by David Ward
The two attorneys for Lucas and Franklin were unpaid and court appointed, but they mounted an aggressive defense to keep their clients out of the gas chamber. They attacked the government’s case on the grounds that only circumstantial evidence tied their clients to the murder. They also sought to impugn the testimony of guard witnesses, drawing them into discussions of incidents of alleged brutality on the island.
In an effort to demonstrate that guard Otis Culver had “a motive to testify falsely against these defendants,” attorney Faulkner made the following claim:
I’ll prove that in January of 1936, a convict named Jack Allen was yelling and screaming in his cell; that Culver slugged him to stop him. Despite the slugging, Allen continued to scream and yell. Then Allen was removed to solitary confinement, and died the next morning. . . . The next day, the convicts called a strike, in which Defendant James Lucas participated. Lucas was slugged by Culver or by another guard in Culver’s presence; then he was kicked down an iron stairway, and the next day, had to be taken to the hospital.
According to the account in the Examiner, Faulkner’s line of questioning went like this:
Faulkner:
Did you take Lucas to solitary confinement in January 1936?
Culver:
I don’t remember.
Faulkner:
Do you remember one Jack Allen?
Culver:
I do not.
Faulkner:
Do you remember removing Allen to solitary confinement and next day Allen died?
Culver:
I do not.
Faulkner:
Do you remember the convicts going on strike over the Allen case?
Culver:
I do not.
Faulkner:
Do you remember fighting with Lucas?
Culver:
I do not.
Faulkner:
Do you remember escorting Lucas to solitary confinement; Lucas had no shoes on, but blankets on his feet, and you kicked him down an iron stairway?
Culver:
I do not.
Faulkner:
Do you remember slugging Lucas with a blackjack?
Culver:
I do not.
Judge Louderback to Culver: Are Mr. Faulkner’s statements true?
Culver:
Those statements are all untrue.18
By permitting this kind of questioning over the objections of U.S. Attorney Frank Hennessy, the judge enabled a defense strategy that put the staff on the defensive as they were interrogated about various incidents on the island in an effort to claim that a reign of terror existed on Alcatraz, that the prison was so brutal that it forced inmates into suicide, madness, and murder.
As the trial proceeded, the government produced only one inmate witness, a man already transferred to another prison, who testified that he saw Limerick, Lucas, and Franklin in the room shortly before Cline was killed, but the sensational testimony that had been expected did not materialize—the Alcatraz convicts weren’t talking.
James Lucas and Whitey Franklin were convicted of the murder of Royal Cline, but the jury angered the Alcatraz staff by refusing to send them to the gas chamber. Franklin received another life sentence to go with the two already lodged against him and Lucas’s new life sentence was added to his existing thirty-year term. The Alcatraz staff, having interpreted these sentences as constituting no additional punishment for convicts who had murdered one of their number, were determined to find their own means of administering justice on the island. Lucas and Franklin anticipated this reaction when they told reporters after they had been sentenced that they expected to spend “the rest of their lives” in isolation, which meant “continuous imprisonment in unlighted cells on one meal a day.”19 They were returned to Alcatraz and placed in D block. Lucas would remain there for the next six years; Franklin would not be released from disciplinary segregation until 1952—fourteen years later.
The trial demonstrated to Warden Johnston and Deputy Warden Miller that in any trial of Alcatraz prisoners, defense attorneys would seek to point the finger of ultimate culpability at the institution and its administration instead of the defendants. The experience discouraged them from prosecuting prisoners; instead, the prison would employ its own punitive measures, mainly taking away years of good time and locking inmates up in disciplinary segregation for months or years—decisions that required no due process proceeding or public scrutiny. The trial showed prisoners, however, that the press and Bay Area citizens were inclined to accept the argument that the prison was a genuine American version of Devil’s Island. The government never responded to such allegations other than denying their accuracy—and future juries would be inclined to believe inmate claims that the regime on the Rock drove them to acts of violence.
FIVE REACH THE WATERS OF THE BAY
Attacking the armed guards on the roof of the model building was a desperate and very dangerous way of engineering an escape and, because it involved little ingenuity, had almost no hope of success. Only seven months after the attempt by Limerick, Franklin, and Lucas, five inmates devised a more clever and stealthy mode of escape. They succeeded in breaking through every level of the Alcatraz security system—they got out of their cells, out of the cell house, past the gun towers, and confronted San Francisco Bay as the final barrier to freedom.
Dale Stamphill, one of the leaders of the breakout, was well acquainted with prisons and how to get out of them. Sentenced on auto theft charges to the Oklahoma State Reformatory, Stamphill had whittled himself a wooden gun in an attempt to replicate John Dillinger’s escape from jail at Crown Point, Indiana. He pointed his homemade gun at the guard in a tower, and the surprised man threw down his rifle—but not into the prison yard—and dove to the floor of the tower, where he set off the escape alarm that foiled Stamphill’s plan. In solitary, Stamphill heard a commotion one day and to his surprise the door to his cell opened and an inmate poked his head in and said, “Come on, we’re breaking out.” Stamphill joined a group of some thirty convicts who, with several smuggled guns, took over the administration building and grabbed hostages from its visiting room. On their way out of the building, Stamphill and several escapees took the keys to the chief clerk’s automobile, parked in front of the prison. Then they herded the hostages toward the main gate. The officer at the gate was armed with a shotgun but handed it over to Stamphill when he saw the crowd of hostages. One other obstacle, the front tower, remained. The tower guard was warned to throw down his gun but—with many inmates shouting instructions at the same time—he hesitated. Shots rang out from the ground below, the visitors scattered, screaming, and the guard fell, mortally wounded.
While the other inmates and all the visitors ran in many directions, Stamphill and seven other men raced to the vehicle, crowded in, and sped away from the prison. As they came to small towns, the escapees dropped off in groups of two or three. Stamphill and two men got out at the town of Seiling, where they promptly robbed the First National Bank, grabbed a local physician whose automobile was handy, and drove from Oklahoma to Texas. The bank robbery and kidnapping put federal agents on their trail, along with state and local police; the three were soon caught and returned to Oklahoma where they were tried, found guilty, and given life sentences for killing the prison guard.
Stamphill was sent to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester and locked up in the disciplinary unit, where he remained for almost two years. After his release into the general population, he fell into a conversation with several older convicts in the yard, and one, a lifer named Brown, told him, “I don’t know your business but as someone who’s done a lot of time, if you plan to escape, do it the first chance you get. Don’t wait because you’ll get institutionalized and you won’t have the guts to do it.”20
This advice registered with Stamphill, but it was not until he had been taken to federal court, convicted of kidnapping the doctor, and transferred to Leavenworth with another life sentence that he began to se
riously consider Brown’s advice. The guards in the disciplinary segregation unit there warned him, “We’re going to send you to Alcatraz; you’re not going to escape from us.” Eighty days passed while the staff accumulated enough convicts to fill a railroad car for shipment to the Rock. While he was waiting, a guard allowed him to see a newspaper editorial that commented on Cole and Roe’s escape attempt—and its apparent ending in the icy waters of the bay. The guard probably thought the editorial would send the message that it was futile to try to escape from Alcatraz. But the article made a different impression on Stamphill: “They got out. So, I started thinking toward escape.”
Stamphill arrived at Alcatraz in December 1937, with escape foremost in his mind. He talked to prisoners who had been on the island for several years and learned about using a bar spreader. The idea intrigued him. “I looked at those curved bars over the windows in the dining room and thought, God damn, that’s simple,” Stamphill recalled years later. “I knew that D block was a weak place. The cells had flat metal bars just like A block. And it was used as a punishment unit.” As the basic idea of a breakout plan formed in his mind, Stamphill sought out another convict he had known in the Oklahoma reformatory, a man who had a reputation for taking chances—Dock Barker. In Barker, Stamphill found someone already thinking about breaking out who was well connected with other convicts. Both men concluded that if their friend Ted Cole had escaped, “Hell, we can, too.”
Barker convinced an inmate in the blacksmith shop to make some saw blades from an old wood saw to cut through the soft metal of the old flat bars still in place in the doors of the cells in D block. Then he had the inmate make a bar spreader or screw jack—a round metal rod about a half inch in diameter and four inches long, with a bolt on the screw and a groove on the bolt. When the bolt was turned with pliers or a wrench, tension was created that caused a bar to bend.
The next task was getting these tools into the cell house. It would be nearly impossible for inmates to smuggle them in, because they had to pass through a metal detector and pat-down frisks on their return from the industries area each day. When the staff asked an inmate machinist to build a device to sharpen the blades of safety razors, Barker saw the solution to this problem: he arranged with the machinist to hide the saw blades and bar spreader in the interior working parts of the razor-sharpening device. The machinist gave the finished device to an officer, who carried it up to the cell house, thereby bypassing the metal detector and body search. The sharpening machine was taken to A block and left for an inmate who would begin working on the worn blades.
Stamphill received saw blades and bar spreader on a day when, as part of his work as orderly, he was permitted to move around the cell house. He knew that a toilet in a cell on the second tier of D block had been removed for repairs, leaving a gaping hole in the back wall of the cell that was easily seen by inmates living across the corridor in C block. (The interior side of D block held no prisoners because like A block it had not been remodeled by the Bureau of Prisons.) Stamphill climbed up the stairs to the second tier and crawled through the hole into the utility corridor, the ventilation and plumbing area that divided the east and west sides of each cell block. He called out to Rufus McCain, who was locked up in one of the isolation cells on the other side of D block; when he responded, Stamphill crawled up pipes to the flat top of D block and down to the third tier on the other side in order to lower the tools through the railing. Then Stamphill reversed his journey, climbed back through the hole in the wall of the cell facing C block, and resumed his general housekeeping work around the main cell house. He told Barker, “Well, the stuff’s over in D block. So he got into a fight and they locked him up in D block.” Barker then recruited three inmates—Rufe McCain, Henry Young, and a black convict named William Martin—to participate in the break. According to Young, the four inmates began cutting the flat bars in front of their cells with Dock Barker humming, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”21
Three of the co-conspirators in D block had been allowed to move to cells near each other on the ground-floor level, which allowed them to easily communicate and exchange the tools. Furthermore, these particular cells were located on the far side of the two concrete vestibules that extended three and a half feet out from the row of cells to serve as solitary confinement cells; these obstructions blocked the view of the guard who looked down on their side of D block cells from the gun cage located on the north wall.
Using the tools provided by Stamphill, the four inmates began cutting the flat bars in front of their cells. The bottom of each bar in the lower section of each cell door was held to the frame by a rivet—so when the top was severed, the bar could be pushed to either side, leaving a hole some ten by sixteen inches through which a man could crawl. Once they were able to free themselves from their cells, the inmates could begin working on the bars of a window in the outer wall of the cell block. This was a riskier procedure because the window was not hidden from the view of the guard in the gun gallery.
By studying the movements of the gun gallery guards, the inmates had learned that the officer on duty left the D block side of the gallery at meal times to help supervise the general population prisoners in the dining room and the flow of inmates as they moved from the main cell blocks to and from the dining room. At meals the four men waited until the guard moved out of the D block side of the gallery. When he disappeared, Henry Young climbed up to the third tier of cells and took up his post as a lookout. The others took turns working on the interior set of bars covering the window. These bars constituted a serious obstacle since, unlike the cell bars, they were made of tool-proof steel and were resistant to the cutting blades. Here the bar spreader was essential. The men took turns laboring with the device, first pressing one of the curved bars to one side and then applying pressure to the other side of the bar, moving the bar ever so slightly in one direction and then in the other. When the guard was about to come back to his post, they returned to their cells and pulled the cut bars in the cells back into place, making them temporarily secure with a mixture of paint and floor wax.22
After days of work on the interior window bars, the inmates succeeded in snapping the bar at its weakest point—the section where it was welded to the frame. There now was an opening twelve inches wide and fourteen inches high—big enough for each man to squeeze through. The prisoners moved on to the next barrier, a set of old, soft, flat metal bars affixed to the outside of the window. These bars presented no more resistance than the flat bars of the cells, and they were soon cut. To resecure these bars the inmates used a puttylike substance comprised of tooth powder and the paint used in routine maintenance of the cell block.
In his account of this escape, Henry Young commented on the need for other convicts in D block who could see what was happening not only to keep quiet about the escape attempt but to make sure that their usual jawing and calling out to each other between cells did not fall off as they watched Barker and the others saw away on the two sets of bars in the window of the outer wall. Dale Stamphill explained this absence of leaks as follows: “You always worried [in prison] about somebody finding out about a thing like [an escape] and snitching on you. But Alcatraz was one place where every time that somebody’d become aware of somebody trying to escape, nobody would say a word. I guess they was afraid of what would happen to them.”
While the four men in D block were working on the bars, Stamphill had to get himself locked up in disciplinary segregation or be left behind. This step proved to be more difficult than he expected. In late October he picked a fight with another inmate but found himself locked up not in D but in A block. Trying to get moved from A to D he raised a commotion, but that resulted only in his being moved into one of the solitary cells in A block; six days later he was returned to general population. His next effort involved smuggling a knife into his cell and making sure it would be discovered during a routine shakedown. He was locked up for possessing the knife, but again in A block. Finally in mid-December he was
moved to D block, where his only task was to cut the bars in the lower front section of his own cell, all the other work on the outside wall window and grill having been completed by the other four men. But the saw blades, by the time Stamphill got them, were so worn down that he could not cut the inch-and-a-half-wide flat bar. To reduce the area to be cut he began working on the bars of the cell door rather than the bars that covered the front of the cell; the door bars were square rather than flat and were about one-half inch wide. He was able to cut through two of the bars but only at one point and he told the others that he would have to have their help in bending the bars down far enough to expose an opening wide enough for him to squeeze through.
When the bars on Stamphill’s cell were cut, the prisoners dropped the cutting tools down their toilets and waited for a night when fog would provide cover for their escape. The tension they experienced is reflected in notes they passed among themselves; these notes, thrown down their toilets, were retrieved later by guards when they searched the cell block after the escape.
—Henry how many rounds did the Bull make while I was trying to sleep? Give him time to git out good for he may walk right back. That was his second, he is staying out longer tonight than last night. . . . We are going to take it the next round. Take one of your sheets along, the best one—roll it up tight as we may need a rope to get down the cliff. It won’t take but a minute to go out that hole so the bull in the cage would have to be mighty restless to wheel back so quick. No good yet, but ready to go anytime.
