Born to Lose

by James G. Hollock

  Having come straight from the military to his job at Western, Hoffman was strong and fit,

  but Hoss kept everyone on high alert, and an incident flitted through my mind of when I monitored a therapy group of really bad guys, Hoss among them. One day Hoss, sitting beside me, said quietly, for me only I guess … He said, “Joe, I’m a natural born killer. I don’t know why, but that’s what I am.” Now, seeing Hoss through the gate, I was a believer. He had grayish eyes and they were like, you know, when a shark bites the eyes roll back. They were the most demonic-looking eyes I’ve ever seen. He began staring, angry at us for what happened, that is, rescuing his rightful prey. I saw both sets of eyes, Spruill’s and Hoss’s. One’s the victim, one’s the predator. Everyone knew who was who.

  As more officers closed in, Hoss and Phelan dashed into the yard, knives glinting in the morning sun. “On a terrorizing rampage,” recalled Sgt. Doug Cameron, “Stanley and Frankie Hatchet, as he was called, tried to run down black guys. When they got inside the mess hall, knives waving, sweat and blood on ’em, god, they were apparitions from hell. We even had inmates jumping out the goddam windows.

  “Finally, with all inmates running far off and with ten officers ringing them, Hoss, fearing nothing, victory in his eyes, calmly surrendered his weapons. Frankie Hachet held his ground and growled but we got him subdued. Both were cuffed and taken to the Home Block.”

  Inmate Johnny Keen summed things up. “Hoss became King of the Penitentiary, reputation made … as if it needed any enhancin’.”

  Trooper Jim Christie of the state police arrived to bring charges against Hoss. Authorities would start off high—attempted murder. Yet despite all pleadings, Geno Spruill told Christie, “Don’t want no charges. I’ll handle this myself.”

  The prison took measures against Hoss and Phelan, each receiving 180 days in segregation for assaulting Spruill.

  . . .

  Superintendent Gil Walter’s first months at the helm had been stressful. At this juncture, Walters needed the trust of his staff more than the faith of the inmates. Even though most of the problems he faced were inherited, he knew anything that happened from now on would be on his watch. He ordered a shakedown. Among assorted contraband, eight shanks were found, signaling that plenty more were still in inmates’ hands. To relieve Western Penitentiary’s crowded conditions, he transferred two hundred inmates to other prisons and shipped out a batch of troublemakers. Stanley Hoss was not among them.

  Dear Diane,

  It’s six weeks since I stabbed the nigger so I’m in isolation til Feb. So Jodine is getting married? I’m not surprised. This Oct. will be a year since I seen her, and twice that since I seen the 2 boys. At least her new husband won’t have to break her in. Ha Ha. Sorry about Pookie’s sister committing suicide but I can dig her side of it. This big dirty world has nothing to offer anyone. Last Sunday a gang of guards rushed in here with clubs and tear gas. Three of my friends climbed to the ceiling of the isolation block to get someone to listen to their grievances. The guards used ladders to get them. They were sprayed and beat bad with blackjacks and fists. It’s an everyday thing down here since the new warden took over. He’s a stupid red-headed bastard who don’t know one thing about prison and the whole place is in revolt against him. Just last night one of the female nurses in the prison hospital was raped by an inmate.

  Hoss continued to receive enticing requests from women. He passed on these until he received the letter of a woman named Jill Joy, whose enclosed picture caught his attention: she was blonde—as he liked his women—slim in the hips, nice up top. Jill began to visit, and those visits had become frequent since early summer. She regularly wrote to Stanley, telling him that no matter what he did or didn’t do she was on his side. Although visits to inmates in segregation were restricted, Stanley used one for Jill in late November. Adorned by dark mascara and eyeliner, ruby lipstick and rouge, wearing a short skirt, and showing as much cleavage as she dared, Jill arrived determined to deepen her relationship with Hoss. When the visiting room guard’s attention was elsewhere, Jill reached under her skirt to produce an expensive pen for Stan, telling him he’d have no excuse not to write her all the time.

  Meanwhile, attempts to prosecute Hoss for the attack on Geno Spruill stalled, stymied by Spruill’s refusal to testify against Hoss. At one point Spruill even claimed he was no longer sure who had stabbed him. Then it was too late: Spruill escaped.

  As part of its “trust initiative,” the prison had begun allowing convicts to go into the community for certain events or reasons. Under this plan, Walter’s predecessor had granted Spruill permission to accompany the prison’s weight-lifting team (of which he was a member) to a competition outside the walls, even though Spruill was doing time for assault with intent to kill and despite the fact that his knife injury from Hoss’s attack five weeks earlier would prevent him from taking part. No permission had been given for the team members to repair to a tavern afterwards to have drinks with their wives or girlfriends—but they did so, and Spruill excused himself to go to the restroom, not to be seen again for a year. Heads rolled, not because of the dubious program itself—for that would be indicting the policy makers—but to punish the accompanying staff for their folly in permitting drinking and in not reporting the incident to bureau headquarters in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. The episode might never have become public had not the police launched a search for the culprit in the November stabbing death of John Beck and the wounding of his wife, Beatrice. Prime suspect: Geno Spruill. The deputy superintendent of Western Pen, who had given the final okay to Spruill’s release while Gil Walters was on vacation, was ordered to resign. As for Walters, himself a mere whisker away from ensnarement in the scandal, he declared, “I will not let anyone like Spruill go out again.”

  It got worse. It was rumored that Spruill’s attack on the Becks was a botched attempt to get even with Hoss. Apparently, Spruill had made his way to Natrona Heights, home of Hoss’s half-sister Mary Jane (nicknamed “Punkin”), intending to kill her as payback for what Hoss had done to Spruill in prison. As it turned out, Spruill got the wrong house. The victims were innocents.

  During the same visit Jill Joy gave Stanley the pen, he told her that as soon as he saw Spruill again, “there’ll be one less spook in this world.” Jill was pleased to be Stanley’s special listener. Stan had other confidants, as well. He wrote Diane,

  I got 6 months disciplinary time but the officials told me and Frank that we’ll be entombed in this hole til we have involved ourselves in their shit programs. They say it’s expected my threatening attitude will cease.

  Of the 800 prisoners in here, less than a handful are not active agents for the officials. The very few guys, of whom I am one, will not compromise ourselves to the officials’ whim. Us few guys, just by being ourselves, terrorize all the agents, spys and punks. Then they all run to the officials and beg for protection. Then the officials reward its agents by locking up the cause of the agents’ fear—me and a few others. Then I’m supposed to tolerate this indignity.

  The Program Review Committee, in the form of 6 tremblers, came to see me. I told them what I will do if they keep torturing me. The officials have no programs to benefit me. They’d rather spend hundred of thousands on drugs and gases so they can make us narcotic zombies or gassed out physical wrecks, or for guards who lurk around with guns for a chance to kill us, but they won’t let us have light or hot water in these cells. If we need medical treatment, we can’t get it.

  They encage me to destroy my personality so they can feel safe around me. Just how terrorized are the officials? The warden has publicly stated: “I will not enter the prison. It is not safe for me in there.” He hides in his office.

  I could tell you something, but now is the wrong time. Maybe someday nobody will doubt the essence of my attitude as dictated by my atavistic personality. Someday.

  Hoss’s use of the adjective atavistic would have absorbed the psych staff had Diane ever shared Stan’s letters,
but Diane regarded many of her ex’s ramblings as senseless. As to his own makeup, Stan had concluded his past and his future were not altogether in his hands: they had been destined by bloodlines of distant ancestors.

  Meanwhile, violence continued to plague the penitentiary. On November 22, 1972, news stories on the nine-year anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination were forced to share column space or airtime with a new item of local interest: the serious stabbing of veteran corrections officer Joe Bodnar. Only two weeks earlier, Gil Walters had attended a memorial service in the prison chapel for Officer Cliff Grogan, slain by a convict in 1965. While danger was inherent in the job, the increasing frequency of assaults on prison staff, atop common violence between inmates at the pen, worried Walters no end. He’d have to keep locking up the untamed and readdress the vexing proliferation of weapons.

  As for Hoss, he had no intention of moderating his attitude or behavior. Instead, he was working on becoming even more lethal. Hoss pounded his right fist, then his left, into the old brick of his cell. It was yet another method to toughen up. His knuckles had become indented a quarter inch, so said the guards. Most observers assumed Hoss had put on his muscle through lifting weights, but others found it hard to believe such development could come about by weights alone. They were right.

  In an experimental program, the penitentiary began issuing dianabol, a steroid, to certain weight lifters and other exercisers to see how it affected muscle growth and to identify other benefits. Said medical technician Mike Farris, “About forty inmates volunteered. Half got sugar pills, half got steroids. We’d regularly weigh them, take blood pressure and other measurements. I know Stanley Hoss, Frank Phelan, and Geno Spruill were in the program, but I was not privy to who got the steroids … but you didn’t need to know. After some months it was apparent.”

  Now locked up and without steroids, Hoss wanted to hold on to his gains. Daily, in his cell, he put himself through an ambitious regimen. Slamming his fists into walls was an exercise he thought up himself.

  Since the Spruill knifing, Christmas had come and gone. In February 1973, a hearing was held on whether to release Hoss back into the general prison population. Even though his punishment time was about to expire, the decision was no. Instead, his status of disciplinary custody (DC) was changed to administrative custody (AC). This allowed Hoss, and Phelan, to be held in segregation indefinitely. The pair were told they were risks to the institution.

  Thus Hoss remained “entombed,” as he’d put it, long after completing his disciplinary time in segregation. If he wanted his administrative custody status to be lifted, he’d have to show at least a willingness to conform. This shouldn’t have been terribly difficult, given Western Pen’s rock-bottom expectations: Hold the fist and be praised. Yet Hoss’s attitude remained unchanged, and so far he had avoided full punishment for his violent acts.

  Someone calculated that if Hoss did stand trial on each of the thirty-nine felonies he was said to have committed while on the run in the getaway GTO, he’d be looking at another one hundred years, but this would never happen: the trials would be too costly, transporting the killer deep into the midwest too risky, and, anyway, Hoss was already serving a life sentence. All these reasons may have been practical, but they left Hoss unpunished and provided his victims with no redress.

  By the early summer of 1973, Hoss had reason to be optimistic on other legal fronts. For one thing, he and his attorneys were planning to drag poor Kathy Defino back into court. “I know I can beat that this time. When did I ever have to rape a girl to get the cunt?” he wrote Diane. For another, Hoss was not far wrong when he wrote in the same letter: “That leaves only the cop killing. That judge made so many mistakes, there’s no doubt I’ll get a new trial.”

  Meanwhile, the capture of Geno Spruill in August brought more bad press to Western. In his year of hiding out, not only was Spruill sought for killing John Beck but for four more deaths that had followed. News reports noted that all this happened after Spruill had walked away from the prison’s supervised leave program.

  . . .

  Stanley never wrote of Jill Joy to Diane but was candid about another woman, one named Sharon:

  Betty thinks she is being pushed aside since Sharon came into the picture. Me and Sharon are trying to get married. She has to have an interview with Dr. Thomas, a psychiatrist who’s been working with me since I came to this place. He has the final say. What’s important in this is our daughter Nicole. She’s getting around the age she knows who I am, so Sharon wants her to have my name legally.

  This news may surprise you but it’s just one more part of the life I lived when I was out there.

  Later, he wrote of Sharon again.

  I’ve never been so happy in my life. Sharon is beautiful. She just turned 21, has long hair and a body that’s out of sight. She dances in Pittsburgh and Ohio but not topless anymore. She keeps her job away from our daughter and doesn’t bring any men to the house.

  We’re still trying to marry but the people here keep putting walls up as if they’re happy to see me stabbing people because they know marriage would make me want to settle down. If they fuck it up for me, I’m going on one more bloody rampage which will make anything I’ve done before look like kid stuff. The only ones who get anything in here are homosexuals and snitches.

  Jill Joy was still visiting as often as she could. Stan kept her in the dark about Sharon, and remained fairly closemouthed about the women in his past. Jill shared that she was divorced with no kids. She kept angling for an evening visit (more romantic, she told Stanley) but lamented that she worked the night shift in a bolt factory and slung hash browns part-time. She also had to accept that Stanley got only a set number of visits each month and that she couldn’t hog them. Within these limits, she did her best by dressing the way Stanley liked and becoming a sympathetic listener. Occasionally, though, Hoss would say something that gave even Jill pause.

  Once, when Stanley spoke of the merriment that came with shooting cops, Jill took his hand while crossing her leg to edge her skirt higher. “Seriously, honey, the one in Verona … it was you or him, right?”

  “Yeah,” Hoss said, “me or him, that’s how it was.”

  “See,” Joy whispered, “I knew you’d never do something like that unless you had to.” But at another time, when Jill mildly raised the subject of the “woman and baby,” Hoss changed the subject.

  Other women aside, Hoss resented that it had been a year since Diane had visited with the kids.

  I want to see my children! Forget Jodine. You don’t believe I ever loved her, do you? Do you still have that boyfriend, Ron? I was wondering if it’s hard pulling a trick since you’re not as young as you once was.

  I’m not in the mood for anything today. It’s been a bad life.

  Diane indeed had the boyfriend, a man who treated her well and had a job, and she finally revealed their plans to marry. Stanley wrote to say he accepted the situation, but added, “If its marriage you want, you may as well make some money off it. I tell the girls I know that if they don’t sell it they are fools.”

  . . .

  However Hoss’s sister Betty felt about his girlfriends, she remained his staunchest ally. Angered by his complaints of his treatment at the penitentiary, she sent a petition to Governor Shapp requesting a redress of grievances. Signed by thirty-four “family and friends” of Hoss, the petition blasted a system that, in her view, unjustifiably held her brother in solitary confinement. “My brother is harassed, intimidated, threatened with bodily harm, and subjected to punishment over and above the sentence imposed on him by the court,” she wrote. Following other criticisms, Betty accused the prison of forcing her brother to exist on a “subhuman animal-like level.”

  Infuriated over Betty’s public appeal, Barbara Sizemore fired back. She was a sister as well, to the beloved Joe Zanella, dead four years now by Hoss’s hand. In a two-column letter published in its entirety by the Pittsburgh Press, Barbara wrote that Hoss’s co
nditions in prison “would be fitting if they were accurately described. Is he to have every comfort of home? Further, from what I understand, the taxpayer has paid for plastic surgery that Hoss has undergone in an effort toward rehabilitation. No amount of surgery on the outside will change what is in that man’s heart.”

  Barbara didn’t stop at her own family’s grief. “Hoss said he murdered the Peugeots. Yet, the courts tarried and he wasn’t brought to trial before a certain time. Now he will never stand trial. Talk about getting away with murder! Maybe our courts have let him slide by, but the High Court won’t. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.”

  The petition and letters prompted a cascade of public responses rejecting pity for the killer. Nonetheless, the airing of Betty Matecka’s plea to the governor obliged Western Penitentiary’s superintendent to defend his position. Walters confirmed that Hoss’s status restricted him from most prison facilities, recalling Spruill’s knifing a year earlier that had brought matters to a head but added, “There are other reasons for Hoss’s confinement which I will not make public at this time.”

  What Walters kept to himself was Hoss’s influence over and complicity with other violent men. When out in the general population, he ran with a band of white men who intimidated the blacks. Hoss was, if not the prime player, at least one of the prime players in widening the white/black chasm within the prison, an untenable situation for its administrators. For even minimal peace prospects, Hoss had to be removed from the equation.