and warm. He was a very loving and a gentle man, particularly with my daughter. He was tender around her and he was good with my two boys. I really didn’t care what this secret was.” Within a year, Elke gave birth to a son.

  When Phillip Shoats was discharged in 1975, the family moved to his hometown of Kansas City and he scanned the classified advertisements for work. Leavenworth was hiring and Shoats signed on. “He didn’t like it at first, but we needed the money and Phil thought he could move up fast.” For five years, Shoats worked at the Hot House and it was during that time that he changed, Elke Shoats later recalled. “He got harder, became distant. Whenever the kids did something wrong, he got real angry, I mean real, real angry. I’d say, ‘Phil, kids will be kids. They’re going to make mistakes.’ He’d say, ‘Not mine. They ain’t never ending up in a place like Leavenworth.’ ”

  If Shoats gave an order, he expected the children to jump. If Elke interfered, he accused her of being “weak.” It was the same lingo, she noticed, that he used to describe guards who gave in to convicts. “I found out later that he was beating the kids when I was at work.”

  When Shoats was promoted to a medium-security prison in Ray Brook, New York, Elke hoped things would improve. Her husband was no longer working in such a hostile prison. But the Shoatses’ home life continued to deteriorate. “One day Phil was playing cards with the kids, and he would get mad when he lost, so he was cheating. Imagine, cheating your own kids, but he told me that they wouldn’t respect him if he lost. It was the same sort of stuff I heard when he and his buddies from the prison got together. Everyone had to respect you in prison. You couldn’t let anyone beat you at anything.”

  When Shoats was promoted to the rank of lieutenant at the prison in La Tuna, Texas, a few miles north of El Paso, Elke Shoats again hoped for the best. His new assignment was at a level-two prison, a lower ranking than Ray Brook and much lower than the Hot House. Elke’s oldest son had recently joined the military, leaving only three children at home to feed and clothe. “It got worse, not better,” Elke said. “The prison just wouldn’t leave him alone. The phone was always ringing and he was always having to choose between it and us.

  “One night Phil accused me of having boyfriends, and I didn’t have any boyfriends. The next night he apologized. The next morning, he’d accuse me again.”

  The turmoil inside the home became violent when Shoats found his stepdaughter kissing an older boy while both were in a parked car. Elke tried to intervene and Shoats slapped her as well as his stepdaughter. The next day Elke took the children and moved to a motel. Shoats begged them to return. She refused. Several days later, she received a long letter from her husband. In it, he revealed to her the secret that he had mentioned on their wedding night. After reading the letter, Elke Shoats moved back in with her husband. That is when they decided to get a fresh start by returning to Leavenworth.

  “Phil promised to change, and he didn’t hit the kids at first, but when they put him in charge of the Cubans, it was too much pressure,” Elke Shoats said. “He couldn’t keep all that anger bottled up inside at work and at home. He had to let it out and he took it out on us.”

  Shoats was having an especially tough time with his fifteen-year-old stepson. At Christmas, Shoats bought his stepdaughter an expensive stereo record player and gave his fourteen-year-old son a new bicycle. But Shoats gave his stepson one pair of white socks. That was all.

  In January 1988, Elke Shoats won $500 playing bingo and sent her husband on a weekend trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, by himself, just to get him away from the Cuban units. “He had a blast, and when he arrived home, it was like I saw the old Phil, but then the phone rang and it was the prison and he left, and when he came back, he had changed back into that other person.”

  After the funeral, Elke Shoats called her children into her bedroom and read them the letter that her husband had sent her in La Tuna. She shared his secret. Now that he was dead, she said, he couldn’t be embarrassed by what it revealed.

  “When Phil was six years old he was raped by a boy named Willie, he’s dead now, but he raped Phil five or six times until Phil threatened to tell,” said Elke Shoats, who still has the letter. Shoats wrote that he had hated Willie and had felt guilty because he had never taken revenge by killing him. “It is difficult for me to understand, but the fact he was raped and working in prison did something to him. I don’t know what, but it made him feel like he had to do something to make sure that bad people like Willie stayed locked up,” Elke Shoats said. “I think the hate and anger just swallowed him up.”

  Chapter 16

  THE LIEUTENANTS OFFICE

  Associate Warden Smith was leaving the lieutenant’s office when an alarm sounded in C cellhouse. Racing down center hallway, Smith hurried through the steel doors into the Cuban cellblock, where flames and thick smoke were pouring from cell 124.

  John Streeter, the guard on duty, was dragging an unconscious Cuban prisoner from the cell. Another guard went inside with a fire extinguisher. Hundreds of arms thrust out between the bars as Cuban prisoners in the other cells tried to see down the tier, using the crystals on their wristwatches as mirrors.

  Streeter used his fingers to clear the prisoner’s mouth, then began pushing on his chest. A physician’s assistant hurried into the cellblock and took over. He snapped an oxygen mask over the Cuban’s face and turned on the nozzle of a portable green oxygen tank. The man gagged, his entire body trembled, his head swung from side to side.

  The Cuban was dressed in badly wrinkled, filthy khaki trousers and a worn pair of blue nylon socks. His kinky hair was dirty. His face was unshaven. His chest was a canvas of tattoos. A haloed Madonna rose from his flabby belly, a red-tongued serpent wrapped around a naked woman with huge breasts and yellow hair decorated one arm, a dagger stabbed into a human skull adorned the other. The Cuban looked spent, as if his life had been sucked out from inside him, leaving only a limp torso behind.

  As the oxygen slowly took effect, he began to moan through the mask. More than a dozen guards had answered the alarm. Now they began to disperse. The medic said, “I got a pretty strong pulse. H
e’s going to make it.”

  “What happened?” asked Smith.

  “He’s a porcelain termite,” said Lieutenant Myhand, who was in charge. “He’s destroyed the sinks and toilets in two cells since he’s been here, but this is the first time he’s started his cell on fire.”

  Myhand explained that the Cuban had placed his mattress against the front bars of his cell and put a match to the bedsheets. Each cell has a vent at the back that pulls air through from the tier. When the Cuban set fire to the sheets the current fed the flames, causing them to erupt like needles from a dried Christmas tree.

  Streeter lifted the prisoner at the waist and slipped a thin steel chain around him. He snapped on handcuffs and connected them to the chain, making it impossible for the Cuban to raise his hands more than five inches from his stomach. Then the guards lifted him onto a wire gurney so he could be transported to the prison hospital. Smith and Myhand followed.

  “What’s his story?” Smith asked.

  “He’s in love,” Myhand replied. “He and his cellmate are homosexuals and had a fight, so we moved the cellmate. Now he wants him back.”

  In an examining room, a prison doctor flashed a tiny light in the inmate’s pupils, removed one of his socks, and began tapping his foot. Even the right ankle had a tattoo. The Cuban yelled something in Spanish.

  “He says he will kill himself unless you move his friend back into his cell,” said one of the guards, a Hispanic.

  There was another yell.

  “He says he hates all guards. He says he will kill a guard if you don’t move his friend back.”

  More yells.

  “He says he started the fire and will keep starting fires until we move his friend back.”

  “Tell him we are going to take an X ray,” the doctor said. “Tell him not to move.”