The Hot House: Life Inside Leavenworth Prison

by Pete Earley

  Both men went to their cells.

  Although Bowles had promised that he wouldn’t interfere, both he and Bucklew knew that Bowles probably would have no choice but to step in if Bucklew attacked Little. This was because of the nature of the Hot House. While Bowles and Little insisted that they were only friends, other inmates looked upon Bowles as Little’s guardian. If Bowles stood by and watched Bucklew beat Little, other inmates would think that Bowles was afraid of Bucklew. They would begin insulting him as well as Little. The code required that Bowles would have to kill Bucklew if he raised his hand against Little. Bucklew understood all these consequences. He would have to kill Bowles before he could touch Little.

  A few hours after the confrontation in the television room, Little knocked on Bucklew’s cell door and quietly asked to come inside. He had come, he said, because Bowles had sent him to deal with the problem.

  This is how Bucklew later recalled the conversation. “Listen, kid,” Bucklew began, “you got no respect coming from me, ’cause you’re riding on Carl. If it weren’t for Carl, you’d have thirty niggers lining up to fuck you.”

  Little tried to turn the conversation to the television room, but Bucklew refused.

  “You’re a punk,” said Bucklew. “I talk to Carl, not you.”

  He then dismissed Little.

  For the next several days, Bucklew and Bowles watched each other. Each was waiting for the other to make a move. In the Hot House, no one fought by the Queensberry Rules, especially convicted killers such as Bucklew and Bowles. “In here, there’s no ‘Put up your dukes’ bullshit,” an inmate explained. “When guys like a Bucklew or a Bowles get into a fight with another inmate, it only lasts a few seconds, ’cause they are going to rip out a guy’s windpipe with their first blow and rip off his nuts with their second.”

  For his part, Little stayed close to Bowles. In fact, he never left his sight. All of this was going on, of course, without the guards having any idea that the two murderers were facing off against each other.

  And then fate intervened. Late one night, a guard caught Bucklew’s winemaking partner drinking in his cell. As Bucklew watched, the guard hustled the inmate down the tier toward the Hole. Bucklew knew that his friend had hidden a large plastic container of hooch in his cell and he wanted to get it before the guard came back. But Bucklew needed a “jigger,” someone to watch for the guard. The only white inmates available were Bowles and Little. Bucklew asked them to help and they agreed.

  “Helping him had nothing to do with our disagreement,” Little later recalled. “I hoped he’d drop dead, but this was a convict-versus-police thing with the wine and I wasn’t going to do anything to get him busted.”

  No one mentioned the television-room incident again. Years earlier, such a peaceful standoff would have been unlikely. But neither Bowles nor Bucklew wanted to be sent to Marion, and both realized that a fight between them could only end with one of them dead.

  But Bowles also understood that Little’s trouble with Bucklew was a prologue to what was to come, and in a sense, it was his fault. He had taught Little that the only way a convict got respect in prison was by being willing to kill. Like a child taking his first step, Little was now beginning to test Bowles’s theory. He emulated Bowles. But there was a major difference between the teacher and student: no one questioned that Bowles was a killer, but Little had never killed anyone and the other inmates still saw him as Bowles’s sissy.

  “Tom ain’t no coward and he ain’t no sissy,” Bowles said. “People are misjudging him, but I don’t want him put in a situation where he is going to have to grab a mop wringer and kill someone in here just to prove himself. He don’t need to get himself a life beef to show he’s a man. The best thing to do is get Tom transferred.”

  By the fall of 1988, Bowles had received replies from the jailers, attorneys, and the judge in Florida familiar with Little’s case. All of the letters showed that Little had never been charged with or convicted of escaping from jail. Clearly, the bureau had made a mistake sending him to the Hot House. Bowles had taken the evidence to Little’s case manager and to his prison counselor, and both had agreed to recommend that Little be transferred to a lower-security prison. Every ninety days, inmates were reviewed by a unit team that noted their progress or lack of it. Little’s team consisted of his case manager, his prison counselor, and the A cellhouse manager, Eddie Geouge. Bowles figured the deck was stacked in Little’s favor and he would get his transfer. But when Little came out of the five-minute session, he was upset. Geouge had nixed the move.

  Originally, Little had been told that he would have to spend five years in Leavenworth. After studying the letters that Bowles had collected for Little, Geouge was willing to reduce Little’s stay to two years. But that was it. No immediate transfer.

  Geouge later explained that he didn’t like the way Bowles was orchestrating Little’s affairs. “It’s dangerous to allow one inmate to run another inmate’s life in here,” Geouge said, “and that was what Bowles was doing.” Geouge said that Bowles was making Little into a replica of himself. “If that’s what Little wants, to be a miniature Carl Bowles, then he belongs here, not a lower-level prison.”

  Part of the reason why Geouge was irritated at Bowles was because a few weeks earlier, Bowles had asked for permission to meet Little’s mother. “This woman was coming to visit her son, and she wanted to know why her son was living in a cell with a convicted murderer who had spent twenty-three years in prison,” Geouge recalled, “and Bowles wanted to be the one to explain it to her. We don’t let inmates explain things.” Geouge had rejected Bowles’s request.

  Little’s mother wasn’t the only person curious about her son’s relationship with Bowles. Other convicts were grumbling, particularly homosexuals who were not allowed to share the same cells as their lovers. “Carl Bowles is dangerous, so the bureau is buying him off—letting him have a sissy to keep him entertained and out of trouble,” one complained.

  Warden Matthews had heard similar comments and he wasn’t happy either. “The reason Bowles and Little are allowed to cell together is because I believe in putting people into cells who are compatible, not because they are homosexual lovers,” he said. “Homosexuality is a product of this environment, but the bureau does not condone it and neither do I.

  “In this case,” Matthews continued, “I think we’ve let this situation go too far. It does look like we are promoting homosexuality, especially when we assigned Bowles and his sissy to the same job outside the hospital. It would have been better if one worked in industry and the other somewhere else, but for some reason someone decided to put them together. Maybe it was to keep Bowles happy. I don’t know. But the point is that we are treating them differently from other inmates and I really don’t believe in doing that and I plan to look into it.”

  Carl Bowles knew that he and Little were running out of time. Even though Connor had fired them as caretakers of the hospital grounds, they were still working as a team, collecting trash in another section of the compound. If Matthews and Associate Warden Connor decided to split them up by reassigning Little to a job in prison industries, Little would be tested by other inmates.

  “These dumb motherfuckers are going to put Thomas in a situation where he’s not going to have any choice but to stab someone, and then they’re gonna say, ‘See, we knew he belonged in a penitentiary all along,’ ” Bowles complained.

  The problem was Eddie Geouge, Bowles decided. He had to figure out a way around him.

  Chapter 34

  EDDIE GEOUGE

  A New Jersey bank robber nicknamed Lumpy, who had a history of attacking guards, woke up one morning and decided to kill Eddie Geouge. Lumpy had had a tough week. He had been fired from his job in the kitchen for arguing with his boss, a guard had assigned him extra work around the cellhouse as punishment for not keeping his cell clean, and his mother had died and Geouge had denied his request to attend her funeral. (The bureau sometimes allowed inmates to attend fu
nerals if their families paid the cost of having guards accompany them.) Lumpy would later recall that when he got out of his bunk, he had simply said to himself, “Fuck this! I don’t care anymore. I’m going to kill Geouge.”

  When Lumpy didn’t show up for work at his new prison job that morning, his boss notified the lieutenant’s office, and at 9:35, Lieutenant Tracy Johns spotted Lumpy sitting in the bleachers in the prison yard with two other inmates.

  “Need to talk to you in the lieutenant’s office,” said Johns as he approached the trio.

  “I ain’t going,” Lumpy replied.

  “C’mon,” Johns ordered.

  “I got a knife,” Lumpy blurted. “I’m gonna kill Geouge!”

  Johns froze. “I didn’t know exactly what he had in mind,” Johns recalled later, “but if he had a knife and his buddies were backing him, I figured I was in trouble.”

  As Johns stood silent, Lumpy suddenly covered his face with his hands and began to sob. “He just broke down right there,” Johns recalled. He frisked Lumpy and found nothing. During questioning, Lumpy said he had gotten a knife that morning and had waited for an hour for Geouge to arrive at his office in the cellhouse. Geouge never came, so Lumpy got rid of the knife and went into the yard to think.

  It turned out that Geouge had been delayed at home. “I don’t mean to belittle this,” he said, when he was told that Lumpy had been stalking him, “but in this business this sort of thing happens, and you can’t worry about it or you’d never come to work.”

  Better than most, Geouge knew death. As a soldier in Vietnam, Geouge had killed for the first time when he was eighteen. By the time he ended his combat tour two years later, he had received four Purple Hearts, two Bronze Stars, a Silver Star, and had stopped counting the number of enemy he had killed. His specialty was setting up ambushes.

  “I slept with the first one I killed for a long time,” he recalled. “Knowing that I’d killed another human being bothered me. But although I hate to admit it, killing is no different from anything else. It’s like walking. After you take that first step, it becomes easy. You get used to it, and it got so it wasn’t difficult at all for me.”

  During a particularly fierce firefight in December 1968 in the A Shau Valley, all but two of Geouge’s men were killed. They were badly outnumbered, so Geouge ordered both men to retreat while he—in what the army later described as an extraordinary act of valor—fired an M-60 machine gun at the enemy troops until all its ammunition was spent. He then fired all the rounds in his M-16. Only after that did Geouge retreat. “I didn’t want to die. I wasn’t one of those guys who felt he was born to fight and die in Vietnam, and I remember thinking, ‘Goddamn, Geouge, what the hell are you doing? You are going to die. They are going to kill you. Why didn’t you fall back with those other two guys?’ And I honestly didn’t know why I stayed. I really didn’t. I just felt someone had to do it.” He managed to elude the attacking enemy troops and was later rescued by a helicopter.

  Geouge had never turned away from a fight, nor did he understand men who shrank from blood. The son of a prison guard at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California, Geouge had been a self-described “hell-raiser” as a teenager. He quit school at age sixteen to work. Two years later, he married Pistol, who was two weeks shy of her fifteenth birthday. They were poor. She hoed weeds with migrant workers to help support them. He was drafted less than one month after their wedding.

  The army made Geouge a drill sergeant when his tour in Vietnam ended, but Geouge didn’t reenlist. A friend gave him a job working in a bar. “I didn’t have any skills,” he recalled. “I was going nowhere and sure to become an alcoholic.”

  When the bureau hired him in 1970 as a guard at Lompoc, where his father still worked, he and Pistol were elated. “We felt rich,” remembered Pistol. Geouge was paid $6,200 per year. “I felt very grateful to the bureau,” she added.

  On his first day at work, a beefy inmate walked up to the much shorter and bone-thin Geouge and said, “I hear you’re Geouge’s kid. On the best day in your life, you couldn’t whip me.” Replied Geouge, “I never said I could, but just before you get me whipped, you’re gonna wonder if you’ll get it done. Now you want to fight or talk?” The inmate walked away.

  In the early 1970s, the bureau didn’t have specially trained and outfitted SORT teams. Instead they operated “riot squads,” made up of volunteers who did whatever was necessary to stop an inmate from hurting other inmates or staff. Geouge became the “first man,” which meant that when a cell door was opened, he was the first to scramble inside and confront an inmate. He enjoyed it.

  Geouge earned the rank of senior lieutenant in only five years, an amazing feat at the time. He was one of the bureau’s most promising young officers and he was proving to be especially good at investigating prison murders.

  From Lompoc, Geouge was sent to the penitentiary in Atlanta, and on December 4, 1979, he solved one of the most gruesome murders in the prison’s history. A twenty-two-year-old dietician, who joined the bureau directly from college and had only worked at the prison for a few weeks, was found dead in the library at the prison hospital. Geouge discovered a package of Pall Mall cigarettes lying under her skirt, which had been jerked down around her ankles. The pack had apparently fallen out of an inmate’s pocket while he was raping her. Geouge also found a coffee cup on a shelf near the door. Armed with those two clues, Geouge checked the sheet that inmates were required to sign when they first came into the hospital. One of the patients listed on it was Robert E. Lee Hogan, Jr., a convicted rapist. The name Hogan sounded familiar to Geouge, and when he looked at the coffee cup, he remembered why. The letter H was scratched on the bottom. Geouge went immediately to Hogan’s cell and found a freshly opened carton of Pall Mall cigarettes next to the bunk. It was missing one pack. Geouge called the FBI, and when agents interviewed Hogan, he admitted that he had raped and murdered the woman.

  Over the coming years, friends and neighbors would ask Geouge if he ever felt sorry for the inmates he guarded. People unfamiliar with prisons frequently talked sympathetically about convicts, as if they really didn’t deserve to be locked up. Whenever this happened, Geouge would remember the afternoon that he spent with two FBI agents listening to Hogan confess. Geouge’s investigation showed that Hogan had actually gone to the hospital to kill a psychiatrist who had been treating him, but she had gone to lunch, so Hogan walked the halls aimlessly until he came upon the dietician. In a voice that was chilling because it was so calm, Hogan described what had happened.

  I just took the knife out of my pants and I held it there for a second and she was gonna scream or something, ’cause she took a big breath, and I told her that was the worst thing that she could do.… I asked her to take off her dress and remove her panty hose.… I couldn’t achieve an erection. She said she had never had sex before and was a virgin, and I told her to quit lying.… I got on top of her … somewhere during that time I achieved ejaculation, but sex wasn’t the major thing on my mind. I said, “I’m going to let you go.” She said, “I won’t tell anybody, just don’t hurt me.” I said, “All right, but I’m going to have to tie you up.” I took her panties and put them in her mouth and took her panty hose and tied them across her mouth.… I laid her back down on the floor and tried to choke her, but it just seemed the more I choked the more, you know, her eyes wouldn’t close, like she wasn’t going to die. So I told her to close her eyes and she did, and when she did I knew this choking deal wasn’t doing no good. So I took the knife and tilted her head back.… When I first stuck it in her throat, it just didn’t seem like it was working. She still had her eyes open looking at me. I told her again to close her eyes and she did, so I used both hands and I tried to force it in, then I took a dust broom and I held the knife with my left hand and hammered it in with my right hand using the dust broom … I pulled the knife all the way to the left and then all the way to the right and I knew, I knew that would kill her ’cause that would cut everything on
the inside of her neck.

  Recalling his feelings that day, Geouge said, “I looked at him and I thought, ‘You are a total piece of worthless shit.’ ”

  Geouge was still in Atlanta in 1980 when the bureau decided to change it into a prison for Cuban detainees. As always, Geouge was put in charge of the troublemakers.

  “He worked twelve to sixteen hours, seven days a week,” recalled Pistol Geouge. “The bureau pushed and pushed, and had pushed him as far as it could, but whenever I started to complain, I stopped myself, because the bureau had been so good for us—providing us with a house, a good salary. I was loyal to it, even though I knew Eddie was at the point where he was both mentally and psychologically exhausted … and then it happened.”

  Geouge was talking to a contentious Cuban when the detainee suddenly flinched. “I honestly thought he was taking a swing at me, so I backhanded him and the blow knocked him down,” Geouge recalled. Geouge’s boss, a captain, was standing nearby and he slugged and kicked the Cuban while he was on the floor.

  When the Cuban later complained about brutality, Director Carlson sent Jerry O’Brien to investigate. “The real story is, they just smacked this inmate around a little bit because he was mouthy,” O’Brien said. “They weren’t trying to hurt him. It was more slapping him to get his attention.”

  Before O’Brien filed a written report, he briefed Carlson. “Norm looked at me and said, ‘Fire ’em both.’ That was it.” O’Brien waited a day and went back in to see Carlson. “I told him more about the situation,” O’Brien recalled, “but he didn’t change his mind. Norm was totally against brutality.” Still, O’Brien waited. “Finally, I went in for a third time and just blurted it out. I said, ‘Norm, that place is wild. The frustration level among staff is high. It demands some compassion.’ He listened to me for a while and said, ‘Okay.’ So we demoted the captain, and Eddie Geouge was suspended for two weeks and transferred to the penitentiary at Terre Haute [Indiana]. It was really a shame because Geouge was on the rise. He had been destined to move up the ladder.”