Alcatraz

by David Ward

  A poem penned by an anonymous prisoner on the island summed up the convicts’ view of the escape and the reaction of Deputy Warden Edward Miller, known to the prisoners as “Meat Head.”

  LOST IN A FOG

  Twas a few days before Christmas,

  With the fog like a sheet,

  When over the fence two boys did leap,

  With all the Bulls [guards] in the towers fast asleep,

  With high powered rifles, tommy-guns and grenades,

  They said, “Old Alcatraz” boys can never be made,

  With thousands of dollars spent day by day,

  I wonder now what the public will have to say,

  Such tumultuous excitement we have never seen before,

  All the Bulls in the joint were walking the floor,

  As we marched in to supper, there stood,

  “Ole Meat Head” with a puss that was ashen gray,

  Though they called out the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Marine Corps,

  The boys kept right on swimming for the opposite shore,

  Now dear public be very skeptical when you hear Edgar J. Hoover say,

  We have the incorrigibles where they can’t get away,

  All night through we wished the boys luck,

  While the screws in the joint were passing the buck.3

  A couple of days passed, and the continued absence of bodies allowed for the possibility that Cole and Roe actually reached land. As the FBI launched a widespread search, along with an investigation into the circumstances surrounding the escape, the San Francisco field office was instructed by FBI headquarters to include interviews with the Alcatraz staff in the investigation, since in Director Hoover’s view, “as far as we are concerned everyone over there is under suspicion.”4 Agents examined the backgrounds, family situations, and credit records of the thirteen guards and civilian employees who worked in the industries area and held long interviews with each man. In response to questions about the degree to which they conversed with inmates, the guards reported that they had been instructed not to talk with prisoners except to issue orders or instructions and therefore they had not talked with Cole or Roe and had not heard anything about the escape from other inmates.

  The civilians who worked in the laundry and other shops had more informal, friendly relations with the prisoners under their supervision, but they also reported that they had heard nothing that aroused their suspicions or would provide any clue as to the plans or whereabouts of the escapees. One guard reported that some three to four weeks before the escape he personally had hammered the bars on the window from which Cole and Roe exited.

  Close examination of the window through which the inmates crawled revealed that two of the bars had been cut and three small panes of glass removed, leaving an opening 8¾ × 18¾ inches. Since many of the Model Shop windows had been broken “for ventilation,” the missing panes where the bars were cut had not attracted the attention of the guards or the civilian work crew supervisors. The bars showed evidence that small sections had been freshly cut while other sections showed signs of rust with putty smeared over the cuts to disguise them. The cuts were smooth, indicating that either a hacksaw or a first-class prisoner-made cutting blade had been used. A check of the equipment log indicated that no blades had been given to Cole or Roe. Other inmates had to have “loaned” the blades to the escapees and thus it was concluded that one or more men in the shops had knowledge of the escape.

  During their interviews with FBI agents, several civilian employees emphasized the limited and restricted nature of communication between rank-and-file staff and inmates, one remarking that the regimen at Alcatraz was “so strict that a man must not even wear a smile or happy expression on his face.” Another civilian worker, noting the absence of any conversation unrelated to work with inmates, recalled that an inmate had once asked him how things were in San Francisco. When he responded that he didn’t know, the inmate replied, “Hell, you live over there don’t you?” He also reported that an inmate once asked him about the weather in San Francisco, and he replied that it was probably the same as it was on Alcatraz.5

  The officer directly responsible for supervising the inmates in the shop area also reported that he had not seen or heard anything suspicious. He told the agents that one inmate whom he regarded as reliable told him that other prisoners had seen Cole and Roe in the water, that Roe was “floundering and just about all in” and that Cole was staying close by Roe. The inmate also claimed that the escapees struck out from the island with nothing to keep them afloat. When asked if any of the inmates in the shop area might talk about the escape, the guard replied that one convict had made a sound like a drowning man, but “that is as much as he would say even if you cut his eyeballs out.”6 This officer also reported that at the time the escape was discovered, he was able to see three hundred yards offshore and that the bell buoy marker was visible, so that he would have seen any boat in the area. Asked by agents about the possibility that the inmates might try to grab onto one of the large ferries passing in the vicinity, he replied that the boats were propelled by large side wheels or screw propellers that created so much suction that anyone coming close to them would be pulled into the blades and “ground into mince meat.” In addition, the distance from the surface of the water to the decks of the ferries was six feet, a distance too great to allow the escapees to jump out of the water and gain a hold on the boats.

  Alcatraz staff and FBI agents, alerted to the possibility that one or more of the five-gallon oil cans stored in the machine shop could have been used to help keep the convicts afloat, checked the cans, found none missing, and concluded that the cans were too large to pass through the hole the inmates had made in the window. A check of lubricants and grease kept in the shops provided no evidence that any substance was missing that could have been used to ward off the effects of the cold water.

  In the months that followed, Alcatraz inmates transferred to other federal prisons were questioned on their arrival by FBI agents. Two men shipped to Atlanta denied any knowledge of the escape and both stated that if they did have any information they would not “rat” on a fellow prisoner to the FBI or anyone else.7 Agents even sought to identify the sender of a card, addressed to Warden Johnston and postmarked Denver, Colorado, which stated simply: “Tut tut goodbye, give my love to the boys.—T. Cole.”

  From time to time in later years, rumors of the escapees’ whereabouts, or their fates in the cold waters of the bay, would appear in the press. In 1941 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Roe and Cole were in South America, had “plenty of money,” and were “living comfortably in their hideouts” in Peru and Chile.8 A guard at Leavenworth said it was common knowledge among ex-Alcatraz guards and inmates that Cole and Roe were killed by Alcatraz guards while trying to escape and to avoid negative publicity their bodies had been dumped in the bay.

  In 1958, some twenty-one years after the escape, there was a report that the escapees had finally surfaced and were playing banjo and guitar in a bar in North Bergen, New Jersey; the FBI took it seriously enough to launch an inquiry. Over the years the FBI continued talking with relatives and associates of Cole and Roe and followed up on reports and rumors. In September 1974, some thirty-seven years after the escape, the active investigation was discontinued. No firm evidence ever came to light indicating that Cole and Roe made it or died in the attempt.

  A VIOLENT BREAKOUT

  ATTEMPT AND MURDER TRIAL

  After the Cole and Roe escape, Warden Johnston enhanced security at the model building. He posted a second guard on the roof whose assignment was continuous foot patrol around the perimeter of the building; the other guard was instructed to remain in the enclosed guard box. New tool-proof steel bars were placed in the shop windows. Despite these measures, men bent on escape understood that the model building, by virtue of its location immediately adjacent to the waters of the bay, was still the weakest spot in the prison’s security perimeter. In May 1938, less than six months after
Roe and Cole’s break, three other men attempted to exploit this weakness. Their escape plan did not rely on stealth and cunning; it involved a direct assault on guards in the shops and on the roof of the model building.

  The three convicts in on the break, Thomas Limerick, James Lucas, and Rufus “Whitey” Franklin, were typical of the general Alcatraz inmate population during its first decade. They had limited education and work skills and robbed banks because it seemed an obvious way to get money. Though well known in their local communities, they had not achieved the notoriety or celebrity status held by Alvin Karpis, Dock Barker, George Kelly, Harvey Bailey, John Paul Chase, and the other big shots on the island.

  Limerick, who had been transferred from Leavenworth to serve a life sentence at Alcatraz, was characterized as a “habitual criminal of the more vicious type.” Earlier in his life he had served time at the Iowa State Reformatory and the Nebraska State Penitentiary. At Alcatraz he joined in the January 1936 general work strike and was locked up in the D block segregation/isolation unit. Limerick received two additional disciplinary reports in this first year at Alcatraz, one for refusing to eat all of the hash on his tray and another for refusing to eat all of his beans. But, with only these minor infractions and an attitude that seemed to have improved, he was assigned a job in the Model Shop.9

  James Lucas had escaped twice from the Texas State Reformatory and arrived at Leavenworth with federal terms totaling thirty years; the state of Texas wanted him on charges that totaled 128 years. He was one of those Alcatraz inmates who, as the staff put it, “did not go along with the program.” By May 1938 his misconduct record included citations for disobeying orders, refusing to go to the mess hall, insolence, refusal to work, possession of contraband (a small amount of gunpowder in a cigarette paper), joining in a strike with other inmates, fighting with Capone (which cost him 3,600 days, or approximately ten years, of good time), and fighting with another inmate. But in May 1938 Lucas was also working in the Model Shop.10

  Whitey Franklin was sent to reform school in Alabama at age fourteen; when he was sixteen he received a life sentence when his partner in a robbery shot and killed a store owner. Four years into his term at Kilby Prison, Franklin’s mother died and he was given a fifteen-day furlough to attend her funeral and visit with family members. While on leave he and a confederate stole an automobile and robbed a bank, which earned him a thirty-year federal sentence. Committed to Atlanta, his escape from Kilby had made him a candidate for the Rock.

  On May 23, 1938, Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin were at work in the Model Shop. They waited for the guard who supervised them, Royal C. Cline, to go into his office to check his count sheet. They knew that he typically remained there fifteen minutes—plenty of time for them to put their plan into effect. Working quickly, they placed wooden boards against the ceiling and at the base of one of the shop windows that opened out from the top and swung inside the room. The boards held the bottom of the metal window frames at a horizontal angle so that a man could climb out the window, stand on the frame, and reach up to the roof of the building. The three could not, however, simply climb up over the edge of the roof because four strands of barbed wire on supporting bars stood out on all four sides of the roof. Lucas’s plan was to cut the wire strands with pliers they had picked up in the workshop, but as Lucas and Limerick prepared to climb up on the outside frame of the window, Officer Cline unexpectedly walked out of his office back into the work area. Franklin ran to the surprised officer and hit him with a hammer in the head, again and again. Cline fell on the floor, with a widening pool of blood seeping out from under his body.

  Their plan had called for the men to cut the barbed wire and climb over the edge of the roof at the moment the guard on patrol, Clifford Stewart, walked behind a concrete elevator shaft that kept him out of the sight of the guard box—and the escapees. But on this day Officer Stewart was delaying his walk at the far edge of the roof because he had been instructed to keep an eye on the civilian workers who were installing new tool-proof steel window guards on the bay side of the building following the escape of Cole and Roe. When Stewart moved out of sight, the three inmates climbed up onto the roof and ran toward Officer Harold Stites in the guard box.

  But Stites heard noises behind him, turned around, and saw the inmates advancing in his direction. The three began throwing heavy iron bolts, a hammer, and wrenches at the windows in an effort to force him to seek cover before he could grab his rifle. One of the missiles thrown by the inmates crashed through a window and hit Stites, but he pulled out his pistol and felled Limerick with a bullet to the head. Franklin, still clutching the bloody hammer he’d used to subdue Officer Cline, was hit by bullets in both shoulders; he fell back over the edge of the roof onto some uncut strands of barbed wire. Lucas dove for cover next to the guard tower, where he quickly found himself lined up in the sights of a rifle held by Officer Stewart who, on hearing the shots, rushed from behind the elevator shaft to assist Stites.

  At the sound of gunfire other guards quickly appeared on the scene. Officer Cline, who never regained consciousness, was taken by stretcher up to the prison hospital. The unconscious Thomas Limerick was also taken to the prison hospital. Whitey Franklin, to the disgust of his fellow convicts, was left lying wounded on the barbed wire strands for some thirty minutes before he was removed and taken to the prison hospital for treatment. James Lucas was escorted up the hill to the main cell house, where he told Deputy Warden Miller that if the three men had been successful in getting the guns from Stites and Stewart, they were going to make a run for the dock on the other side of the island and try to capture the prison launch to complete their escape.11 Lucas was locked up in the D block isolation unit.

  Warden Johnston—in San Francisco acting as an honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the former chief of police—was called and informed that there had been trouble on the island; shots had been fired, and an officer had been injured. He ordered the prison launch sent back to San Francisco to bring him back to the island.

  Limerick never regained consciousness and died that evening. Officer Cline was transported to the U.S. Marine Hospital at the Presidio in San Francisco, where his condition deteriorated. He died the next afternoon.

  At first the violent breakout attempt by Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin attracted only moderate press attention, even though one inmate had been killed and another seriously injured, and an officer had died in the line of duty. The decision to try the surviving prisoners in federal district court, however, brought the incident to the headlines of Bay Area newspapers and produced what was called “the trial of the year.”

  The press was particularly excited about the prospect of learning directly about life on the Rock from the two convicts on trial and from six others who had been present in the model building at the time of the escape and were listed as government witnesses. When the Alcatraz cons to be called as witnesses were identified to the press, the greatest interest focused on Harvey Bailey, whom a reporter labeled “the most dangerous convict at Alcatraz.” The question was whether Bailey would “rat on fellow convicts, cast suspicion on himself, or defy the federal court by refusing to testify.”12 He was reported to have warned government prosecutors that he would be a poor witness because “he’s spending the rest of his life here and he has to live with these people. He didn’t see anything and doesn’t know anything. Number 139 is not talking.”13

  The local dailies also saw the trial as an excellent opportunity to satisfy the public’s desire for the lurid details of courtroom testimony. Even the process of selecting jurors was written up in dramatic imagery as the widow of the slain guard took a seat in the courtroom:

  There’s a place reserved for a woman, with a red dress and a red hat and a granite face and eyes that stare bitterly at Lucas and Franklin. She’s Mrs. Royal C. Cline—widow of the Alcatraz guard who fell with bashed head under the hammers of his assailants on the day of the break attempt. Cline died a few hours later; he never recovered consc
iousness to say goodbye to his wife. She remembers that.14

  Before the trial actually began, Lucas’s attorney made an effort to stop the proceedings on the ground that his client had “gone mad,” but after a court-appointed psychiatrist concluded that Lucas was malingering and “scared speechless,” not insane, the judge rejected the motion.15

  The question for the jury was not whether the two men had tried to escape—that they admitted; it was whether they had killed Cline. Franklin and Lucas claimed that other convicts in the shop had committed the murder because they did not like Cline.16

  The trial began with the prosecution handing over for the inspection of the jurors close-up photographs of the battered head of Officer Cline and a white plastic death mask that had been formed by pouring a hot gelatinous substance over the dead guard’s face. Mrs. Cline covered her eyes. The trial produced sensational reports of the “gruesome” death mask, the “ghastly” photographs, and the “death hammer.” One story described the courtroom scene:

  Rows of spectators—and for the first time, most of them are women—shudder in delighted thrill as [Officer Harold] Stites tells of sending his bullet through a convict’s skull, through another convict’s back.17

  Enhancing the San Francisco Examiner accounts of the trial was the commentary of former Alcatraz inmate P. F. Reed, who had been released several weeks earlier; Reed’s remarks ran under the headline “Alcatraz Is Hell.” Ex-Rock convict Roy Gardner showed up to watch the proceedings, and as author of a book entitled Hellcatraz, he pronounced Reed’s characterization of the Rock accurate. Thus, behind the question of who committed the murder of Officer Cline was the debate over whether the long criminal records of Lucas and Franklin provided the explanation for their violent acts or whether the “grim discipline” of the prison provoked convicts’ violence.