Letters from Alcatraz
Page 20
1 pair Sunglasses
2 each Daily Missals
1 each Rosary
1 each Pocket Watch
2 each Fountain Pens
1 each Mechanical pencil
1 each Padlock
1 each Nail Clipper
15 pkgs Cigarettes, Philip Morris
2 each Hair brushes
1 tube Colgate dental cream
2 cakes Woodbury soap
1 lot Letters
1 lot Photographs
1 lot Papers regarding case
1 Transcript of Record- Kathryn Thorne Kelly vs. United States of America
There is $104.56 in George’s commissary account and there will be an additional credit when the July patrol is posted on August 15. When the exact amount is determined, we will advise you and forward claim forms to be completed by you.
My I on behalf of our entire staff, express our heartfelt sympathy to you and other members of the family in this hour of bereavement.
Very truly yours,
C.H. Looney
Warden
* * *
July 18, 1954
Warden, Looney
Leavenworth, Kansas
Dear Sir:
May I extend my appreciation to you, to the institution, the medical staff, and the inmates and friends of my husband there, for your kindness and care of him. I was comforted after talking with you yesterday. I telephoned Mr. Shannon and all arrangements with the Decatur Texas funeral home had been completed. I thought you might be able to mail a few little keepsakes of his personal property home for me. I know he had a fountain pen, he loved, which he wrote me with, that I would like to have just any small thing you may be able to give me. Anything of that sort if possible please mail to:
Mr. R.G. Shannon
Paradise, Texas. [my step-father]
Thank you for your present and past consideration
With all good wishes,
Sincerely,
Kathryn Kelly
* * *
Albert Bates was a co-conspirator of Kelly in the Urschel kidnapping case. He was sent to Alcatraz due to his profile status and special custody needs. This letter was sent directly to Urschel relating to his ransom.
Harvey Bailey and Willie Radkay at the “Outlaw,” a private club in Kansas City in 1973. Both remained good friends outside of prison. Bailey was a co-conspirator with Kelly and Bates in the Urschel kidnapping case and was sent to Alcatraz along with Kelly in 1934. Bailey would spend 12 years on the Rock. He died in Joplin, Missouri at 91 years of age.
A. L. Bates – 137
TO: Mr. C. F. Urschel U.S. Penitentiary
F. O. Box 1146 Alcatraz, California
Oklahoma City, Okla. October 1, 1942
Dear Sir:
Your letter of September 10th was forwarded to me by Mr. James V. Bennett, Director, Bureau of Prisons, and though there is little that I can divulge about the case that isn’t known, I can answer your query in reference to the division of the ransom money.
After Kelly and I received the money from Mr. Kirkpatrick in Kansas City we returned directly to the Shannon Ranch, arriving there about 2 p.m., on Monday, July 31, 1933. We retired to the front room of the house and divided the money in privacy. Kelly had a “nut” (as we refer to an expense account in connection with any job), of $11,500.00. I did not inquire what it was for simply because it was customary for each individual of outfits like ours to keep a record of his expenses on our various enterprises. I do know that we abandoned a new Buick of his on the night of July 29th about 2 or 3 miles northeast of Luther, Oklahoma, alongside the “Katy” tracks. (There was a humorous side to that incident, but I do not wish to infringe upon Mr. Kirkpatrick as a story teller. I read “Crime’s Paradise” and also tried to purchase his anthology of poems, “Dim Trails,” but was informed that it was privately printed).
I received the sum of $94,250.00 for my “end”, and when I left the room to clean up a bit on the back porch I saw Bailey was still there, although he had told me four days previous that his friends would call for him not later than Saturday. I had warned him that the place was “hot” on account of our past activities in Texas and our connections with detective friends, Messrs. Weatherford and Sweeny of Ft. Worth. I was in a hurry to get the job over with so I did not converse much with anyone. I gave Bailey $500.00 out of my pocket and Kelly did likewise. I left the farm with $93,750.00.
When we released you at Norman, Kelly and I separated. I drove via Chickasha to Amarillo, thence to Denver. My wife was in Portland, Oregon, where I communicated with her, advising her to return to Denver immediately. I put $50,000.00 in a bag with surplus clothes, locked it, and left it with friends to keep until my wife called for it. I left instructions in a letter addressed to her in my post office box for her to rent an apartment upon arrival and to leave the address in that box. I had been under a tremendous strain for a week, on the go night and day, so I decided I’d have a little pleasure in Denver. I don’t believe I spent over $1,000.00 during the three days I stayed there. I then went by plane to Minneapolis where I rejoined the Kelly’s as prearranged. I arrived there on August 5th. The following day the three of us drove to Mills Lak, a resort. Kelly told me he was leaving early the next day for Cleveland and in the event anything of importance occurred to wire him. I told him I brought $42,000.00 with me. The next day, at the Boulevards of Paris, a roadhouse, Jack Phifer, (now deceased) got word via the grapevine that the “0” were concentrating in the Twin Cities. He learned that four of his crew had been arrested and held incommunicado. I warned Kelly by wire and left that night for Omaha and Denver.
When I was alone in the apartment my wife had rented I put $41,000.00 in the same bag with the $50,000.00. I probably spent about $2,000.00 all told and had $700.00 on me when I was arrested three days after returning to Denver. I told my wife when I left the apartment on the date of my arrest that there was over $90,000.00 in a locked bag in the clothes closet.
Roy Gardner, 110-AZ
Roy Gardner
“The talking pictures are wonderful. You will be surprised when you hear the melodrama voice of the famous Will Rogers. He sure makes you laugh when he opens up that nice looking mouth of his.”
-Letter to Roy Gardner, 1932
Much of Alcatraz’s early reputation had been congealed by early inmate accounts printed across the nation in newspapers and magazines ranging from true crime to trendy lifestyle themed publications. The cold veil of secrecy made stories of life inside the prison popular reading for the public at large, and Roy Gardner helped sustain that intrigue by writing prolifically about his experiences at Alcatraz in various news and media venues. Roy Gardner served at Alcatraz from 1934 until 1936, and was well-known publicly as one of the last notorious train robbers from the old western era.
Gardner spent two years incarcerated on Alcatraz. After his ultimate release in 1938, he peddled a small informational book at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island and narrated boat tours for San Francisco tourists. Gardner was known to the public as a brilliant escape artist, and he was famous for his Houdini-like jailbreaks, including a magnificent escape from a Mexican jail, when just three days before his scheduled execution before a firing squad, he amazingly overpowered his sentry and fled back across the border to Arizona. He was later captured in San Francisco for robbery and finally found himself imprisoned at USP Leavenworth.
Surprisingly, Gardner volunteered to be transferred to Alcatraz. He claimed that he wanted to go straight, and felt that this would bring him closer to his friends and family. Gardner was destined to do hard time during his 25 month imprisonment at Alcatraz. Warden Johnston had assigned him to work in the mat shop, and he would later comment that USP Leavenworth and USP Atlanta were summer resorts compared to the Rock. He wrote:
The hopeless despair on the Rock is reflected in the faces and actions of almost all of the inmates. They seem to march about the island in a sort of hopelessness, helpless daze, and you can watch
them progressively sinking down and down... On “the Rock” there are upwards of three hundred men. One hundred fifty will die there. Sometime – in ten, fifteen, twenty-five years – the others come out into the world. These, too, are dead; the walking dead. The men confined there, to all intents and purposes, are buried alive. In reality they are little more than animated cadavers – dead men who are still able to walk and talk. Watching those men from day to day slowly giving up hopes is truly a pitiful sight, even if you are one of them.
Gardner was transferred back to USP Leavenworth in 1936, and was finally released from prison in 1938. His wife had left him and remarried, and he drifted back to San Francisco to reestablish his life. In March 1939, he set up an exhibition booth at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. Gardner recounted to patrons his law-breaking stories of violence and torture, and autographed his self-published memoir entitled Hellcatraz. Gardner’s show, entitled Crime Doesn’t Pay, failed to draw large crowds, and eventually closed. He would later spend a brief period working as a narrator on a San Francisco tour boat, before finally hitting rock bottom and taking on employment as a baker in San Francisco. His days of fame and dreamed fortunes had now passed.
Distraught, elderly, and without friends, he committed suicide at the Hotel Governor, in San Francisco on January 10, 1940. Using cyanide, sulfuric acid, and a bath towel, he draped the bathroom sink and covered his head, creating a makeshift gas chamber. On the door was a warning note to the maid: “Do Not Open Door - Poison Gas - Call Police.” Gardner had also left the maid a small cash tip for cleaning out his belongings. His suitcase stood neatly in a corner of his room, and the shower curtain was neatly folded across the floor to prevent any mess. Additionally, he had already made burial arrangements with Halsted and Company, a local funeral home, leaving their phonebook advertisement neatly clipped to his belongings.
The San Francisco Examiner provided some thought-provoking perspective on the last years of Gardener’s troubled life in this excerpt from a January 12, 1940 article:
Gardner was ill in body and in mind. There was the heart condition he spoke about in the undertaking parlor. Six months to live—what was the use? He had written prison exposes of the “crime doesn’t pay” variety, sold a script to a Hollywood producer, lectured in dingy little theaters—ended up exhausted, mentally bankrupt.
But Gardner had friends. The cops on the beat liked him. The newsboy who sold him a paper at 2:30 Thursday afternoon at the corner of Turk and Jones Streets, and thereby fixed the time of his death almost to the hour - thought he was a fine fellow.
The druggist at the same corner liked to chat with the soft-spoken ex-convict; the waiter in the café around the corner was glad to serve him, because he always left a tip and had a cheery thing or two to say.
Even the wife who divorced him two years ago - Mrs. Will Parker of Napa - expressed great sorrow, said that “Roy just hadn’t been able to adjust himself to the world.”
Gardner was no angel—inside of prison or out. He liked to gamble at cards and to play the races. He was too free with the money he made, too generous, and he became an easy mark, whom chance acquaintances found profitable to cultivate.
Thus did Roy Gardner live and die.
To Dr. Yoke
From: Roy Gardner #110
Dr. Yoke I am taking this method to protest against unnecessary cruelty. The food that is constantly setting here under my nose is not tempting in any way to me. Instead it is nauseating.
Under those circumstances I feel justified in asking you to discontinue having food placed in my cell. Of course I could display my ill nature by knocking it off the floor, but I don’t want to do that, in fact, I am not going to do it, because I do not wish to offend the attendants who are instructed to place the food in here. It is not their fault.
Won’t you discontinue that practice please?
Respectfully submitted,
Roy Gardner
* * *
Leavenworth, Kansas 1924
To: Hon. H.H. Votaw
Supt. of Federal Prisons
Sir: My wife is now in Washington endeavoring to obtain from Attorney General Stone permission to have an operation performed on me for the purpose of relieving the pressure on my brain.
I understand that she bears recommendations from federal officials at Phoenix, Arizona, also letters from well-known surgeons setting forth their opinions in detail. The x-ray pictures that my wife carries show very plainly the portion of my skull that is pressing on my brain, not withstanding Dr. Yokis’ opinion to the contrary. Whether this pressure has any connection with the criminal tendencies I have displayed since the accident causing the pressure, is problematical. I am well aware of the dangerous character of this operation but the possibilities of success which would return make me at some future date to return to society with all thoughts of crime obliterated from my mind, and make it possible for me to resume the life of a law abiding citizen, causes the danger of the operation resulting fatally to appear inconsequential. If I survive my present term of confinement and return to society with my mind intend on further crimes, what have I profited and in what manner has society gained by my long confinement? I state to you in all sincerity that my thoughts everyday dwell on criminal activities even as they did before my incarceration.
This statement may prove to be detrimental any opportunity I might have now for release in future years, but I do not desire to evade the issue. It would be unfair both to myself and society, if I should be released in my present state of mine, the cure of which I believe, lies in this operation that my wife is endeavoring to obtain through the approval of Attorney General Stone.
Down in my heart I know and realize to the fullest extent, the futility of crime. If I possessed the ability to defeat or evade the man-made laws of achieving the perpetration of the so-called “perfect crime” my ultimate defeat by the law of compensation, which is infallible in its operation would be inevitable. Although I am capable of seeing these things in the proper light, and know in my own mind that crime cannot be successful, I state to you frankly, that if I were released tomorrow, I sincerely believe a sack of registered mail would be too great a temptation for me to resist.
What else, other than a disorder of the brain would cause me to do things that I know I cannot be successful in, things that I do not want to do and which I know can only result in suffering for my family and myself. It is in the realization of the hopelessness of the situation in my present condition that I send this letter to you with the earnest appeal that my application might receive careful consideration before this one ray of hope, uncertain and fraught with danger as it is. I believe the attorney General’s action on my application will depend too on a great extent upon your recommendation, and I place my appeal in your hands with full confidence that you will accord it every consideration for which I will be truly grateful.
Respectfully submitted,
RAY GARDNER
#17060
P.S. I would appreciate a private interview with you if you can find it convenient to grant me a few minutes of your time.
Roy Gardner
* * *
Leavenworth, Kansas
May 7, 1923
To: Mr. H.H. Votaw
Supt. of Federal Prisons
Dear Sir:
This is to protest against the treatment now being accorded my wife by W.J. Biddle.
Some two months ago, I was indiscreet enough to produce a one-dollar bill that I had secured before being confined in isolation, and Mr. Biddle immediately seized it as a protest and, after subjecting my wife to a verbal grilling in his office, he continued his unwarranted persecution by suspending her visiting privileges. Seeing me for one hour every two weeks is the only pleasure the girl gets and to have that pleasure denied her on the unsupported and unwarranted suspicion of Mr. J. Biddle is, to put it mildly, unjust and ungentlemanly. If he wants to punish me for being in possession of the dollar, I am ready to stand but
I am not now and never will be reconciled to having my wife punished for something that she knew absolutely nothing about. I appeal to you as Supt. of Federal Prisons Mr. Votaw, to instruct the Warden to cease his unwarranted persecution of my wife.
If he can provide one iota of evidence against her, outside of his perverted suspicion, then I will gladly withdraw his complaint.
Respectfully submitted,
ROY GARDNER
OFFICE OF THE WARDEN
September 21, 1929
* * *
TO A.H. McCormick
Assistant Superintendent of Prisons
Department of Justice
Washington, D.C.
Dear Sir:
I am in receipt of your letter of September 18th with further reference to Roy Gardner, Reg. No. 20580. As suggested by you, I have arranged with Dr. J. Calvin Weaver, former Prison Physician, to call today for a conference with Dr. Cross regarding the advisability of feeding him by force. This is his twelfth day of fasting and, from his outward appearances; he shows no signs of weakening. From the beginning of his fast, it has been my intention to resort to these measures, and I have informed him, in no uncertain terms, that unless he will willingly submit to being fed or to voluntarily break the strike, playing the manly part himself, it is our intention to forcibly feed him. He tells us that he will resist any such efforts, even to the extent of losing his life. Just how much of this attitude on his part if bluff, I am not in a position to say, but judging the future by the past, we anticipate some trouble with him as he succeeded in getting his released from isolation on two occasions by using these same tactics. Until after the conference of the physicians, I shall not determine just when the forcible feeding will be started, but I am inclined to think that such a move will be unwise until he has lost some of his physical strength. He is a physical giant and will put up a desperate fight for the time being, at least.