The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  There were other denominations at the Hot House besides the Moors, the Muslims, and the Protestants inside the Chapel. A Roman Catholic mass had been held Saturday night. There were a handful of Jews, Rastafarians, and Native Americans at Leavenworth too. Two chaplains, one a Protestant, the other a Muslim, were in charge of religious programs, but both had only been there a few months and hadn’t settled in yet.

  While attendance on Sunday was usually small, there was a group of about ten men who met regularly for Bible school in the chapel’s back room. They addressed each other as “Brother” and spent an hour studying scripture under the tutelage of a Native American inmate from the Black Hills of South Dakota who had converted to Christianity. There was one black, another Native American, and six or seven white inmates in the group. These Christians were conspicuous because they were the only men of different races in Leavenworth who ate their meals together, always first bowing their heads in prayer.

  Other inmates always segregated themselves in the huge dining room. Blacks ate at the tables along the south wall, dividing themselves according to whether they came from Washington, D.C., California, New York, or somewhere else. The Aryan Brotherhood and various neo-Nazi groups sat along the west wall, as far away as possible from the front doors, located on the east side of the dining room, where prison officials stood mainline. The north half of the room was for other whites and five tables in the far northeastern corner were for the prison’s outcasts. This is where the dozen or so Native Americans at Leavenworth sat, along with the blatant homosexuals, inmates who were mentally disturbed, and the Christian Brothers. No one paid much attention to the Christians at the Hot House and it was rare that one of them got into trouble. “I think our fellow prisoners leave us alone because we mind our own business,” said one. “Most men get into trouble because they smoke dope, get drunk, chase whores, or gamble. It’s like in the outside world. If you hang out in church, you’re a lot less likely to get mugged than if you are getting stoned at three A.M. in a biker bar in the red-light district.” Then, he offered another comment. “Just because you are a Christian doesn’t mean you aren’t going to defend yourself or stick up for someone. There is lots of bloodshed in the Bible. Of course that is something most of us try to avoid.”

  The parole board used to look favorably on inmates who had “found the Lord,” Lieutenant Sandels explained, particularly at the time the bureau was following the medical-model rehabilitation program. But that has now changed, and the board doesn’t give religious commitment as much weight. As soon as the board modified the way it evaluated inmates, attendance at religious services plummeted, as did enrollments in the educational and vocational classes and therapy groups at the prison.

  Less than one hundred men were enrolled in educational and vocational classes now. Only about twenty attended therapy sessions regularly.

  “It’s hard not to get discouraged in here,” said a teacher who had been at the Hot House for two years. “Occasionally you will find someone whom you think you can help and you will try to get close to them, change their life for the better, and when that happens, the other inmates will put pressure on that person to quit coming. You see, most of these men hate correctional officers, and any inmates who get too close to staff members are going to feel the same sort of pressure that we get from guards when we get too close to an inmate. The guards don’t trust us if we get too close to inmates. The inmates don’t trust inmates who are too friendly with us. It’s really difficult to try to help someone under circumstances like this. How can you change a guy without getting personal? Most guys come in here idealistic like me, but after a while, you just show up for a check and that’s not good.”

  Professional criminals such as Carl Bowles, Norman Bucklew, and Dallas Scott saw no use to the prison’s programs. Those who participated in rap sessions or attended church were considered naive and weak. “They’re looking for a crutch,” said Bucklew.

  The guards proved as cynical as hardened criminals. “You hope the guy is on the level, but some are just looking for a way to impress the parole board,” Sandels explained as he watched the Sunday morning service. “Once they hit the streets, they revert.”

  By this time, the lead singer had finished and the band was playing its closing hymn. The band’s leader, an evangelical preacher, was asking the congregation to pray with him. About half the heads in the room bowed.

  “Please, sweet Jesus, touch these men, heal these men, let your mercy and forgiveness flow through them.” And then he asked, “Who will come forward and dedicate their life to Jesus? Who will come forward?”

  No one in the congregation stirred, even though the preacher continued to plead as the band played. Almost desperate now, he asked, “Who will stand for Jesus? Come, brothers, who will stand up with Jesus today?”

  One man stood, followed by another and another, until a total of four were standing.

  “Who wants Jesus to touch them, heal them, who wants Jesus to be with them? Raise your hands, brothers, raise your hands!”

  The four men who were standing raised their hands, as did two men sitting down.

  “Praise the Lord!” said the preacher in triumph. “Now who will come forward?” he repeated. “Who will step up here to the front and receive forgiveness? Who will come forward and dedicate his life to Jesus?”

  No one moved, and after a few more minutes of trying, the minister ended the service. Still, he had gotten four men to stand up and two others to raise their hands. He seemed happy as he greeted each inmate as he left the service. “God works in mysterious ways,” he said. “I know in my heart that some men’s lives were touched today.”

  Chapter 23

  WILLIAM POST

  The Catman had a secret. While the guards and Norman Bucklew fussed about Brittany Monet, William Post had quietly been having an affair with a part-time employee at the Hot House. Now she was getting ready to quit her job and move from Leavenworth, and Post had a favor to ask. He wanted his clandestine lover to bring him a gun.

  Post had seduced her nearly two months earlier. They had met when he gave her one of his kittens. The Catman was always looking for good homes for them, and when he heard that there was a prison employee who didn’t have a pet, he went directly to her office with the most adorable kitten of the litter. Neither the guards nor the woman’s coworkers were suspicious when he did this. Nor did anyone become alarmed when Post started stopping by her desk regularly to ask how the kitten was doing. It was during these conversations that Post and the woman developed a friendship that led to something more.

  Later, when he recalled the romance, Post said he had felt confident that the woman would bring him a gun on her last day at work. By that time, they had talked about it several times and Post had assured her that he didn’t want the pistol in order to hurt anyone. He intended to turn the gun over to the lieutenant’s office and claim he found it hidden in the prison yard. The parole board had rejected his appeal because, in the words of its letter, his institutional achievements were not “deemed sufficient to warrant a more lenient decision.” But if the board heard that he had turned in a handgun, Post figured it would have no choice but to grant him an early release. At least, that is what he told the woman. She promised to consider his request but acknowledged she was afraid; if caught, she could be sent to prison. It was her choice, he assured her. He would simply wait until her last day at work to learn whether or not she loved him enough to bring him a gun.

  Post had always had a way with women. The employee was not the first one he had seduced while in prison. But of all the women he had known, only Glenda Thomas had been, as he later put it, “my perfect criminal soulmate.”

  Glenda Thomas was nineteen when she first met Post in Glendale, California, in early 1972. She had a slender figure, a sad face, and a heavy heroin habit. Post, then twenty-six, had just been paroled from San Quentin and was also using drugs. A mutual friend had introduced them, and one day when Post stopped by Thomas’s
apartment, he found her naked in bed with three men who had given her amphetamines in return for sex. Post pulled a gun and ordered them to leave. Later, when Thomas asked Post why he had kicked them out, he said, “I think there is more to you than being a doped-up whore.”

  “She was like a wounded animal,” Post said of her later. “Her mother had been an alcoholic hooker who used to bring her tricks home and then pass out. Some of the johns had crawled into bed with Glenda. Can you imagine—she was only eight years old. No one had ever given her a break. I thought maybe she’d be different if anyone just let up a little bit.”

  Post began stopping by to check on Thomas and one afternoon he found her unconscious from a drug overdose. He forced her to walk the floor, made her drink coffee, put her under a cold shower. “She wanted to die,” he recalled. When she recovered, he took her to his apartment.

  “You eat here, you sleep here, but you don’t fuck no one here,” he explained to her, “and you don’t have to fuck for your rent. You are just here. There’s the bathroom, there’s the kitchen, there’s the food, rent is free, just kick back and take a break for a while.”

  Post had been supporting himself by robbing banks, and he and another ex-convict, Robert Butler, left the apartment a few hours later to pull a robbery. Before they reached their target, the car developed mechanical trouble, forcing them to turn back to Post’s apartment. Glenda was gone. She had left behind a suicide note written in mascara. Post hurried to her apartment and found her unconscious and lying in her own vomit, a bag of amphetamines nearby. A neighbor called an ambulance while Post gave Glenda mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Later, at the hospital, doctors told Post that he had saved her life.

  Post returned to his apartment and found Butler waiting, drunk and angry. Butler suggested that they rob an all-night market a few blocks away. “You’re nuts,” said Post. “We’d be lucky to get twenty bucks from that place.” He was wrong. They got sixty-five dollars. They also were seen by a customer as they ran from the store. He followed them and took down the license number of their car. Within minutes, a Glendale police car was giving chase. Post pulled his still crippled car to the curb and Butler flung open the passenger door and ran. “I had planned on running,” recalled Post, “but as I opened the door I thought, ‘You coward. You have been people, waving a pistol in their faces, taking their money, and the first time a guy with a gun comes at you, you want to run and surrender. What kind of punk are you?’ That’s why I decided to shoot it out.”

  Post emptied the clip in his .45 automatic, shattering the police car’s windshield and hitting the front tire, spotlight, radiator and grille. Racing into a nearby apartment building, he dashed up a stairwell and paused to reload. Just then a tenant opened the door to her apartment to see what was happening. Post pushed his way inside, waving the handgun in her face. For the next eight hours, he hid in the apartment. He kept the woman and her husband, ironically an off-duty policeman, as hostages while police searched the area. By morning, Post felt it was safe for him to escape. He tied up the couple, stole their car, and fled. “I decided not to kill them, because they had done everything I asked.”

  Post drove to Detroit, Michigan, where he and another ex-convict, Gary Tanksley, began robbing banks. Several weeks later, Post telephoned Glenda.

  “I want to be with you,” she said, so he arranged to meet her in Las Vegas, Nevada, where they celebrated their reunion by spending and gambling away $12,000 that Post had gotten in his last bank heist.

  In need of cash, they drove to Oregon intending to rob a bank. They stopped at a roadside cafe and Post robbed the cashier of $900, but as he bolted outside, the cafe’s owner grabbed a shotgun and went after him. Post jumped into the backseat of his car and Glenda hit the accelerator just as the owner fired his first blast. It shattered the rear window. “I’m shaking real bad ’cause there is glass everywhere and this nut is pumping rounds at us, but Glenda is just as serene and as happy as could be.”

  Post and Glenda returned to Las Vegas and found an easier way to get money.

  “Glenda was incredibly sexy, so we decided she would hang out in this hotel bar and when some john hit on her, she would take him upstairs where I would be waiting.” At first Post jumped out of the hotel bathroom and robbed the men, who were so embarrassed many of them never reported the robberies. Later, Post gave Thomas a gun and she robbed the johns herself. “We didn’t even bother renting a room because Glenda was jamming them right on the elevator. I’d be waiting in a hallway and the elevator door would open and out would fly some guy with a knot on his head. She began really getting off on the power. She started making them drop their pants and bend over and grab their ankles while she got away. She’d stick the gun up in their face and threaten to kill them.”

  Post said he noticed a change in her. “All Glenda’s life, she’d been fucked over by men. She was nothing but a cunt, the slut, a worthless piece of flesh, but now she had a gun and these fat bastards had to admit that this little girl was making them bend over, with their butts naked. She was getting off on the power, so much so that we talked about her killing someone just to see what it was like. We talked about forcing some guy into the car and taking him out to the desert somewhere and having her shoot him just for the experience of it, and I think she could have done it. She was starting to get a thirst for the kill.

  “She realized when you have that kind of power you are a shark, and when a shark comes out, all the little minnows put their heads down and hide.”

  Post had never considered Thomas his equal, nor did he think any woman was. “Prisons ruin your relationships with women because all of your close associates are males,” he explained. “Women are dirty-legs, cunts, weaklings. Part of it has to do with guys who get fucked in prison. Everyone calls them ‘girls’ or ‘punks’ and that carries over into the outside world. Anyone without a dick is weak, and you might fuck weak people but you don’t really respect them. But Glenda was becoming different. It wasn’t just the sex between us. It was the mutual thrill of the kill. I remember the first time she jammed a guy. I was hiding in the closet, and after we got the money we went to another room in the hotel and we ripped each other’s clothes off and went after each other like fucking animals because of the incredible power that we had over someone else. We had fucking robbed this guy and scared him shitless and that was an unbelievable high.”

  For six months, Post and Thomas worked Las Vegas as a modern Bonnie and Clyde. But Post got worried that their luck was going to end and Thomas would end up trying to rob an undercover vice cop, so they packed up and drove to Michigan where Post met up once again with Tanksley, his ex-con, bank-robbing buddy.

  “For the first time in my life I felt actual fear when I robbed a bank,” Post recalled. “I didn’t used to care, but I was afraid now because I didn’t want to be separated from Glenda.”

  Post and Tanksley hit several banks together, and Glenda always drove the getaway car. The bank in Dearborn, Michigan, that they intended to rob didn’t seem any different from others that the trio had successfully robbed earlier. But it was during that 1973 robbery that Tanksley was killed by the bank guard and Post and Glenda were arrested a few hours later while driving out of town. Post agreed to plead guilty to the Dearborn robbery and several others in return for Thomas’s getting a suspended sentence. “It was a good deal, except they required her to stay in the Detroit area for two years of probation, and she didn’t know a fucking person there except some sleazy dope fiend that she met in the county jail,” Post recalled.

  He was sent to the federal prison in Marion, and one month later he received two letters on the same day. He recognized Thomas’s writing and opened her letter first. “It was a birthday card and a love letter telling me that she’d wait for me. It really made me feel good,” he said. The other letter was from someone in Detroit whom Post didn’t know. The letter was dated the day after Thomas had mailed Post his birthday card and the writer identified herself as a friend of he
rs. It said Glenda had died from an overdose of heroin. This time, there hadn’t been anyone around to save her.

  Post was waiting when the part-time employee at the Hot House reported for her last day at work. As soon as he saw her face, he knew she hadn’t brought him the pistol that he had wanted. She avoided eye contact until he told her that it was okay. He wasn’t angry.

  “If I’d pushed her more, really pushed hard, I think I could have gotten her to do it,” he said later. “But we had a good time together, and you always run a risk when you push someone to do something they really don’t want to do.

  “It was better just to let her go,” he recalled. “We just said good-bye and that was it.”

  A Voice: BANK ROBBER, AGE 39

  When I first came in back in ’78, I was always in the free world when I dreamed at night, but recently I stopped dreaming about being outside. Now, even in my dreams, I’m in the penitentiary.

  I’ve been dreaming a lot lately and having this same dream a lot. I’m coming up the tier and there is a riot and guys are sticking all the snitches and burning the prison. In my dream, I go into this room where there are four or five of these little turd guards. You know, the ones that always act so tough and always give you a hard time by messing with your mail. Super cops.

  These pigs are crying and moaning and begging for their lives and I walk up and down looking at them, and suddenly I grab one of the fat hacks by his curly hair and I jerk him out in front of everybody and I tell him to pull down his pants and he is begging me not to kill him and he is crying about his wife and kids and telling me how he is sorry for everything he has done.