by David Ward
—I hear someone moving—is that you? Doc wasn’t asleep all night so he is getting some now. He said that if it gets good enough [to go] to punch him awake as he got all his clothes on. I can’t tell from where I am. I am leaving it up to Doc.
—There is nothing to it yet for I can see the Frisco light. We couldn’t get a break on the time like this anyway.
—Yes things are lit up like Christmas but there is a lot [of fog] out there it may be here anytime. No breeze.
—Henry I have lost so much sleep I can’t stay wake but have shoes on and clothes like fire man it will take just one minute so will sleep but if things get right, there looks like a lot of fog out there, if O.K. clear your throat.
—This stuff [fog] sure comes and goes fast. Now I can’t see the lights in Frisco. Dale told me yesterday that he had a sure way of telling. Can you see the light out front?23
On the evening of January 12, 1939, the inmates got what they were waiting for: a heavy fog shrouded the prison. The Alcatraz lighthouse keeper noted in his log that continuous fog began to roll in beginning about 10:15 P.M. and that the visibility was “practically nil.” The convicts in D block knew that there were three counts during the night: at midnight, at 3:00 A.M., and at 6:00 A.M. Shortly after the 3:00 A.M. count, the gun cage officer walked through the door in D block to provide coverage for a guard making counts in the other cell blocks. Barker, Young, Martin, and McCain dislodged the precut bars in their cell fronts, squeezed out into the corridor and crossed the sixteen-foot area to the outer wall. Martin walked quickly over to Stamphill’s cell and pushed the door bars down by standing on them, allowing their confederate to join the group at the window.
The window bars were quickly dislodged, and with some boosting and shoving—particularly to get William Martin through, since he was a much larger man than the others—the five men climbed through the window, dropped eight feet to the ground below, and made their way toward the end of the island closest to San Francisco. They picked up pieces of wood and wooden lawn chairs as they crossed in back of the employee living quarters. When they reached the cliffs, the group split up.
Barker and Stamphill, with no flotation gear, found concrete steps leading down to the water’s edge and immediately started out into the bay, hoping to catch an outgoing tide. “We got about twenty or thirty feet,” Stamphill recalled, “and hit the tide, which just whipped us right around back to the shore.” They decided to move toward an old dock, where they hoped to find some lumber they could tear off for flotation, thinking that they hadn’t been gone long enough yet for their absence to have been detected. But the escape siren had already wailed, its sound obscured to the escapees by the many foghorns sounding around them, and guards both on and off duty had been mustered, armed, and sent to different parts of the island to search for the escapees.
Stamphill and Barker were unaware that Officer Clifford Ditmer, who had drawn a Thompson submachine gun from the armory, was standing on the cliffs above them. At first Ditmer could not see the water through the fog, but as he watched, a gust of wind blew some of the fog away from the cove at the base of the cliffs and he was just able to make out two white shapes moving from the shore into the water. Ditmer warned the men to stop and when they continued to move he opened up with the Thompson, firing a half dozen shots into the water in front of the forms; the forms continued moving, at which point he aimed directly at them and fired a longer burst. He saw both men go down in the shallow water. More shots were fired from the prison launch, which was now standing close offshore and shining its lights on the cove. Stamphill thought all the gunfire was coming from the launch: “This boat came around and they just opened fire—never said a word, just opened fire with a machine gun; they knocked us both down.”
Both men were shot in the legs and fell in the shallow water. Barker, writhing in pain, raised up on his elbows to shift his weight, another fusillade sprayed in the water around him with one bullet hitting him in the head. He gasped to Stamphill, “Don’t move, they’re going to kill us.”
In the meantime, Henry Young and Rufe McCain had descended the cliffs at a different location and frantically tried to make a raft out of rolled up bed sheets and the pieces of wood and chairs they had picked up on the way down to the shore.
Before they could launch the raft, they were discovered by Lt. Henry Weinhold, who with Lt. Isaac Faulk was near the road tower.
We heard shots being fired whereupon we immediately ran down to the lower road to a point overlooking the cove on the beach immediately below the Road Tower and I began firing into the cove at some faintly white shadows, firing three to five shots to the best of my recollection. I then went . . . to the edge of the lower road overlooking the cove and instructed the officer in charge of the Road Tower to turn his light on the cove and after more light had been brought to bear on the water edge in the cove two pairs of legs could be distinguished.
I then proceeded to the Sea Wall and as I arrived the Launch McDowell came around the northeast corner of the island throwing its searchlight along the beach. A makeshift raft was floating in the water near the end of the sea wall. I threw my flashlight along the beach toward the west side of the Island and saw two men, one naked and the other clad in a pair of drawers. I called to them to surrender and they came around the ledge of the rock with their hands in the air. I then identified them as inmates Rufus McCain no. 267 and Henry Young no. 244.24
Left to himself, William Martin had made his way to the south end of the island, where he was trying to climb down a twenty-foot cliff. Lt. Faulk and Deputy Warden Miller walked along the beach past Young and McCain’s raft and waded along the base of the cliffs with their flashlights shining among the rocks. According to Faulk, they had gone close to one hundred feet from the cove where McCain and Young had been captured when he caught a glimpse of movement above them. At that moment, Martin—naked except for a pair of socks—fell from the cliff, struck the bank, and fell into the water. He surrendered peacefully. Injured in his fall, he was taken to the prison hospital.25
In the hospital Stamphill was treated for shock and several bullet wounds. Martin was treated for exposure and the multiple bruises and abrasions suffered in his fall down the cliff. Barker had been shot through the left leg, and another bullet had entered his neck behind the right ear and emerged at the corner of his right eye. According to the medical report, there was bleeding from the right ear, indicating a fracture of the skull. Semiconscious, and complaining of pain in his leg and of feeling cold, he mumbled to Deputy Warden Miller, “I’m all shot to hell. I was a fool to try it.” His wounds were dressed; he was treated for shock and given a sedative. Later in the morning he appeared to have periods of consciousness but uttered no words. During the afternoon he became more restless and his breathing more labored. At 5:30 P.M. his condition rapidly worsened and ten minutes later he stopped breathing.26
Since Henry Young and Rufe McCain had not been injured in the break, they were locked up in isolation. Deputy Warden Miller and an FBI agent came around two days later to talk to them, but Young said he had absolutely nothing to say to agents of the FBI or to any employees of the Bureau of Prisons. McCain refused to discuss the escape, only saying, when asked why he tried to escape, “I just wanted to go home.”
Stamphill and Martin also declined to provide any information regarding the escape when questioned by Miller and several FBI agents. Earlier that morning, however, immediately after he had been brought up to the prison hospital, Martin had been interrogated by Miller and talked about the escape, with his statement recorded by the assistant chief clerk. Martin reported that the escape had been planned before he was sent to D block, that cutting the bars took more than a month, that Stamphill had smuggled the files and the bar spreader into the isolation unit, and that the five men had gone to the cliffs together but then separated in order to find boards and other materials to make a raft.27
Stamphill, later reflecting on this and other attempts to break out o
f Alcatraz, noted the preoccupation of so many escapees with getting out of the buildings on the island, while giving so little thought to means of surviving the cold currents of the bay and getting to the nearest land, a mile and a quarter away: “The amazing thing to me is that in escapes all you think about is beating the institution. . . . We never planned beyond that. Escape from the institution—that’s all we concentrated on . . . as soon as the fog came in, off we went.”
Five days after the escape, Director James Bennett wrote to Warden Johnston. Noting that there were many “lessons” to be learned from the incident, Bennett suggested a number of measures for improving security:
• Place an extra officer in the gun gallery during meals so that D block would not be left unsupervised.
• Discontinue use of the cells on the lower floor of D block, where the obstructions posed by the two solitary confinement cells allowed the escapees to saw away on the cell bars, hidden from the gun cage officer’s line of sight.
• Remind guards of the need to vary their routines and to remember that their primary obligation is to the government, not covering up for fellow officers who had been derelict in their duties.
• Complete an inventory of all tools and materials on the island.
• Acquire improved outside lighting, police dogs to aid in searches, and flare guns to light up the island and the nearby waters in an emergency.
• Institute a policy of frequent cell changes for the most escape-prone inmates.
• Fingerprint all persons admitted onto the island, including workmen, friends, and relatives of the officers who live on the island, employees of the lighthouse, “and anyone else.”
• Immediately prepare plans for constructing new segregation/ isolation cells with tool-proof steel bars.28
Several of these suggestions, including the remodeling of D block, were promptly accepted, but police dogs and flare guns were never acquired, and the task of routinely processing fingerprints and undertaking criminal record checks for everyone who came over to the island met resistance from both the FBI and employees.
The repercussions of the 1939 escape attempt, however, went far beyond matters internal to the Bureau of Prisons. Even though the Bureau could point to some positive elements in the response to the escape—the breakout was discovered within twenty-five minutes, and the escapees caught before they could get away from the island—the fact remained that the inmates had succeeded in breaking out from cells inside the most secure penitentiary in the federal prison system. For this reason, the FBI saw the attempted escape as evidence of defective security arrangements and poor management.
Always looking for incompetence, inefficiency, and evidence of corruption in lesser agencies, FBI Director Hoover made sure that the attorney general knew of the failure of the BOP to measure up to FBI standards and ordered an investigation into the escape. The investigation, conducted by the San Francisco field office, began on January 14, two days after the breakout attempt. By the end of the day, FBI agents had collected enough information to make a telephoned report to Director Hoover, who condensed it into a memo he sent to the attorney general.
This initial report was harshly critical of the management of Alcatraz. It identified a long list of defects in the security arrangements in place on the island, reported that some men in the kitchen crew were also planning an escape that involved taking wives and children of the staff as hostages, described the many knives and other forbidden objects discovered in inmates’ cells, and noted hostile attitudes toward Warden Johnston on the part of inmates. The report recommended a number of rather obvious changes, including obtaining new and better metal detection devices, removing potential raft or flotation materials from the prison grounds, and, most important, overhauling the prison’s security, calling for
an inspection of the windows, bars, and cells on Alcatraz at frequent intervals. In this case it is to be noted that these bars had been sawed and the bar at the window loosened and were in this condition for over a month, but were not at any time ascertained by any of the prison guards.
Some change should be made in the supervision and guarding of the isolation ward. In this case, it is to be noted that these five prisoners, in five separate cells at various times of the day and night sawed the bars from their cell doors and then crossed the hallway at least sixteen feet from the cells to a window from which they loosened a bar and then cut the framework of the window. The work that accomplished these results had extended over a period of many weeks, and yet no one noted these activities.29
On the same day, Hoover sent a supplemental memorandum to the attorney general based on interviews that his agents held with two guards. The guards identified several blind spots in D block, including the obstruction created by the concrete solitary cells, which had prevented the gun cage officer from seeing the doors of the five cells in which the escapees were housed. The memo outlined administrative problems that might be regarded as outside the range of an escape investigation but about which Hoover decided the attorney general should be informed; no copy of this report was sent to Bureau of Prisons Director Bennett.
Two days later, the San Francisco FBI office sent a fourteen-page “personal and confidential” report to Hoover titled, “Conditions at Alcatraz.” This document conveyed information and impressions gained from interviews with rank-and-file guards who agreed to talk to the FBI investigators about general conditions apart from the escape. These officers “felt that there was a breakdown in the system at Alcatraz to such an extent that it would probably affect the entire system of the Bureau of Prisons,” and “they just had to tell somebody of these situations.”30
The agents noted that these guards and other line staff had given up reporting defects they observed in the security system because their comments or suggestions were regarded by Deputy Warden Miller as personal criticism of his ability, and Miller, in turn, was not about to make any suggestions to Warden Johnston. The officers complained of poor communication from supervisors to the line staff and cited instances in which their supervisors withheld information that the officers felt they needed to know in order to anticipate or control trouble in the cell blocks. They also resented the policy that prohibited line staff from reading the files kept on the prisoners whom they were supervising.
The practice, approved by Deputy Warden Miller, of allowing inmates to move to cells where and next to whom they wished in exchange for cooperation (namely for not creating disturbances), was also criticized. The placement of the five escapees in adjacent cells was a consequence of this policy, and members of various cliques and gangs gathering in cells close to each other was cited as another example of poor administrative decision making.
The guards complained that the light workload in the shops allowed inmates ample opportunities to fashion weapons and escape paraphernalia, and to “case” the industries area for escape routes. They also criticized the failure to install tool-proof steel bars in D block, where the prison’s most serious troublemakers were kept.
Another guard provided the FBI agents with a memo he had written on January 9 to Warden Johnston, pointing out the structural defects that made D block the least secure unit in the prison and recommending that “at least two panels of grill screen be placed on and attached to the bars of both gun galleries” in order to protect the officer stationed there and prevent inmates from acquiring gas grenades, gas masks, and night sticks.31 (If this recommendation had been approved and carried out, the serious and deadly breakout attempt that occurred in May 1946 would have been foiled.)
The FBI’s critique of security measures also included a list of materials found in the shakedown of the entire prison after the escape attempt.32 The final section of the report revealed that when the prison siren sounded, employees did not know whether it signified a fire or an escape. On the night of the break, three officers had left their living quarters and run to the fire truck; they were driving up the hill to the cell house when they were flagged down and
informed that the alarm was sounded for an escape, not a fire.
The report concluded with a reminder and a caveat: the information obtained in the investigation had not been verified, and some of the officers’ comments “might be prompted by personal prejudices or jealousies or personality.” But the information should be sent to the director “for his interest.”33 On January 19 Hoover sent a copy of this report to the attorney general; five days later, he sent a copy to James V. Bennett. He requested that Bennett handle the information “in a most discreet manner”; it included the identity of employees who had made “confidential” statements to the FBI agents.34
The investigation into the escape from D block thus provided Bureau of Prisons headquarters and Warden Johnston with evidence that FBI agents called to Alcatraz to investigate violations of federal law by prisoners had also reported opinions from employees about management policies and practices. Relations between Hoover and Bennett would continue to be suspicious and tense throughout the history of Alcatraz.
If the FBI’s criticism to the attorney general’s office wasn’t enough, within several months the prison’s security arrangements came under attack from another source: criminal complaints were taken to mainland juries, U.S. attorneys, and federal courts. A coroner’s jury investigating the death of Dock Barker came to the following conclusion:
The said Arthur Barker met his death attempting to escape from Alcatraz Prison from gunshot wounds inflicted by guards unknown. From the evidence at hand, we, the jury, believe this escape was made possible by the failure of the system for guarding prisoners now in use at Alcatraz Prison and we recommend a drastic improvement by those in authority. Further, that a more efficient system be adopted for illumination of shores and waters immediately surrounding the prison; that the citizens of San Francisco unite in an effort to have a more suitable location for imprisonment of the type of desperadoes at present housed at Alcatraz.35
Given the beating Alcatraz was taking in the press, and knowing that the FBI had advised the attorney general of “administrative problems” at the prison, neither the Bureau of Prisons nor the attorney general’s office in Washington encouraged the U.S. attorney in San Francisco to initiate criminal proceedings against the four convicts who survived the escape attempt.
